Homeless encampment sweeps spiked after Supreme Court decision
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 30-May-2026 08:16 ET (30-May-2026 12:16 GMT/UTC)
Officials in Oakland sharply increased the number of homeless encampments they cleared in the months after the 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision made it easier for municipalities nationwide to do so, new research from UC Berkeley shows. Many sites have been closed repeatedly, the analysis found — one was swept 18 times in a four-year period. More recently, efforts to close camps have shifted into census tracts that have higher poverty rates and larger shares of Hispanic residents.
Samuel Kruger, associate professor of finance; John Griffin, James A. Elkins Centennial Chair in Finance; and doctoral student Prateek Mahajan found that fraud in government-funded pandemic loans explained 22.5% of the average increase in housing prices during 2020 and 2021.
In new research, Yan Leng, assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, has devised a sort of personality test — more precisely, a behavioral audit — for large language models (LLMs), the technology that drives products such as ChatGPT.
By understanding an LLM’s existing tendencies, an organization can decide whether an available model already fits its values and usage scenarios. If not, it might need to fine-tune a model before putting it to use.
Leng compares her framework to trying to understand a person through their actions and thought processes. “For a human, we would have our values, and our values would dictate how we make decisions, so we try to have that for LLMs as well,” she says.
Virtual reality is entering the agricultural science classroom, and University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture researchers are helping teachers incorporate and create their own virtual reality resources.
With a $500,000 grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a faculty team in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications is building on their findings from a previously funded USDA grant project aimed to further develop efforts to train secondary school teachers and bring virtual reality (VR) to the classroom through the Agriscience Metaverse Academy.
A new study published in Animal Behaviour found that bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida, that engage in risky human-centric foraging behaviors, such as taking bait or catch from fishing gear, scavenging discarded bait or fish, or approaching humans for food tend to associate more with other dolphins that use similar tactics. The study also found that severe harmful algal blooms, commonly known as red tides, altered the relationship between these foraging behaviors and dolphin social structure.
The research was led by Kyra Bankhead of Oregon State University, with co-authors Mauricio Cantor of Oregon State University, Katherine McHugh and Randall Wells of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which is operated by Brookfield Zoo Chicago.