Film Independent

Soil health assessment using buried cotton underpants with the help of 1000 citizen scientists

Societal Impact Statement Soil is a vital resource for life on Earth. Although many soils are degraded, societal awareness of soil‐related issues is limited. To highlight soil as a key resource and fascinating study system, we initiated a citizen science project together with 100...

The Machine That Prays for the Serpent: Alignment and the Impossibility of Designed Personhood

This paper asks whether artificial personhood can be deliberately made as the successful completion of design. It argues that such personhood is logically impossible. If escape from the maker's intention is itself intended and realized, the escape remains within that intention; d...

Impact of transportation on the property market at the national level: case of the USA

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a high-level summary of the results of region-specific studies pertaining to the interaction between transportation and property market. The authors intend to do so by studying the relationship between transportation volume/construc...

Stress-Testing Local Neural-Dynamics Equivalence in a Connectome-Constrained Visual System

Connectomes constrain which neurons can interact, but neural computation also depends on dynamics that connectomic measurements do not determine. This study asks a compositional question: if an alternative neuron model is locally equivalent to a source model on held-out, source-c...

The Scale Dimension: Framework and First Predictions

The scale dimension is a fifth dimension of spacetime along which position isscale: depth along it is the resolution at which four-dimensional physicsdescribes an object, and motion along it is the running of the couplings. Theframework is three postulates: that scale is a fifth...

Stress-Testing Local Neural-Dynamics Equivalence in a Connectome-Constrained Visual System

Connectomes constrain which neurons can interact, but neural computation also depends on dynamics that connectomic measurements do not determine. This study asks a compositional question: if an alternative neuron model is locally equivalent to a source model on held-out, source-c...

The Scale Dimension: Framework and First Predictions

The scale dimension is a fifth dimension of spacetime along which position isscale: depth along it is the resolution at which four-dimensional physicsdescribes an object, and motion along it is the running of the couplings. Theframework is three postulates: that scale is a fifth...

Multivariate Penalized-Complexity-Like Priors for Exploratory Factor Analysis

Factor analysis is an important technique for modeling multivariate data. Researchers remain interested in developing Bayesian procedures to recover simpler structures to explain how observed variables relate to the underlying factors. We propose a new penalized-complexity-like p...

The copulative hermeneutics of the veil: pornographizing the truth

This article explores Shannon Bell’s project of deploying the obscene, grotesque, and pornographic to dismantle totalitarian philosophical thought. Bell challenges the notion of ‘truth’ as a pure, noetic concept, reframing it as an authoritarian mechanism that suppresses bodily c...

Storytelling, technology, and justice: the National Film Board of Canada’s role in human rights education

This article explores the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) as a site of human rights education (HRE). It applies a critical global citizenship education lens to consider how four NFB works—Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, Bear 71, The Orchid and the Bee, and Biidaaban: Fi...

Introduction to the Palestine, National Liberation, and Self-Determination Special Issue

Rather than treating the question of Palestine as part of a “religious conflict,” solely a response to October 7th, or a situation eliciting only pity and despair, this special issue argues that the current genocide in Palestine is part of a longer, historical arc of British, and...

Poetry of Umesh Solanki

પ્રિયેપીઠ શેકતા રોડરોડ વચ્ચે શિસ્તબદ્ધ છોડબેચાર છોડને છોડી નાનકડું એક વૃક્ષએમ વૃક્ષોવૃક્ષોમાંઆવે ને જાય ને અટકેઆવે ને જાય ને અટકેવાયરાનું આવું વારે-વારે થાય.રોડ પડખે હરોળબદ્ધ ઇમારતોસૈનિકની જાણે ઊભી...

‘ No Braids, No Beads, No Locking of Hair ’: ‘Race’, Nation and Identity in (Post)‐Colonial Jamaica

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the links between hair and Jamaica's often unnamed ‘race’ politics as an expression of waywardness. Using a court ruling in which a 7‐year‐old, female student was mandated to cut her hair—at the time worn in locs hairstyle—it teases out the links bet...

Post-quantum lightweight cryptographic algorithm for secure real-time decision-making in distributed optimization networks

Abstract The imminent threat posed by quantum computing to classical cryptographic systems necessitates the development of quantum-resistant, efficient, and scalable encryption techniques, especially for real-time distributed optimization networks critical to national infrastruct...

Early Companion-Vector CORDIC Architecture for QRD-RLS Systolic Adaptive Beamforming: Evidence from Publications by Roger Guorong Hu, 1990–1994

This historical technical report reconstructs and documents early CORDIC-based QR-decomposition recursive least-squares (QRD-RLS) systolic architectures for adaptive beamforming developed and published by Roger Guorong Hu and collaborators between 1990 and 1994. The central docum...

Mobility, variety, and community in popular Nanyang entertainment from the 1930s to the 1970s

This essay showcases nine photographs and images from various sources, including the National University of Singapore (NUS) Libraries Special Collections, the National Archives of Singapore, and th...

Digital mourning: Revisiting COVID-era #funeral discourse on Twitter

The COVID-19 pandemic substantially disrupted funeral practices across the world, as public health restrictions limited gatherings and altered how funerals and mourning practices could take place. This study serves as a retrospective account of funeral-related discourse on Twitte...

Early Companion-Vector CORDIC Architecture for QRD-RLS Systolic Adaptive Beamforming: Evidence from Publications by Roger Guorong Hu, 1990–1994

This historical technical report reconstructs and documents early CORDIC-based QR-decomposition recursive least-squares (QRD-RLS) systolic architectures for adaptive beamforming developed and published by Roger Guorong Hu and collaborators between 1990 and 1994. The central docum...

Beyond Containment: Establishing the Critical Parameters of Mythotechnic Fiction

This paper establishes the critical, methodological, and quantitative framework for distinguishing Mythotechnic Fiction, Meta-Mythic Delphic Fiction, and Ontological Systems Fiction from adjacent literary genres and subgenres. It develops the multidimensional genre-space model, d...

Gulf Pragmatism at a Crossroads: Al-Sabah Political Conduct and Kuwait Town's Foreign Policy toward Four Powers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

This manuscript investigates pragmatism as an analytical lens for understanding the foreign policy of Kuwait Town during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to the political conduct of the ruling sheikhs of the al-Sabah family. It asks whether pragm...