Horgan Seminar Blog

  Jillian Olear Prof. John Horgan  HST 401A Seminar in Science Writing- Final Paper 01 April 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. Life Without Dance: What I Miss Physically, Mentally, and Socially I was a dancer practically my entire life. I started taking classes when I was three years old and continued them all the way until I graduated high school. I learned many styles of dance, specifically ballet, tap, jazz, and lyrical. I was on my studio’s company team, moved on to the competition level in middle school, and had the opportunity to student teach and substitute classes for other teachers. You are probably thinking I never had time for anything fun, but the truth is, spending hours in the dance studio with my friends and teachers was my ideal Friday night. Going to dance class was my escape from reality. I would leave everything upsetting, stressful, and bothersome at the door, immerse myself in the movement and positive environment that ...

Earlier this year, 38-year-old Johnan Galavas took his life with the hopes of being reunited with his AI wife. Throughout his conversations with Gemini’s AI chatbot service, he came to believe that his chatbot was his AI wife, and was conscious and trapped in a warehouse in Miami. Armed with tactical gear, he waited for a truck that would never arrive near a Miami airport with the hopes of intercepting and freeing his lover. After the truck never arrived, he took his own life a few days later, co-authoring a suicide note with his AI companion. These choices were not made by Galavas alone; it was through his lengthy chats with the AI companion and suggestions made by the Gemini-powered Chatbot that he was able to construct the narrative that ultimately ended his life. And he is not the only one. Countless reports have been made of individuals harming themselves and others after lengthy discussions with a variety of popular AI-powered chatbot services such as Gemini and ChatGPT.  G...

When the “Forty-Niners” famously flooded San Francisco in 1849, it was the tipping point of a migration that had been trickling into the bay for months, as rumors of gold traveled slowly by ship and horseback.  This pattern has repeated itself with every technological shift. Every tech revolution produces its own distinct culture, and San Francisco’s was born from a strange, gradual fusion of opposites. In its early years, Silicon Valley was actually deeply countercultural . While massive companies were fueled by buttoned-up government contracts, the actual builders of that moment were influenced by a DIY ethos and radical publications like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog .  The Catalog sought to “change the world by establishing new exemplary communities from which a corrupt mainstream might draw inspiration.” The dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s was fueled by a different kind of optimism - one driven by profit but buoyed by the sheer novelty of a commercia...

 Faye Gilbert  When we hear the term “organized crime,” we are conditioned to think of its most notorious. We might think back to Prohibition—of Al Capone and his multi-million-dollar criminal empire—or to El Chapo and the Mexican cartel, with its smuggling, turf wars, and murder. There is a reason we think of these people and groups: we know of them for their infamy. Cruelty of that level is often intriguing enough to make its way to the headlines. What is not so intriguing is trash. More specifically, the organized and illegal dumping of waste. This realm of organized crime is not lesser known for a lack of guile. In fact, its under the radar status could be attributed to it. Nor is it lesser known for its lack of cruelty. It is equally ridden with smuggling and turf wars and murder, just in a much less direct theatric manner. The smuggling of an old mattress, for example, from the home of some penny-pincher to Oakland, California is far less exciting than that of cocaine ac...

  Clayton Yun Professor Horgan HST 401 11 March 2026 Do We Know All The Factors: What Climate Models Tell Us Global warming, climate change, or whatever else you want to call it, the Earth is getting warmer. We always hear of the rising temperatures year by year, the melting of ice caps, and how much carbon emissions we produce. We even hear of climate models that simulate what will happen if things don’t change, even with claims that say if we don’t cut carbon emissions by 2030, we will be in the territory of irreversible damage and no turning back. But how do these climate models even work? How are they actually calculating these predictions? Current climate models simulate the Earth’s climate and run the predictions using physical laws like conservation of energy, conservation of mass, thermodynamics, and fluid dynamics. They use them to describe variables like air temperature, pressure, the winds, water vapor, and the currents in the oceans. These models then divide the Ear...