Higher Education

Jane McManus has watched sports — and sports journalism — change. From her first job at the New York Daily News to now teaching the next generation of professionals (while writing a sports column at Deadspin), she knows that students are graduating into a different media landscape and could use guidance preparing for it.

Which is what brought her to Seton Hall — that and Bob Ley ‘76, legendary sportscaster and now executive founder of the Seton Hall Center for Sports Media.

“When Bob Ley calls and says ‘we’re starting a new center for sports media, do you want to throw in your hat?’ — you throw in your hat,” she said.

When Gabi Von Roedern was in high school, her optometrist said something wasn’t right with her eyes. Not only was her vision imperfect, but her eyes were dry and red all the time.

“I was told, ‘You’re overwearing your contact lenses, or it’s the very beginning of something else,’” she recalls.

But contact lens hygiene wasn’t the issue. Von Roedern had keratoconus, an eye condition where the normally round, dome-shaped cornea becomes weak and irregular. People with keratoconus have distorted, blurry, or double vision and are sensitive to light. They may also see halos when driving at night, or what Von Roedern describes as seeing fireworks around any headlight.

We are truly never alone, not even within our own bodies. Human beings play host to trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms that make up the human microbiome. In recent years, the mix of these resident bacteria, and the presence of specific bacterial species, has been linked to conditions ranging from obesity to multiple sclerosis.

When Idris Solomon ’02 launched the “Black Shutter Podcast,” he thought he was prepared.

“I bought two microphones, two microphone stands, two cables, everything,” he says.

The problem? He began the podcast in January 2020. After recording two episodes from his Brooklyn-based photography studio, COVID hit.

When Vice President Dick Cheney received a new defibrillator in 2007, his doctor disabled the device’s wireless capabilities so that it wouldn’t be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

“I worried that someone could kill you,” his cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, told him years later on CBS’ 60 Minutes.

While healthcare systems have focused on warding off threats from malware and ransomware, a more insidious way to create havoc is gaining attention: hackers targeting patients by changing or disabling network-connected medical devices and diagnostic test results. Earlier this week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a meeting to highlight the potential dangers.

When DHL decided to upgrade its 434,000-square-foot cold storage facility at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the company had an eye not just on maintaining temperatures inside the facility, but making sure those temperatures held at all parts of the delivery cycle.

When David G. Marrero, PhD, talks about diabetes, he is not shy about using strong language. “Diabetes may be the most serious public health crisis of our time,” said Marrero, director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center for Border Health Disparities in Tucson. “If you think our healthcare system is stressed now and that the costs are exacerbated, put another 40 to 50 million people with diabetes into the mix, and we’ll be in very deep trouble.”

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are not just a $2.2 billion healthcare industry problem: They’re a modern-day health crisis that has continued to build a dangerous momentum.

If your warehouse isn’t on the wearable bandwagon, expect to jump on soon: MHI expects 70% of facilities to adopt wearables in the next five years.

Wearables don’t necessarily mean the latest GPS watch you’ll wear while marathon training. It could be as simple as a barcode scanner that eliminates the need for manual data entry, or as complex as smart glasses that identify what exactly a person should pick through augmented reality.

An egg seller recently had a chicken/egg problem, though not which came first. The company wanted to figure out how to optimize its chickens’ egg laying capacity.

“The problem is the coop is covered with chicken feces,” said Alfonso Velosa, research vice president for IoT at Gartner, discussing a recent client’s conundrum. “For them, the central thing is how do we increase productivity while the floor is clean enough.”

The threat of blackmail never really goes away. It’s just now the bad guys want their anonymous payments in bitcoin (BTC).

In a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack hackers bombard a website with so much traffic from multiple sources the site can’t function. To make the problem go away, hackers are demanding ransom in cryptocurrencies, which make the payments easier for them to get.

You may know that hackers want to take over your devices and use them to get rich mining cryptocurrencies. What you may not know is the problem is getting worse very quickly.

That’s a key finding from McAfee Labs’ first-quarter threats report. The research unit of the computer security software company McAfee found what it calls a “stunning” 629 percent increase in coin miner malware during the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter of last year. This kind of malware infects a victim’s device and turns it into a cryptocurrency miner, allowing the attacker to pocket the profits.

Big data is the buzzword we can’t avoid, but for good reason: it’s changing the way a lot of businesses operate, and will continue to do so, especially within the supply chain world.

Sixty-four percent of supply chain executives consider big data analytics a disruptive and important technology, according to SCM World, even though it’s still a relatively new application of the technology.

It’s a wrap for bulky, wasteful packaging. Shippers today have to satisfy consumers who not only demand that fewer materials be used in packaging, but also prefer those materials to have a low environmental impact.

In addition to eliminating packaging waste to satisfy consumers, shippers also need to consider cost. Cutting back on packaging can reduce both material spend and shipping costs. Making packages smaller and lighter helps companies streamline the supply chain for additional time and money savings.

On a jobsite in Kingsville, Texas, in August 2013, a worker was mixing gypsum concrete in preparation for gypcrete installation on an apartment building. It’s not a particularly taxing job, but he was doing it in direct sunlight. “He wasn’t training or doing anything that involved a lot of lifting or climbing,” says Holly Webster, director of administration at Texas-based KWA Construction, which served as the general contractor on the job. (KWA would not release further information on either the worker or subcontractor.) The man, in his 20s, had just transferred from New Mexico, and he wasn’t used to the heat and humidity of a Texas summer. While he’d had some water that day, he also drank some caffeine-packed energy drinks.

When Smoothie King decided to change its point of sale system, the company didn’t just make alterations to what was currently in more than 600 stores. It scrapped the whole thing.

“As far as our guests are concerned, it’s really about what’s happening when they visit a story and what’s happening on their tablet or their phone,” says John Lapeyrouse, Smoothie King CIO. “The opportunity to replace point of sale systems doesn’t come along very often.”

Small and medium-sized businesses may think they’re immune to the kinds of attacks that wreaked havoc on Target last year, but they’re susceptible to the same nefarious forces — sometimes even more so, as they can lead hackers to a bigger prize.

Since the Target breach, other retailers have been affected, including Neiman Marcus,eBay and P.F. Chang’s. But the Target breach was huge — information on 40 million credit and debit cards was stolen, along with records of 70 million customers, including name, address, email address and phone number.

Having a proactive attitude about money and healthy financial habits is an essential part of building a solid future for ourselves and our family.  It’s important to start giving children the knowledge and skills they need to make smart money choices at a young age. But it’s not always easy to engage and empower kids and teenagers around financial issues.  Maybe that’s why today’s college students are more in debt than ever before.

Now in its third year, ENR California’s Top 20 Under 40 list makes clear that the construction industry has a deep well of talent.

Sports used to be a boy’s club. But today women are integral players in the sports world, from your kid’s soccer team to the professional level.

“In half a century, we’ve gone from girls in high schools engaging in one or two play days a year and that counting for their athletic experience to full-blown athletic participation in virtually any sporting activity that a high school or college offers,” says Stephen D. Mosher, professor of sport management and media in the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance.