Science & Technology
For many years, researchers have studied the “digital divide” by examining the gap between those who have access to digital technology and those who don’t. But as these gaps have narrowed over time, another set of contrasts has emerged when it comes to the ways different demographic groups use technology. Although whites, blacks and Hispanics […]
Black Americans play a profound role in shaping the world’s technology. Many everyday essentials, from caller ID to traffic lights, came from the creative minds of Black technology inventors, innovators and leaders. At VMware, we pride ourselves on innovation. So, in honor of Black History Month, we decided to highlight some of the all-time greatest […]
In Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, he details a history of Black feminist movements that interrogate what is “normal”, while also envisioning new ways of living and interacting that constitute a total transformation of our society, indicating a notion of “freedom dreams” stemming from feminism and queer movements. Similar approaches such […]
People with depression tend to write and speak about how bad they feel, years of research has shown. But linguistic features linked to depression seem to be absent in Black people’s social media posts, researchers report in the April 2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We now have over a decade of research […]
David Cabello dropped out of Shippensburg University the day after President Donald Trump was elected. He felt like he had a mission, to help Black businesses as much as he could. A few years later, he founded Black and Mobile, a food delivery app that only features Black-owned restaurants. With more than 40,000 downloads, 100,000 […]
Black Americans are broadly critical of several key aspects of policing and the criminal justice system in the United States. But their views on an emerging tool in . . .
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t already done so, test yourself with our new Science Knowledge Quiz. There is a significant gap in knowledge about scientific concepts along racial and ethnic lines in the U.S., according to a new Pew Research Center report released last week. When asked a series of 12 . . .
By Edmund L. Andrews The technology that powers the nation’s leading automated speech recognition systems makes twice as many errors when interpreting words spoken by African Americans as when interpreting the same words spoken by whites, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford Engineering. Tests by Stanford researchers show that five leading speech […]
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea After taking part in hands-on STEM lab experiments as part of a youth science program I coordinate, Latino and Black students were more likely to picture scientists as people who look like them – and not stereotypical white men in lab […]
Higher education pipeline suggests long path ahead for increasing diversity, especially in fields like computing and engineering Raychel Lewis, a cell culture technician, sets up equipment to test COVID-19 samples from recovered patients at a lab in New York City. (Misha Friedman/Getty Images) For this report, we analyzed federal government data to look at gender, […]