The payoff of higher education was so great, many teens would forgo working in high school and early in college. Some focused on volunteering, sports and other enrichment activities, while others didn’t work because automation and competition with immigrants made some typical teen jobs harder to find, said Northeastern University economist Alicia Sasser Modestino.

At a minimum, “Facebook is going to have to think about ways to structure their technology to give that proper notice,” said Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University professor of law and computer science.

Janet Randall, a psycholinguist at Northeastern University, has found that rendering these instructions in plain English, stripping out passives and legalese especially, makes them much easier to interpret. Providing a written version brought an even bigger benefit. She first recorded modest results when testing psychologists’ favourite lab rats—their students. But these are people who did […]

The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most of the world’s oceans, so increased vigilance about possible growth of shell disease remains very important, said Justin Ries, a marine biogeochemist with Northeastern University. The low percentage of Maine lobster with shell disease could be temporary, he said.

Traditionally, the FTC will settle these type of cases because proving consent decree violations is difficult, says Woodrow Hartzog, professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. But this situation with Facebook could be different, he says. “We can learn a lot from watching what happens after FTC reaches the conclusion of its investigation.”

It also included presentations by a score of African scientists under 42, selected by a forum committee as “Next Einstein Fellows” and willing to act as role models for youngsters. Among them were Yabebal Fanteye, an Ethiopian cosmologist who is now a researcher at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg, South Africa; […]