Every spring as students move off campus, dormitory hallways, quads, Dumpsters, and the streets of surrounding neighborhoods are strewn with lightly worn but unwanted futons, lamps, textbooks, minifridges, kitchenware, and laundry supplies. Most of it winds up in a junk yard. A few months later, college students and their families arrive on campus hauling truckloads […]

The one-in-five figure is based on the Campus Sexual Assault Study, commissioned by the National Institute of Justice and conducted from 2005 to 2007. Two prominent criminologists, Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox and Mount Holyoke College’s Richard Moran, have noted its weaknesses: “The estimated 19% sexual assault rate among college women is based on a […]

Of the state’s most diverse municipalities, Boston’s police department is by far the most representative of its city’s demographics, though the department has struggled to diversify its upper ranks. Black residents make up just over a quarter of the city’s population and make up 23.2 percent of the police force. Asians and Latinos are slightly […]

As the biggest Ebola outbreak in history continues to claim lives, a handful of researchers are using mathematical models and knowledge about the virus to predict the reach of the disease before it strikes. Among them is Northeastern University researcher Alessandro Vespignani, but he and others are stymied by a lack of data about the […]

Cellphone apps that find users car rides in real time are exploding in popularity: The car-service company Uber was recently valued at $18 billion, and even as it faces legal wrangles, a number of companies that provide similar services with licensed taxi cabs have sprung up. What if the taxi-service app on your cellphone had […]

Labor Day is a time to dust off the grill and gather with friends and family. But it’s also a time to celebrate, and think about, the American labor force. And to look how the economy, how technology, is changing work. Wages are stagnating. Manufacturing jobs disappearing. Technology upending whole industries. Many people who hold […]

Studies show that market entrances by insurers have a greater effect when there are few in a market, compared with when there are already many. (A more precise measure of competition takes into consideration enrollments into plans offered by insurers, not just number of insurers: A four-insurer market in which one has 90 percent of […]

Alessandro Vespignani hopes that his latest work will turn out to be wrong. In July, the physicist from Northeastern University in Boston started modeling how the deadly Ebola virus may spread in West Africa. Extrapolating existing trends, the number of the sick and dying mounts rapidly from the current toll—more than 3000 cases and 1500 […]

“Everybody knows there has been a decline in the 25-to-44 age group, but instead of continuing to focus on the problem, we want to find ways to reverse this trend,” Van Vleck said. “The survey sparked community conversation and we are now developing think tanks, financial literacy materials, and consumer education.” The survey, which was […]

Labor Day has become a mindless holiday. It is a day off of work for most Americans, nothing more. But with 18 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, it should be a time to debate labor policy. Given the pressures of computers, automation, off-shoring and immigration, we don’t actually honor labor unless we debate labor policy. […]

The statewide mortality rate for black babies — 8.2 per every 1,000 births — was higher than Boston’s. Building social networks with other pregnant women is critical for mothers-to-be, said Elmer Freeman, a Northeastern University specialist in the study of health care disparities. The city has sought to nurture those networks with support groups known […]

“The best (and most successful) academics are the ones who are so caught up in the importance of their work, so caught up with their simple passion for a subject, that they publicise it with every breath,” Professor Hitchcock says. He praises the early career scholars who have dismissed concerns that exposing their research too […]