Author: TheConversation

By Eddie King, Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering, University of South Carolina The first message sent by Morse code’s dots and dashes across a long distance traveled from Washington DC, to Baltimore on Friday, May 24, 1844 – 175 years ago. It signaled the first time in human history that complex thoughts could be communicated at long distances almost instantaneously. Until then, people had to have face-to-face conversations; send coded messages through drums, smoke signals and semaphore systems; or read printed words. Thanks to Samuel F.B. Morse, communication changed rapidly, and has been changing ever faster since. He invented...

By John R. Thelin, University Research Professor, University of Kentucky As college and high school graduations take place, thousands of select students will step to podiums to deliver their graduating class’s farewell remarks at commencement ceremonies throughout the United States. These students – usually the graduating seniors with the highest grade point average, or GPA – are recognized with a formal title: valedictorians. Though the tradition goes back to colonial times, the validity of valedictorian honor is increasingly being called into question. A growing number of schools are changing how they bestow the honor or doing away with it...

By John E. Finn, Professor Emeritus of Government, Wesleyan University Constitution worship does not encourage or even tolerate critical thinking about the Founders or their work. Nor does it make room for any inquiry into where they might have got things wrong or where or how the Constitution may need fixing. I believe the Alt-constitution threatens the values, norms and principles that make up our constitutional tradition. About 10 years ago, I spent a sabbatical on the Maine coast writing a book about the Constitution. One afternoon, an eager reference librarian who knew about my interests invited me to...

By David Swenson, Associate Scientist of Economics, Iowa State University Since the Great Recession, most of the nation’s rural counties have struggled to recover lost jobs and retain their people. The story is markedly different in the nation’s largest urban communities. Across the Midwest, every four years presidential hopefuls swoop in to test how voters might respond to their various ideas for fixing the country’s problems. But what to do about rural economic and persistent population decline is the one area that has always confounded them all. The facts are clear and unarguable. Most of the nation’s smaller urban...

By Victor Pickard, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania A foundation created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam gave $100 million to investigative news outlets and other initiatives in 2017, a rare boon for media institutions under duress. Even a fraction of this gift could help bolster impoverished American journalism. Yet, while foundation-backed nonprofit outlets have clear advantages over their commercial counterparts, they may never compensate for the market failure that’s afflicting journalism. As I present in my book America’s Battle for Media Democracy, commercial journalism’s deeply systemic problems call for structural alternatives, especially public models that...

By Dudley Poston and Rogelio Sáenz, • Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University • Professor of Demography, The University of Texas at San Antonio Since the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the start of the Colonial period, the United States has been predominantly white. But the white share of the U.S. population has been dropping, from a little under 90% in 1950 to 60% in 2018. It will likely drop below 50% in another 25 years. White nationalists want America to be white again. But this will never happen. America is on its way to becoming predominantly nonwhite....