“Disadvantaged populations need higher-touch services, not self-services,” said Peter Stokes, an expert on education innovation at Northeastern University. Abdoulaye Coulibaly, 26, is an English master’s student at Felix Houphouet Boigny University in the West African nation of Ivory Coast. He does not believe online education can or should replace the classroom. “We’re going to be […]

So far, U.S. courts consistently have rejected arguments that casinos are liable for the behavior of addicted patrons. But some attorneys trying to take on gambling companies say that if behavioral tracking truly can identify potential problem gamblers, the legal tide could turn, similar to the way bar owners have been found partly at fault […]

The speculation had been building since Wednesday, when the Boston Globe reported that Red Sox principal owner John Henry had restructured his bid to buy the paper. It reached a peak on Friday afternoon, when legendary baseball reporter Peter Gammons — himself a Globe alumnus — posted a one-line item on his new website, Gammons Daily: “A source says the New York Times […]

Among those weighing in on the conflict of interest issue was Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University. In a blog item that ran on The Huffington Post, Kennedy wrote, “The real issue is not how The Globe covers the Red Sox as a baseball team but rather how it manages the tricky task of reporting […]

You may have seen earlier this summer a series of maps released by Twitter showing thegeography of different cities as revealed by millions of tweets. Such maps of digital information are compelling for the way they also illustrate concrete infrastructure: the road networks around cities, the public parks inside of them, the clusters of commercial office buildings. If […]

Some companies last for generations after the loss of their founding visionary. And to be sure, examples of successful generational transfers abound, from Ford Motor Corp. to Walmart. But fewer than one in three companies survive through a second generation of leadership and only one in 10 survive through a third generation, according to research by […]

A new job report out today shows teen employment remained stagnant from June to July, and there’s been no increase over last year. Dr. Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, says a big part of the problem is that federal programs supporting summer job programs have disappeared. He says […]

William Dickens, however, is not one of them. “I have a lot of problems with that.” Dickens is a distinguished professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston, who has written and researched extensively into the causes and effects of unemployment. “Before the recession, (full employment) was typically estimated to be in the range of […]

Physicist Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University in Boston, who was not involved with the study, called it an interesting contribution to scientists’ understanding of social behavior and of how people adapt to learning of an epidemic. Still, “many elements of realism are still missing in the modeling approaches,” Vespignani cautioned. More studies are needed “to […]

James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, said he understands why police are reluctant to speak now about the case, but he said there is a public interest in learning the details of the alleged crime. “Ordinarily, you would want them to release information about the actions of public employees,” he said. “In […]

Rebecca Riccio tried to keep her expectations low. Yes, the first massive open online course — or MOOC –on philanthropy that she’s teaching had the backing of billionaire Warren Buffett and his sister, Doris. But it was a four-week, no-college-credit course offered during the height of summer, mid-July through mid-August. Absolutely the worst time to try to […]

William Darity: Ninety-five percent joblessness for teen black male dropouts? That estimate, from Northeastern University’s Andrew Sum, borders on the fantastic as an indictment of the American labor market. Add to Sum’s damning statistic the finding that blacks with some college education or an associate’s degree experienced higher unemployment than whites who had dropped out of high […]