Tacked on to the appendix of a British government health report in 1858, a rose-shaped diagram presented a striking finding: during the Crimean War, far more soldiers died of disease in hospitals than of wounds on the battlefield. The diagram’s author, famed mother of nursing Florence Nightingale, had a talent for statistics. Today, her rose […]

The recent arrest of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in Northern Ireland has academics reviewing their responsibilities in recording history. The arrest renewed questions about a supposed confidential audio archive at Boston College, known as the Belfast Project. It contained recorded interviews with people directly involved in the violent, three-decade-long Troubles in Northern Ireland. The […]

Most academics would view a post at an elite university like Oxford or Harvard as the crowning achievement of a career—bringing both accolades and access to better wine cellars. But scholars covet such places for reasons beyond glory and gastronomy. They believe perching on one of the topmost branches of the academic tree will also […]

In the Terminator movies, fully autonomous robots wage war against humanity. Although cyborg assassins won’t be arriving from the future anytime soon, offensive “Terminator-style” autonomous robots that are programmed to kill could soon escape Hollywood science fiction and become reality. This actual rise of the machines raises important strategic, moral, and legal questions about whether […]

{Video} As any regular viewer of Beat The Press knows, it’s a rough time to be in the media. With a broken business model, lousy job prospects, and public antipathy, you’d think the profession would appeal only to the most retrograde masochist. Well, a new survey suggests there actually might be some truth to that. […]

I distinctly recall the moment when I first learned the word boko, now notorious as half the name of the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. (“Haram” means “forbidden” or “sinful.”) I was living in a remote, rural borderland straddling the border between northern Nigeria and Niger Republic in the early 1980s, conducting research as a […]

Successfully starting and running a business is about many things: hard work, determination, innovation, human relationships and management. And numbers. You can’t manage what you can’t see. When it comes to business basics, processes and results, numbers count, literally and figuratively. However, you can waste a lot of time obsessing over things that don’t count. […]

This is an exciting time of year for America’s young people. Nearly 4 million people will receive an accredited degree from an academic institution in the United States this year, according to the US Department of Education. Regardless of how long it took them or where they studied, these young men and women should feel […]

Hip hop legend and actor LL Cool J never graduated from high school or college after signing with Def Jam Records as a teenager in 1984. But last week, the rapper born James Todd Smith received an honorary doctorate degree from Northeastern University. The moment became even more special because he shared the experience with […]

Got a job? Count your blessings. Got one that uses your skills and pays you for them? Wow. The U.S. employment picture is definitely brightening. An unforeseen surge in jobs gained helped drop the jobless rate to 6.3 percent in April. The Federal Reserve thought we wouldn’t get there until the end of the year. […]

The sharing economy or collaborative consumption is a vast market existing everywhere around us, but is not readily apparent. Instead, it is a by-product of the everyday inefficiencies of life — the person with an extra seat in their car, extra room in their house, or with extra time to spare. Anyone who has used […]

I once silenced a seatmate on a transatlantic flight who threatened to be overly chatty by (truthfully) telling him that I was traveling to London to speak about the history of the patent examiner. Horrified I might tell him about it, he quickly returned to his own, apparently more interesting reading. One glance at the […]