The 1.7 million students who graduated from American colleges and universities in recent months, their newly minted bachelor’s degrees in hand, face bleak prospects. Their average student-loan debt is some $33,000. The underemployment rate for recent graduates is 44 percent, meaning the jobs many get won’t require the bachelor’s degrees they just earned. And since […]

Fabien Cousteau, grandson of famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, is due to emerge from the turquoise waters off the Florida Keys on Tuesday morning, marking the end of a record-breaking, 31-day stay inside an underwater habitat with a team of scientists and documentary filmmakers. The younger Cousteau, 46, along with two “aquanauts,” took the 60-foot […]

Today, the cloud infrastructure market is dominated by several big companies – Amazon, Google and Microsoft — but a public/business/academia partnership called the Massachusetts Open Cloud project is hoping to change that by creating an open computing marketplace where you can negotiate whatever services you need from multiple infrastructure vendors. Peter Desnoyers, a professor at […]

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau captivated American television viewers, introducing them to the natural wonders of the ocean and illustrating how little we knew about life under the sea. While Jacques Cousteau passed away in 1997, his family has carried on his legacy of ocean exploration, including his grandson, Fabien Cousteau, who recently completed […]

The kidnapping, by a group that many consider to be a terrorist organization (though the U.S. has yet to officially declare ISIS as such), comes just two months after another terrorist organization, Boko Haram, based in Nigeria, kidnapped more than 200 girls from their school in Chibok. After their kidnapping, the international community took note […]

A monthly confidence index that seeks to take the temperature of Bay State employers declined from May to June, said the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, a group that represents the state’s employers. The index posted a reading of 53.7 in June, down from a reading of 54.8 in May. The reading for June 2013 was […]

But even if Facebook’s experimentation “creeps you out,” a la Susan Fiske, you realistically, as a user, don’t want it to stop. Why? It makes Facebook better for you. In the two hours it’s taken me to write this, Facebook has probably run dozens of “experiments” on new features and design changes that will make […]

Graffiti and vandalism are frowned upon in everyday life, but one college is aiming to use these actions to encourage future students to think outside of the box. As part of its Whiteboard Innovation Challenge, Northeastern University recently introduced a plain white van to the streets of Boston. According to BetaBoston, the vehicle had simple […]

It was a remarkable result: By manipulating the news feeds of thousands of Facebook users, without their knowing consent, researchers working with the goliath of social media found that they could spur a significant, if small, effect on people’s behavior in the world beyond bits. The year was 2010. The scientists were poking at voting […]

As Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings continue to unfold, once again some creditors and commentators are arguing that the city should sell off the Detroit Institute of Art’s art collection to pay off the city’s creditors, among whom are thousands of retired city workers. The pro-liquidators would have the pensioners vote against a federally mediated Grand Bargain […]

Employees will not trust you by default. As a leader, you need to prove your trustworthiness time and time again. You will need to track and manage the level of trust your employees have in you and your leadership. David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of The Truth About […]

Is it problematic that Facebook was the one to run the study, and for commercial purposes? If you’re feeling exploited — either by Facebook’s collection of data or by the way the company used it — then you have a bigger issue with 21st-century enterprises more generally. Whether disclosed publicly or not, the use of […]