Editor's note

Participating in the modern world means clicking “Agree” without reading the privacy policies for every online service, frequent-buyer program, and mobile device. Nobody has the time or the patience. University of Maryland, Baltimore County computer scientists Karuna Pande Joshi and Tim Finin explain how they’re harnessing artificial intelligence to summarize complex texts for regular people.

A new report released this week reveals that, on average, university presidents in the U.S. are even older and whiter than they were five years ago. To give just one data point: While 56 percent of college students are women, only 30 percent of college presidents are. SUNY Albany’s Jason Lane reflects on the recent retirement announcement of one of the most prominent female presidents, Harvard’s Drew Faust, and what her departure means for the future diversity of university leadership.

Next week marks the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that made gay marriage a nationwide right. For decades, researchers have studied the benefits of marriage but those studies only looked at people who were allowed to marry. Jayn Goldsen and her team at the University of Washington report on their findings from the first study of how marriage has influenced the health of LGBT Americans.

Jeff Inglis

Editor, Science + Technology

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Can artificial intelligence help us stop drowning in paperwork? Jiw Ingka/shutterstock.com

Teaching machines to understand – and summarize – text

Karuna Pande Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Nobody can understand the legal language in privacy policies. Can artificial intelligence digest the text and produce a human-readable explanation?

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  • Why cash remains sacred in American churches

    James Hudnut-Beumler, Vanderbilt University

    ATMs began appearing in churches providing a way for people to come up with ready cash to give to God and their church. But why was cash necessary?

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