Boston needs to embrace curbside collection of organic waste OVERALL, THE Boston mayoral candidates agree with the city’s goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Several have mentioned that they want to see improvement in Boston’s recycling rate, which, at 20 percent, is 10 percent lower than the national average. But to match recycling rates of 80 percent in San Francisco, 65 percent in Los Angeles, […]
Gratitude Is About the Future, Not the Past When life’s got you down, gratitude can seem like a chore. Sure, you’ll go through the motions and say the right things — you’ll thank people for help they’ve provided or try to muster a sense of thanks that things aren’t worse. But you might not truly feel grateful in your heart. It can be […]
Unemployed increase as Mass. economy slows The Massachusetts unemployment rate is just slightly below the 7.3 percent national rate, which has declined recently. “Recent employment growth has been slow,” said Northeastern University economist Alan Clayton-Matthews. “The number of jobs is not increasing, but people are entering the labor force. That’s driving the number of unemployed up and the unemployment rate.”
In The Future, You May Get An Origami Liver Transplant The ancient Japanese art of origami is useful for making more than just pretty papercranes and owls. In the future, the practice may be used to produce new human organs–an alternative to the 3-D printed organs that scientists are working on today. Carol Livermore, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, has long studied microfabrication […]
White Women in Harlem’s Renaissance Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University, offers a joint biography of six largely forgotten women (winnowed down from five dozen whom she researched) in “Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance” (Harper, $28.99). The convention-bending women included philanthropists, educators, heiresses and novelists who figured in the Harlem Renaissance of […]
‘Miss Anne in Harlem: the White Women of the Black Renaissance’ by Carla Kaplan There may be no clearer embodiment of that idealism than the Misses Anne of Carla Kaplan’s intriguing new book: the white women who in one fashion or another decided to make the Harlem Renaissance their own. Kaplan, the Davis distinguished professor of American literature at Northeastern University, admits that it was a minuscule group, largely […]
Online anger ‘spreads faster than joy’ on Weibo Sadness was not quickly shared, and the authors said it required more detailed exploration to observe the underlying reasons. Christo Wilson, a US-based researcher at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved with the work, also undertakes analysis of Weibo. He said that the headline result of the latest study was “slightly sensational […]
Reliable Sources To the Editor: As one of those interviewed by Evan Mandery for his meticulously researched book, “A Wild Justice,” about the Supreme Court’s capital punishment decisions, I am pleased that it received the praise it deserves from David Oshinsky (Sept. 1). But it is not the case that “no source for the meeting” ending in the agreement […]
NOVA Beams of Light Could Steer Future Spaceships Picture this: A spaceship—nothing out of the ordinary, except for the spinning glass rods mounted at the corners—that can be steered by nothing more than light. While that application may be a long ways off, physicists at MIT and Northeastern University theorize that the Bernoulli principle—the same thing that lifts airplanes and hooks golf balls—may […]
Is an Education in the Liberal Arts Important? The results of two separate surveys were announced the week of September 16 that provide very interesting insights into the American job market. One addressed the opinions of those who hire candidates for jobs and the other reported on the salaries of those who get hired. Inside Higher Ed reported on a survey conducted for […]
CNN Money More Americans feel graduates unprepared after college Although a majority of Americans believe a college degree is the most important factor in career success, they’re increasingly skeptical schools are doing a good enough job to prepare students, a new study conducted for Northeastern University found. According to the study, 62% of the people surveyed rated colleges’ efforts to prepare graduates for the […]
Mass Shootings Are on the Rise—and Falling Or we could use the FBI’s definition of a mass shooting: one in which at least four people, not including the perpetrator, are killed. This is a vastly larger category than the one Maddow employs: there were about 600 such incidents in the United States between 1980 and 2010. As James Alan Fox, a professor of […]