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☀️Sunny and pleasant, with highs near 70. Sunset is at 6:58 p.m.
Today we have a look at the news of Josh Kraft dropping out of Boston’s mayoral race. But first: if you’re looking for an outdoorsy end-of-summer activity this weekend, listen up: with the weather cooling and the beach crowds gone, the state’s Department of Conservation & Recreation and Center for Coastal Studies are starting monthly marine debris clean-ups.
“We don’t do any cleanups in the summer because the beaches are just shrouded with people,” Laura Ludwig, marine debris and plastics program director at the Center for Coastal Studies, told Amy Kolb Noyes from our sister station, CAI. “So we kick off in September and we go straight through June. We do at least one a month, sometimes up to six a month.”
The first clean-up of the season goes from Sunday to Wednesday on Peddocks Island, situated in the Boston Harbor between Hull and Quincy’s Houghs Neck. If you’d like to volunteer, organizers ask that you register in advance and arrive at the Hingham Shipyard (30 Shipyard Dr., Hingham) before 8:30 a.m. if you’re coming on Sunday and before 7:30 a.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And if you’re interested, but unable to make it this weekend, there are other upcoming dates.
Four Things to Know
1. Josh Kraft is dropping out of Boston’s mayoral race. He announced his decision last night, two days after a preliminary election in which he trailed incumbent Mayor Michelle Wu by 49 points, a 72%-to-23% vote. Wu won’t face another challenger on November’s ballot, though there are contested city council races across Boston.
“I got into this to make an impact, as I’ve done my whole life, build a sense of community to make change for the greater good,” Kraft, the former head of Boston’s Boys & Girls Club and the son of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, told WCVB. “When I kept looking at the next eight weeks, the negativity, and all that it was going to be about, I realized, wow, I can do more. I can make a better impact for the residents of the city of Boston.”
2. Harvard professors have started getting notices that payments from federal grants, frozen on the Trump administration’s orders, will soon resume. This comes after a federal judge ruled that the administration illegally froze $2.6 billion in grant money.
Still, the university has not yet received any money from the frozen grants. “Harvard is monitoring funding receipts closely,” university spokesman Jason Newton said.
3. Two public works employees from Everett, Jesse Winocour and Jason Papa, got the Madeline Amy Sweeney Award for Civilian Bravery yesterday for rushing into a burning building last summer and evacuating 14 people to safety.
The award is named for a flight attendant from Acton killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks who contacted the airline’s ground crew to tell them about the hijacking before she died. Sweeney’s daughter, Anna Sweeney Rossman, is raising her own daughter to know how brave her grandmother was. “She will know that courage isn’t something you only see on the screens. It lives in real people, just like her grandmother. I will keep telling my mother’s story not only to carry her with me, but so her voice is never silenced and her legacy is never forgotten,” Sweeney Rossman told GBH’s Katie Lannan.
4. The Big E, one of the biggest fairs in the nation, starts in West Springfield today and goes through Sept. 28. There will be food, concerts, rides, agriculture — and a lot of local businesses hoping for a boost.
“Tourism dollars are just so critical to the continued growth of both Downtown Springfield, the renaissance we’re going through down here, as well as just broader small business development in Western Mass.,” Brett Albert, who owns Rumspringa Books on Main Street in Springfield, told New England Public Media’s Phillip Bishop. “You know, bring it on.”
Harvard professor sees academic scandal as a wake-up call
Max Bazerman met former Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino when she was a Ph.D. student there. In 2012 the two — then both Harvard Business School professors — coauthored a paper showing that people who signed a pledge to be honest before filling out a form were more likely to complete it truthfully.
“We studied the psychology of how good people may do bad things,” Bazerman, who teaches negotiations and behavioral economics at Harvard Business School, told GBH’s Kirk Carapezza.
Then, in 2021, behavioral scientists who write the blog Data Colada published a post saying Gino had falsified data in four studies, including that one.
The fallout was significant: a two-year investigation that ended with Gino becoming the first professor in Harvard’s history to lose her tenure. The investigators determined that someone had altered a dataset, and said Gino was behind the fraud. She has since filed a $25 million lawsuit against the Data Colada authors and Harvard; it has yet to be resolved.
Gino, who declined to speak with GBH News, went on Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig’s podcast (he is one of her attorneys) and said her Ph.D. program did not teach her about data management.
“It wasn’t just me or my lab,” Gino told Lessig. “It was everybody in the field having the same type of practices and not exactly thinking through, well, if we collect data on paper, what kind of security do we need around it? Or if we insert data in Excel, what kind of errors are likely to happen?”
Bazerman has written a book about the scandal. He said he believes fraud is rare in behavioral science, and that he hopes Gino’s case will lead to more transparency. That’s especially important, he said, in a time when there’s extra scrutiny on universities.
“We want to make sure that we don’t lose the benefits of social science research based on these criticisms,” he said, “because there’s other people who are spreading misinformation in ways that I think are quite harmful.”
Previous coverage:
-In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor
-College Uncovered: Why Do Colleges Rarely Revoke Tenure?
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