Tag Archives: Creative Commons

18Apr/23

Casey review: how the Met police needs to accept that it is institutionally racist and deal with failures

Angus Nurse, Nottingham Trent University

Louise Casey’s review of the standards of behaviour and internal culture at the Metropolitan police makes for uncomfortable reading. It was commissioned following the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, who was a serving Met officer at the time.

Casey highlights the prevalence of sexism and homophobia. Crucially, in considering police culture she draws different conclusions on the existence of institutional racism than the position taken in 2021 by Boris Johnson’s government on race.

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18Apr/23

ChatGPT: what the law says about who owns the copyright of AI-generated content

Sercan Ozcan, University of Portsmouth; Joe Sekhon, University of Portsmouth, and Oleksandra Ozcan, University of Portsmouth

The AI chatbot ChatGPT produces content that can appear to have been created by a human. There are many proposed uses for the technology, but its impressive capabilities raise important questions about ownership of the content.

UK legislation has a definition for computer-generated works. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 they are “generated by computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work”. The law suggests content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) can be protected by copyright. However, the original sources of answers generated by AI chatbots can be difficult to trace – and they might include copyrighted works.

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15Apr/23

Why democratic countries around the world are not prepared to support Ukraine – and some are shifting closer to Russia

Jose Caballero, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

After over a year of the Ukraine war, efforts at building a global consensus against Russia seem to have stalled, with many countries opting for neutrality.

The number of countries condemning Russia has declined, according to some sources. Botswana has edged towards Russia from its original pro-Ukraine stance, South Africa is moving from neutral to Russia-leaning and Colombia from condemning Russia to a neutral stance. At the same time, a large number of countries have been reluctant to support Ukraine.

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14Apr/23

When what you type doesn’t mean the same thing to the (older) person you’re texting or tweeting

Daniel Bürkle, University of Central Lancashire

On a day-to-day level, the way we interact with the people around us is shaped by our expectations, which are rooted in our experience. Most adults experience more regular and intensive contact with adults of roughly the same age as them. It is no surprise then – as a cursory glance at any multigenerational Twitter row over the past decade clearly demonstrates – that our expectations tend to be skewed towards how our own age group expresses themselves.

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11Apr/23

‘It’s like you’re a criminal, but I am not a criminal.’ First-hand accounts of the trauma of being stuck in the UK asylum system

Steve Taylor, Leeds Beckett University

Warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of violence. Pseudonyms are used to protect the interviewees’ identities.

Angela had already been in the UK as an asylum seeker for nine years and four months when we interviewed her. She was still in a state of limbo, unsure whether asylum would be granted, and her story was disturbing to hear.

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10Apr/23

Good Friday Agreement: the early 1990s back-channel between the IRA and British government that made peace possible

Niall Ó Dochartaigh, University of Galway

In February 1990, in the midst of the Troubles, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness publicly invited the British government to reopen a back-channel used during previous phases of contact with the IRA in the 1970s and during the 1981 hunger strike.

If [the British government] think there is something to be lost by stating publicly how flexible they would be, or how imaginative, we are saying they should tell us privately … there is an avenue which they are aware of whereby they can make what imaginative steps they are thinking about known to the Republican movement.

It was a crucial early step on the road to the Good Friday Agreement.

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08Apr/23

A professor is going to live in an underwater hotel for 100 days – here’s what it might do to his body

Bradley Elliott, University of Westminster

As nightmares go, being trapped in a small box deep underwater is probably high on many peoples’ lists. But one US professor is doing this on purpose. Joe Dituri, a former US navy diver and expert in biomedical engineering has been living in a 55 square meter space 30 feet below the surface of the Florida Keys since March 1, and plans to stay for 100 days. If he manages this, he will break a record for most time spent in a habitat beneath the surface of the ocean.

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06Apr/23

Life: modern physics can’t explain it – but our new theory, which says time is fundamental, might

Sara Imari Walker, Arizona State University

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

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04Apr/23

Kanye West and Wyndham Lewis: how ‘cancellation’ affected two artists, a century apart

Nathan Waddell, University of Birmingham

It may seem like the modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) and Kanye West (the rapper and onetime presidential hopeful now known as Ye) have little in common. But their stories are connected: both are known for making controversial statements about the Nazis.

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04Apr/23

The Pope Francis puffer coat was fake – here’s a history of real papal fashion

Carol Richardson, The University of Edinburgh

Before news of his hospitalisation for a respiratory infection this week, a fake image of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga-style white puffer jacket was posted to Reddit and Twitter. The image – created through AI programme Midjourney – had many viewers fooled into believing that the head of the Catholic church had dramatically updated his style.

As an art historian and an ecclesiastical historian, the image has fascinated me, not least in thinking about the rich history of papal fashion.

First of all, it caught my eye because it looks like shot silk (fabric made of silk woven from two or more colours producing an iridescent appearance). Intentionally or not, it’s a nice nod to the fascia, a sash worn by clerics over their cassocks.

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