This sort of behavior is more easily explained in the context of crowd behavior as much as sports fan behavior, says Dan Lebowitz, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Society at Northeastern University in Boston. “People take the cloak of crowd anonymity to allow themselves to do things they would not normally […]

Experts at the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems at Northeastern University have developed a computer model designed to predict the path of Ebola, based on everything from demographics to travel patterns. Alessandro Vespignani, a computer and health sciences professor at Northeastern University, is leading the research and joins Here & Now’s […]

“People have died from faulty equipment producing gas pipeline explosions and from drone bombings of civilians. US companies have lost billions worth of business as foreign customers no longer trust their products and services,” said Judith Perrolle, a professor at Northeastern University. The report comes a day after the top US cyber official said the […]

Health authorities have long favored voluntary isolation, mostly for practical reasons. “If you make people feel as if they will be stigmatized and outcast and scapegoated, they’re not going to come forward the next time someone gets sick, and that would be a disaster,” said Wendy E. Parmet, director of the health policy and law […]

The policy change is meant, in part, to improve how drugs function in girls and women. Yet it may benefit men as well. For instance, another problem the NIH identified arises when researchers average results from pools of lab animals including both females and males. That commonplace practice may obscure sex differences that could help […]

When you’re searching for a flight, there are dozens of travel websites ready to show you the best price. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look, right? Wrong. Turns out, you might get different results on some search engines based on a variety of factors, including whether you’re a member of the site, […]

“If you were to walk into a brick and mortar store and they were offering better prices for less affluent people there would be a revolt, right? No one would stand for this.” Christo Wilson, a computer scientist at Northeastern University. But on the Internet, he says, anything goes when it comes to pricing. “It […]

The apotheosis of the modern bumpkin mode has been embodied by Sarah Palin, who nearly found herself one 72-year-old heartbeat from our highest national office. Palin, the starkest example yet of a proud unsophisticate taking the national stage, has remained visible and unapologetic. She also appears to have made little attempt to fill the knowledge […]

An international team of researchers including Alessandro Vespignani of Boston’s Northeastern University made a computer model showing that trying to block travelers form Ebola-affected countries would be futile. “Traffic reductions are shown to delay by only a few weeks the risk that the outbreak extends to new countries,” they wrote in the journal Eurosurveillance. New […]

Stephen E Flynn, the director of the Center for Resilience Studies at Northeastern University, says that the recent state-level responses, including the original, occasionally ham-handed efforts in Texas, “tell us a lot about the nation’s uneven preparedness for a deadly disease outbreak”. “The alarms that should be ringing around the country should not be centred […]

Nurse Kaci Hickox on Friday arrived in New Jersey after spending a month in Sierra Leone treating Ebola patients. Under a mandatory quarantine policy announced by Gov. Chris Christie the same day, Hickox was forced to stay in a tent outside a hospital with no working shower, even though she tested negative for the disease. The mandatory […]

In cases of forced quarantine or isolation, “people do have a right to have their detention reviewed by a court, especially if there are individualized determinations being made,” said Wendy E. Parmet, a Northeastern University law professor and expert on public health policy. “The Constitution is very clear,” she said. “While governments have a right […]