preLaw Magazine You could look it up What is a client buying when he or she hires a lawyer? If your answer is that lawyers get paid for knowing the law, think again. The law, defined as relevant statutes, regulations and court cases, is now instantly available to anyone connected to the Internet. Access to primers, government forms, and even Internal Revenue […]
Gizmodo Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information Giridhari Venkatadri, Piotr Sapiezynski, and Alan Mislove of Northeastern University, along with Elena Lucherini of Princeton University, did a series of tests that involved handing contact information over to Facebook for a group of test accounts in different ways and then seeing whether that information could be used by an advertiser. They came up with […]
Forbes Look out for this surprising consequence of influencer marketing that could hurt your brand It is these kinds of questions–healthy skepticism, let’s call it–that prompted me, along with three other academics, to conduct a study that looked at various outcomes of running influencer campaigns. We were looking in particular for unintended consequences of seeding products with apparently influential individuals who are supposed to spread word of mouth (WOM) about […]
This Chrome Extension Protects You from ‘Price Steering’ in Online Shopping An experienced online shopper will tell you to always search for purchases – whether it be a gift for your mom or a flight – in an incognito window. There’s a reason for that, and it’s called price discrimination. Companies can use consumers’ online data to determine what they’re looking to buy and will hike […]
How researchers could tell if you’ve been laid off – from your cell phone records Think about your daily cell-phone use. Maybe you generally call your significant other from the break room. Maybe at lunch you call a friend about meeting up for a drink later. At 3 p.m., you call to make sure your kid got home from school, and at 7 p.m. you call from the bar to apologize […]
This Boston startup offers ‘don’t-do-it-yourself’ storage One Boston startup has been offering customers “Don’t-Do-It-Yourself” storage since 2010, but it’s still managed to remain relatively unnoticed – ask someone if they’ve ever heard of Fetch Storage and there’s a good chance the answer will be no. Brij Patel, one of the company’s co-founders, told BostInno “word of mouth” and “Google searches” have thus far […]
PRI In oil-producing Iran, a slight hike in gas prices could cause a jump in discontent Until Thursday, Iranians could purchase up to 16 gallons of gas for just $0.45 per gallon. Now, they are paying $0.83 and, after the first 16 gallons, they’ll pay $1.17 a gallon. That’s because the government is cutting part of the subsidy it provided for gas in an attempt to improve the economy. While the […]
Gizmodo Flytenow is the airplane rideshare service you can actually afford Admit it: You’ve always wanted to ride in a private plane. Imagine stretching out your legs and listening to music without headphones. What luxury! Too bad, you probably can’t afford it. But, with Flytenow, you just might. Think of it as a Lyft for airplanes. Flytenow aims to connect pilots looking to rack up hours […]
Rand Paul Couldn’t Be More Wrong About Unemployment Insurance Imagine you lost your job when the economy was in free fall, and six months later it was still in free fall. You sent out resumés every day, and every day you heard nothing back from companies too scared to hire. Then things finally started to look better. Companies finally started to think about hiring […]
Slate Life Advice for Young Men That Went Viral in the 1850s This anonymous list of advice for young men was a mid-nineteenth-century viral sensation, appearing in at least 28 newspapers, Northern and Southern, with datelines between 1851 and 1860. The list even made it all the way to Hawaii, and was published twice in Honolulu’s The Polynesian. A group of investigators at Northeastern University identified the list […]
Experts say bond with brother may have helped draw younger suspect into Boston bomb plot Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died last week at age 26 in a shootout with police, and his 19-year-old sibling Dzhokhar are hardly the first brothers involved in criminal acts. Three pairs of brothers were among the 9/11 terrorists, for example, and three brothers were convicted in 2008 for planning to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in […]
See how the most influential science comes in waves Despite previous research suggesting that most scientists make their biggest discoveries early in their career, Sinatra argues in a paper in Science today that a scientist’s most impactful publications—those with the largest numbers of citations, in this instance—could happen at any point in your career. Visualized, this phenomenon looks a lot like Sinatra’s waves. Or […]