“Both candidates will be under greater scrutiny than they have ever been due to their age,” Alan Schroeder, a professor emeritus at Northeastern University who wrote the book “Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trial.” He called the debate “one of the only moments in which the candidates don’t have complete control.”

Joan Fitzgerald, a professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University: “The impact of climate change on coastal cities is happening now. About 40% of the nation’s population lives in coastal areas. Sea-level rise is increasing water levels on the Eastern coast sooner than expected and in many cases, land is subsiding.”

Nikos Passas, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, employs a catchy phrase to describe corporate practices that are within the letter of the law yet have adverse social consequences: “lawful but awful.”

“Any one of those things would get attention, but when you add them all up, there is a fascination,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University. “We’re all like rubberneckers, watching for the next bombshell.”

MySpace was deemed a “ghetto” as more Black users joined up, Meredith Clark, a Black Twitter researcher and professor of communications at Northeastern University, says in the docuseries, while Facebook felt akin to a “digital gated community.” Quickly, Twitter filled the virtual void. 

“I love my daughter, and I was thrilled to see her when I came home from work, but I was also happy to be at work,” as one mother told professors Jamie Ladge of Northeastern University and Danna Greenberg of Babson College.

Piotr Sapiezynski, a research scientist at Northeastern University who specializes in testing online algorithms, said advertisers competed with one another to reach women because they dominate U.S. consumer spending. As a result, Dr. Sapiezynski said, the algorithm probably focused on highly interested, easier-to-reach men who had interacted with similar content.

“If it’s a means to an end, what is the end?” said Rébecca Kleinberger, an author of the paper and a researcher at Northeastern University, where she studies how animals interact with technology. “It does seem like there was a bias toward social activity or activity that means remaining in interaction with the caretaker.”

Written by Fred H. Lawson, a Professor of Government Emeritus at Northeastern University.

David Bau is very familiar with the idea that computer systems are becoming so complicated it’s hard to keep track of how they operate. “I spent 20 years as a software engineer, working on really complex systems. And there’s always this problem,” says Bau, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Co-written by Joan Fitzgerald is a professor at Northeastern University School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs.

According to Brooke Foucault Welles, professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and author of You want a piece of me: Britney Spears as a case study on the prominence of hegemonic tales and subversive stories in online media, Spears’s battles are part of a larger issue of stories that emerge online, are picked up in the […]