On Monday a US federal judge ruled Google has violated antitrust laws, saying the organisation is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. Google disputes the ruling. Its president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said “this decision recognises that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed […] … learn more→

Title of course: Campaigns and Elections, in Theory and Practice What prompted the idea for the course? I noticed many of my students, including those interested in political science, had never actually engaged in politics beyond voting. I also saw that many of the clubs and activities that helped me make friends when I was a […] … learn more→

Language enables people to transmit thoughts to each other because each person’s brain responds similarly to the meaning of words. In our newly published research, my colleagues and I developed a framework to model the brain activity of speakers as they engaged in face-to-face conversations. We recorded the electrical activity of two people’s brains as they engaged in unscripted […] … learn more→

Studies at the global and national levels show that many young people from Generation Z (Gen Z) and Millennials are very concerned about environmental issues and climate change. Gen Z is a global population group born between 1998-2012, while Millennials were born between 1981-1995. Their level of concern about the current state of the earth is higher than that […] … learn more→

After widespread backlash, Google pulled its “Dear Sydney” Gemini ad from Olympics coverage. The ad featured its generative AI chatbot tool, Gemini, formerly known as Bard. The advertisement featured a father and his daughter, a fan of United States Olympic track and field athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The father, despite considering himself “pretty good with words,” uses Gemini to […] … learn more→

The World Class University (WCU) status targeted by the government will be achieved, one of the ways is if there are more world-class researchers from Indonesia. In fact, as of October 2023, there were only 92 Indonesian researchers included in the Top 2 Percent World Ranking Scientist list out of a total of 210 thousand top researchers, or […] … learn more→

CAPTCHAs are those now ubiquitous challenges you encounter to prove that you’re a human and not a bot when you go to log in to many websites. Websites and mobile apps have long been attacked by bots on a massive scale. Those malicious bots are programmed to automatically consume a large amount of computing resources, post spam messages, […] … learn more→

The higher education sector in the UK is in financial crisis. Over 60 institutions have announced severance or redundancy programmes, and around 40% expect to be in deficit in 2023-24. The financial collapse of one or more universities is now a distinct possibility, with disruptive economic and social repercussions for the regions in which they are based. This alarming situation is the […] … learn more→

New scientific understanding and engineering techniques have always impressed and frightened. No doubt they will continue to. OpenAI recently announced that it anticipates “superintelligence” – AI surpassing human abilities – this decade. It is accordingly building a new team, and devoting 20% of its computing resources to ensuring that the behaviour of such AI systems will be aligned […] … learn more→

One day, the Russian physicist Piotr Kapitsa asked Paul Dirac for his opinion on the book Crime and Punishment . The latter’s laconic response: “Very well, but the author was mistaken, because he described two sunrises on the same day.” Dirac spoke little, very little and never to say nothing. It is said that his physicist colleagues and students […] … learn more→