Campus Technology A data commons for scientific discovery Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and former graduate fellow at the Cultural Observatory, is quoted as saying that Harvard uses the OSDC to process and provide fast, structured access to the data from huge digital libraries: “Currently that means a public-facing visualization at arxiv.culturomics.org that scientists can use to explore […]
Xconomy Pitching startups, Roxbury style: Apps, bodyguards and more Pitch in the City is a little bit of Cambridge, MA, in Dudley Square. The entrepreneurs who are pitching have startups mostly from Smarter in the City, Roxbury’s first high-tech accelerator and one of the nation’s few minority-focused accelerators. The other entrepreneurs have been through or are part of MassChallenge or Future Boston Alliance’s accelerator. […]
Newsweek ISIS mass grave death toll in Iraq and Syria surpasses 3,000 Max Abrahms, professor of political science at Northeastern University and member at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicts that the real number of ISIS’s mass killings is even higher and will be revealed as the group is rolled back from the areas it controls, such as Mosul, which a U.S. Central Command (Centcom) official revealed […]
WGBH Tsarnaev guilty verdict and transportation sec. Stephanie Pollack on MBTA report Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been found guilty on all 30 counts in the Marathon bombing trial. Adam Reilly was inside the court when the verdict was read and gave his take. We also talked about what’s next in the trial with our panel of legal experts: Harvard Criminal Justice Institute’s Ronald Sullivan, former Homeland Security official […]
The Christian Science Monitor Tsarnaev guilty of Boston bombings. Where does trial go from here? From the prosecution’s perspective, the relatively quick guilty verdicts on all 30 counts might suggest that what they’re doing is working – and they should continue. “In a case like this it appears pretty clear that the prosecution has momentum,” says Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston. The timing of verdicts […]
Teaching scientists how to visualize their data Moret is a first-year graduate student in Northeastern’s Information Design and Visualization program. The program was started in 2013 as a unique merger of analysis and design meant to help researchers tell their data stories to a broader audience. “[Visual communication] allows people to catch the gist of something at a glance. . . that’s […]
How do cities’ police homicide rates compare? Question spotlights limits of U.S. data Since 1985, police in North Charleston, S.C., have recorded four “justifiable homicides” in which a felon was killed by an officer, according to FBI data. All those killed were male. Two were white, two black. But how does that number (as compiled by criminologist James Alan Fox at Northeastern University) compare with other cities of […]
What Tsarnaev deserves Now the real Boston Marathon trial can begin. A federal jury’s decision to convict Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of 30 charges related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings was the most anticlimactic of anticlimaxes. The 21-year-old’s lawyers admitted from the beginning that their client had participated in the horrific terrorist attack, which both scarred and strengthened this […]
On the lam with bank robber Enric Duran Before robbing banks, Enric Duran networked. As a teenager he was a professional table-tennis player and helped restructure the Catalan competition circuit to be more equitable. He turned his attention toward larger injustices in his early 20s, when he read Erich Fromm’s diagnosis of materialist society and Henry David Thoreau’s call to disobedience. This was […]
Newsweek U.S. Army funds body armor inspired by fish scales The current body armour used by the U.S. military is primarily made of Kevlar, a high-strength synthetic fibre first developed in the 1960s. A Polish company recently announced it had developed a liquid for use in body armour which could provide more protection than traditional Kevlar-based armour. The liquid, called Shear-Thickening Fluid, hardens upon impact […]
CNBC Global business may still be vulnerable to Heartbleed One year after the massive security flaw, Heartbleed, was revealed to the public, a new study found that up to 74 percent of companies in the Global 2000 are still vulnerable to being hacked via the bug. The flaw grabbed widespread media attention when it was revealed in 2014, and made countless businesses scramble to […]
WGBH Rolling Stone UVA rape story: A textbook case of how not to practice journalism Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the journalist at the heart of the Rolling Stone rape-story scandal, harbored doubts about “Jackie,” her principal source, all along — or, at the very least, had come to doubt her by the time the story was published. That’s the only way I can make sense of a remarkable section that appears […]