Author: TheConversation

By Saurabh Bagchi, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. But black box is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence. AI black boxes refer to AI systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user. You can feed them input and get output, but you cannot examine the system’s code or the logic that produced the output. Machine learning is...

By David B. Parker, Professor of History, Kennesaw State University A news story was published recently about a Black cemetery in Buckhead, a prosperous Atlanta community. The cemetery broke ground almost two centuries ago, in 1826, as the graveyard of Piney Grove Baptist Church. The church has been gone for decades; the cemetery now sits on the property of a townhouse development. It is overgrown, with most of its 300-plus graves unmarked. The article described how some of the buried’s descendants and family members are trying to get the property owner to clean up and take care of the...

By Laura E. Alexander, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Goldstein Family Community Chair in Human Rights, University of Nebraska Omaha Many religious traditions preach the need to care for strangers. But what happens when caring for the stranger comes into conflict with government policy? After Title 42 restrictions at the U.S. border ended on May 11, 2023, debates about immigration have heated up again – focused mostly on reform, border security or refugees’ needs. But the treatment of immigrants is deeply intertwined with religious freedom as well. As a scholar of religious ethics who studies immigration, I am interested...

By Jeff Basara, Associate Professor of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma; and Jordan Christian, Postdoctoral Researcher in Meteorology, University of Oklahoma Flash droughts develop fast, and when they hit at the wrong time, they can devastate a region’s agriculture. They are also becoming increasingly common as the planet warms. In a study published May 25, 2023, we found that the risk of flash droughts, which can develop in the span of a few weeks, is on pace to rise in every major agriculture region around the world in the coming decades. In North America and Europe, cropland that had a...

By Robert Samuels, Continuing Lecturer in Writing, University of California, Santa Barbara The United States is an increasingly polarized country when it comes to politics, but one thing that almost all people want is to live a long and healthy life. More and more Americans are moving from Democratic-leaning blue states to Republican-voting red ones, and one of the effects of this change is that they are relocating to places with lower life expectancy. Idaho, Montana and Florida, all red states, had the greatest population growth among U.S. states between 2020 and 2022. Meanwhile, New York and Illinois, both...