Recent and relevant news items that require more than just a headline glance.
I’ve heard several friends call social media “the new town square” — a big public space where anyone can say anything. Is it, though? Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok aren’t public parks that a city runs. They’re privately owned spaces run to pay dividends to their shareholders. That means the people who own and operate…
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…
My degree and training are in cybersecurity, and I have worked as a cybersecurity professional. As a result, the term “biometrics” is part of my everyday vocabulary. If it’s not for you, if you have to stop and think about what biometrics is, you’re in the majority. You’re probably using biometrics somewhere in your life,…
I don’t write much on green tech, CO2, or carbon capture. I’ve known for a while that our modern lifestyle was causing problems for our planet. However, I’ve never been an “environmentalist.” Rather, I have always identified myself as a “conservationist.” I think it’s important to take care of our home, but I refuse to…
We’ve been on a journey through the different regions of Machine Learning. We’ve explored Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning, and Reinforcement Learning. If you haven’t had a chance to read those posts, that’s fine; you don’t need to read them in any particular order to make sense of the topic. We’ll conclude the trek with Deep…
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…
When Maria’s rural clinic shut down during the pandemic, she thought her diabetes care would have to wait. Then her doctor called—with a plan to manage everything from her phone. Remote healthcare has been building for several decades, but it saw meaningful growth in the 2010’s. Apps like Teledoc, MDLIVE, and Amwell, coupled with the…
ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022. Within six months, it landed an attorney in hot water with a judge. The attorney submitted a brief to the judge that ChatGPT had written in its entirety. As impressive as that sounds, it contained six fictitious citations to other cases and precedents. The judge was…
You’ve heard them before when you’ve dialed a customer service number. “Please give a brief statement of the reason for your call.” Or something like “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you. Would you like Sales, Parts, or to make an appointment?” Maybe you’ve gotten a call from a number where the voice was just a…
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…
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