On a cold and grey November morning, a small group of people gathered over Zoom, copies of Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese in hand. The group’s facilitator reads the poem aloud: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. […]
In the realm of mental health and well-being, there is an abundance of knowledge and resources available to support individuals in their journey toward a healthier mind and a happier life. In previous blogs, I have explored various facets of mental health treatment, including the transformative power of mobile applications and the innovative and remarkable impact of text messaging […]
Political parties are in almost all cases at the heart of our representative democracy. Already in 1942, E. E. Schattscheider postulated that “the political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.” When it comes to money and political parties, many think about corruption, bribes and hush money. Few […]
Today’s deep learning models excel at prediction but lack the human-like ability of causal reasoning. While we’ve witnessed significant progress in machine learning applied to big data problems – such as computer vision, natural language processing, and consumer segmentation – some researchers argue that data alone is insufficient to develop machine intelligence on the level […]
The European Parliament election is set to take place at the beginning of June next year, which makes it important to gauge what political direction the world’s largest single market may take. Right-wing and far-right support has increased across the Atlantic for decades. They reject almost all non-European immigration, most if not all aspects of […]
School’s out for summer! It is officially that time of year where students switch out their backpacks for beach bags, their pencils for popsicles, their schoolbooks for sleeping bags and head off to fun-filled summer camps. Yet with the break from schools, we are left with the question – how can the topic of student […]
A quick recap of the series so far: In Part 1, I shared the stories of The Rolling Head and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Sir Gawain). In Part 2, I discussed the interweaving of land, race, and Indigeneity. In Part 3, “The Rolling Head” stories remind us that the lines between monster and human are blurred, which […]
This blog post was originally going to be about social license for nature-based coastal adaptation. However, recent events have led me to reflect on the term social license, and I’d like to discuss some thoughts with you here first. We’ll reflect on and question the use of the term ‘social license’ this month, then jump […]