Category Archives: Transforming

Projects that are making a difference, improving lives, and building communities.

Authors I-Q, Education

Reimagining Education for the AI Era – by Muhammad Usman Qazi

Building Inclusive, Interactive, and Future-Ready Curricula

I have had the opportunity to witness several important stages in the evolution of computing. When I first encountered computers, interaction was largely command-oriented. Users needed to understand commands, remember syntax, and enter instructions carefully to make a computer perform a task. Computing was powerful, but it was not necessarily intuitive or accessible to everyone.

Then came a major turning point: the emergence and widespread adoption of the Windows graphical environment. The way people interacted with computers changed dramatically. Instead of relying primarily on typed commands, users could work with windows, icons, menus, folders, and a mouse. Tasks that once required specialized knowledge became much easier for ordinary users.

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Advisors, Authors A-H, Social Issues

Legacy of 16-year-old Barbara Johns – by Terry Howard

Exhausted enough for change

pastedGraphic.pngBabara Johns
Note: Not long ago, this author co-sponsored a trip from central Virginia to Farmville, Virginia for a visit to the R. R. Moton Museum . Mounted prominently on the wall in the museum’s auditorium is a picture of 16-year-old Barbara Johns, who led a protest that changed trajectory of history. Here’s her story.

20 years ago, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. penned words that have held their meaning and significance to this day….“Few forces are more compelling than a soul grown exhausted enough for change.”

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Advisors, Authors R-Z, Education

American Education Is Changing – by Sridhar Rangaswamy

Something has been quietly changing in American classrooms, and it’s worth paying attention to. Over the past two to three years, schools have been rethinking almost everything. How they teach reading. What role does technology play? Who gets to enroll, and under what conditions? The debates happening in school board meetings and university hallways right now will shape what American education looks like for the next decade.

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Go Green, Levine articles

Going Green is Tough Public Policy — by Deborah Levine

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Editor’s note: Written 12 years ago but timely as ever.

Environmentalists may not be happy with some of the solutions to climate change.  In a recent article in Wired Magazine, “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green”, the top 10 ways to save the planet are likely to drive environmentalists crazy. Calling for Greens to unite around the issue of greenhouse gasses, the article makes the case for public policies that favor nuclear energy and urban density. The outcry from readers was memorable as they criticized the single mindedness of the article, its lack of supporting data, its in-your-face sensationalism, and overall creepiness.   Yet, the discussion of climate change and public policy does and should raise these most difficult issues as new reports show irreversible damage.

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DL Opinion columns, Tech & AI

Conversational AI comes to Chattanooga, again – by Deborah Levine

originally published in The Chattanooga Times Free Press

Project Voice 2026 marks a decade of Conversational AI and it was a pleasure to attend at its conference at the Chattanooga Convention Center. I’m in total agreement with the organizer, Bradley Metrock, (General Partner, Project Voice Capital Partners) and his explanation of the celebration. “We’ve been very pleased to host Project Voice for the last ten years here in Chattanooga. Every time I get asked “Why Chattanooga?” I respond “Why not?” The city is growing, vibrant, and hungry, and those working with voice AI and conversational AI from around the world that have attended over the years have witnessed that energy first-hand. The conference itself moves the voice AI world forward, and quietly has established a reputation as a central event for this young but growing technological domain.”

There were more than 160 attendees for amazing sessions like: Alexa, What’s Next For Voice AI?, Security Reimagined in an Age of AI, Hiring In The Age Of AI, Conversational AI in Modern Healthcare, and Measuring AI’s Effectiveness in Customer Service.

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Academic Articles, Authors I-Q, Politics

A Value-Based Peace Proposal for the Middle East – by W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz

The New Israel and the New Palestine

“The world is the totality of values, rather than the totality of facts.”
— Tractatus Politico-Philosophicus, 7.2021

Modern diplomacy consistently fails in the Middle East because it treats the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a zero-sum collision of physical facts, borders, and raw power politics. This paper (Korab-Karpowicz 2026a) operationalizes the evolutionary axiology of the Tractatus Politico-Philosophicus to present a structural, value-based alternative.

By rejecting the Hobbesian trap of mechanically dividing the contested territory of the West Bank, I propose a grand geopolitical exchange: the complete integration of the West Bank into Israel to ensure its strategic and historical security, balanced by the creation of “The New Palestine”—a sovereign, world-class hyper-developed state encompassing the Gaza Strip and an expanded territory in the Sinai Peninsula, funded entirely by the international community.

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Authors A-H, War

Middle East Part 1: Ancient Wisdom for a World at War -by Chaim Goldberg

A Single Verse, A Complete Moral Vision

In the book of Leviticus, a short commandment appears: “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind.”

On the surface, it is simple: don’t trip someone who cannot see. But Jewish legal tradition has understood this verse for centuries as something far larger — a comprehensive moral principle about knowledge, power, and responsibility.

The blind person in this verse is never the one at fault. He is the vulnerable party — the one who lacks information, lacks sight, lacks the ability to protect himself. The prohibition is directed entirely at the one who can see — and chooses nonetheless to place an obstacle in his path.

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Authors A-H, War

Middle East Part 3: Why the American Chassis Doesn’t Fit the Israeli Soul – by Chaim Goldberg

A Meeting That Left Me With Questions

I did not expect the conversation to stay with me the way it did.

I sat with Jonathan Pollard in Jerusalem — a sharp, vital man, the kind you leave with more questions than you arrived with. The meeting was genuinely enriching. And at the same time, something in it placed before me a question I cannot put down:

Not a question about what he did, or what was done to him.

An architectural question.

What does it mean to live inside two states that are not the same kind of thing?

Because Pollard did not inhabit two countries. He inhabited two systems of reality — ones that sometimes use the same words and mean entirely different things. And under pressure, for one terrible moment, the structure cracked.

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Authors A-H, War

Middle East Part 2: Between the Illusion of Death and the Engineering of Life – by Chaim Goldberg

I read the word three times before I understood it wasn’t a translation error.

“The subject demonstrated resistance… focused physical force was applied… she was later found without signs of life.”

The subject. That’s how she was described in the internal report of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Nika Shakarami, as exposed by BBC Persian. A sixteen-year-old girl who had gone out to protest the death of Mahsa Amini. A girl the same age as my granddaughter. The same age as the students who stood in front of me in the classroom for thirty years.

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DL Opinion columns, Levine articles, War

Creative souls needed in war zones – by Deborah Levine

 ( based on column for The Chattanooga Times Free. Press)

When my hubby and I saw that Iran had bombed Bet Shemesh, a community outside of Jerusalem, we were horrified. That’s where our daughter Elana and 4 grandsons live. Photos of the decimated village and stories of nine dead in the bombing filled the news. It was 24 hours before we heard from Elana. You can imagine what a relief it was to see her post this on 

Facebook: “War has started again. Thank G-d we are all ok…” 

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