Legal Tools to Stop Junk Food Marketing to Children Interview with Cara Wilking, senior staff attorney, Public Health Advocacy Institute For this installment of Ask a Food Lawyer, we profile Cara Wilking, senior staff attorney with the Public Health Advocacy Institute, at Northeastern University School of Law. Her research focuses on the role of state consumer protection laws to limit unfair and deceptive food marketing […]
Boston’s Housing Challenge: Affordability, Availability Housing availability in Boston has been a particular passion for Mayor Thomas Menino, who is fast-tracking developments across the city during his final four months in office. It’s part of his last pushto address a housing affordability crisis that’s been a persistent problem for Boston during his tenure. Today we’re looking at Boston’s housing challenge. WBUR’s Sacha Pfeiffer speaks with […]
The Hechinger Report Survey: Colleges aren’t preparing graduates for jobs Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the higher education system is doing only a fair or poor job of preparing graduates for the workforce, according to a new poll. So firmly does this belief appear to be held that 60 percent of those polled said employees with some work experience but no college degrees are likely to […]
Mass Shootings Fuel Fear, Account for Fraction of Murders The mass slaughters listed in the report caused the deaths of 547 people. Over the same three decades through 2012, that’s less than a tenth of 1 percent of the 559,347 people the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates were murdered in America. “It is a very, very small percentage,” said James Alan Fox, who teaches […]
Discovery News Termites Create Their Own Antibiotics Rebeca Rosengaus also studies termites and is an associate professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences at Northeastern University. She told Discovery News: “A variety of insects — both solitary and social — exploit the chemicals of Streptomyces to control parasites and/or pathogens.” Based on the latest study, which she said is “well […]
Forbes Do Millennials Think Differently About Money And Career? So how to make sense of an American Psychological Association study in 2009 that there was a “63% increase in the number of young people who rated money as “extremely important” (16% of Boomers compared to 26% of Millennials)”? The same study found that Gen-Y measured lower on the civic engagement scale than did Gen-X (lower than […]
Mass murders less frequent than we think: Column “Yet another mass shooting,” lamented President Obama on Monday before giving a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis. Meanwhile, the cable news channels featured wall-to-wall coverage of the D.C. Navy Yard massacre, complete with eyewitness interviews and telestrator-aided analysis of how the events had unfolded. Commentator after commentator pondered the reasons why […]
Mayoral rivals offer formulas for transit, parking Many of the candidates are expected to speak about transportation issues at a candidate’s forum on the topic, scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Boston Public Library. Stephanie Pollack, associate director of Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy and co-moderator of the forum, said transportation issues have been a prominent part […]
WGBH Will MOOCs Make The ‘Ivory Tower’ Obsolete? On a recent sunny afternoon at Northeastern University, President Joseph Aoun mingles with incoming freshmen. As a member of the American Council on Education, Aoun is urging higher-education institutions to embrace disruptive technologies such as MOOCs to expand their reach. He says Northeastern is already taking the lead. “We are in Charlotte, we are in […]
Are You Experienced? Employers Hope So Your college degree is important, but it needs to be bolstered with plenty of work experience. According to a new survey by FTI Consulting, on behalf of Northeastern University, 60% of the general public feels someone with no college degree but some work experience would fare better in the workforce than a person who has a […]
NECN Broadside: Clues to mass shootings At this time, there are few clues to what motivated Washington Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis. Sources tell the Associated Press that investigators have found no manifesto or other writings suggesting a political or religious agenda, and the search for answers continues. Jack Levin, the Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University, is […]
WGBH Northeastern Survey: Colleges Not Prepping Students For Workforce A majority of Americans believe college and universities are doing a “fair” or “poor” job of preparing recent college graduates for the workforce, a new survey released Tuesday by Northeastern University finds. At the same time, the survey shows nearly two-thirds of Americans say they prefer a well-rounded higher education compared to one that focuses […]