Kinea

Music in the digital era: from Copyright to Creative Commons

2018-05-07 - Jean-Benoît Zimmermann

Digitalisation has deeply changed the musical industry. Yet, it has allowed a great number of musicians to spread their work through the Internet expecting to reach a larger audience. Creative Commons licensing offers a new approach to copyright which is more in line with this situation. CC have been adopted by many musicians, for instance in the free-music platform Jamendo.
May 2018 Read more →
New Horizons: NASA’s space probe sent to Pluto

2018-04-01 - Diane Dessalles-Martin

We take another look at New Horizon’s encounter with Pluto in 2015 and at the space probe’s future adventures
April 2018 Read more →
The end of Gerrymandering? Electoral boundaries vs. maths

2017-12-04 - Renaud Helbig

The election of assembly representatives through a constituency system, as it is done in the USA, requires at first an electoral districting. Yet, even if the result is composed of population-balanced constituencies, districting can have a strong influence on the results of the elections, and politicians do not hesitate to use it in their favour. How can we objectively tell if a districting is biased and should be invalid?
December 2017 Read more →

From the archives

The end of Gerrymandering? Electoral boundaries vs. maths

2017-12-04 - Renaud Helbig

The election of assembly representatives through a constituency system, as it is done in the USA, requires at first an electoral districting. Yet, even if the result is composed of population-balanced constituencies, districting can have a strong influence on the results of the elections, and politicians do not hesitate to use it in their favour. How can we objectively tell if a districting is biased and should be invalid?
December 2017 Read more →
Does electronic voting undermine democracy?

2016-02-08 - Théo Zimmermann

Electronic voting, either through voting machines or internet voting, already exists in professional or associative elections; and there are numerous questions about its use for political elections. What are the issues, the risks and benefits induced by this type of ballot?
February 2016 Read more →
The rejection of refugees under the lens of Jean Malaquais' “Javanais”

2015-11-26 - Victoria Pleuchot

Foreigners and strangers often frighten us: they are part of the unknown. To reduce the fear, let us first define the concept. Even if those two words tend to be confused (in French, their meaning is merged in the single word “étranger”), they represent different notions. The foreigner is a person who does not have the nationality of the country where they live and work; whereas the stranger is defined by their otherness, by being somebody who we are not familiar with.
November 2015 Read more →
The Mexican agave and the bat: a dance of evolution

2015-11-16 - Agustín Ávila Casanueva

The histories of bats and agaves are constantly crossing each other’s paths. The latter needs the former for reproduction, and the former needs the latter for food. But it isn’t just any pollinator and it isn’t just any food. Bats can visit a lot of plants each night, while carrying a big load of pollen. The nectar and the pollen of the agaves contain proteins with many essential amino acids, allowing the bats to feed exclusively from this food.
November 2015 Read more →
Walls and the liberal city of Buenos Aires

2015-11-02 - Christopher Casas

There’s a scar just on the middle of Buenos Aires, a long east-west line dividing the city in two parts: the cauterized one, up north; the bleeding one, down south. Its inhabitants have traditionally considered Rivadavia Avenue as the border between the city of the rich ones and the city of the poor ones. And there’s no need to build up a fence or dig a ditch, between the two sidewalks of this street there’s the biggest abyss societies build: money.
November 2015 Read more →
Why Mercator?

2015-11-02 - Guillaume Geoffroy

A quick glance at an actual globe should convince you that the Mercator projection deserves its poor reputation: Europe, the United States and Canada are way too big, and Antarctica should certainly not be bigger than South America and Africa combined. So, how come this map became so widespread? Why is it still used today, even in products such as Google Maps?
November 2015 Read more →
Forced disappearances in Franco's Spain: recovering the memories

2016-02-01 - Alex Feynmann

Spain is the second country in the world with the most forced disappearances, only behind Cambodia. After the death of general Franco in 1975, Spain initiated a transition towards a democratic government. Nevertheless, the wounds left by the civil war and the forty years of dictatorship continue to bleed despite the efforts to hide them.
February 2016 Read more →
Epigenetics: how cells remember (and sometimes struggle to forget)

2015-11-02 - Renaud Helbig

If the genome is indeed the same in all cells, it is not expressed the same way: a set of supplementary materials will guide the cell, it will tell it which gene to consider in order to function. This annotating mechanism of the DNA is called epigenetics: what is above the genetics.
November 2015 Read more →

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