Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
There are moments in business when the price tells you that you are looking at the wrong thing. NVIDIA is reported to have agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a company whose annual revenue has been put at roughly $150 million. Reuters carried the story on August 27, relaying reporting from The Information, Read More “The Empire Strikes Back”
A woman walks into a public library because she needs to print a form. That is the problem she presents. The problem she has is larger. She needs the form for unemployment benefits, which she needs because the car stopped running, which cost her the shifts she missed, which is why the electric bill went Read More “The People Close Enough to Notice”
Hank Green took some heat recently for using artificial intelligence in his work. Vanity Fair framed the controversy around the anger of some fans who believed his use of AI crossed a line between technological assistance and creative authenticity. One Hank would like to stand up for another. The criticism raises a larger question that Read More “Hank Green, AI, and the Economics of Authenticity”
Over the past several years I put together a set of lecture notes for teaching bioinformatics, pairing classic Python/BioPython methods with AI-assisted workflows so students could see both approaches side by side. I’ve cleaned them up and organized them into a free 14-chapter book: Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction. It moves from the basics Read More “Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction”
The question usually arrives near the end of the interview, after the pleasantries are spent and the résumé has been reviewed twice. Have you ever been convicted of a crime? The applicant already knows the choreography. Sometimes the interviewer glances back down at the page, suddenly hunting for a reason to stop. Sometimes the tone Read More “Second-Chance Saints”
For years, teaching bioinformatics meant building the same lecture over and over: here is the biological concept, here is the Python script that operationalizes it, here is what a student needs to understand before either one makes sense. Over time those notes accumulated into something larger than any single course, a full walk through computational Read More “Notes From the Classroom, Now Free to Everyone”
Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sports stories are supposed to simplify that further still, handing us a winner and a loser, a hero and a villain. Somebody raises the trophy. Somebody drops the ball. Everybody knows whom to cheer and whom to blame. This story refuses to cooperate. Late on Read More “The Team That Tried Too Hard to Win”
Antoinette Tuff was sitting in the front office of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy when a young man carrying an assault rifle entered the school. Nearly 900 children were inside. Tuff was not the principal. She was not a police officer, counselor, or trained hostage negotiator. She was the school’s bookkeeper, one of those Read More “The Person Who Knows Where Everything Is”
Donavan McKinney, a Michigan state representative running for a Detroit-area congressional seat, has become a small but telling case study in a much larger question: what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is trying to become after 2024. That question is bigger than any one race. It is worth separating from it here, because Read More “Donavan McKinney and the Politics of Credibility”
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”