Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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 Read More “Where America Still Meets Face to Face”
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. Read More “The Next Species of Computing”
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, Read More “The Knowledge We Build Together”
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 Read More “The Missing Language of AI Accountability”
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. Read More “The Rule Did Not Change. The Household Did.”
Your phone buzzes before the sky changes color. A cone graphic appears on television, tracking a spiral mass across warm water toward a coastline with names and zip codes you recognize. A radar loop pulses green, yellow, and red across a county map. A forecaster at a desk in Norman, Oklahoma, or Tallahassee, or Anchorage Read More “The Sound of the Siren”
There is a phrase that lands differently depending on where you sit in the American political conversation. Say “social engineering” to a conservative and you will see a familiar tightening around the eyes, the look of someone who has just caught a bureaucrat in an admission. Say it to a progressive and you will see Read More “What We Quietly Teach Ourselves”
Early in the morning in northern Virginia, the lights inside a windowless warehouse complex never go off. Thousands of servers hum in tight formation, training artificial intelligence models that will write code, diagnose disease, and accelerate the tempo of global commerce. The people who built these systems track processor speed, model parameters, and inference latency Read More “The Battle for the Next Kilowatt”
A nation reveals itself in how it treats the most vulnerable. Judges across the country are now raising alarms about the detention of pregnant women and nursing mothers in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Federal courts, not advocacy groups, not pundits, are describing what they see as harrowing: women separated from breastfeeding infants, women in Read More “We Are Better Than This”
There are times in sport when beauty is obvious. A gymnast floats. A skater lands as if gravity signed a waiver. A downhill racer carves a line so clean it looks drawn by a compass. And then there are times when beauty arrives wearing a mouthguard. The United States women’s hockey team may be the Read More “They Are Team USA Too”