Northeastern University’s School of Journalism has received a $250,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help launch a graduate program focused on media innovation. Beginning in the fall, the school plans to enroll experienced media professionals who will devote much of their studies to nonjournalism subjects, such as computer science […]

It’s a common experience. You log on to Facebook for your lunchtime fix of friends’ baby photos and links to fascinating online content from trusted sites like Slate, when you come across an intriguing headline such as “Stephen Hawking’s Blunder on Black Holes Shows Danger of Listening to Scientists, Says Bachmann” or “Sochi Hotel Guests […]

Meredith Dank has a job that she admits can be a “party buzz kill” — she spends her days delving into the often gritty and grim lives of child sex workers, prostitutes and pimps. “As much as you think you have built up this wall of emotion, there are some horrific stories out there that […]

For the last decade, overdoses of opiates and similar drugs have advanced at an accelerating pace, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Improving access to the drug naloxone, which counteracts the effects of overdoses, is one of the only interventions proven to save lives. Programs that have distributed naloxone to drug users, their family members […]

The five-year-old digital currency is increasingly being adopted by brick-and mortar businesses, including dentists, pet boutiques — even a small honey business in Utah. In 2012, about 1,000 businesses used BitPay, the largest processor of Bitcoin payments. Today, more than 26,000 businesses worldwide use BitPay, said Tony Gallippi, its cofounder and CEO. The majority of […]

An Android presentation just after Mandt’s asserted that the one-two punch of Android fragmentation has placed Android users at risk of missing out on important security updates. That’s not going to be fixed anytime soon, they said. The issue, argued Jon Oberheide of Duo Security and Northeastern University security researcher Collin Mulliner, lies in how […]

Teenagers are getting squeezed out of the labor force in record numbers as unemployment among the youngest workers remains at astronomical levels nearly five years after the last recession ended, according to a study from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The study, released Friday, found that numbers of working teenagers has plunged by […]

If you want to know what’s up with the flu at the moment, you have a few choices: You can get the latest information at . Or you can get the from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is based on data that’s by now a couple of weeks old. But a in […]

A new study shows that using big data to predict the future isn’t as easy as it looks—and that raises questions about how Internet companies gather and use information. Big data: as buzzwords go, it’s inescapable. Gigantic corporations like SAS and IBM tout their big data analytics, while experts promise that big data—our exponentially growing […]

s Google’s Flu Trends (GFT) tracking system a failure of big data? A new article published this afternoon in Science magazine suggests that Google’s much-covered algorithmic Flu Trends model, used to monitor search queries to track the spread of the flu, has routinely failed to accurately predict flu prevalence since it’s inception in 2008. While […]

Tech companies—Facebook, Google and IBM, to name a few—are quick to tout the world-changing powers of “big data” gleaned from mobile devices, Web searches, citizen science projects and sensor networks. Never before has so much data been available covering so many areas of interest, whether it’s online shopping trends or cancer research. Still, some scientists […]

Google may be a master at data wrangling, but one of its products has been making bogus data-driven predictions. A study of Google’s much-hyped flu tracker has consistently overestimated flu cases in the US for years. It’s a failure that highlights the danger of relying on big data technologies. Google Flu Trends, which launched in 2008, monitors […]