María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías swiftly cuts hundreds of strips of newsprint and colored crepe paper needed to make a piñata, soothed by Norteño music on the radio while measuring pieces by feel. “The measurement is already in my fingers,” Ortiz Zacarías says with a laugh. She has been doing this since she was a...
Author: DKS783NLFABV
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The Right to Reality
AI-generated content might cause the marketplace of ideas to fail. Recognition of the right to reality might safeguard space for democratic deliberation. New technologies pose new risks that require new rights. The right to privacy emerged when the camera made private affairs public. The right to be forgotten took root when data shared online for a specific purpose for...
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A Bottle of Scotch Recently Sold for $2.7 Million – What’s Behind Such Outrageous Prices?
When a rare bottle of Scotch whisky sold for US$2.7 million in November 2023, I was stunned, but I wasn’t surprised. The whiskey market has been booming for some time. Bourbon brands like Pappy Van Winkle from Buffalo Trace distillery are selling for astronomical prices in the secondary market. Japanese whiskies, which have become popular...
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Shuang Li on Finding the Wrinkles in Technology
‘The idea of having a body makes me cringe,’ says artist Shuang Li, speaking via Zoom from her chilly Berlin studio. ‘Once you have a physical form, you’re trapped. I’ve always felt that – both when I make work and in daily life.’ So, it comes as no surprise that Li feels more freedom online than in IRL....
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A River Runs Through It: How Artists Are Reframing the Landscape
From An-My Lê and Zoe Leonard to Emilija Škarnulytė and Nguyen Trinh Thi, artists are turning to rivers to illuminate the fluidity of life on earth Fourteen vertical, black-and-white photographic landscapes compose Fourteen Views (2023), a cyclorama created by Vietnamese-American photographer An-My Lê for her survey show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Taken...
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Public Opinion Polls May Not Be as Straightforward as You Think
Public opinion polls are often considered “the will of the people” but a new study on the role of polls in South Korea shows that they may not always be that transparent. “Using polls to gauge what people think about politics is not as simple as it sounds, as there are multiple mediating factors between...
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The Uncomfortable Geopolitics of the Clean Energy Transition
Every time UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks about the climate crisis, he ups the ante with his admonishments—and rightly so. In September, when he said “humanity had opened the gates of hell,” it was at the end of a summer of unprecedented flooding, including in Libya, China, and the United States, and record-breaking fires in Canada and...
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Extremely Rare Bird Captured on Film
A striking and extremely rare half female, half male bird has been spotted by a University of Otago zoologist. Sesquicentennial Distinguished Professor Hamish Spencer was holidaying in Colombia when an amateur ornithologist John Murillo pointed out a wild Green Honeycreeper with distinct half green, or female, and half blue, male, plumage. “Many birdwatchers could go...
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New Tool Helps Gauge Trust in Government
People are less likely to adopt new health policies if they don’t have faith in their government, and a new tool from University of Waterloo researchers aims to fix that. The tool – designed by a team based in Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences – aids lawmakers in how trustworthy they may appear to the public...
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Nourishing Communities: Neighborhood Restaurants as Social Infrastructure
Studies on sustainability inevitably touch on food-related topics like food security, culinary heritage, and the sustenance of vulnerable people. Social sustainability is one of the three pillars of sustainability, alongside environmental and economic sustainability, and has become a pivotal topic in various research fields. It includes concerns about social justice, resource distribution and recognition, and...