Breaking Barriers

Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future

Breaking Barriers

Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future

Author: cary

The New Town Square Has a Login Screen

A generation ago, if you wanted to find the cultural center of gravity, you could do worse than stand in the middle of a mall on a Saturday afternoon. Teenagers clustered in loose circles, families drifted between storefronts, and the food court served as a kind of informal parliament of everyday life. The space was.

The Show Must Still Go On

Every generation is convinced that the arts are in decline. People say nobody goes to plays anymore. Nobody listens to real music anymore. Nobody watches serious movies anymore. Technology changed everything, attention spans are shorter, and culture is supposed to be collapsing under the weight of its own distractions. Complaints about the state of the.

The Machinery of Democracy: 250 Years and Counting

There is a gymnasium in a small Indiana town where, every other November, a few dozen folding tables are arranged in rows and draped with American flags. Poll workers arrive before dawn with boxes of supplies, voter rolls, and a binder of procedures updated since the last cycle. The doors open at six. By mid-morning.

Where America Still Meets Face to Face

Saturday mornings in much of America still begin the same way. Folding tables go up before the sun is fully overhead. Pickup trucks back into parking spaces and unload crates of tomatoes, corn, peaches, and jars with handwritten labels. Coffee steams from paper cups while people walk slowly from stall to stall, talking more than.

The Next Species of Computing

There is a diagram I drew on whiteboards for twenty years. Three boxes, stacked vertically. Application at the top. System Software in the middle. Hardware at the bottom. I called it the ASH model. Students thought they were learning about computer architecture. What they were actually learning was how the world absorbs a good idea..

The Knowledge We Build Together

There is a certain kind of American story that never quite makes the front page. It has no villain, no scandal, no moment of dramatic collapse. It is a story about thousands of people who simply decided to build something together and share what they made. It turns out that story, quiet as it is,.

The Missing Language of AI Accountability

Artificial intelligence now shapes decisions about jobs, loans, healthcare, and education. When those systems carry bias, the consequences are real for the people affected. One of the biggest obstacles to fixing that problem is surprisingly basic: everyone uses different language to describe it. Researchers, policymakers, auditors, and educators often mean the same thing but talk.

The Rule Did Not Change. The Household Did.

Something happened in my family recently that I had not expected. As a member of the sandwich generation, we know that there will be change. Relatives pass, children go off to school or start a family of their own. It is a moving target largely expected. One of my family passed and there was grief..