Author: TheConversation

Political Pawns: Why Russia kidnaps Ukrainian children when it is unable to care for its own

Political Pawns: Why Russia kidnaps Ukrainian children when it is unable to care for its own

Posted by | Jul 22, 2023

By Clementine Fujimura, Professor of Anthropology, Area Studies and Russian, United States Naval Academy Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian soldiers have forcibly taken an estimated 16,000 Ukrainian children to Russia. Over 300 children have since returned home, but it is not clear what happened to most of the rest. The mass abductions led prosecutors at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants in March 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. Moscow counters that the children it has brought to Russia – its estimates are...

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Echoes of Holodomor: Award-winning documentary “Famine” banned by Russia for depiction of cruel past

Echoes of Holodomor: Award-winning documentary “Famine” banned by Russia for depiction of cruel past

Posted by | Jul 22, 2023

By Jeremy Hicks, Professor of Russian Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London In October last year, Russia banned a documentary depicting the famine that hit parts of the Soviet Union including Ukraine between 1921 and 1923 and revoked the film’s screening licence. The film had its UK premiere, with English subtitles, on June 22 in east London. Famine is an artistically sophisticated but in many respects unremarkable historical documentary. It does a good job of telling viewers about its subject, which is not one familiar to the Russian public, despite being one of the most traumatic events...

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Lurking fascism: How the conflation of “partisan” and “political” became a danger to liberal democracy

Lurking fascism: How the conflation of “partisan” and “political” became a danger to liberal democracy

Posted by | Jul 20, 2023

By Lawrence Torcello, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology “The personal is political!” is a well-known rallying cry, originally used by left-leaning activists, including feminists, to emphasize the role of government in personal lives and systemic oppression. It seems that now, it could be equally popular among right-wing politicians and their followers to communicate the idea that “everything is political.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of former President Donald Trump’s recent indictment by the Department of Justice. Trump supporters say that the decision to charge Trump was “political.” If the department hadn’t charged...

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True cost of E-commerce: Inside the black box of Amazon’s product returns

True cost of E-commerce: Inside the black box of Amazon’s product returns

Posted by | Jul 19, 2023

By Simone Peinkofer, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management, Michigan State University E-commerce may make shopping more convenient, but it has a dark side that most consumers never see. Say you order an electric toothbrush for Father’s Day and two shirts for yourself from Amazon. You unpack your order and discover that the electric toothbrush won’t charge and only one shirt fits you. So, you decide to return the unwanted shirt and the electric toothbrush. Returns like this might seem simple, and often they are free for the consumer. But managing those returns can get costly for retailers, so...

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Kent Cooper: How a journalism titan of 20th-century led Associated Press to transform the news industry

Kent Cooper: How a journalism titan of 20th-century led Associated Press to transform the news industry

Posted by | Jul 19, 2023

By Gene Allen, Adjunct Professor, Journalism/Communication and Culture, Toronto Metropolitan University On the day of Kent Cooper’s funeral in February 1965, the flow of news through the international Associated Press network, the institution he spent a 40-year career building, came to a complete stop. In scores of AP bureaus and thousands of newsrooms around the world, the printers that hammered out the news fell silent. This tribute to a man who changed the kind of news millions of readers and listeners relied on, and opened the way for its global spread, lasted only a minute before the torrent of...

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Infringement or fair use? Why generative AI is a minefield for U.S. copyright law

Infringement or fair use? Why generative AI is a minefield for U.S. copyright law

Posted by | Jul 19, 2023

By Robert Mahari, JD-PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jessica Fjeld, Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School; and Ziv Epstein, PhD Student in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney, a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the internet, to create the piece. The process was far from fully automated. Allen went through some 900 iterations over 80 hours to create and refine his submission. In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won...

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