Something old, something new The National Endowment for the Humanities has a new home and a new chairman, but the agency’s work to fund digital humanities projects continues unabated. The NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting was hosted for the eighth time in Washington on Monday, but for the first time in the agency’s new premises in the recently […]
Euronews Fact-check: Can cold weather actually make you sick? Well, one legacy of the COVID pandemic was the popularisation of one important device for fending off these pesky germs: a face mask. “One thing we’ve found, which is something we’re already doing in many parts of the world, is wearing a mask. Even though COVID-19 has decreased and the concerns are not as significant,” Mansoor […]
CBS Boston Concern about parking garage safety in Mass. in wake of deadly collapse in New York City Northeastern University Professor of Structural Engineering Mehrdad Sasani told WBZ there is a possibility something similar could happen right in our backyard.
The Daily Beast How the White House Caved to Fox News’ Biden ‘Crack Pipe’ Faux-Scandal Leo Beletsky, a law and health sciences professor at Northeastern University School of Law, told the Associated Press he was let down by the White House’s reaction to the GOP outrage. “This administration has said repeatedly they are making harm reduction one of their key priorities,” he stated. “As soon as there’s a little right-wing echo chamber […]
PBS NewsHour ‘Old Town Road’ defied a 20-year trend in hit music. Math explains why “If a listener wants to be on the cutting edge of exploring the new content and, hey, see something blowing up, they want to be in it,” said Andrew Mall, an ethnomusicologist and music industry expert at Northeastern University, who wasn’t involved with the study. “It’s a kind of feedback hype.”
Tech Republic Microsoft’s new AI app to assist the blind could be a ‘game changer’ in accessibility Meryl Alper, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said she believes the app could be useful, even for people who are not visually impaired. “What is obvious to one person can be invisible to another,” Alper told […]
WGBH Holding a president to account in an age of extreme polarization I found the comments of these uninformed voters to be both amusing and disturbing — and something else as well. At a time of an emerging crisis over what the president knew about the Russia connection and when he knew it, we are so hopelessly divided by partisanship and tribal loyalties that we are incapable […]
Water-based implant new option for Americans with big toe damage “It’s a good thing for prolonging a joint’s use without doing something more drastic, like a total joint replacement … but nobody knows how long this hydrogel will last,” said Dr. Arthur Coury, a professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. “There are some horror stories of hydrogels degrading in the body and […]
The Patriot Ledger The lure of something-for-nothing banking policies The Federal Reserve’s long-awaited September meeting ended with the Fed once again deciding not to raise interest rates. We have seen this movie before. Consider a society in which government has been traditionally run by the Old Guys political party. They are great believers in “prudent government,” and their definition of prudence includes balanced budgets; […]
New York Daily News Spooky New Jersey house ‘Watcher’ analyzed by criminologists: ‘It makes them feel powerful. They get a thrill from it’ “This very well could be someone who’s enjoying the impact they’re having by terrifying strangers,” James Alan Fox, an interim dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston, told NJ Advance Media. “It makes them feel powerful. They get a thrill from it.” No other neighbors have reported issues, […]
The new thing in Google Flu Trends is traditional data The lesson seems to be that in fields like public health and economics, where there are long-standing information-gathering systems, the smart move is to marry the new data with the old. The new breed of data from the web, cellphones and sensors can be a powerful, knowledge-enhancing asset. But it is a signal, not thesignal. […]
End of era for local newspapers The South Boston Tribune published its final edition Thursday. The Dorchester Argus-Citizen, Jamaica Plain Citizen, and Hyde Park Tribune are also folding. In an era before Facebook, Twitter, and online news sources became the norm, community papers were a constant for many Boston neighborhoods. But as more readers migrated to the Web for their news […]