Over the past seven months, Massachusetts residents have relaxed their adherence to COVID-19 prevention guidelines, according to a new survey conducted by researchers from Harvard, Northeastern, Northwestern, and Rutgers.

“One of the sides could decide to drop the matter,” Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, said. “This is exactly what the Biden-Harris administration must do. They should relinquish their misguided position that federal law stands in the way of public health measures proven to save lives.”

To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by David Lazer, a Northeastern University professor and researcher with the group that produced the study, The COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States; and Dr. Katherine Gergen Barnett, vice chair of primary care innovation and transformation and program director of the department of family medicine […]

When it comes to commercial use of facial recognition, some researchers worry that laws focused only on gaining consent to use it aren’t strict enough, says Woodrow Hartzog, a computer scientist and law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who studies facial surveillance.

But Matthew Nisbet, a professor of environmental communication at Northeastern University who has studied climate philanthropy, said it’s not clear they will do enough to offset the impact of Amazon’s own operations. 

When it comes to crowdsourcing, the more people, the better, Jeff Howe, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and the originator of the term “crowdsourcing,” told ABC News. A number over 100,000 is key, he added.

“We really need some degree of coordinated behavior, and some of that is about individual responsibility and some of that will be coordinated acts by our institutions, our schools, our universities and our government,” Lazer said. The Northeastern University computational social scientist said we must get more aggressive immediately, because, as he says, the bad […]