Author: TheConversation

By George Grispos, Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity, University of Nebraska Omaha; Austin C. Doctor, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Nebraska Omaha Farmers are adopting precision agriculture, using data collected by GPS, satellite imagery, internet-connected sensors and other technologies to farm more efficiently. While these practices could help increase crop yields and reduce costs, the technology behind the practices is creating opportunities for extremists, terrorists and adversarial governments to attack farming machinery, with the aim of disrupting food production. Food producers around the world have been under increasing pressure, a problem exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and...

By Neil Roberts, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto With the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new session on October 3, Clarence Thomas is arguably the most powerful justice on the nation’s highest court. In 1991, after Thomas became an associate justice and only the second African American to do so, his power was improbable to almost everyone except him and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. He received U.S. Senate confirmation despite lawyer Anita Hill’s explosive workplace sexual harassment allegations against him. Today, Thomas rarely speaks during oral arguments, yet he communicates substantively through his prolific written...

By Ramona L. Pérez, Professor of Anthropology, San Diego State University As I opened a recent email from my local grocery store chain advertising Hispanic Heritage Month, it runs from September 15 to October 15 each year, I was surprised to see it highlighting recipes from four distinct regions: Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America. The advertisement rightly noted that while corn and beans have framed much of what in the United States is considered “Hispanic” foods, Latin America has a much greater diversity of foods. Its cuisine, which began long before the Spanish or other colonizers...

By Cornelius Holtorf, Professor of Archaeology, Linnaeus University Wars, pandemics, artificial intelligence, a swiftly unfolding climate crisis. The world is changing rapidly, and human communities must adapt to many challenges. In this situation, world heritage presents something of a twofold paradox: when the world needs global solidarity and collaboration, world heritage sites serve as cultural totems of the different nation states, which themselves can be in conflict. As we anticipate and adapt to change, world heritage looks backward, encouraging us to conserve what was before. Fifty years after the establishment of Unesco’s World Heritage Convention, it is time to...

By Northrop Davis, Professor of Media Arts, University of South Carolina When Hayao Miyazaki’s animated feature “Spirited Away” premiered in the United States 20 years ago, most viewers had not seen anything like it. Disney distributed the film. But as one critic pointed out, “Seeing just 10 minutes of this English version … will quickly disabuse any discerning viewer of the notion that it is a Disney creation.” It tells the story of a 10-year-old girl named Chihiro who, when traveling with her parents, stumbles across what appears to be an abandoned theme park. As they explore, the parents...

By Chris Ogden, Senior Lecturer in Asian Affairs, University of St. Andrews Over the last decade, the number of countries considered to be liberal democracies has contracted from 41 to 32, back to the same level as in 1989. In the same period, 87 other countries were labelled as closed autocracies or elected autocracies. A 2021 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit showed that only 8.4% of the world’s population lived in a fully functioning democracy, this shift is being referred to as a “democratic recession.” To many, leaders such as Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s president Recep...