On the north campus of Microsoft's 500-acre headquarters, anticipation is quietly mounting. The company is gearing up to launch its new Inclusive Tech Lab, which sits in Building 86 -- one of 125 buildings in its Redmond, Washington grounds. This 2,000-square-foot room used to be a reception area, with a set of doors leading to the offices within and another pair facing the rest of the world. It only seems fitting, considering what Microsoft envisions this lab to be: a place to welcome members of the disability community, the tech industry and its own designers. Across the street is building 88, where you'll find chief product officer Panos Panay's office, while down the road is the Hardware Lab in building 87.

In media news today, Bill Maher panics about 2024 Democratic presidential prospects, The New York Times says Biden is contributing to his own'political woes' by downplaying inflation, and voters sound off on the economy under Biden. In past years, news anchors, reporters, commentators, and late-night hosts have unabashedly gushed over Republican senators who've broken ranks their party, hailing them as "mavericks" and "heroes" for casting politics aside and voting with their "conscience." However, when Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., buck the party line, the same liberal talking heads criticize and lecture them. Democrat Sens. Manchin and Sinema have come under attack by their own party for bucking President Biden and voting against the Democrat caucus in opposing the efforts to change the Senate's filibuster threshold from 60 votes to 51. The move sparked a full-scale media assault, exposing a stark contrast between the coverage afforded to Republican and Democratic senators who vote out of line with their party.

Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years, social media such as Twitter has enabled people to share their opinions regarding elections. Social media has provided a platform for collecting a large amount of social media data. This paper proposes a computational public opinion mining approach to explore the discussion of economic issues in social media during an election. Current related studies use text mining methods independently for election analysis and election prediction; this research combines two text mining methods: sentiment analysis and topic modeling. The proposed approach has effectively been deployed on millions of tweets to analyze economic concerns of people during the 2012 US presidential election.

The Master Algorithm is a book about Machine Learning. But while it claims to be about its future, the focus is more on its past. Domingos' gives us a tour of the five different Machine Learning fiefdoms (Evolutionaries, Connectionists, Symbolists, Bayesians, and Analogizers), how they connect, and what their histories are. At times the discussion gets a little too technical. Sentences like "...we can view what SVMs do with kernels, support vectors, and weights as mapping the data to a higher-dimensional space and finding a maximum-margin hyperplane in that space" (pg 196) make it clear Mr. Domingos is no Malcolm Gladwell.

You'll read these next three paragraphs in my voice. Better get busy reading, or get busy dying. On June 14, America escaped from the primary season. All the wardens found was a "Make America Great Again" hat, a hollowed-out copy of "Hard Choices" and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking the nominees would be decided by mid-March.

Every once in a while an innocuous technical term suddenly enters public discourse with a bizarrely negative connotation. I first noticed the phenomenon some years ago, when I saw a Republican politician accusing Hillary Clinton of "parsing." From the disgust with which he said it, he clearly seemed to feel that parsing was morally equivalent to puppy-drowning. It seemed quite odd to me, since I'd only ever heard the word "parse" used to refer to the computer analysis of sentence structures. The most recent word to suddenly find itself stigmatized by Republicans (yes, it does somehow always seem to be Republican politicians who are involved in this particular kind of linguistic bullshittery) is "encryption."