Ronald Inglehart, University of Michigan professor, makes a strong case for the cyclical nature of populism in a democratic society.  (“The Age of Insecurity, by Ronald Inglehart, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2018, pgs. 20-28.)   He argues populism thrives during periods of change,

Despite the growing loss of personal privacy on the world wide web, a number of idealists are fighting against the trend. (Click)  They are trying to give users command over their personal data.  In India,  “ a group of activists successfully blocked Facebook from implementing a

For me, computers pose a mystery.  They are as confusing as a black hole or as simple as a line of 0s and 1s.  When we get to algorithms, life gets tricky.  I haven’t a clue about computer programing, but I remember something from calculus about the difficulty of choosing random

During the 2016 election, I reported my blog had come under Russian attack.  My friends laughed.  My gurus didn’t. Lately, the blog has experienced another invasion, the source of which is unknown.  Three hundred people have subscribed to my blog in the last month alone.  They�

Last week, I wrote a blog capped by a cartoon which amused my web manager.  (Click)  It exposed the gobbledygook terms that accrue to Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Apparently, the alphabet soup expresses different purposes.  Or, as a tweet from a recent article revealed, “It’

A funny thing happens when you ban girls from a boys’ club.  Not only do they create their own, (Click) but what they build tends to have wide appeal.  That’s what happened for Pooja Nath Sankar, now CEO of a Palo Alto Company called Piazza. Sankar didn’t plan to build a busin

Recently, I spent a terrible morning trying to keep up with various upgrades on my browser, on my e-books platform for Apple and for the site where I launch my blogs.  “Upgrade” is the most annoying word in the English language, in my opinion.  Demands for them never seem to sto

Crispr is a technique that has added a large body of knowledge to our understanding of the human genome. (Click) (Click)  It is a gene-editing technique which allows human DNA to be altered in the hope of ending deadly diseases like cancer and sickle-cell anemia. Two women worked tog

I’ve done some hand wringing about robots, wondering about the degree to which they will change our world. Take self-driving cars, for example.  Who is responsible if a self-driving car has an accident.  The designer?  The manufacturer?  The automobile owner? Or, can we blame a

Four years ago, I wrote a blog in which I quoted 29- year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, as saying young people were smarter than anyone else.  (Click) By my math, he turned 34 on May 14 of this year, and when I read his recent testimony before Congress, I had to smile. (Clic