A little over a year ago, Justin Dowd’s boss bought a pack of colored chalk to write the day’s specials on the wall. Little did he know, that chalk would change Dowd’s life forever. The Northeastern undergraduate, then a third-year studying physics, told me he’d always had a penchant for doodling and a minor love affair ...
When economists talk about producers and consumers—the people that make stuff and the people that use it—they’re usually thinking about commodities like coffee, wheat, or oil. Not knowledge. That’s because knowledge hasn’t really been quantifiable before. But today, in this era of the “data deluge,” it is. For the first time in history, we can ...
4/15, 11:41am: Not 24 hours later and the contents of this post seem empty and distant. Yesterday morning we were watching the governor place crowns on the winners’ heads; yesterday afternoon we listened to him tell us about the injuries and fatalities incurred not a mile away when two bombs exploded along Boylston Street. Yesterday morning ...
I got some feedback that the webcrawl is a little overwhelming in length, so from now on this weekly post will be focused on three or four of my favorite stories from around the web instead of a roundup of the whole sclogosphere. For this Friday-before-Marathon-Monday, here are my picks, which have nothing to do ...
4:16pm: The awards are in! First place: Page Turner Second place: ICD and 4G^2 Third place: TRAQ and goCAD Peoples’ Choice: ICD 3:44pm: Time to breathe and my fingers hurt Well, the ECE capstone presentations are officially over. It was a great day and the projects were all incredibly impressive. The last one might even be ...
Here are two things that shouldn’t surprise you: Our past experiences determine our future behaviors and our social interactions are constantly changing. When it comes to humans operating in the world, these are just facts and we don’t think about them that much. But they are deeply connected to the way information spreads. Right now ...
Check it out! I was a guest on the Northeastern College of Science Twitter chat this afternoon. They do this every Wednesday at noon (find them at #sciencechat) on a variety of topics. Next week research faculty member K. M. Abraham will be discussing his work on lithium air batteries. He’s a great guy doing ...
A few weeks ago I got to pretend I was a middle schooler again and joined in on a field trip to the Marine Science Center. About ten seventh and eighth grade students from Buckingham, Browne, & Nichols School in Cambridge piled in a van and made their way up to Nahant on one of ...
Yes, I know what you’re going to say and I don’t want to talk about it. It’s been a busy couple of weeks and the webcrawl just fell into the abyss. But it’s back, as I know you’re incredibly relieved to hear. And don’t worry, today’s list includes some highlights from not one but two weeks ...
I’ve said it here before: I’m not much of a gamer. My 9-year-old nephew gets exasperated every time he sets me up in front of the Wii and ultimately just takes the controller away from me so he can deal with both characters at once. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get excited when I ...
Last night I finally got a chance to finish reading all of the stories in the 14th issue of NUScience, which hit the shelves a few weeks ago. The magazine is Northeastern’s first and only science magazine, and, as far as I know a pretty unique undertaking in the undergraduate world. They’ve been around since ...
If Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, then this whole thing we call the universe is either a dream or it works a lot differently than we suspected. So far, all the pieces of the theory have fallen into place, with good evidence to support them. All except one. We’ve been hearing about it for ...