The number of recruiters requesting two or more years of work experience for some middle-skill occupations rose as much as 30% from 2007 to 2010, according to a paper by economists at Harvard University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The slack labor market during that time offered a natural experiment, said one of […]

The intellectual epicenter of Western civilization has expanded dramatically over the past 2,000 years. Once centered in Rome and Athens, culture soon spread out to Paris and London, and, eventually, New York and Hollywood. In a study published last week in the journal Science, researchers from Northeastern University mapped the dispersal of cultural history across […]

The shift cuts represent a sudden, harmful side effect for workers, who at rallies and through social media have urged loyal customers to boycott Market Basket stores in hopes that falling revenues would compel the company’s board of directors to reinstate their former president. Instead the board — controlled by Arthur S. Demoulas, Arthur T.’s […]

Road repairs are easier and as much as five times cheaper when problems are detected early. But sending crews to continually survey streets for damage isn’t practical, and minor cracks often grow into gaping holes before workers can get to them. A group headed by Ming Wang, a professor of environmental and civil engineering at […]

Potholes in Boston are an issue we all confront on a seasonal basis. Once in the throes of the harsh winter months, potholes riddle our streetscape from one corner of the city to the next. Come the spring, Public Works crews spend hours filling gaping holes in the with a fresh batch of concrete. A […]

NSF also awarded a grant to the Modular Approach to Cloud Security, or MACS, project, which seeks to build information systems for the cloud with multi-layered security, the release said. Researchers from Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Connecticut and Northeastern University will test a modular approach to cybersecurity, meaning the system’s […]

It is all too easy to become inured to the horrors of war. What at first shocks us soon ceases even to arouse our attention. After decades of violent conflict, Israelis have become tragically accustomed to violence. Operation Protective Edge is just the latest in a long line of military operations and wars that Israel […]

Even as the economy slowly gathers steam, men like Mr. Campbell, who lack college degrees, are increasingly falling behind. Many manufacturing jobs that kept blue-collar workers afloat have vanished. And wages have plunged. Between 1979 and 2007, wages for men under 30 with only a high school diploma fell nearly 29 percent, according to a […]

Resilience and redundancy should be the key takeaways from this, said Peter Boynton, founding co-director of the Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University in suburban Boston. Instead of viewing catastrophic events from an emergency management perspective, where the discussion revolves around what was — or was not — managed well, it’s better […]

The Senate bill is a long shot, but it would help hundreds of thousands of people, according to Northeastern University law professor Daniel Austin. Prof. Austin, who tracks how much debt bankrupt people report in public court filings, evaluated Sen. Whitehouse’s proposal at Bankruptcy Beat’s request. By his estimate, more than half of the people […]

There was a good reason why, for the past five and a half years since Israel last invaded the Gaza Strip in January 2009, Israel’s generals were reluctant to send their troops back in. They knew that while getting into Gaza would be easy for the mighty Israeli army, getting out would not be. This […]

An international team of researchers, including an art historian and a handful of physicists, have crunched three giant databases that record the births and deaths of notable people to map the geographical creep of culture over two millennia. The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, presents an unusual way of tracing the arc of […]