As machine learning has made its way into more and more areas of our lives, concerns about algorithmic bias have escalated. Machine learning models, which today facilitate decisions about everything from hiring and lending to medical diagnosis and criminal sentencing, may appear to be data-driven and impartial, at least to naïve users—but the typically opaque…

Thanks to large datasets and machine learning, computers have become surprisingly adept at finding statistical relationships among many variables—and exploiting these patterns to make useful predictions. Whether the task involves recognizing objects in photographs or translating text from one language to another, much of what today’s intelligent machines can accomplish stems from the computers’ ability…

Glancing at Barcelona’s still-unfinished Sagrada Família Roman Catholic basilica, with its famous sandcastle-like exterior, it is easy to get the wrong idea about its architect, Antoni Gaudí, as a carefree, loosey-goosey artist. The whimsical exterior hides a geometrically sophisticated, structurally advanced design—a big part of the reason this grand basilica, begun in 1882, has taken…

Quantum computing, which promises to harness the special properties of quantum mechanics to dramatically speed up calculations and thus help solve currently intractable problems, has attracted considerable investment from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Yet there is still no commercially available quantum computer because of the immense challenges in creating and running such…

Fifteen years ago, as Silicon Valley was recovering from the dot-com bust, David Hornik, a long-time VC at August Capital, started seeing a recurring theme in pitches from startup founders: overt references to a new term called “the long tail.” A typical pitch deck included a slide showing a stylized sales graph taken straight from a 2004 Wired magazine article by that name,…

At the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in California this past spring—with work projects on hold, travel plans canceled, and the house suddenly full—I upped my walking, clocking 60 to 90 minutes most days. Never had my suburban neighborhood’s streets seemed so inviting. Whether I was taking a leisurely stroll by myself or a brisk…

Facing a patchwork of minimum-wage laws, company leaders are finding ways to raise the pay of their lowest-earning workers. But at what cost? In 2016, the leaders at Sheetz Inc., a family-owned chain of convenience stores headquartered in Altoona, Pa., decided to raise the wages for all its hourly staff to $10 per hour, even…

How third parties can keep everyone honest. Back in 2008, on a trip to Russia, I got lost. My husband was working at his employer’s Moscow office, and I had gotten off at the wrong bus stop on my way to meet him. With no way to tell him I’d be late, I thought I’d…

Two years ago Michelle Rapp, then a 28-year-old Cornell University graduate, experienced a series of unfortunate events. First, she lost her job in a mass layoff at a San Francisco start-up. Then, anxious to get back to work, she took a physically demanding job at a Chinatown tea shop—but weeks later she threw out her…

When Rachael Sobon, SHRM-CP, started her job as the first HR professional at CRP Industries 10 years ago, she quickly saw room for improvement. Sobon understood that the daily deadlines of a bustling warehouse required many of the Cranbury, N.J.-based company’s 180 workers to be onsite at certain hours. However, she also believed that some…