Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, built a website to visualize how students describe male and female professors differently onRateMyProfessor.com. It’s striking how different adjectives sort by gender — sometimes dramatically so. Men are more likely to be described as smart or brilliant.

Others deliver similar messages, if in more measured tones. Universities “are champions of the intellectual and physical human endeavor,” said Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern. “The Olympics do the same.” Anthony P. Monaco, president of Tufts, said he sees an Olympics in Boston as an opportunity to encourage civic-minded attitudes among youths. A key […]

In the Brookings “advanced industries” rankings, Silicon Valley was far and away the leader. Usual tech suspects Seattle and Boston ranked highly, too; Boston, a solid eighth, might have placed higher had researchers factored in more of the health care sector into their calculations. Just as striking, though, is the prominence of unsung metro areas […]

There are a lot of alternative product development methodologies that might apply more directly to data products. One of the more recent ones is the “lean startup” approach, created primarily by Eric Ries. Intuit Inc.INTU +0.79%, for example, has embraced both the lean startup idea (see a series of short videos on it here) anddata products, […]

A new assessment of the government’s record concludes the trustbusters haven’t always anticipated which mergers will have anticompetitive results. John Kwoka, an economist at Northeastern University who has worked for the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice, analyzed every postmerger study published in an academic journal for combinations completed between 1976 and 2006 for […]

Elizabeth Nabel will be looking at the work the NFL’s advisors have already done and are currently engaged in. Cantu says Nabel will bring her leadership background in running a major hospital, and the resultant skill set of working with many medical experts. “As an administrator of a high-profile hospital, with the natural egos that […]

Incognito was suspended for the final eight games of the 2013 NFL season amid allegations he bullied and harassed fellow Dolphins lineman Jonathan Martin. An independent investigation released in February 2014 found that Incognito and two other teammates, John Jerry and Mike Pouncey, persistently taunted Martin and an athletic trainer with racial, sexual and homophobic […]

Whether you think your professor is an eccentric genius or a disorganized mess might depend on his or her gender, according to data mapped by a history professor at Northeastern University. You can plug words like “rude” or “brilliant” into an interactive chart created by Benjamin Schmidt and see how often those words were used […]

Many professors cringe when they think about the way they are described on Rate My Professors, the popular site used by students to evaluate faculty members. A new tool allows those being rated (or anyone) to see the way students tend to use different words when rating male and female professors — generally to the […]

Easy or demanding? Boring or engaging? And what about homework? The student-evaluation site Rate My Professors contains a huge stockpile of information about what college students think of their instructors. And thanks to a new tool created by a Northeastern University professor, those millions of reviews can be mined to reveal students’ biases about male […]

Hispanic neighborhoods tend to have higher populations of immigrants who were first-time home buyers and were put at risk by lenders who waived credit checks and minimum-income levels, housing specialists said. Many of these subprime loans were for multifamily homes, which are popular among low-income residents because they can rent out units to generate income. […]

Boston Dynamics has developed a series of robots that look like animals including BigDog, which was originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and is the size of a large dog or small mule. It’s also developed two human-like robots, Atlas and Petman. Last fall, Boston Dynamics’ founder, Marc Raibert told an […]