Edmund Ruffin

From Soil to Secession: Edmund Ruffin, The Man Who Wouldn’t Surrender

History remembers those who played by the rules—but it doesn’t always do justice to those who shattered them. I introduced the section Radicals, Renegades, and Rebels to tell the stories of the people who pushed boundaries, broke molds, and defied convention, whether for better or worse. These are the figures who refused to blend in,…

supervised learning, a teacher reading to a computer

Supervised Learning: How AI Learns to Make Smart Decisions

Imagine you’re scrolling through your email and notice that most of the junk mail—those too-good-to-be-true lottery winnings and suspicious “urgent” messages—never even reach your inbox. You don’t think twice about it, but behind the scenes, something powerful is at work: supervised learning.Your email provider has been trained on countless examples of real emails versus spam,…

a person looking into a crystal ball filled with data predicting future events

The Science of Predictions: A Simple Guide to Predictive Analytics

Do you use predictive analytics? (Hint: yes, you almost certainly do.) Predictive analytics are the force behind streaming recommendations in your movie and music apps, weather forecasts, and personalized shopping recommendations. Predictive analytics is a way to use information about the past and present to guess what might happen in the future. It looks at…