Tag Archives: Creative Commons

27Jun/23

How streaming platforms make you more likely to watch certain programmes – new research

Neil Thurman, City, University of London

With the vast array of options of what to watch online, have you ever wondered why you picked that new comedy or that old documentary? Would you have chosen to watch them if they were on terrestrial TV? How much were you nudged to choose them by subtle prompts from the online streaming platforms?

Last year, when a new British streaming TV platform, ITVX, launched, it promised to be “led” by viewers who could “choose [from] thousands of hours of content.” Disney+ has made a similar promise: “Watch the way you want.”

Continue reading

26Jun/23

Putin seriously weakened by Wagner Group mutiny – but it was a missed opportunity for Ukraine too

Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko, National University Odesa Law Academy

Blink and you could have missed it. Within 36 hours, the challenge mounted against the Kremlin by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary private military company the Wagner Group, was over. On Friday June 23 2023, Prigozhin ordered 25,000 of his troops on to a “march for justice”, which duly set out to confront the Russian president in Moscow. The following afternoon he called it off.

Continue reading

22Jun/23

How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons – and what to watch out for

Stacey Wood, Scripps College and Yaniv Hanoch, University of Southampton

Online fraud is today’s most common crime. Victims are often told they are foolish for falling for it, but fraudsters use psychological mechanisms to infiltrate the defences of their targets, regardless of how intelligent they are.

So it’s important to keep up with the latest scams and understand how they work.

Continue reading

19Jun/23

US regulators continue crypto crackdown – but here’s why the latest charges are different

Andrew Urquhart, University of Reading

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase shortly after launching a lawsuit against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.

This isn’t the first time Binance and Coinbase have caught the SEC’s attention – it’s not even the first time this year. But the latest charges are much more serious, including accusations that the exchanges are operating without the correct registration.

Continue reading

19Jun/23

How a 400 million year old fossil changes our understanding of mathematical patterns in nature

Sandy Hetherington, The University of Edinburgh and Holly-Anne Turner, University College Cork

If your eyes have ever been drawn to the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, the texture of a pineapple or the scales of a pinecone, then you have unknowingly witnessed brilliant examples of mathematical patterns in nature.

Continue reading

17Jun/23

How traditional Indigenous education helped four lost children survive 40 days in the Amazon jungle

Eliran Arazi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The discovery and rescue of four young Indigenous children, 40 days after the aircraft they were travelling in crashed in the remote Colombian rainforest, was hailed in the international press as a “miracle in the jungle”. But as an anthropologist who has spent more than a year living among the Andoque people in the region, conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I cannot simply label this as a miraculous event.

At least, not a miracle in the conventional sense of the word. Rather, the survival and discovery of these children can be attributed to the profound knowledge of the intricate forest and the adaptive skills passed down through generations by Indigenous people.

Continue reading

07Jun/23

Apple Vision Pro headset: what does it do and will it deliver?

Panagiotis Ritsos, Bangor University and Peter Butcher, Bangor University

Apple recently unveiled its Vision Pro headset at the Worldwide Developers Conference in California. With it, Apple is venturing into a market of head-mounted devices (HMDs) – which are usually just displays, but in this case is more of a complete computer attached to your head – as well as the worlds of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR).

Continue reading

05Jun/23

Voices of Preston’s Windrush generation – when I first arrived, I said: ‘Really? I thought there were no slums in this place!’

Alan Rice, University of Central Lancashire and Jack Hepworth, University of Oxford

From the earliest arrivals of what would become Preston’s “Windrush generation”, the status of the Caribbean diaspora was hotly contested in this post-industrial Lancashire town, as elsewhere. Discrimination and prejudice dogged the daily lives of people from the Caribbean who made their home here.

Continue reading

02Jun/23

Fast X review: proof that there’s method in the madness of the Fast & Furious franchise

Joshua Gulam, Liverpool Hope University; Dr Sarah Feinstein, University of Leeds, and Fraser Elliott, The University of Edinburgh

There’s a scene in the latest Fast & Furious film, Fast X, where Aimes (Alan Ritchson) – the government agent tasked with apprehending Dom (Vin Diesel) and his crew – gives a rundown of the heroes’ backstory:

Let’s start back at the beginning … Los Angeles, 2001 … Humble roots, local kids … Street racers who became hijackers … Graduated to high-speed smuggling, mobile jailbreaks, train robberies … If it could be done in a car, they did it … If it violates the laws of God and gravity, they did it twice.

Continue reading

30May/23

‘They just ignored my tears, they ignored my unhappiness’: former Irish nuns reveal accounts of brainwashing and abuse

Karen Hanrahan, University of Brighton

Any thoughts of escaping to a more natural life was regarded as being sinful. The idea of being unfaithful to your vocation was a step on the way to hell. It would be a mortal sin.

These are the words of Mary, my mother. She was just 15 when she entered a convent in Ireland in 1950 and 34 by the time she finally managed to leave. She had been expressing doubts to her superiors since her early twenties but years of “brainwashing” and the very real fear of her and her family facing eternal damnation made breaking her vows seem impossible.

Continue reading