Women Stick to Their Guns — But Men Don’t | Could A.I. Turn You Into a Nature Lover?

Men are slowly giving up their firearms. White women, on the other hand? Not so much.

Nearly three decades ago, Susan Carrichner was held hostage in her Knoxville-area home at knifepoint by a former romantic partner. She remembers calling 911 and nobody answering, and her former partner tearing the phone out of the wall. She describes the rain combining with her tears as she made a break and ran out the front door, only to get caught again. Five and a half hours passed before the police finally arrived, after which her attacker calmly walked out the door without being charged. Officers chalked it up to a domestic dispute.

That was in the winter of 1992. Carrichner spent the night in a hotel, and a few days later the county sheriff advised her to get a gun. Since then, the 61-year-old has tried to make sure that women who want to carry are well-protected, and she has trained at least 100,000 people through her Shooting Women Alliance classes, at least half of that total in handgun permitting courses. Carrichner claims to have the only gun ranges in America that only allow men who are guests of female members to shoot. She has multiple locations across Tennessee and nationwide, with some 28,000 active members and a quarter-million women on her company’s email list.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are spawning apps that allow biologists and ordinary folks to identify exotic species with the click of a photo.

Imagine you’re a biologist with camera traps in the savanna or samples of algae from a bloom in Florida waterways. If you pinpoint endangered species’ migration corridors, your research could draw the boundaries of a new preserve. Determining which algae are blooming — and why — could have massive public health implications. Either way, the challenge is the same: It takes hundreds of hours to sort through tens of thousands of nighttime photos of animals or microscopic images of water samples with thousands of species of algae. But now help is at hand, and you don’t need to be a biologist to access it.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past five years are spawning a wave of technologies and apps that are allowing biologists to leave some of their most tedious tasks of identifying species to machines trained to do that instead. This explosion is also spilling over into the public domain, expanding resources that enable curious citizen scientists, foraging backpackers, landscape architects and farmers to, on their own, also identify rare species of plants and animals they come across.

These teams import players from around the world to help expand the sport.

If the opportunity arose to leave your family, friends and job behind to move to a beautiful country and have your basic necessities taken care of to play the sport you’ve always loved, would you put your life on hold to do it?

For Sam Siddall, the answer was unequivocally yes. Growing up, Siddall dreamed of making it to the major leagues. But, more than anything, he just wanted to play baseball.

As a right-handed pitcher with an 86 mph fastball, Siddall faced an uphill climb. After his senior year playing at Midland University, an NAIA-level program in Nebraska, major league scouts still didn’t know who he was. Instead of being drafted, he got a marketing job with a local Coca-Cola distributor in his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. Five months later, Siddall finally got the offer he’d been waiting for. But it didn’t come from the Chicago Cubs or the Toronto Blue Jays — rather, the Northern District Reds baseball club in Adelaide, Australia.