how to make it a success Daniel Wheatley, University of Birmingham Flexibility has become a key element in the world of work. Even before the pandemic hit, many jobs were designed to provide greater choice about how, when and where they could be done. Now the notion of “hybrid working”, which combines time working from home and time in physical proximity to colleagues at a workplace, is expected to be a popular option for many employees as companies seek to attract them back to the office. Some employers are reducing their office space or even closing locations in anticipation of a … Continue reading Hybrid working:

Velda Elliott, University of Oxford What do you do with a young man convicted for being in possession of a bomb-making manual? A count of possessing information likely to be useful for preparing an act of terror can carry a jail term of up to 15 years. But 21-year-old Ben John wasn’t sentenced to prison: he was sentenced to read English canonical literature. The judge in his case told him to go away and read books such as Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The defendant was also … Continue reading Everything that’s wrong with sentencing a white supremacist to read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens

Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws James Jin Kang, Edith Cowan University and Jumana Abu-Khalaf, Edith Cowan University A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security. The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, … Continue reading Did you know the Australian Government can ‘modify’ Facebook/Twitter posts?

Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham Unsurprisingly, the Taliban’s rapid takeover of power across Afghanistan has prompted headlines about a renewed “civil war”. This is misleading, however. “Civil war” implies a situation where an insurgent movement is taking on a ruling government. But in 2001, it was not just the US-backed Northern Alliance that removed the Taliban from Kabul – other local commanders and political leaders were challenging their authority too. And in 2021, the Taliban swept to power by offering local groups incentives to cooperate or persuading them to stand aside. Now that the Taliban try to establish a government … Continue reading Afghanistan: the warlords who will decide whether civil war is likely

Shows why ISIS is harder to defeat online than on the battlefield Joe Burton, University of Waikato As Friday’s attack by an ISIS sympathiser in a New Zealand supermarket has shown, ISIS’s extreme ideology still holds strong appeal for some disaffected Muslims living in the west. ISIS ideology did not die in Syria and Iraq with the defeat of ISIL and its plans to establish a caliphate. ISIS continues to be a radicalising influence on those susceptible to anti-western narratives. Social networks, the dark web and encrypted platforms continue to facilitate the global spread of its beliefs. The Sir Lankan-born national … Continue reading New Zealand’s latest terror attack

But our theories are probably steering us away from it Peter Vickers, Durham University If we discovered evidence of alien life, would we even realise it? Life on other planets could be so different from what we’re used to that we might not recognise any biological signatures that it produces. Recent years have seen changes to our theories about what counts as a biosignature and which planets might be habitable, and further turnarounds are inevitable. But the best we can really do is interpret the data we have with our current best theory, not with some future idea we haven’t had … Continue reading Alien life is out there

How ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise Matthew MacKisack, University of Exeter Glen Keane, the Oscar-winning artist behind such Disney classics as The Little Mermaid (1989), was once described by Ed Catmull the former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios as “one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation”. But when he sat down to design Ariel, or indeed the beast from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Keane’s mind was a blank. He had no preconception of what he would draw. This is because he has aphantasia, a recently-identified variation of human experience affecting … Continue reading The Art of Aphantasia

Susan H. Kamei, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences As soon as Islamic extremists were identified as having carried out four deadly, coordinated attacks on U.S. soil in the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta started hearing calls from the public to ban Arab Americans and Muslims from all flights – and even to round them up and detain them. In the chaotic hours and days following the attacks, Mineta did not yet know that his childhood incarceration by the federal government in the aftermath of Japan’s Pearl Harbor bombing nearly 60 … Continue reading Memories of Japanese American imprisonment during WWII guided the US response to 9/11

Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Al-Qaida was planning two sets of terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. On Sept. 11, 2021, as Americans commemorate and mourn the lives lost that Tuesday morning 20 years ago, it is important to remember the second plot as well – the attacks that didn’t happen. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organizer of the 9/11 operation, originally envisioned simultaneous attacks on the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States. He bragged about having had dozens of recruits to choose from. But the numbers were smaller than he … Continue reading Al-Qaida, Islamic State group struggle for recruits

Sahotra Sarkar, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts A Texas law that aims to eliminate almost all abortions in the state is part of a long-standing nationwide movement to restrict the right to abortion. The Texas law went into effect on Sept. 1, 2021, and severely limits the right to have an abortion in that state. But the anti-abortion movement is aiming more broadly than just Texas and placing its bets very strongly on a case expected to be argued this fall at the U.S. Supreme Court, known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In … Continue reading When human life begins is a question of politics – not biology