The Nation Plea Time for Snowden Let’s start with the obvious. Edward Snowden doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in Moscow or even Ecuador, Brazil or the other havens he has unsuccessfully pursued. He wants to come back to America—and we need him here. The Obama administration cringes at his every public appearance, and the intelligence community has […]
Northeastern gets Knight Foundation grant to launch media innovation program Northeastern University’s School of Journalism has received a $250,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help launch a graduate program focused on media innovation. Beginning in the fall, the school plans to enroll experienced media professionals who will devote much of their studies to nonjournalism subjects, such as computer science […]
Slate Study explains why your stupid Facebook friends are so gullible It’s a common experience. You log on to Facebook for your lunchtime fix of friends’ baby photos and links to fascinating online content from trusted sites like Slate, when you come across an intriguing headline such as “Stephen Hawking’s Blunder on Black Holes Shows Danger of Listening to Scientists, Says Bachmann” or “Sochi Hotel Guests […]
Researcher tracks illicit sex after quitting commodities Meredith Dank has a job that she admits can be a “party buzz kill” — she spends her days delving into the often gritty and grim lives of child sex workers, prostitutes and pimps. “As much as you think you have built up this wall of emotion, there are some horrific stories out there that […]
Room for Debate: A drug that should be easier to get For the last decade, overdoses of opiates and similar drugs have advanced at an accelerating pace, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Improving access to the drug naloxone, which counteracts the effects of overdoses, is one of the only interventions proven to save lives. Programs that have distributed naloxone to drug users, their family members […]
My business accepts Bitcoins The five-year-old digital currency is increasingly being adopted by brick-and mortar businesses, including dentists, pet boutiques — even a small honey business in Utah. In 2012, about 1,000 businesses used BitPay, the largest processor of Bitcoin payments. Today, more than 26,000 businesses worldwide use BitPay, said Tony Gallippi, its cofounder and CEO. The majority of […]
CNET News Beware this big iOS flaw– and it’s not alone An Android presentation just after Mandt’s asserted that the one-two punch of Android fragmentation has placed Android users at risk of missing out on important security updates. That’s not going to be fixed anytime soon, they said. The issue, argued Jon Oberheide of Duo Security and Northeastern University security researcher Collin Mulliner, lies in how […]
Teens getting squeezed out of labor market, study finds Teenagers are getting squeezed out of the labor force in record numbers as unemployment among the youngest workers remains at astronomical levels nearly five years after the last recession ended, according to a study from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The study, released Friday, found that numbers of working teenagers has plunged by […]
Google’s flu tracker suffers from sniffles If you want to know what’s up with the flu at the moment, you have a few choices: You can get the latest information at . Or you can get the from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is based on data that’s by now a couple of weeks old. But a in […]
Google’s flu project shows the failings of big data A new study shows that using big data to predict the future isn’t as easy as it looks—and that raises questions about how Internet companies gather and use information. Big data: as buzzwords go, it’s inescapable. Gigantic corporations like SAS and IBM tout their big data analytics, while experts promise that big data—our exponentially growing […]
Buzzfeed What if Google can’t predict flu outbreaks? s Google’s Flu Trends (GFT) tracking system a failure of big data? A new article published this afternoon in Science magazine suggests that Google’s much-covered algorithmic Flu Trends model, used to monitor search queries to track the spread of the flu, has routinely failed to accurately predict flu prevalence since it’s inception in 2008. While […]
Scientific American Why big data isn’t necessarily better data Tech companies—Facebook, Google and IBM, to name a few—are quick to tout the world-changing powers of “big data” gleaned from mobile devices, Web searches, citizen science projects and sensor networks. Never before has so much data been available covering so many areas of interest, whether it’s online shopping trends or cancer research. Still, some scientists […]