Sep 3, 2026
The Sky Is Falling
The BBC published a story this morning about the Netherlands moving part of its national gold reserve from North America to London. BBC article Ordinarily, this would not be particularly exciting. Central…
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Aug 25, 2026
A Maintenance Plan for Memory
The United States maintains thousands of buoys. They are numbered, charted, lit, and serviced on a schedule. Every one of them says some version of the same thing, which is that the…
Aug 11, 2026
The Fatal Image Is Now Open
I have built a virtual museum exhibition. This was not the plan. Judith and Holofernes: The Fatal Image is now open at judith.jameshoward.us. It brings together 58 works depicting Judith, Holofernes, and…
Jul 30, 2026
Effective Challenge Is Now Optional
On April 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took the most battle-tested governance framework in American finance and…
Jul 27, 2026
When Every Bank's AI Fails Together
Financial regulation is built on a useful fiction: that banks make mistakes independently of one another. This assumption underpins diversification requirements, stress testing methodology, and most of what the Federal Reserve does…
Jul 22, 2026
What We Do Now
The history of artificial intelligence is a history of a moving target. The first machine decision was a thermostat closing a circuit. The field got its name at Dartmouth in 1956 and…
Jul 8, 2026
The Naming Problem
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a six-game match. It was treated as a milestone in artificial intelligence. Researchers debated what the victory meant about…
Jul 3, 2026
Cramér's V and the Missing Half of Chi-Square
You are auditing a loan approval model for demographic fairness. You build a cross-tabulation of predictions against a protected category and run a chi-square test. The result comes back p Effect Size…
Jul 1, 2026
Attention Is All You Need
In June 2017, eight researchers associated with Google posted a paper on machine translation. Its title, "Attention Is All You Need," was a provocation directed at the field's dominant architectures for sequence…
Jun 29, 2026
The Model Is Not the System
There is a class of AI deployment failure that has nothing to do with the model. The model can be well-trained and well-validated. The precision and recall can be exactly where you…
Jun 25, 2026
Neurons All the Way Down
In October 2012, the full results of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge were released. The competition required systems to classify photographs into 1,000 object categories and measured performance as top-five…