Deep Dives explores a topic in greater detail that a basic explanation. Digital devices, security, privacy, and policy are all fair game here.
On a recent trip to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, we followed a road around the back side of the Elk Refuge just south of the park (it’s open to the public). At the head of one private driveway, we saw a sign that read, “Your GPS is wrong—this isn’t the place you’re looking…
In the past year, we’ve seen a pattern emerging. As you’re typing in a box, the application tries to finish your sentence. You may have interacted with a chatbot on a website. Your browser’s search bar seems to “understand” what you meant, not just what you typed. These moments are all powered by the same…
You send and receive emails, often with multiple accounts. You may make use of “cloud storage” for your phone photos and backups. Where do these things live? Where, exactly, is “the cloud?” The answers to these and many other questions lie in data centers. Before we go any deeper, though, we need to understand what…
From the time you wake up on Monday to the time you wake up on Tuesday, chips surround you. They’re everywhere – your phone, computers, even your refrigerator. For decades, we have relied on silicon and electrons to transmit power and data. They’ve worked so well that we continue to find ways to use them….
John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, B.F. Skinner in the 20th, and Q-learning today all hinge on a simple, almost universal truth: What gets rewarded gets repeated. Whether it’s shaping behavior in people or machines, the logic remains the same—define the reward, and you define the outcome. This simple statement lies at the root…
A few years ago I read a book (that most people read in elementary or middle school) called My Side of the Mountain. The main character is a young boy named Sam who goes all alone up into the Catskill Mountains to try and live off the land. There are no adults around to guide…
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,…
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…
If you enjoyed my earlier post on Unexpected Origins of Everyday Items, I’ve got three more! I love reading stories about people who had an idea and worked hard to bring it to fruition, but sometimes, things don’t work out the way we expect them to. As fascinated as I am by stories of successful…
I envy people who understand physics. I think maybe one day, if I ever get any of that elusive “spare time” I keep hearing about, maybe I’ll be able to start learning about it. One branch of physics, though, has captured my attention, because of its application to cybersecurity, and that’s quantum physics. In order…
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