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Category: Academic Analysis

  • MIL-OSI Global: Apprenticeships aren’t designed for young people any more

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Charlynne Pullen, Principal Research Fellow in Education, Sheffield Hallam University

    BigPixel Photo/Shutterstock

    The number of people in England choosing to enrol in an apprenticeship has declined markedly over the past decade. Apprenticeship participation has fallen overall from 908,700 in 2016-17 to 736,500 in 2023-24.

    Particularly notable has been a shift away from apprenticeships providing introductory skills for young people towards them becoming higher level qualifications for older adults.

    In 2023-24, 55,660 under-19s were taking part in an intermediate apprenticeship, down from 75,500 in 2019-20. On the other hand, 185,810 over-25s were participating in a higher level apprenticeship in 2023-24 – up from 109,770 in 2019-20.

    “Apprenticeship starts for the under-25s fell by 38% in the period 2015-16 to 2022-23,” education secretary Bridget Phillipson told the House of Commons in September 2024. “It will fall to this Labour government to turn that around.”

    Continued messaging from successive governments has emphasised that apprenticeships are for young people. “To every young person I meet my message is that no matter who you are, or where you’re from, or whatever career you want to do, an apprenticeship will open doors for you,” Robert Halfon, skills minister in the previous Conservative government, said in 2023.

    Politicians present a decline in young people taking apprenticeships as a problem. But it is government policy that has turned these qualifications into something much more suitable for adults already in the workforce.

    Employers first

    A large reason for this is changes to how apprenticeships work that make them more centred on the role and needs of employers.

    The changes to apprenticeships since 2012 include a levy on large employers. Companies with an annual pay bill of more than £3 million pay 0.5% of this into a time-limited pot that they can use for apprenticeships within the company or transfer a proportion to smaller companies.

    Apprenticeships have also shifted from a focus on achieving qualifications towards meeting standards that focus on the knowledge, skills and behaviours of a job and often include a status or recognition from a professional body.

    The employer recruits, employs and pays the apprentice. Employers appoint the training provider, and they set the standards.

    Faced with using or losing money for apprenticeships and the choice between an unknown new recruit and an established member of staff, large employers might rationally opt to use apprenticeships to support their existing workforce to improve their skills.

    Many adults enrol on apprenticeships to improve their skills.
    fizkes/Shutterstock

    Adult apprentices typically have experience in relevant roles but want to improve their skills and progress in their careers.

    The NHS, for example, sees apprenticeships as a key part of its workforce strategy. Emerging evidence from my research with colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University and charity the Edge Foundation suggests many people on health apprenticeships are adults and existing staff.

    Reduced requirements

    Policy announcements from the current government have cemented this shift. They include the removal of the need for English and maths qualifications for adult apprentices, and the reduced minimum time period for an apprenticeship from 12 months to eight.

    In announcing the recent changes to English and maths, Bridget Phillipson said: “Businesses have been calling out for change to the apprenticeship system and these reforms show that we are listening. Our new offer of shorter apprenticeships and less red tape strikes the right balance between speed and quality, helping achieve our number one mission to grow the economy.”

    These changes are designed to increase the number of adult apprentices who complete their apprenticeship. Shorter apprenticeships should allow adults’ substantial relevant experience to be recognised within their apprenticeship so they can complete it more quickly.

    English and maths requirements had been a barrier for some adults to completing their apprenticeship. Some employers had made having English and maths qualifications a requirement for getting onto an apprenticeship. Without the requirements, more adults should be able to access and complete apprenticeships – but this change is only for those aged over 19.

    Increased funding for small and medium enterprises to take on apprentices, which was introduced under the previous government, also prioritised employers, although it did come with an additional incentive for them to take on 16-to-18 year olds. Other employer-focused policy changes from the previous government include reducing the requirements for time spent training off-the-job.

    The current government’s planned change to a growth and skills levy does include the creation of foundation apprenticeships. More detail on what they will entail in England is yet to come. But these do currently operate in Scotland, allowing younger people to gain substantial work experience whilst studying for qualifications at college.

    This kind of programme could create a smoother transition into an apprenticeship for a young person, and may increase the number of young people participating in apprenticeships. But for now, employers and the skills needed for economic growth still seem to be the priority.

    Sheffield Hallam has received funding for Charlynne Pullen to conduct related research on apprenticeships from the Low Pay Commission and the Edge Foundation. Charlynne was a Labour councillor in 2010-14 and a Labour parliamentary candidate in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, but has not been active in the party since 2019.

    – ref. Apprenticeships aren’t designed for young people any more – https://theconversation.com/apprenticeships-arent-designed-for-young-people-any-more-249640

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Car brake dust can be more harmful than diesel exhaust – new study

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By James Parkin, Research Fellow, Air Pollution, University of Southampton

    Kichigin/Shutterstock

    Exposure to air pollution is associated with around seven million premature deaths per year across the world. When we think of urban air pollution, diesel exhaust emissions are often portrayed as a key culprit – rightly so, given previous research findings. However, our latest research shows that dust from brake pads could be more harmful to our lungs.

    Dust produced by wear of the road, tyres, and brakes, known as “non-exhaust emissions”, are now the major type of emissions from road transport, surpassing exhaust emissions across many European countries. Of these, brake dust is often the main contributor, but it’s not yet subject to regulation. There is much less known about the potential health effects of brake dust compared to diesel exhaust dust.

    We grew cells in the lab to mimic the lining of the lung, and exposed these cells to both brake dust and diesel exhaust dust. Brake dust proved significantly more harmful to these cells across different measures that are linked to lung diseases such as cancer and asthma. Interestingly, we found that removing copper from the brake dust reduced these effects.

    Despite this, current vehicle regulations in the UK only target exhaust emissions. Our findings suggest there is an urgent need to consider regulation of non-exhaust emissions as well. Reformulating brake pads might be one way to reduce the potential health burden imposed by these emissions.

    Brake pads previously contained asbestos fibres to deal with overheating. However, asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999 because of links to lung disease. This resulted in the motor industry designing new brake pad linings, including non-asbestos organic (NAO) pads commonly used in vehicles today.

    We compared the harmfulness of dust from the wear of different pad types. Ironically, we found that dust from the NAO pads, designed to replace asbestos-containing pads, was the most toxic to lung cells compared not only to dust from other pad types, but also to diesel exhaust dust. Some of the effects on our exposed cells relate to diseases such as lung cancer, lung fibrosis (lung scarring), asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

    Friction braking system.
    Photology1971/Shutterstock

    Previous research has shown that metals in air pollution particles can have toxic effects. We measured the metal content in the different types of brake dust and diesel exhaust dust. AI techniques identified high copper content as the defining characteristic of brake dust from NAO pads.

    We also found that this copper could get inside exposed lung cells. Most interestingly, when we treated this brake dust with a chemical to neutralise copper, its toxic effects were diminished. This suggests that copper is causing at least some of the harmful properties of this dust.

    Almost half of all copper in the air we breathe comes from brake and tyre wear. Various studies conducted by other research groups have found that exposure to high concentrations of copper is associated with impaired lung function, and overall risk of death.

    EVs aren’t perfect

    There is a huge body of evidence showing that airborne dusts are damaging to our health. Unfortunately, while the switch to electric vehicles (EVs) will eliminate exhaust emissions, which include toxic gases as well as dust, it will not eliminate road, tyre and brake dust. Studies indicate that, because they tend to be heavier, electric vehicles can generate more non-exhaust dust than petrol or diesel vehicles – the zero-emission label is clearly not accurate.

    Electrification of transport won’t solve the problem of brake pad emissions.
    Sue Thatcher/Shutterstock

    Some EVs are fitted with regenerative braking systems that allow the engine to act as a generator, slowing the car. However, EVs are still fitted with friction braking systems, which help bring the car to a full stop, so they still generate brake dust.

    The upcoming Euro 7 emissions standards that will be introduced in November 2026 will place limits on brake dust emissions which may spur innovation to develop new brake materials or dust-trapping mechanisms. They may also place extra focus on traffic calming and road design, to minimise stop-start and aggressive driving styles – both of which increase brake dust emissions.

    New brake pad formulations might reduce the total level of dust emissions or might be designed to exclude toxic components similarly to how asbestos was eliminated previously. Notably, in the US, both California and Washington have passed legislation to reduce copper content within brake pads, although this was primarily in response to concerns about the runoff of copper from brake dust into waterways, affecting aquatic life.

    Non-exhaust emissions are all around us, making up around 60% of all vehicle-derived pollution particles in the UK. It is important for us to recognise that there is no air pollutant for which there is an established safe exposure level.

    As we make the shift to electric cars, science and regulation must approach these emissions as seriously as those from the exhaust pipe.

    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    James Parkin works for the University of Southampton. He received funding from Wessex Medical Research.

    Matt Loxham receives funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Academy of Medical Sciences, Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, Wessex Medical Research, and Asthma Allergy and Inflammation Research (AAIR) Charity.

    He is a member of the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP), but he is writing here as an individual and his views do not necessarily represent those of the Committee or its members.

    – ref. Car brake dust can be more harmful than diesel exhaust – new study – https://theconversation.com/car-brake-dust-can-be-more-harmful-than-diesel-exhaust-new-study-249736

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘A shameful call by Creative Australia’: the arts community reacts to Khaled Sabsabi being dropped from the Venice Biennale

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cecelia Cmielewski, Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

    To be selected as the artist and curator team to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale is considered the ultimate exhibition for an artistic team. To have your selection rescinded, as has now happened to the 2026 team of Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, is without precedent.

    Australia has presented at the biennale since 1954, and is one of 29 countries to have a permanent pavilion. Last year, Archie Moore was the first Australian to win the Golden Lion for best national pavilion.

    The selection of an artist and curator pair is managed by Creative Australia. The arts funding body appoints a committee of visual artists and industry experts to form a shortlist of six teams, and make the final selection.

    The announcement on February 7 of Sabsabi and Dagostino was widely celebrated as creatively bold and inclusive.

    On Thursday, opposition arts spokesperson, Claire Chandler, questioned Sabsabi’s selection in the Senate. She cited a 2007 work that featured Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and said the artist had made work “promoting” Osama bin Laden.

    In a statement released on Thursday night, Creative Australia said Sabsabi and Dagostino would no longer represent Australia at the biennale.

    The Creative Australia board, the statement said, “believes a prolonged and divisive debate about the 2026 selection outcome poses an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia’s artistic community”.

    On social media, the artistic community was swift in its condemnation. They criticised the paucity of understanding of Sabsabi’s artistic and community practice, and questioned the role of political interference and freedom of artistic expression.

    Artists called for the resignation of the Creative Australia board, and for a boycott of the Australian pavilion at the biennale.

    ‘A remarkable career’

    Before moving into visual arts, Sabsabi began his career as a hip-hop artist, known as Peacefender. In a career spanning more than 35 years, he has worked in video, mixed media and installation art, exhibiting around Australia and internationally.

    Media artist and academic John Gillies described Sabsabi as “a thoughtful and peaceful person” who has worked as a community arts worker in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

    The former head of the Sydney gallery Artspace, Nicholas Tsoutas, said Sabsabi “has had a remarkable career in contemporary art and his selection was so well deserved”.

    He praised the selection of Sabsabi as “an extraordinary opportunity to really advocate for artistic freedom for bringing [people] together”, and added this decision will “do the exact opposite”.

    ‘A sad day’

    Artist Kate Just said the board’s decision “undermines the expertise of the artist, curator, and the selection team. The decision fails to uphold the work of artists to interrogate complex personal and political histories and the urgent issues of our time.”

    Fiona Winning, former director of programming at Sydney Opera House, said it was “a shameful call by Creative Australia”. Artist Nigel Helyer expressed his belief this decision was “liable to emphasise cultural divides, rather than placate them”.

    Investment banker, art collector and philanthropist Simon Mordant, commented on Instagram he has “resigned as an Ambassador to the now cancelled project and withdrawn my financial support – this situation is unacceptable”.

    He suggested “the Pavilion should remain empty in solidarity with Khaled. A very dark day for Australia and the Arts”.

    Advocacy body National Association for the Visual Arts (commonly known as NAVA) released a statement saying “government interference in the expert panel’s selection process undermines the very principle of independence”.

    The decision, they said, “erodes public trust, alienates artists, and sparks widespread protest from those who stand with Sabsabi and Dagostino as a matter of principle”.

    ‘Artists reflect the times they live in’

    The five artistic teams who were shortlisted to represent Australia at the biennale have released a joint statement in support of Sabsabi.

    They called the selection process “rigorous and professionally independent” leading to the selection of a team with “artistic vision and courage”.

    Revoking support, they wrote, is “antithetical to the goodwill and hard-fought artistic independence, freedom of speech and moral courage that is at the core of arts in Australia”.

    In a statement, Sabsabi and Dagostino said “art should not be censored as artists reflect the times they live in”.

    “We intended to present a transformational work in Venice, an experience that would unite all audiences in an open and safe shared space,” they said.

    As the artistic community is showing, this decision has raised a debate on what artists are allowed to say in Australia and brings into question the independence of Creative Australia.

    Cecelia Cmielewski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. ‘A shameful call by Creative Australia’: the arts community reacts to Khaled Sabsabi being dropped from the Venice Biennale – https://theconversation.com/a-shameful-call-by-creative-australia-the-arts-community-reacts-to-khaled-sabsabi-being-dropped-from-the-venice-biennale-249941

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Dingoes are being culled in Victoria. How much harm to the species is needed to protect commercial profits?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Ireland-Piper, Associate Professor, ANU National Security College, Australian National University

    A Victorian government decision to allow dingo culling in the state’s east until 2028 has reignited debate over what has been dubbed Australia’s most controversial animal.

    Animals Australia, an animal welfare group, has filed proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria, challenging the decision. The case is due to be heard this year.

    Announcing the legal action, the group said the eradication program targeted a unique native animal at risk of extinction, and ignored pleas from Traditional Owners who “treasure the dingo as a totem species”.

    The controversy raises a few thorny questions. Are dingoes an important native species or an agricultural pest? And what is the right balance between protecting the species, and protecting the interests of farmers?

    What’s this all about?

    Dingoes are listed as vulnerable in Victoria. This means the species faces a high risk of extinction in the wild over the medium term.

    Dingoes are also protected under Victoria’s Wildlife Act – unless a special order is made to declare them “unprotected”. To date, these unprotection orders have been made when authorities deem it necessary to prevent dingoes from killing livestock.

    An unprotection order means a person can legally kill dingoes in certain areas of private and public land, by trapping, poisoning or shooting.

    Since around 2010, a succession of unprotection orders have allowed dingoes to be killed in various parts of Victoria. The unprotection order now being challenged came into effect on October 1 last year and will continue until January 1, 2028.

    Announcing the decision, Victoria’s Environment Minister Steve Dimopoulos says the government was:

    striking the right balance between protecting our vulnerable dingo populations while giving farmers the ability to protect their livestock, and we will regularly engage to ensure settings continue to achieve this balance.

    Dingoes are not ‘wild dogs’

    DNA studies suggest dingoes have been in Australia for between 4,600 and 18,000 years. Often wrongly described as “wild dogs”, they are [actually descended from south Asian wolves](https://environment.desi.qld.gov.au/wildlife/animals/living-with/dingoes#:~:text=The%20dingo—Australia’s%20only%20native,role%20in%20the%20natural%20environment.Sustainable dingo management (and public sympathies either way).

    Adding to the complications, it can be hard to distinguish between a wild dog and a dingo without DNA testing.

    Dingoes were once widespread across Victoria but are now extinct across most of the state, save for two populations in the state’s north and east.

    Conservationists and scientists fear the extended order in eastern Victoria may push dingoes to local extinction

    The experience in north-west Victoria offers a cautionary tale. There, under a dingo unprotection order, the population dropped to as few as 40 individuals. The local dingo population was deemed “critically low and at risk of extinction”, prompting the government to reinstate dingo protections.

    In eastern Victoria, the dingo population is estimated at between 2,640 and 8,800.

    However in September last year, before the unprotection order in eastern Victoria came into effect, Nationals Member for Gippsland, Tim Bull, claimed 1,500 dingoes were already being killed in the region each year by farmers and others.

    If those figures are correct, it suggests extending the unprotection order until 2028 will devastate the dingo population in eastern Victoria.

    A decline in dingo populations is not just a concern for the species itself – it will have knock-on effects.

    Dingoes are apex predators and research shows they are central to how ecosystems function. They can help control introduced predators such as foxes, feral cats and rabbits. This benefits native animals and plants.

    Is the balance right?

    Given the risks to dingo populations and the broader environment, it’s pertinent to ask if the government decision swings too far towards protecting agricultural production.

    One report suggests within Victoria’s 16 “wild dog management zones” in the 2022–23 financial year, there were more than 1.7 million head of livestock. Of these, 1,455 were confirmed killed by dingoes. While understandably of concern to farmers, this nonetheless represents a tiny proportion of total stock numbers.

    The number of sheep killed by dingoes is also only a fraction of the 14.6 million currently farmed in Victoria. Sheep are not at risk of extinction.

    These numbers suggest the government has not struck the right balance between protecting livestock and ensuing dingo populations survive.

    Considering the rights of Traditional Owners

    When weighing up an unprotection order, a minister must consider how it affects the rights of Traditional Owners.

    In 2023, when deliberating over whether to make an unprotection order in eastern Victoria, the Victorian government stated that for Aboriginal people:

    • dingoes are part of their living cultural heritage

    • the loss of a dingo is akin to the loss of a family member

    • the dingo helps maintain connection to Country

    • some have a totemic and kinship relationship with the dingo.

    The government said while the order would limit Aboriginal people’s rights, this was justified when taking other factors into account.

    The court will decide

    Animal protection group Animals Australia has filed proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria, challenging the lawfulness and validity of the unprotection order. Court documents are not yet publicly available.

    Australia does not have a single and consistent animal welfare and protection regime. Instead, protections are fractured between the states. That is why the current challenge to dingo culling is limited to Victoria, even though culling takes place in other states. This illustrates the difficulty in using the law to protect animals at a national level.

    This challenge is part of a broader push to redefine the relationship between humans and animals through what’s known as animal law. In recent years, animal advocates have used various aspects of the law to challenge the gassing of pigs before they are slaughtered, and recreational duck shooting.

    The current case is an important test for how the law balances the needs of humans and animals – and in particular, how much harm is deemed “necessary” at law to protect commercial profit and livelihood.

    Danielle Ireland-Piper does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Dingoes are being culled in Victoria. How much harm to the species is needed to protect commercial profits? – https://theconversation.com/dingoes-are-being-culled-in-victoria-how-much-harm-to-the-species-is-needed-to-protect-commercial-profits-245759

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Bracing for a monster: Tropical Cyclone Zelia is bearing down on WA. Here’s what to expect

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Turton, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography, CQUniversity Australia

    Severe Tropical Cyclone Zelia is bearing down on the northwest coast of Australia and is likely to make landfall early Friday evening.

    It’s a monster storm of great concern to Western Australia. Port Hedland is the largest town in the firing line and also our busiest iron ore export port. Strong winds may extend to other areas along the coast, and inland to areas such as Marble Bar, Tom Price and Paraburdoo.

    Even if Zelia doesn’t hit towns directly, it’s likely to cause a lot of damage. The Bureau of Meteorology predicts extremely dangerous sustained winds of around 205 kilometers an hour and wind gusts higher still, at 290km/h. That’s strong enough to flatten homes, trees, power lines and other infrastructure.

    This is a category five cyclone, which is the most severe possible under the current scale. But as climate change worsens, authorities may need to add another category to the scale.

    Bureau of Meteorology video explaining the threat of Tropical Cyclone Zeila.

    Do we need a category 6?

    Elsewhere in the world, tropical cyclones are called hurricanes or typhoons.

    The severity of a tropical cyclone (or hurricane or typhoon) is ranked in categories from 1 (weakest) to 5 (strongest).

    Category one involves maximum average wind speed of up to 88km/h, and strongest gusts up to 125 km/h. It typically causes negligible damage to homes but may damage crops, trees and caravans.

    Category five, the most severe, is defined as “extremely dangerous”, causing widespread destruction of buildings and vegetation. These cyclones bring maximum average wind speeds greater than 200km/h and gusts greater than 279km/h.

    However, on a warming planet, cyclones are expected to become more intense. It’s also making tropical cyclones and hurricanes intensify more quickly.

    Some scientists have called for a category six for hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones with sustained wind speeds greater than 309km/h. They argue a new category is needed to communicate the risks associated with tropical cyclones fuelled by climate change.

    Bureau of Meteorology video explaining the threat of Tropical Cyclone Zeila.

    Climate change is feeding storms

    It’s too early to say if Cyclone Zelia is directly caused, or fuelled, by climate change. However, research over the last 30 years has found a link between global warming and more intense tropical cyclones.

    Globally, 2024 was Earth’s warmest year on record. Ocean heat content is increasing around most tropical seas, and other places where tropical cyclones are forming.
    Warmer oceans, and a warmer atmosphere, both feed energy into tropical cyclones, making them more intense and fast-forming when conditions are favourable.

    Zelia intensified from a category one into a five in just over 24 hours.

    Australia is currently experiencing record-breaking sea surface temperatures. The area off the northwest coast has been up to 4-5°C above normal this summer.

    Hurricane Milton, which struck the United States in October last year, also shows how climate change is making tropical cyclones worse. Amid very warm ocean temperatures, it intensified rapidly over the Gulf of Mexico to a category five hurricane.

    We can expect more of these severe cyclones in future, if humanity keeps warming up the oceans and the atmosphere.

    Slow is not good

    Climate change is slowing the forward motion of tropical cyclones over the ocean and land. That means they take longer to cross the coast and pass through an area – inflicting more damage from wind and storm surge, and dumping more rain.

    The Bureau of Meteorology says Cyclone Zelia’s “forward speed” is quite slow, at 11km/h. So, heavy rain and the strong winds will persist for quite a few hours before and after it crosses the coast.

    The strongest winds of a tropical cyclone are usually near the eye, but can extend for hundreds of kilometres. Sometimes, winds on opposite sides of the eye blow in different directions, causing destruction on the ground which damages buildings, infrastructure, farmland and the environment.

    Conditions on the ground

    At the moment around Port Hedland, winds are about 70-100km/h and rising. That’s gale force but not too alarming. Conditions will rapidly deteriorate into this afternoon, particularly to the east of Port Hedland.

    The storm has already dropped a lot of rain. This has caused local flooding and cut rail lines. But there’s more to come.

    The Bureau of Meteorology is also warning of a significant storm tide – when sea levels rise well above a typical high tide. This may lead to flooding and inundate coastal roads and properties.

    The cyclone will continue to trek inland over the weekend, gradually weakening as it goes. People in mining and Indigenous communities hundreds of kilometres inland could experience strong winds, heavy rain and flooding.

    The bureau is providing regular updates online. For those in the path of the cyclone visit www.emergency.wa.gov.au or download the Emergency WA app for the latest community alerts and warnings.

    Steve Turton has received funding from the Australian government.

    – ref. Bracing for a monster: Tropical Cyclone Zelia is bearing down on WA. Here’s what to expect – https://theconversation.com/bracing-for-a-monster-tropical-cyclone-zelia-is-bearing-down-on-wa-heres-what-to-expect-249947

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: In Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US has put a conspiracy theorist in charge of public health

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hassan Vally, Associate Professor, Epidemiology, Deakin University

    Overnight, Robert F. Kennedy Jr was confirmed as the secretary of the US Health and Human Services Department. Put simply, this makes him the most influential figure in overseeing the health and wellbeing of more than 330 million Americans.

    As health secretary, Kennedy will be involved in overseeing federal health agencies that regulate medical research, disease prevention, drug approvals and health-care programs.

    This includes oversight of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, which are among the most crucial public health agencies in the country.

    Reports suggest he’ll oversee a budget in the order of US$1.8 trillion (A$2.8 trillion) annually.

    In the era of Trump 2.0, there’s little that shocks me anymore. But Kennedy would have to be the most unqualified person ever to hold this crucial role of protecting the health of the American people.

    A history of discounting science

    The absolute minimum requirement for someone occupying such as role should be an understanding of science and respect for scientific evidence and expertise. Yet, Kennedy fails spectacularly in this regard.

    Here are just some of the false claims he has made over the years:

    None of these positions has even the smallest amount of scientific support.

    It’s hard to predict what Kennedy will do as health secretary, especially given his confirmation hearings looked to be an exercise in being vague, evasive and denying or downplaying his prior controversial statements to secure support.

    But there are three areas where his views are fairly clear and his appointment could be expected to have a significant impact. These are water fluoridation, infectious diseases research and vaccines.

    Fluoridation of water

    Kennedy has been a long-term opponent of water fluoridation, despite its proven benefits in preventing tooth decay. He has consistently questioned its safety and claimed it’s linked to a range of illnesses such as arthritis, bone cancer, IQ loss and neurodevelopmental disorders.

    While a recent review suggested a link between water fluoridation and lower IQ in children, the levels of fluoride in the water in countries included in this review were generally several times higher than the levels in public water fluoridation programs in countries such as the US and Australia. There were also other limitations that make interpreting these findings challenging.

    The CDC has identified community water fluoridation as as one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century. And it continues to benefit dental health today, without any convincing evidence of possible harms.

    Nonetheless, it seems likely that in keeping with his longstanding views one of Kennedy’s first priorities will be to try to halt water fluoridation in the US.

    Infectious diseases

    Alongside his confirmation as health secretary, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing “The President’s Commission to Make America Healthy Again”, with Kennedy as the chair.

    The Make America Healthy Again movement (MAHA) is an initiative driven by Kennedy focusing on improving nutrition, increasing transparency in medical practices and reducing the corporate influence in health.

    Though premised primarily on combating chronic diseases, the movement also embraces scepticism of established medical practices, unproven alternative therapies and a general mistrust of institutions.

    What’s more, Kennedy’s focus on chronic diseases seems to be coming at the expense of continued work on infectious diseases.

    He has proposed directing the National Institutes of Health to pause infectious disease research for eight years to prioritise research into chronic diseases and alternative treatments.

    As health secretary, Kennedy has the power to shift research priorities. If he were to effectively halt infectious diseases research – in the wake of COVID and with a looming threat of future pandemics – this would be catastrophic for the US and global health.

    Vaccine scepticism

    Related to infectious diseases, there’s little doubt the area in which Kennedy has done the most damage relates to vaccines.

    He has dedicated a large part of his life to undermining public confidence in vaccines. This is despite overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrating their safety and effectiveness, and the millions of lives they’ve saved.

    Although he has subsequently denied it, Kennedy is on record as falsely stating there is no such thing as a safe and effective vaccine. Notably, he has continued to push the debunked claim that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is linked to autism, despite the single study finding this having been widely discredited.

    Kennedy’s frequent assertion that he’s not anti-vaccine, but “pro-safety”, is also deeply disingenuous. Being “pro-safety” is a deliberately vague notion designed to appear reasonable while at the same time undermining the scientific evidence.

    The impact of Kennedy’s appointment as health secretary on vaccine confidence will not just be limited to the US. Vaccine hesitancy has been recognised as one of the greatest threats to public health. Having a vaccine sceptic leading the US health agencies has the potential to harm vaccine uptake worldwide.

    As we’ve seen during the COVID pandemic, producing a vaccine is only half the battle. Convincing people to take it is just as important. There’s no doubt Kennedy’s influence on public health messaging could further erode vaccine confidence at a time when vaccine messaging must be clear.

    It’s bad news for the US and the world

    One of the reasons Kennedy poses such a threat to public health in the US and globally is his lack of trust in science. He believes a narrative can be crafted by picking and choosing any study that fits with his world view, regardless of its quality.

    In addition, he personifies the bad-faith tactics of conspiracy theorists globally, “selling” the flawed premise that any assertion is valid until others prove it false.

    What the world needs now is a safe pair of hands leading public health in the US. Someone who is guided by evidence – not someone who promotes anti-science propaganda and conspiracy theories.

    Hassan Vally does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. In Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US has put a conspiracy theorist in charge of public health – https://theconversation.com/in-robert-f-kennedy-jr-the-us-has-put-a-conspiracy-theorist-in-charge-of-public-health-249601

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Parliament has passed landmark election donation laws. They may be a ‘stitch up’ but they also improve Australia’s democracy

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joo-Cheong Tham, Professor, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

    Federal parliament has passed the biggest changes to Australia’s electoral funding laws in decades.

    The Albanese government’s Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Bill 2024 cleared the Senate on Wednesday night after just two hours of debate on amendments agreed to earlier by the Coalition. In blatant disregard for democracy, the government refused to refer the bill to a parliamentary committee for proper scrutiny.

    The amendments fail to address numerous deficiencies in the original bill that was introduced last November. Transparency has been wound back and hollow contribution caps have been locked in.

    In significant respects, however, the package is an improvement on the status quo, which has seen unrestricted donations and spending flourish. So, too, secrecy.

    We need to penetrate the sound and fury of partisanship and assess the substance of these laws. This will yield a much more nuanced picture than conveyed by cross bench claims of a major party stitch up.

    Some improvement to transparency

    The government originally proposed lowering the disclosure threshold for donations from $16,000 to $1,000. The revised bill settles on a new threshold of $5,000.

    The amendments fail to plug a loophole that allows a donor to give separately to all of the branches attached to a political party if each individual contribution is just under the threshold. For example, a donor could spread almost $45,000 to the nine state and federal branches of the ALP without being required to declare the amounts.

    But the new laws will usher in near-real time disclosure and substantially reduce “dark money”, a seismic shift from the secrecy and lack of timeliness in the regime it replaces.

    Hollow donation caps

    Under the reforms, a series of contribution caps have been introduced to curb the influence of big money in politics.

    In my assessment of the original bill, I highlighted how the caps would prevent multi-million dollar contributions from cashed-up individuals.

    The amendments go further by closing a number of sizeable loopholes. Self financing candidates, such as Clive Palmer and Malcolm Turnbull will be subject to the contribution caps. The current exclusions for membership and affiliation fees to associated entities – “disguised donations” – will also be caught by the caps.

    But any positives are emphatically outweighed by the “annual gift cap” more than doubling to $50,000. The same “spreading” loophole that applies to the disclosure obligations would allow a donor to to give just shy of this amount to each of a party’s state and federal branches across the country. The major parties could reap up to almost $450,000 per annum from a single donor.

    And the “overall gift cap” on total donations made to political parties and candidates is a generous $1.6 million, which means large contributions will still be permissible under the new framework.

    The government has also failed to remove the patently unfair provisions relating to “nominated entities”, which are likely to be used by the major parties as investment vehicles.

    As the Victorian Electoral Review Expert Panel has rightly noted, such entities:

    provide some (parties) with significantly more funds, creating a risk that those (parties) drown out other voices.

    Election spending contained and fairer

    The spending caps in the new finance laws are fundamentally unaltered by the government’s amendments.

    The $800,000 per electorate limit, and $90 million per party nationally, will contain the “arms race” that has necessitated “big money” fundraising and fuelled unfair contests.

    However, the limits are set too high and will benefit the established parties due to the narrow scope of the spending caps in individual electorates. This means the major parties will be able to shift funding to must-win seats without being caught by the electorate caps.

    This shortcoming has been seized upon as clear evidence that Labor and the Liberals are seeking to kneecap Teal election campaigns. While having some force, these criticisms should be viewed in the context of the current situation where the major parties have an unfettered ability to direct spending to marginal seats, a situation which the Teals are ironically defending with their opposition to spending caps.

    The importance of public funding

    The new regime includes a substantial jump in public funding from $3.50 to $5 per vote.

    Crossbenchers, such as Kate Chaney, are opposed, to the increase, saying it will entrench the might of the majors while making it harder for new independents:

    The effect of increasing public funding is that political parties don’t have to fundraise because they’ve got their war chests. But any challengers do have to fundraise.

    While there is a clear risk of unfairness, the crossbench position throws the baby out with the bathwater. It romanticises the role of private funding, skating over the risks of corruption and undue influence via large donations.

    The public funding of political parties and candidates is warranted. But there should be a conversation about the design and scope of taxpayer support.

    The political finance laws could be made considerably fairer by fixing the structural bias that favours incumbents, including teal MPs. And they don’t need to be as generous given the large flows of private funding that will continue under the shallow contribution caps.

    Unfinished business

    Bad processes tend to make bad laws. The government’s actions have cast a pall of illegitimacy over its political finance regime. The new framework is unfair and ineffectual in significant ways and yet democracy enhancing in others.

    We are all trustees of democracy, with an obligation to protect and deepen democratic practices. An urgent task in that continuing struggle is to protect the strengths of these laws while jettisoning the elements that are egregiously bad.

    Joo-Cheong Tham has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, European Trade Union Institute, International IDEA, the New South Wales Electoral Commission, the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption and the Victorian Electoral Commission. He is a Director of the Centre for Public Integrity; Expert Network Member of Climate Integrity; a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia; and the Victorian Division Assistant Secretary (Academic Staff) of the National Tertiary Education Union.

    – ref. Parliament has passed landmark election donation laws. They may be a ‘stitch up’ but they also improve Australia’s democracy – https://theconversation.com/parliament-has-passed-landmark-election-donation-laws-they-may-be-a-stitch-up-but-they-also-improve-australias-democracy-249588

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Suicide or accident? The hidden complexities of intentional road crashes in Australia

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor & Principal Fellow in Urban Risk & Resilience, The University of Melbourne

    Juris Teivans/Shutterstock

    In Australia, fatal road crashes are climbing again, especially since the pandemic, and despite years of attempts to reduce road trauma, the numbers remain stubbornly high.

    Strategies to reduce the road toll have largely focused on speeding, distractions and enforcement gaps, such as roadside drug testing.

    But hidden in these statistics is a lesser-known, deeply troubling reality: some of these crashes are not unintentional at all.

    A difficult area to explore

    A portion of road fatalities each year are deaths by suicide.

    For some, cars and trucks are not just modes of transport – they become a means to intentionally end their lives.

    The true scale of this issue is difficult to determine, as coroners and crash investigators often struggle to distinguish suicide from accidental death.

    The phenomenon is not confined to Australia – it has been studied and documented in several countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and the United States.

    International research suggests driver suicides may account for up to 8–9% of all fatal road crashes. But studies indicate up to half of these cases may go unreported.

    So what do we know about these cases? Why are they so difficult to identify and what patterns exist in these incidents?

    How bad is the problem?

    Between 2001 and 2017, the rate of suicide involving a road vehicle collision in Australia nearly doubled from 0.125 per 100,000 people to 0.25 per 100,000.

    These suicides take several forms.

    Some involve single-vehicle crashes, where a driver deliberately collides with a tree, pole, or concrete barrier.

    Others are multiple-vehicle collisions, where a driver or rider intentionally steers into oncoming traffic, often targeting trucks.

    There are also pedestrian suicides, where people step or lie in front of moving vehicles.

    Among driver suicides, single-vehicle crashes are the most common, with studies estimating more than half of driver suicides involve collisions with fixed objects (some studies suggest the figure is more than 70%).

    For multiple-vehicle collisions, almost 82% of cases involve colliding with an oncoming truck.

    More than half of pedestrian deaths by suicide also involve trucks.

    While there are variations in research findings, current evidence suggest males make up between 78% and 91% of those who die by road transport suicide.

    Certain demographics have been found to be more likely to die in a road suicide in Australia compared to other methods of suicide:

    This includes those who are:

    • male (15% more likely than females)
    • younger than 25 (nearly five times more likely than those older)
    • non-Indigenous (three times more likely than First Nations people)
    • born overseas (40% more likely than those born in Australia)

    The ripple effects

    Unlike most other suicide methods, road vehicle collisions pose a significant risk to others.

    Intentional crashes can involve unsuspecting drivers, passengers and pedestrians, turning a personal act of self-harm into a broader public safety issue.

    Studies show that when a suicide collision involves vehicles with a large weight disparity — such as a car colliding with a truck — nearly 30% result in injury to another person and almost 4% result in the death of another person.

    Beyond the immediate loss of life or injury, these incidents leave lasting psychological scars on the drivers involved.

    Why is it difficult to establish suicide on the road?

    Determining whether a fatal road crash was intentional or unintentional is fraught with challenges. Unlike other suicide methods, there is often no definitive proof of intent.

    Coroners and crash investigators rely on a patchwork of evidence: eyewitness accounts, vehicle behaviour before impact, the driver’s psychological history and physical crash characteristics.

    Even when red flags are present — such as high-speed impacts with no signs of braking, the driver not wearing a seat belt, collisions with trucks, or cases where drivers abruptly veer into oncoming traffic — these alone are not always enough to confirm intent.

    Investigators must also navigate the cultural and social sensitivities surrounding suicide, which can lead to hesitation in formally classifying a death as intentional. Families, religious beliefs and even financial factors such as life insurance claims can influence how these cases are handled.

    In many instances, those who use this method do so in a way that obscures their intent, deliberately staging a crash to appear unintentional.

    Without conclusive evidence, such as a documented history of suicidality or a suicide note, these cases often remain in statistical limbo — unconfirmed, unclassified, and possibly unreported.

    What can be done?

    While broader suicide prevention efforts are always relevant, reducing suicide-related road crashes requires targeted, practical interventions that make vehicles less likely to be used for suicide. Some ideas include:

    1. Vehicle safety features that reduce lethality, such as automatic emergency braking and collision avoidance systems, can make intentional high-speed crashes less likely to be fatal. As such, they could discourage the use of vehicles as a suicide method. Airbags, in particular, can play a crucial role, as they can make the outcome of a crash less predictable for people attempting suicide.

    2. A national standardised process for classifying intentional crashes would improve detection and data accuracy. Incorporating psychological autopsies and mandating coroners consider behavioural indicators (such as lack of evasive action) could help identify cases that currently go unreported.

    3. Heavy vehicle drivers and first responders should receive specialised training to recognise potential suicide crash indicators and manage the psychological toll of being involved in such incidents.

    Together, these measures can make vehicle-related suicide, as a very complex issue, less likely and more detectable.

    If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. In Australia, you can contact Lifeline at 13 11 14 for confidential support.

    Angela J Clapperton receives funding from Suicide Prevention Australia.

    Lay San Too receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council for a fellowship.

    Matthew J. Spittal receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council for an Investigator Grant (GNT2025205).

    Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Suicide or accident? The hidden complexities of intentional road crashes in Australia – https://theconversation.com/suicide-or-accident-the-hidden-complexities-of-intentional-road-crashes-in-australia-248673

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Parliament has passed landmark election donation laws. They may be a ‘stich up’ but they also improve Australia’s democracy

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joo-Cheong Tham, Professor, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

    Federal parliament has passed the biggest changes to Australia’s electoral funding laws in decades.

    The Albanese government’s Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Bill 2024 cleared the Senate on Wednesday night after just two hours of debate on amendments agreed to earlier by the Coalition. In blatant disregard for democracy, the government refused to refer the bill to a parliamentary committee for proper scrutiny.

    The amendments fail to address numerous deficiencies in the original bill that was introduced last November. Transparency has been wound back and hollow contribution caps have been locked in.

    In significant respects, however, the package is an improvement on the status quo, which has seen unrestricted donations and spending flourish. So, too, secrecy.

    We need to penetrate the sound and fury of partisanship and assess the substance of these laws. This will yield a much more nuanced picture than conveyed by cross bench claims of a major party stitch up.

    Some improvement to transparency

    The government originally proposed lowering the disclosure threshold for donations from $16,000 to $1,000. The revised bill settles on a new threshold of $5,000.

    The amendments fail to plug a loophole that allows a donor to give separately to all of the branches attached to a political party if each individual contribution is just under the threshold. For example, a donor could spread almost $45,000 to the nine state and federal branches of the ALP without being required to declare the amounts.

    But the new laws will usher in near-real time disclosure and substantially reduce “dark money”, a seismic shift from the secrecy and lack of timeliness in the regime it replaces.

    Hollow donation caps

    Under the reforms, a series of contribution caps have been introduced to curb the influence of big money in politics.

    In my assessment of the original bill, I highlighted how the caps would prevent multi-million dollar contributions from cashed-up individuals.

    The amendments go further by closing a number of sizeable loopholes. Self financing candidates, such as Clive Palmer and Malcolm Turnbull will be subject to the contribution caps. The current exclusions for membership and affiliation fees to associated entities – “disguised donations” – will also be caught by the caps.

    But any positives are emphatically outweighed by the “annual gift cap” more than doubling to $50,000. The same “spreading” loophole that applies to the disclosure obligations would allow a donor to to give just shy of this amount to each of a party’s state and federal branches across the country. The major parties could reap up to almost $450,000 per annum from a single donor.

    And the “overall gift cap” on total donations made to political parties and candidates is a generous $1.6 million, which means large contributions will still be permissible under the new framework.

    The government has also failed to remove the patently unfair provisions relating to “nominated entities”, which are likely to be used by the major parties as investment vehicles.

    As the Victorian Electoral Review Expert Panel has rightly noted, such entities:

    provide some (parties) with significantly more funds, creating a risk that those (parties) drown out other voices.

    Election spending contained and fairer

    The spending caps in the new finance laws are fundamentally unaltered by the government’s amendments.

    The $800,000 per electorate limit, and $90 million per party nationally, will contain the “arms race” that has necessitated “big money” fundraising and fuelled unfair contests.

    However, the limits are set too high and will benefit the established parties due to the narrow scope of the spending caps in individual electorates. This means the major parties will be able to shift funding to must-win seats without being caught by the electorate caps.

    This shortcoming has been seized upon as clear evidence that Labor and the Liberals are seeking to kneecap Teal election campaigns. While having some force, these criticisms should be viewed in the context of the current situation where the major parties have an unfettered ability to direct spending to marginal seats, a situation which the Teals are ironically defending with their opposition to spending caps.

    The importance of public funding

    The new regime includes a substantial jump in public funding from $3.50 to $5 per vote.

    Crossbenchers, such as Kate Chaney, are opposed, to the increase, saying it will entrench the might of the majors while making it harder for new independents:

    The effect of increasing public funding is that political parties don’t have to fundraise because they’ve got their war chests. But any challengers do have to fundraise.

    While there is a clear risk of unfairness, the crossbench position throws the baby out with the bathwater. It romanticises the role of private funding, skating over the risks of corruption and undue influence via large donations.

    The public funding of political parties and candidates is warranted. But there should be a conversation about the design and scope of taxpayer support.

    The political finance laws could be made considerably fairer by fixing the structural bias that favours incumbents, including teal MPs. And they don’t need to be as generous given the large flows of private funding that will continue under the shallow contribution caps.

    Unfinished business

    Bad processes tend to make bad laws. The government’s actions have cast a pall of illegitimacy over its political finance regime. The new framework is unfair and ineffectual in significant ways and yet democracy enhancing in others.

    We are all trustees of democracy, with an obligation to protect and deepen democratic practices. An urgent task in that continuing struggle is to protect the strengths of these laws while jettisoning the elements that are egregiously bad.

    Joo-Cheong Tham has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, European Trade Union Institute, International IDEA, the New South Wales Electoral Commission, the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption and the Victorian Electoral Commission. He is a Director of the Centre for Public Integrity; Expert Network Member of Climate Integrity; a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia; and the Victorian Division Assistant Secretary (Academic Staff) of the National Tertiary Education Union.

    – ref. Parliament has passed landmark election donation laws. They may be a ‘stich up’ but they also improve Australia’s democracy – https://theconversation.com/parliament-has-passed-landmark-election-donation-laws-they-may-be-a-stich-up-but-they-also-improve-australias-democracy-249588

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: What was the Sykes-Picot agreement, and why does it still affect the Middle East today?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Thomas, Lecturer in Middle East Studies, Deakin University

    Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Some national borders are determined by natural phenomena like seas, mountains and rivers. Most, however, are created by people.

    This means the creation of borders is often a political exercise – usually informed by the interests of those who create them, not the local populations to whom they apply.

    The Sykes-Picot agreement, known officially as the Asia Minor Agreement of 1916, was arguably the first in a series of attempts by colonial powers to mould the borders of the Middle East.

    Signed in secret at the height of the first world war, Sykes-Picot was an agreement between France and Great Britain, approved by Russia. It would have lasting consequences for the region.

    It is frequently cited as the epitome of European colonial betrayal, and the genesis of most conflict in the Middle East.

    But while Sykes-Picot did significantly affect regional politics, the history is more complicated than popular narratives suggest.

    ‘The Eastern question’

    The agreement was seen by the signatories as a potential answer to what was then known by European powers as “the Eastern question”: what would happen when the Ottoman Empire inevitably collapsed?

    The Ottoman state in the early 20th century was vast compared to its European peers, encompassing Anatolia (the Asian part of modern-day Turkey) and parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

    But it was weak, and had been on a steady decline since the 18th century due to multiple military defeats, revolts and rampant corruption. By the beginning of the first world war, the Triple Entente (France, Britain and Russia) believed the Ottoman state would not survive long.

    The Entente aimed to create new “zones of influence” in the Middle East, dividing Ottoman territory into colonial partitions.

    By the beginning of the first world war, France, Britain and Russia believed the Ottoman state would not survive long.
    Everett Collection/Shutterstock

    Secret negotiations

    Between late 1915 and early 1916, Britain and France sent their respective envoys to negotiate the potential terms of this outcome in secret.

    Mark Sykes, a political adviser and military veteran, represented the British. François Georges-Picot, a career diplomat, represented the French.

    Italy and Russia also had delegations in attendance, though the discussions were dominated by Britain and France as the most powerful nations. The Ottomans were oblivious to these negotiations.

    Under the agreement:

    • France was allocated what is now Syria, Lebanon and southern Turkey
    • Britain claimed most of modern-day Iraq, southern Palestine and Kuwait
    • Russia took control of Armenia.

    An area known as the Jerusalem Sanjak (an administrative division created by the Ottomon Empire) in Palestine was to come under an international protectorate, though it was not settled in the agreement as to how this protectorate would operate.

    Sykes-Picot was kept secret, mostly because Britain had made contradictory commitments to other parties. It had promised (through a series of letters known as the McMahon-Hussein correspondence) to give independence to the Arabs who had helped the British fight the Ottomans in the first world war.

    Later, in early November 1917, it also made a promise to Zionist Jews migrating to Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. In this public declaration, Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour effectively expressed Britain’s support for the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Ottoman Palestine. Then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George also publicly supported both Zionism and Balfour’s statement.

    The Sykes-Picot agreement did not stay secret for long.

    In November 1917, the Bolsheviks, who were now in power in Russia following the fall of the Russian monarchy, published Sykes-Picot to the world.

    Arab nationalists were enraged. So, too, were Zionists who had witnessed the Balfour Declaration just weeks prior. The Anglo-French declaration of November 1918 attempted to allay the fears of the Arabs by pledging to “assist in the establishment of national governments and administrations.” However, Arab distrust of the European powers only grew.

    Borders moulded by colonial powers

    In the years following, European powers started to reevaluate their position on Ottoman territory.

    The French, who still wished to take control of Syria, had argued the newly formed League of Nations (a predecessor of the United Nations) could give France the territory under a mandate. A mandate is a formal authorisation to govern by the League of Nations.

    The British said this would violate their earlier promises to the Arabs. Britain reiterated that the Anglo-French declaration of 1918 superseded Sykes-Picot.

    Then came the San Remo Conference in 1920, an international meeting in Italy. This is where some of the popular readings into Sykes-Picot get muddled, as several aspects of the agreement were discarded. What remained the same was the French and British desire to add Ottoman territory to their dominions.

    Here, the European victors of the first world war sought to finalise the division of Ottoman territories by slicing them into League of Nations mandates.

    This included the French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, as well as the British mandates of Palestine and Mesopotamia. Britain also confirmed at the time its support for a Jewish national homeland, while protecting the local Palestinian population.

    This is where we start to see borders of the modern Middle East form. The boundaries themselves differed from Sykes-Picot. But Britain and France, however, were still able to expand their colonial dominion in the region.

    In 1921, a group of British representatives met in Cairo to finalise the borders of their mandates. This led to the creation of two states: Iraq under King Faisal and Transjordan (now Jordan) under King Abdullah – both of whom were members of the Arab Heshemite dynasty. Palestine was to remain under British mandatory control.

    While these states had independence on paper, then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill believed that Transjordan would ultimately be controlled by the British Empire, giving the Heshemites only nominal independence.

    Little consideration was given to the ethnic and religious diversity of these territories. Some argue this helped lead to modern-day sectarian conflict in Iraq.

    Ripples that continue today

    The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was always going to cause regional upheaval, but the colonial jockeying for territory clearly had lasting consequences.

    Several regional conflicts were exacerbated during this period, but it would also directly lead to the creation of the state of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

    This leads to the displacement of Palestinians and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that still rages today.

    Zionists and Arab nationalists viewed Palestine to have been originally promised to them by the British through the Balfour Declaration and McMahon-Hussein correspondence, respectfully.

    But in Sykes-Picot, the British had no intention of promising Palestine to anyone but themselves.

    As a result, the British mandate was characterised by anti-colonial violence from both Jews and Arabs.

    When the British eventually abandoned control of Palestine in 1947, the UN partition plan for two states (one Jewish, one Arab) was supposed to take over. Instead, Arab-Israeli conflict began within hours of the partition taking effect.

    So a lot happened after Sykes-Picot, with the map proposed in 1916 looking very different to what actually eventuated.

    Many scholars argue it was the agreements that followed Sykes-Picot that were more consequential, and Sykes-Picot holds only “minor importance” by comparison.

    While this may be true, Sykes-Picot is still emblematic of how consequential European colonial ambition was in the Middle East.

    And while the borders outlined in the agreement did not eventuate, Britain and France still managed to get most of the territory they wanted, with little consideration of local populations.

    The Sykes-Picot agreement is therefore one of many colonial projects that we are still feeling the ripples of today.

    Andrew Thomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. What was the Sykes-Picot agreement, and why does it still affect the Middle East today? – https://theconversation.com/what-was-the-sykes-picot-agreement-and-why-does-it-still-affect-the-middle-east-today-246332

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: An unexpected anomaly was found in the Pacific Ocean – and it could be a global time marker

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominik Koll, Honorary Lecturer, Australian National University

    View of the Pacific Ocean from the International Space Station. NASA

    Earth must have experienced something exceptional 10 million years ago. Our study of rock samples from the floor of the Pacific Ocean has found a strange increase in the radioactive isotope beryllium-10 during that time.

    This finding, now published in Nature Communications, opens new pathways for geologists to date past events gleaned from deep within the oceans.

    But the cause of the beryllium-10 anomaly remains unknown. Could it have been major shifts in global ocean currents, a dying star, or an interstellar collision?

    Extremely slow rocks deep in the ocean

    I am on a hunt for stardust on Earth. Previously, I’ve sifted through snow in Antarctica. This time, it was the depths of the ocean.

    At a depth of about 5,000 metres, the abyssal zone of the Pacific Ocean has never seen light, yet something does still grow there.

    Ferromanganese crusts – metallic underwater rocks – grow from minerals dissolved in the water slowly coming together and solidifying over extremely long time scales, as little as a few millimetres in a million years. (Stalactites and stalagmites in caves grow in a similar way, but thousands of times faster.)

    This makes ferromanganese crusts ideal archives for capturing stardust over millions of years.

    The age of these crusts can be determined by radiometric dating using the radioactive isotope beryllium-10. This isotope is continuously produced in the upper atmosphere when highly energetic cosmic rays strike air molecules. The strikes break apart the main components of our air – nitrogen and oxygen – into smaller fragments.

    Both stardust and beryllium-10 eventually find their way into Earth’s oceans where they become incorporated into the growing ferromanganese crust.

    Ferromanganese crust sample VA13/2-237KD analysed in this work. The anomaly was discovered in this crust at a depth of about 30mm – representing 10 million years.
    Dominik Koll

    One of the largest ferromanganese crusts was recovered in 1976 from the Central Pacific. Stored for decades at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hanover, Germany, a 3.7kg section of it became the subject of my analysis.

    Much like tree rings reveal a tree’s age, ferromanganese crusts record their growth in layers over millions of years. Beryllium-10 undergoes radioactive decay really slowly, meaning it gradually breaks down over millions of years as it sits in the rocks.

    As beryllium-10 decays over time, its concentration decreases in deeper, older sediment layers. Because the rate of decay is steady, we can use radioactive isotopes as natural stopwatches to discern the age and history of rocks – this is called radioactive dating.

    A puzzling anomaly

    After extensive chemical processing, my colleagues and I used accelerator mass spectrometry – an ultra-sensitive analytical technique for longer-lived radioactive isotopes – to measure beryllium-10 concentrations in the crust.

    This time, my research took me from Canberra, Australia to Dresden, Germany, where the setup at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf was optimised for beryllium-10 measurements.

    The results showed that the crust had grown only 3.5 centimetres over the past 10 million years and was more than 20 million years old.

    However, before I could return to my search for stardust, I encountered an anomaly.

    Initially, as I searched back in time, the beryllium-10 concentration declined as expected, following its natural decay pattern – until about 10 million years ago. At that point, the expected decrease halted before resuming its normal pattern around 12 million years ago.

    This was puzzling: radioactive decay follows strict laws, meaning something must have introduced extra beryllium-10 into the crust at that time.

    Scepticism is crucial in science. To rule out errors, I repeated the chemical preparation and measurements multiple times – yet the anomaly persisted. The analysis of different crusts from locations nearly 3,000km away gave the same result, a beryllium-10 anomaly around 10 million years ago. This confirmed that the anomaly was a real event rather than a local irregularity.

    Ocean currents or exploding stars?

    What could have happened on Earth to cause this anomaly 10 million years ago? We’re not sure, but there are a few options.

    Last year, an international study revealed that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current – the main driver of global ocean circulation – intensified around 12 million years ago, influencing Antarctic ocean current patterns.

    Could this beryllium-10 anomaly in the Pacific mark the beginning of the modern global ocean circulation? If ocean currents were responsible, beryllium-10 would be distributed unevenly on Earth with some samples even showing a lack of beryllium-10. New samples from all major oceans and both hemispheres would allow us to answer this question.

    Another possibility emerged early last year. Astrophysicists demonstrated that a collision with a dense interstellar cloud could compress the heliosphere – the Sun’s protective shield against cosmic radiation – back to the orbit of Mercury. Without this barrier, Earth would be exposed to an increased cosmic ray flux, leading to an elevated global beryllium-10 production rate.

    A near-Earth supernova explosion could also cause an increased cosmic ray flux leading to a beryllium-10 anomaly. Future research will explore these possibilities.

    The discovery of such an anomaly is a windfall for geological dating. Various archives are used to investigate Earth’s climate, habitability and environmental conditions over different timescales.

    To compare ice cores with sediments, ferromanganese crusts, speleothems (stalagmites and stalactites) and others, their timescales need to be synchronous. Independent time markers, such as Miyake events or the Laschamp excursion, are invaluable for aligning records thousands of years old. Now, we may have a corresponding time marker for millions of years.

    Meanwhile, my search for stardust continues, but now keeping an eye out for new 10-million-year-old samples to further pin down the beryllium-10 anomaly. Stay tuned.

    This research was conducted at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. Dominik Koll received funding from AINSE.

    – ref. An unexpected anomaly was found in the Pacific Ocean – and it could be a global time marker – https://theconversation.com/an-unexpected-anomaly-was-found-in-the-pacific-ocean-and-it-could-be-a-global-time-marker-249695

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: From homes to hospitals, Canada’s food environments need reform

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sara F.L. Kirk, Professor of Health Promotion; Scientific Director of the Healthy Populations Institute, Dalhousie University

    Healthy eating sounds deceptively simple — just eat more fruits and vegetables and avoid junk food, right? However, healthy eating really isn’t easy.

    A new report illustrates how ubiquitous unhealthy foods are, how aggressively they are promoted and how hard it is to access healthy foods in places we spend our time.

    We are part of a team of 18 nutrition and food policy experts from across Canada who looked at research from the past five years to expose the environmental factors that influence what people in Canada buy and eat. We explored many different factors, like the quality of food, food marketing practices and what foods are available in places like hospitals, schools and grocery stores.

    The report is part of an international network called INFORMAS (International Network for Food and Obesity/Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) Research, Monitoring and Action Support). Our findings reinforce that, from homes to hospitals, Canada’s food supply needs reform.

    What we see is what we get

    Unhealthy food is everywhere, and that makes it hard to avoid: what we see is what we get. Our report found that most packaged foods in grocery stores are unhealthy. In fact, two-thirds of them were high in salt, sugar or saturated fat. Only 12 per cent were low in these nutrients.

    Unhealthy foods are readily available for purchase. One study showed that children in Ottawa had, on average, 19 places to purchase foods within one kilometre of their school. In Vancouver, that number was as high as 45.

    In-store environments also thwart healthy purchases: 50 per cent of stores had “power walls” of candy, snacks and sugary drinks, tempting consumers at the checkout, while only around one in five stores operated a junk-free checkout. And nearly all hospital cafeterias and recreation centre vending machines sold sugary drinks.

    Unhealthy foods are also heavily marketed, particularly to children. One study estimated that children aged six to 11 see more than 4,000 food ads on their digital devices each year, while older children see twice that number. Around 90 per cent of the ads that children saw on their digital devices were deemed less healthy based on their sugar, sodium and saturated fat content.

    A closer look at marketing on five food product categories in the INFORMAS Canada report found that one-third of products carried marketing targeting to children.

    For example, almost 46 per cent of breakfast cereals used marketing techniques that made products look fun or cool, or used cartoon characters and celebrities, to entice young consumers. More than 90 per cent of products using these techniques were unhealthy. Of 75 per cent of foods that had some sort of health or nutrition claim on their packaging highlighting healthy attributes of products, 45 per cent of these products were also high in salt, sugar or saturated fat.

    Unhealthy foods are big, cheap and easy

    Our report illustrates how, in many ways, the cards are stacked against us in terms of healthy eating. The food industry, where power is often concentrated within the hands of a few large, multinational companies, continues to create and market unhealthy foods, despite stated commitments to do better.

    With unhealthy foods so available and tempting, it’s no surprise that many Canadians struggle to eat according to Canada’s Food Guide.

    Our unhealthy food environments are making us sick and we all pay the price. Unhealthy eating has been estimated to cost more than $15.8 billion, including direct healthcare costs of $5.9 billion. With unhealthy eating a leading risk for death and the second leading risk for disability in Canada, there is a strong moral and economic imperative for action to improve food environments.

    Creating healthier food environments

    It doesn’t have to be this way. In addition to providing benchmarking data, our report offers a road map for policymakers, industry leaders and advocates to collaborate in creating healthier, more equitable food environments for all Canadians.

    Canada can also draw inspiration from global leaders in food policy like Chile and Mexico. Both countries have introduced bold front-of-package warning labels for foods high in sugar, sodium or saturated fats, combined with restrictions on marketing unhealthy products to children and taxes on unhealthy foods.

    Canada will follow suit with front-of-package labels in January 2026, but policy change in these others areas is lacking.



    Read more:
    Front-of-package food labels: A path to healthier choices

    Mexico has implemented front-of-package food label regulations flagging unhealthy foods. Canada will follow suit in 2026.
    (Shutterstock)

    Taxes on sugary drinks already exist in more than 45 countries, with the United Kingdom recently seeing reductions in sugar consumption after a sugary drink tax was implemented. Canada, unfortunately, is lagging behind, with Newfoundland & Labrador the only province with a tax on sugary drinks.

    As Canada’s national school food policy rolls out, there are opportunities to protect school food from vested interests. These actions need to be extended to other food environments — our homes, hospitals and grocery stores.

    With the threat of tariffs being imposed by the United States and potentially creating major challenges for food affordability, more Canadians are looking for a food supply that is made in Canada. Creating healthier food environments and food systems takes a strong commitment from leaders at all levels (federal, provincial, territorial and municipal).

    Our benchmarking report can help create a nutrition transition that nourishes our population and supports our healthy food producers, farmers and fisheries. This report makes the case for improving our food environments and shows the way to a healthier future for all Canadians.

    Sara F.L. Kirk has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Public Health Agency of Canada, Research Nova Scotia and Dalhousie University Office of Advancement. She is a co-author on the report being discussed in this article.

    Lana Vanderlee receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the US National Institutes of Health, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé and has received funds from Health Canada. She is currently supported by a Canada Research Chair in Healthy Food Policy (Tier 2).

    – ref. From homes to hospitals, Canada’s food environments need reform – https://theconversation.com/from-homes-to-hospitals-canadas-food-environments-need-reform-249540

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: NZ depends on the rules-based world Trump is dismantling – why the silence?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ 2023 strategic foreign policy assessment, “Navigating a shifting world”, accurately foresaw a more uncertain and complex time ahead for New Zealand. But already it feels out of date.

    The Trump administration’s extreme disruption of the international order (which New Zealand helped construct) is going further and faster than foreseen in the assessment. Were another nation responsible, the government would have been quick to condemn it.

    But New Zealand has so far been largely mute while Trump has quit the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord, attacked foreign assistance programs and withdrawn funding from key United Nations organisations.

    Had Russia or China threatened the annexation or acquisition of Canada, Panama and Greenland, New Zealand would have reacted strongly. But it has said nothing substantive.

    The United States still belongs to the World Trade Organization and various regional trade agreements. But Trump’s use of tariffs threatens havoc throughout the multilateral trade system.

    Similarly, Trump has not quit the International Court of Justice. But his proposal to remove two million Palestinians from Gaza amounts to an unequivocal rejection of the court’s recent ruling on Israeli policies and practices in the Occupied Territories – as well as international law.

    On all these fronts, New Zealand has preferred not to make a stand.

    The coming Russia-Ukraine test

    While other countries have been quick to criticise Trump’s Gaza plan, New Zealand has opted not to comment until greater clarity is available, other than to reiterate its support for a two-state solution for Palestine.

    When Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, New Zealand (along with Australia and Japan) failed to join a statement from 79 other countries expressing unwavering support for the court.

    The next likely test will be Trump’s attempt to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. While the goal is undoubtedly worthy, the question will be at what cost.

    If the price is ignoring the UN Charter, and if European supporters of Ukraine find the illegal annexations of its sovereign territory unpalatable, New Zealand will face a stark choice.

    For Australia, with its special trade relationship with the US and membership of the AUKUS security pact, this may be simple politics. For New Zealand, without a special free trade agreement with the US, frozen out of ANZUS and not part of AUKUS, the equation is more complex.

    Discord in the Pacific

    Last year, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said New Zealand must “stand up for this international rules-based system that has actually served New Zealand incredibly well”. Quietly sitting down will not be an option forever.

    Furthermore, all this is happening against the backdrop of New Zealand’s apparently waning influence in its own back yard, the South Pacific.

    While China seeks to expand its own influence, cuts and possible retrenchment in New Zealand’s aid budget suggest little appetite for tangible counteraction.

    The loss of influence was first apparent with Kiribati, which has steered towards a much closer relationship with China since 2022. More recently, China has made inroads into other Pacific countries, including the Solomons and East Timor, working in an increasingly grey zone with support for civilian and military security.

    But the recent fracture with the Cook Islands takes things to a new level.

    Struggling to find a voice

    While no longer a dependency, the Cooks’ free association agreement with New Zealand gives its people immense benefits, including citizenship and the right to work and live in New Zealand.

    In return, the Cooks undertakes to consult over foreign affairs matters, including any policy or initiative that might affect the interests of the other signatory.

    But the development of a somewhat opaque “comprehensive strategic partnership” with China blindsided New Zealand, and has strained what is meant to be a good-faith relationship. Again, however, New Zealand has struggled to find its voice.

    If it speaks too loudly, it risks further undermining that special Pacific relationship, as well as irritating its largest trade partner, China. If it speaks too softly, the respect and influence the country deserves will fade.

    New Zealand’s vaunted independent foreign policy is a fine ideal and has been a workable mechanism to navigate the challenges facing a small trading nation reliant on a rules-based global order.

    This has worked well for the past few decades. But as the old world order erodes, losing its voice for fear of offending bigger powers cannot become the country’s default position.

    Alexander Gillespie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. NZ depends on the rules-based world Trump is dismantling – why the silence? – https://theconversation.com/nz-depends-on-the-rules-based-world-trump-is-dismantling-why-the-silence-249857

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Like dictators before him, Trump threatens international peace and security

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sabine Nolke, Research Associate in International Law, Western Academy for Advanced Research, Western University

    At first, Canadians just shook their collective heads when United States President Donald Trump suggested Canada become the 51st American state.

    They rolled their eyes when he posted a fake image of himself standing next to a Canadian flag amid snowy mountaintops — in actuality, the Swiss Alps.

    Another Trump post showed a map purporting to merge Canada and the U.S. That prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to respond on social media that there was not a “snowball’s chance in hell” that Canadians would soon become Americans.

    Meme wars are one thing, but in the real world, threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a foreign state is quite another. Canadian leaders have stopped laughing, and they now need to situate Trump’s dangerous rhetoric in the language of international law and state-to-state relations.

    As a former Canadian ambassador to the Netherlands, and a permanent representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and international courts and tribunals in The Hague, I know language matters.

    Trump’s threats make it an opportune time to provide a brief snapshot of the historical context for Trump’s rhetoric, and the necessary 21st-century vocabulary with which to respond and shape the public discourse.

    Manifest Destiny

    In threatening hefty tariffs on Canada, Trump cited the flow of fentanyl over the Canada-U.S. border, but it was clear it had little to do with fentanyl, particularly since so little crosses the border into the U.S. Instead, it seems he is coming for Canada’s sovereignty as an independent state.

    When asked on Feb. 3 how Canada could ward off tariffs, Trump reiterated: “What I’d like to see is Canada become our 51st state.”

    Later that same day, Trump paused tariffs on Canada, ostensibly thanks to border measures that Canada, like Mexico, had already announced. But what is still being said by the president of one of the most powerful nations on Earth cannot be unsaid.

    At a Jan. 7 news conference, Trump called the border between Canada and the U.S. an “artificially drawn line” — echoing rhetoric deployed by Vladimir Putin as justification for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. His remarks, in fact, were gleefully retweeted by Russia’s propaganda channel RT.

    Putin claims the Ukrainian border is the result of “administrative” action under the former Soviet Union, while Trump appears to be invoking the 19th century American concept of “Manifest Destiny.”

    He used the phrase verbatim in his inaugural address in the context of planting a flag on Mars, but it is entirely consistent with his plans for, and rhetoric on, Canada.

    As John O’Sullivan, the American diplomat who coined the phrase, wrote in a 1845 article entitled Annexation, it’s America’s destiny to “overspread the continent.” Trump appears to be taking that idea to heart.

    ‘The free white race’

    Arguably the biggest fan of territorial expansion in the 20th century was Adolf Hitler, architect of the Third Reich. Trump reportedly has some of Hitler’s writings on his bedside table. Hitler had this to say in Chapter 4 of Mein Kampf:

    “The extent of the national territory is a determining factor in the external security of the nation. The larger the territory which a people has at its disposal, the stronger are the national defences of that people.”

    Sound familiar?

    But why Canada and not Mexico, you may ask? Likely because he considers Canada less racialized, even though modern-day Canada has a large multicultural population.



    Read more:
    Trump has put down his racist dog whistle and picked up a bull horn

    In 1848, however, in the midst of the American expansionist era, pro-slavery South Carolina Sen. John Calhoun said:

    “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race — the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”

    In short, neither the context nor the history informing Trump’s designs on Canada are reassuring for Canadians.

    Rules still matter

    Trump’s dismissive approach to established borders ignores fundamental norms and principles on the sovereignty, equality and territorial integrity of states, codified following the Second World War in the Charter of the United Nations. Canada is a founding member of the UN; its status as a sovereign state is not subject to challenge under international law.

    The charter clearly states that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

    Similarly, the North Atlantic Treaty obliges NATO member states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”



    Read more:
    Allies or enemies? Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland put NATO in a tough spot

    Trump has said he will use “economic force” to annex Canada. The suggestion that an economically devastated Canada could be sufficiently brought to heel has been embraced by the so-called MAGA-sphere, including an influential blogger with ties to Russia.

    International law

    Threatening economic rather than military force does not make Trump’s efforts at subjugating Canada any more acceptable in terms of international law.

    In 1970, in the UN’s Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-Operations Among States, the UN General Assembly unanimously confirmed that “no state may use … economic, political or any other type of measures to coerce another state in order to obtain from it the subordination of its exercise of its sovereign rights.” While not legally binding, this declaration represents customary international law.

    In 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled in Nicaragua v, United States that:

    “A prohibited intervention must accordingly be one bearing on matters in which each State is permitted, by the principle of State sovereignty, to decide freely. One of these is the choice of a political, economic, social and cultural system, and the formulation of foreign policy. Intervention is wrongful when it uses methods of coercion in regard to such choices, which must remain free ones.”

    Keeping score

    It’s both right and righteous for our elected leaders to say that Canada will never be the 51st state.

    But the time has come, especially in the context of Trump’s threats to buy Greenland, seize the Panama Canal and turn Gaza into a Middle Eastern Riviera, to call out his threats to Canada.

    Amid Trump’s dizzying litany of outlandish pronouncements, Canada’s leaders must keep track of what Trump’s declarations represent:

    • A threat to international peace and security;
    • A threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Canada;
    • Unlawful coercion and intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state;
    • A breach of the UN Charter;
    • A breach of the North Atlantic treaty.

    Trump’s threats are no way to treat an ally, but unfortunately for him, international law is on Canada’s side.

    Sabine Nolke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Like dictators before him, Trump threatens international peace and security – https://theconversation.com/like-dictators-before-him-trump-threatens-international-peace-and-security-248735

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Oscar Peterson: Cherishing a legacy of technical virtuosity and soulful swing

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Barrington Coleman, Professor and Jazz camp instructor, Carleton University

    The distinction given to the virtuoso — an artist recognized for exceptional skill and talent — is generated by their prominence and unique creative fortitude.

    Through the ages and across genres, virtuosi have been revered for their ability to transcend technical limitations and transport audiences into new realms of musical experience.

    Oscar Peterson’s artistic identity as a conveyor of compelling passion, expressive freedom and technical command of the piano through jazz improvisation became a beacon of inspiration among his contemporaries, across the spectrum of music.

    Here, as a professor of vocal jazz studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and as a performing vocal artist, pianist, choral conductor, jazz and gospel artist, I reflect on elements that contributed to Peterson’s identity, distinctive sound and mission as a Black artist.

    As a visiting instructor at Carleton University in Ottawa, I am pleased to present these thoughts in collaboration with my colleague, James Deaville, a musicologist who has researched virtuosity.

    Trailblazer in virtuosity

    Peterson’s legacy stands as a bright beacon among the trailblazers in technical virtuosity and soulful expression.

    Peterson, who was born in 1925 and passed away in 2007, was a foundational catalyst for new generational keepers of artistic excellence due to his tremendous range, from rhapsodic spontaneity to vulnerable tenderness.

    This contributed to his iconic stature, globally evidenced in sold-out concert halls, filled jazz clubs and many commissioned works. His media personality and his television appearances, including performing his acclaimed composition “Canadiana Suite” in 1964, contributed to the pop culture of his generation.

    I was delighted to visit Peterson’s home church in Montréal with my wife on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 20.

    Childhood milieu, training

    Peterson established his musical heritage through the bonds of family and church in his childhood home of the Little Burgundy community in Montréal.

    He did so as one of five siblings with his immigrant father and mother respectively from the British Virgin Islands and St. Kitts.

    Video about Oscar Peterson and Montréal’s Little Burgundy, from Historica Canada, featuring Céline Peterson, Oscar’s daughter.

    Founded in 1907, the Little Burgundy church home of the Petersons, Union United Church, still stands. It serves as a representation of faith-based progressive activism, social consciousness and a resource for the civility and human rights of its congregation. The church proudly displays its African and Afro-Caribbean heritage, and “continues to serve a diverse congregation with roots from over 50 countries.”

    Throughout centuries, Black churches have intrinsically been linked to the core of community engagement, socialization, educational programs, political activism and such initiatives as job training and raising health-care awareness.

    At Union’s observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, individuals spoke to the congregation and with me privately of their lifetime multi-generational sacrifices, accomplishments and efforts to combat racial injustice and employment inequities. These endeavours they undertook from their origin as a community of immigrants and parishioners of colour.

    One meeting of great significance took place with Annie “Mildred” Rockhead, the sister-in-law of Rufus Nathaniel Rockhead (1896-1981), Jamaican-born entrepreneur and founder of the famed Rockhead’s Paradise Jazz Club in Little Burgundy.

    Another was with Oliver Theophilus Jones, critically acclaimed African Canadian jazz pianist, composer and educator.

    Notably, Jones, like Peterson, received musical tutelage under the accomplished Daisy Peterson Sweeney (1920-2017), Oscar’s sister.

    Virtuosic fluency

    Sweeney and Peterson’s father were his first musical teachers.

    An amalgamation of concepts and cultural exposures established the platform for Peterson’s musical explorations. His training in western music theory and his immersion in Black vernacular traditions — comprising linguistic, oral and improvisational elements from Black cultural, popular and religious spaces, and music genres such as spirituals, gospel, blues and jazz — provided him with an expansive repertoire on which to build.

    Pedagogic guidance with such mentors as Hungarian concert pianist Pauly de Marky and the influence of iconic jazz pianist Art Tatum also contributed to Peterson’s unique mix of virtuosic fluency.

    Peterson absorbed a wide range of stylistic influences in tempos and dynamics into his prevailing spiritual core of swing and blues.

    ‘Soulful swing’

    Peterson’s tutelage and cultural absorption contributed to an identifiable expressive voice of stylistic grace, impeccable command of his instrument and execution of spiritual freedom.

    I refer to this freedom as the identity of Peterson’s interminable musical statement of “soulful swing.” It draws on blues from its historical roots of cries, moans, and smiles through tears, of the hope and joyful praise of gospel and the pride and grace of jazz. These may all be woven into a charismatic tapestry of rhapsodic virtuosity or solemn stillness.

    In exploring Oscar Peterson’s encompassing discography, I reference two mesmerizing excerpts from the Solo recording, featuring solo piano renditions performed for live audience in 1972, released 2002.

    Peterson’s performance of the classic Edward Heyman jazz ballad, “Body and Soul,” contains innovative depth, improvisatory brilliance and transportive eloquence. Through these elements, and its structural pace-setting, the performance may be aligned to some of great virtuosi of music history, including such masters of the piano as Franz Liszt, Vladimir Horowitz and another Canadian, Glenn Gould.

    Oscar Peterson’s ‘Body and Soul.’

    Each statement of the song is presented in incremental segments. We hear the mastery of harmonic inflection, dramatic flare — and elements of surprise. Peterson escorts the listener through multiple doors of rapture, humour, joy and personal tenderness.

    “Hogtown Blues” presents Oscar’s rhythmically precise, memorable melody punctuated by harmonic “call and response” phrases raised out of the African American diaspora from secular work songs to sacred songs of faith, hope and praise.

    Throughout each consecutive chorus, Peterson extends this lyrical simplicity into euphoric release by the application of virtuosic complexity in keyboard techniques. Yet, during this journey, the constant dance groove remains at the forefront of Oscar’s signature expressive voice — swing!

    Dignity, elegance, empowerment

    As Canada celebrates Black History Month and the centennial commemoration of Peterson, I am most inspired by Peterson’s own words about his “Hymn to Freedom,” originally featured on the Night Train album with the Oscar Peterson Trio.

    Of the song, inspired by the words and life of Martin Luther King Jr., Peterson said:

    “I wrote the song with hope because the lyrics personified exactly what I was thinking): ‘When every man joins hands and forever sings in harmony, that’s when we’ll be free.‘”

    Today, Peterson’s stardom continues to resonate as one of the first world-renowned African Canadians. He set a path for many African Canadian artists of today like The Weeknd, Drake and hip-hop legend Maestro Fresh Wes, who paid tribute to Peterson in his 1991 track “Nothin’ at All.”

    As one of our most prolific representatives of dignity, elegance and empowerment over adversity, Peterson’s artistic profile and lifetime achievement remain a legacy to cherish.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Oscar Peterson: Cherishing a legacy of technical virtuosity and soulful swing – https://theconversation.com/oscar-peterson-cherishing-a-legacy-of-technical-virtuosity-and-soulful-swing-247288

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: What we learned from Trump and Putin’s phone call – editor’s briefing

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor

    Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, spoke for much of the European diplomatic community when she reacted to news of Donald Trump’s phone chat with Vladimir Putin: “This is the way the Trump administration operates,” she declared. “This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality.”

    The resigned tone of Baerbock’s words was not matched by her colleague, defence minister Boris Pistorius, whose criticism that “the Trump administration has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun” was rather more direct.

    Their sentiments were echoed, not only by European leaders, but in the US itself: “Putin Scores a Big Victory, and Not on the Battlefield” read a headline in the New York Times. The newspaper opined that Trump’s call had succeeded in bringing Putin back in from the cold after three years in which Russia had become increasingly isolated both politically and economically.

    This was not lost on the Russian media, where commentators boasted that the phone call “broke the west’s blockade”. The stock market gained 5% and the rouble strengthened against the dollar as a result.

    Reflecting on the call, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, continued with operation flatter Donald Trump by comparing his attitude favourably with that of his predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden. “The previous US administration held the view that everything needed to be done to keep the war going. The current administration, as far as we understand, adheres to the point of view that everything must be done to stop the war and for peace to prevail.

    “We are more impressed with the position of the current administration, and we are open to dialogue.”

    Trump’s conversation with Putin roughly coincided with a meeting of senior European defence officials in Brussels which heard the new US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, outline America’s radical new outlook when it comes to European security. Namely that it’s not really America’s problem any more.

    Hegseth also told the meeting in Brussels yesterday that the Trump administration’s position is that Nato membership for Ukraine has been taken off the table, that the idea it would get its 2014 borders back was unrealistic and that if Europe wanted to guarantee Ukraine’s security as part of any peace deal, that would be its business. Any peacekeeping force would not involve American troops and would not be a Nato operation, so it would not involve collective defence.

    Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

    International security expert David Dunn believes that the fact that Trump considers himself a consummate deal maker makes the fact that his administration is willing to concede so much ground before negotiations proper have even got underway is remarkable. And not in a good way.

    Dunn, who specialises in US foreign and security policy at the University of Birmingham, finds it significant that Trump spoke with Putin first and then called Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to fill him in on the call. This order of priority, says Dunn, is a sign of the subordination of Ukraine’s role in the talks.

    He concludes that “for the present at least, it appears that negotiations will be less about pressuring Putin to bring a just end to the war he started than forcing Ukraine to give in to the Russian leader’s demands”.



    Read more:
    Trump phone call with Putin leaves Ukraine reeling and European leaders stunned

    Hegseth’s briefing to European defence officials, meanwhile, came as little surprise to David Galbreath. Writing here, Galbreath – who specialises in defence and security at the University of Bath – says the US pivot away from a focus on Europe has been years in the making – “since the very end of the cold war”.

    There has long been a feeling in Washington that the US has borne too much of the financial burden for European security. This is not just a Donald Trump thing, he believes, but an attitude percolating in US security circles for some decades. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, the focus for Nato become not so much collective defence as collective security, where “conflict would be managed on Nato’s borders”.

    But it was then the US which invoked article 5 of the Nato treaty, which establishes that “an armed attack against one or more [member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. The Bush government invoked Article 5 the day after the 9/11 attacks and Nato responded by patrolling US skies to provide security.

    Pete Hegseth dashes Ukraine’s hopes of a future guaranteed by Nato.

    Galbreath notes that many European countries, particularly the newer ones such as Estonia and Latvia, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. “The persistent justification I heard in the Baltic states was “we need to be there when the US needs us so that they will be there when we need them”.

    That looks set to change.



    Read more:
    US says European security no longer its primary focus – the shift has been years in the making

    The prospect of a profound shift in the world order are daunting after 80 years in which security – in Europe certainly – was guaranteed by successive US administrations and underpinned, not just by Nato but by a whole set of international agreements.

    Now, instead of the US acting as the “world’s policeman”, we have a president talking seriously about taking control of Greenland, one way or another, who won’t rule out using force to seize the Panama Canal and who dreams of turning Gaza into a coastal “riviera” development.

    Meanwhile Russia is engaged in a brutal war of conquest in Ukraine and is actively meddling in the affairs of several other countries. And in China, Xi Jinping regularly talks up the idea of reunifying with Taiwan, by force if necessary, and is fortifying islands in the South China Sea with a view to aggressively pursuing territorial claims there as well.

    And we thought the age of empires was in the rear view mirror, writes historian Eric Storm of Leiden University. Storm, whose speciality is the rise of nation states, has discerned a resurgence of imperial tendencies around the world and fears that the rules-based order that has dominated the decades since the second world war now appears increasingly tenuous.



    Read more:
    How Putin, Xi and now Trump are ushering in a new imperial age

    Gaza: the horror continues

    In any given week, you’d expect the imminent prospect of the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire to be the big international story. And certainly, while Trump and Putin were “flooding the zone” (see last week’s round-up for the origins of this phrase) the prospects of the deal lasting beyond its first phase have become more and more uncertain.

    Hamas has recently pulled back from its threat not to release any more hostages. Earlier in the week it threatened to call a halt to the hostage-prisoner exchange, claiming that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had breached the terms of the ceasefire deal. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded – with Trump’s backing – saying that unless all hostages were released on Saturday, all bets were off and the IDF would resume its military operations in the Gaza Strip. Trump added that “all hell is going to break out”.

    The US president has also doubled down on his idea for a redeveloped Gaza and has continued to pressure Jordan and Egypt to accept millions of Palestinian refugees. This, as you would expect, has not made the population of Gaza feel any more secure.

    Nils Mallock and Jeremy Ginges, behavioural psychologists at the London School of Economics, were in the region last month and conducted a survey of Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza to get a feel for how the two populations regard each other. It makes for depressing reading.

    The number of Israelis who reject the idea of a two-state solution has risen sharply since the October 7 2023 attacks by Hamas, from 46% to 62%. And roughly the same proportion of people in Gaza can now no longer envisage living side by side with Israelis. Both sides think that the other side is motivated by hatred, something which is known to make any diplomatic solution less feasible.



    Read more:
    We interviewed hundreds of Israelis and Gazans – here’s why we fear for the ceasefire

    We also asked Scott Lucas, a Middle East specialist at University College Dublin, to assess the likelihood of the ceasefire lasting into phase two, which is when the IDF is supposed to pull out of Gaza, allowing the people there room to being to rebuild, both physically and in terms of governance.

    He responded with a hollow laugh and a shake of the head, before sending us this digest of the key developments in the Middle East crisis this week.



    Read more:
    Will the Gaza ceasefire hold? Where does Trump’s takeover proposal stand? Expert Q&A

    We’ve become very used to seeing apocalyptic photos of the devastation of Gaza: the pulverised streets, choked with rubble, that make the idea of rebuilding seem so remote. But the people of Gaza also cultivated a huge amount of crops – about half the food they ate was grown there. Gazan farmers grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries in open fields as well as cultivating olive and citrus trees.

    Geographers Lina Eklund, He Yin and Jamon Van Den Hoek have analysed satellite images across the Gaza Strip over the past 17 months to work out the scale of agricultural destruction. It makes for terrifying reading.



    Read more:
    Gaza: we analysed a year of satellite images to map the scale of agricultural destruction

    World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox.

    – ref. What we learned from Trump and Putin’s phone call – editor’s briefing – https://theconversation.com/what-we-learned-from-trump-and-putins-phone-call-editors-briefing-249902

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: X has been used to represent love and kisses for centuries. But how did it start?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Barclay, ARC Future Fellow and Professor, Macquarie University

    Wikimedia

    “1,000 Letters and 15,000 Kisses” screamed the headline in an 1898 edition of the English newspaper, the Halifax Evening Courier.

    Harriet Ann McLean, a 32-year-old laundry maid, was suing Francis Charles Matthews, a green grocer, for reneging on the promise of marriage.

    Over a decade-long courtship, Harriet had received 1,030 letters containing 15,000 crosses – kisses – from her “loving, precious, future husband Frank”.

    By 1898, using a cross for a kiss was commonplace for British letter writers – particularly those of the more “ordinary” variety: the increasingly literate servants, tradesmen and shop workers whose love notes drew laughter when their imploding relationships brought them to court.

    The symbol grew in popularity in the following decades, yet its origins have remained obscure.

    X marks the spot (of the kiss)

    Some three decades after Harriet won her suit, someone wrote a letter to Melbourne’s The Sun News asking if its readers knew the origins of using an X for a kiss.

    One correspondent proposed the X resembled the lips of two people kissing. Another thought “the cross marks the spot” where the author had imprinted a kiss for the recipient.

    One reader suggested the cross marks the spot where the writer imprinted a kiss.
    Trove

    The following year, a more confidently penned and rapidly reprinted piece claimed the origins lay in the centuries-old practice of those with low literacy using an X in place of a signature. The article argued that, after marking a document with X, the signee kissed the page as a pledge of good faith, and so the X came to be associated with a kiss.

    This account was to become popular, being rolled out by journalists many times over the following decades. And it may contain some truth. The laundry maids and green grocers who popularised the X as a kiss in their love notes were part of a newly literate community in the 19th century, for whom using an X as a signature was likely familiar.

    However, their 17th and 18th century ancestors had not behaved similarly in their iconography of love. Marks of love on convict tokens, tattoos and the scrappy documents that survive tended to take the form of hearts, crossed Cupid’s arrows and interlinking initials. The cross as a kiss was nowhere to be found.

    One page from an 1801–1803 correspondence between Elizabeth Bass (nicknamed ‘Betsy’ and ‘Bess’) and her husband George Bass. The pair married in October 1800 and lived together for a few months before George sailed for Port Jackson in 1801.
    Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, MLMSS 1284/Box 122/Item [ 2 ], FL4402612.

    The kiss’s importance throughout history

    The kiss had an important role in European culture. The holy kiss, once a mouth kiss shared by congregants in church, allowed for the mingling of spirits and the creation of a uniform Christian body.

    Similarly, kisses of fealty (also on the mouth) formed part of a ritual that established a contract between superiors who held land, and their vassals who rented it. This tradition was carried well into the 16th century.

    The lovers’ kiss also had many of the above meanings – a kiss of love, loyalty and unity of spirit.

    As such, sending kisses in letters had been common among Europeans for centuries, but was usually done in written form. “I send you a thousand kiss’s”, wrote poet Judith Madan to her husband in 1728.

    Kisses marked intimacy but could also be delivered to children and friends. As English letter writer Rebecca Cooper dispatched to her sister Catherine Elliott in 1764, “love to all friends not forgetting my sweet boy with fifty kisses”.

    Wax dots and ink splots

    Using a cross to symbolise a kiss was not unprecedented. Lovers had used ink splots, wax drippings, or drawings to send secret messages to a beloved from at least the 16th century. But at the time these signs were usually personalised and only interpretable by the intended recipient (or especially persistent historians).

    Using specific marks to represent kisses became more fashionable and recognisable during the Victorian period, starting from around the mid-19th century.

    The detective in an 1850 Charles Dicken’s short story tracked his suspect by a wax dot he left on his envelopes – a kiss for the recipient.

    Similarly, in 1862 the jury for the “Hopley v. Hurst” breach of promise of marriage suit heard that the defendant’s letters to his future bride contained “spots of ink” at the bottom, each representing a kiss.

    In 1871, William Steward of Montrose, Scotland, used “a number of crosses and small circles” at the bottom of a letter to his lover, according to the trial report in the Western Times.

    A letter from the early 20th century, with kisses marked at the bottom of the page. The text reads: ‘Darling, your visit was a wonderfully fragrant episode: I do love you, sweet, oh for June!’
    Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy Percy Reginald Stephensen. The work has been digitized into the Library catalogue and the reference is FL9715738.

    Becoming a universal symbol

    The cross as a kiss – initially just one of many symbols used for this purpose – grew in use until it became the predominant choice by the 20th century.

    During the second world war, the cross was even briefly banned by the military censors in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, due to worries it could be used to send illicit information.

    The cross was found across the United Kingdom, and particularly in Scotland in the early years of its use. It eventually spread to the rest of the Anglophone world, but made less headway on the European continent, where lovers continued to write their kisses out in full.

    As the symbol’s popularity grew, so did the mythology and theories around it – its more mundane origin among working-class lovers forgotten.

    Katie Barclay receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

    – ref. X has been used to represent love and kisses for centuries. But how did it start? – https://theconversation.com/x-has-been-used-to-represent-love-and-kisses-for-centuries-but-how-did-it-start-248124

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: TV show Severance looks at workplace personalities. There are healthier ways to separate home and office life

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lena Wang, Associate Professor in Management, RMIT University

    Supplied/AppleTV+

    The highly anticipated season two of Severance, released in weekly instalments, has continued to draw interest among viewers around the world.

    A gripping psychological thriller, this TV series provides an extreme illustration of the compartmentalising of work and personal life.

    In the show, “severed” workers agree to a surgical procedure where a device is implanted into the brain to split their memory and experiences in two.

    Once severed, “innies” go to work with no knowledge of the lives and families of their “outies”. And “outies” have no recollection of the activities they performed or the relationships they developed while their “innies” were at work.

    Back in the real world, the hybrid work revolution has led to a seismic shift in work habits. For some, that’s made it harder to mark where work ends and home starts. But there are still healthy ways to keep our personal and professional lives separate.

    A seismic shift in work habits

    Severance’s first season in 2022 premiered in the wake of the global pandemic, when lockdowns forced most workers to work from home for an extended period of time.

    Now, three years later, many employees are still working in a hybrid mode.

    Data from 2024 shows more than one third of Australian still regularly work from home. This arrangement is especially prevalent among knowledge workers. Knowledge-based workers are generally office workers, whose roles can be performed remotely.

    At the same time, fully remote work is also increasing, and some workers are exploring a digital nomad lifestyle which allows them to travel and live anywhere in the world while working remotely.

    The hybrid work model is clearly the business model of choice for the future from the perspective of workers, although some employers are pushing back.

    But hybrid work creates an ongoing challenge for workers who want to create psychological boundaries between work and home domains.

    Creating boundaries between work and home

    People go to great lengths to construct and manage the psychological boundaries between work and the other activities in their personal lives, such as spending time with family, engaging in the community, or practising self-care.

    Humans crave boundaries, but that shouldn’t be taken to extremes.
    Andrey Popov/Shutterstock

    Examples of these boundaries can include an out-of-office reply to notify others of your set working hours, leaving your laptop at work over the weekend or removing work email apps from your personal phone.

    As human beings we crave boundaries that allow us to better focus our attention and be more present in respective life domains.

    Severance provides a critical look at how far workers might go to achieve work-life segregation. Take the character Mark S., who underwent the severance procedure to escape the grief of losing his wife and block that part of his personal life from his working life. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe.

    Similar to the confrontational and somewhat thorny style of TV series Black Mirror, Severance challenges the audience by presenting a futuristic and innovative method to reduce the tensions people experience when psychological boundaries are not managed.

    Can we sever our identities across domains?

    Creating sensible boundaries across life domains is desirable. But Severance helps us examine how we can’t shut off our home selves completely. Towards the end of season one, the show’s “innies” keep attempting to make contact with their “outies” to find out who they truly are outside work.

    Indeed, personality research shows that while we can take on somewhat different personas in different life domains, our human need for consistency produces enduring self-concepts and patterns of behaviour.

    Digital nomads turn remote work into a lifestyle choice.
    Shutterstock

    Consistency is necessary to maintain the integrity of the self, providing the foundation for us to effectively adapt to different social environments and develop positive wellbeing.

    Research also shows when workers feel they can be bring their authentic selves to work, they experience a sense of self-actualisation, as well as higher job satisfaction and lower burnout. Without these protective elements, it’s no wonder Helly R. repeatedly tried to escape the severed floor.

    Achieving meaning at work

    What is also striking about the work lives of those on the severed floor is how meaningless their jobs appear to be. Throughout season one and into season two, we never truly understand the nature and purpose of their jobs at the mysterious corporation Lumon Industries.

    We know that meaningless, or “bullshit” jobs in the words of American anthropologist David Graeber, are associated with poor mental health. Unfavourable working conditions such as poor management and toxic culture can aggravate this issue, making meaningful work become meaningless.

    In this sense, if we cannot sever our “innies” and “outies” as shown in Severance, negative work experiences would spill over to our family lives, causing a downward spiral.

    Restoring the meaning and purpose in our jobs not only improves our work experiences, but also boosts our self-esteem and enriches our personal lives. This can be done by improving work design, leadership and organisational culture.

    As season two continues, Severance will continue posing sticky ethical questions for us to ponder about the role of work in our lives. While the answers may not be forthcoming, the mysterious twists are almost guaranteed.

    Severance is now streaming on Apple TV+

    Lena Wang previously received funding from various organisations on issues concerning mental health (e.g., National Mental Health Commission). She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    Haiying Kang previously received funding from several organisations on issues concerning employment rights, talent attraction and retention (e.g., Telematics Trust, Department of Defence). She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    Melissa Wheeler has engaged in paid and pro-bono consulting and research relating to issues of applied ethics and gender equality (e.g., Our Watch, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre, VicHealth). She has previously worked for research centres that receive funding from several partner organisations in the private and public sector, including from the Victorian Government.

    – ref. TV show Severance looks at workplace personalities. There are healthier ways to separate home and office life – https://theconversation.com/tv-show-severance-looks-at-workplace-personalities-there-are-healthier-ways-to-separate-home-and-office-life-249360

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Enzymes are the engines of life − machine learning tools could help scientists design new ones to tackle disease and climate change

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sam Pellock, Postdoctoral Scholar in Biochemistry, University of Washington

    Enzymes have complicated molecular structures that are hard to replicate. Design Cells/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Enzymes are molecular machines that carry out the chemical reactions that sustain all life, an ability that has captured the attention of scientists like me.

    Consider muscle movement. Your body releases a molecule called acetylcholine to trigger your muscle cells to contract. If acetylcholine sticks around for too long, it can paralyze your muscles – including your heart muscle cells – and, well, that’s that. This is where the enzyme acetylcholinesterase comes in. This enzyme can break down thousands of acetylcholine molecules per second to ensure muscle contraction is stopped, paralysis avoided and life continued. Without this enzyme, it would take a month for a molecule of acetylcholine to break down on its own – about 10 billion times slower.

    You can imagine why enzymes are of particular interest to scientists looking to solve modern problems. What if there were a way to break down plastic, capture carbon dioxide or destroy cancer cells as fast as acetylcholinesterase breaks down acetylcholine? If the world needs to take action quickly, enzymes are a compelling candidate for the job – if only researchers could design them to handle those challenges on demand.

    Designing enzymes, unfortunately, is very hard. It’s like working with an atom-sized Lego set, but the instructions were lost and the thing won’t hold together unless it’s assembled perfectly. Newly published research from our team suggests that machine learning can act as the architect on this Lego set, helping scientists build these complex molecular structures accurately.

    What’s an enzyme?

    Let’s take a closer look at what makes up an enzyme.

    Enzymes are proteins – large molecules that do the behind-the-scenes work that keep all living things alive. These proteins are made up of amino acids, a set of building blocks that can be stitched together to form long strings that get knotted up into specific shapes.

    The specific structure of a protein is key to its function in the same way that the shapes of everyday objects are. For example, much like a spoon is designed to hold liquid in a way that a knife simply can’t, the enzymes involved in moving your muscles aren’t well suited for photosynthesis in plants.

    For an enzyme to function, it adopts a shape that perfectly matches the molecule it processes, much like a lock matches a key. The unique grooves in the enzyme – the lock – that interact with the target molecule – the key – are found in a region of the enzyme known as the active site.

    The induced fit model of enzymes states that both the enzyme and its substrate change shape when they interact.
    OpenStax, CC BY-SA

    The active site of the enzyme precisely orients amino acids to interact with the target molecule when it enters. This makes it easier for the molecule to undergo a chemical reaction to turn into a different one, making the process go faster. After the chemical reaction is done, the new molecule is released and the enzyme is ready to process another.

    How do you design an enzyme?

    Scientists have spent decades trying to design their own enzymes to make new molecules, materials or therapeutics. But making enzymes that look like and go as fast as those found in nature is incredibly difficult.

    Enzymes have complex, irregular shapes that are made up of hundreds of amino acids. Each of these building blocks needs to be placed perfectly or else the enzyme will slow down or completely shut off. The difference between a speed racer and slowpoke enzyme can be a distance of less than the width of a single atom.

    Initially, scientists focused on modifying the amino acid sequences of existing enzymes to improve their speed or stability. Early successes with this approach primarily improved the stability of enzymes, enabling them to catalyze chemical reactions at a higher range of temperatures. But this approach was less useful for improving the speed of enzymes. To this day, designing new enzymes by modifying individual amino acids is generally not an effective way to improve natural enzymes.

    This model of acetylcholinesterase shows acetylcholine (green) bound to its active site.
    Sam Pellock, CC BY-SA

    Researchers found that using a process called directed evolution, in which the amino acid sequence of an enzyme is randomly changed until it can perform a desired function, proved much more fruitful. For example, studies have shown that directed evolution can improve chemical reaction speed, thermostability, and even generate enzymes with properties that aren’t seen in nature. However, this approach is typically labor-intensive: You have to screen many mutants to find one that does what you want. In some cases, if there’s no good enzyme to start from, this method can fail to work at all.

    Both of these approaches are limited by their reliance on natural enzymes. That is, restricting your design to the shapes of natural proteins likely limits the kinds of chemistry that enzymes can facilitate. Remember, you can’t eat soup with a knife.

    Is it possible to make enzymes from scratch, rather than modify nature’s recipe? Yes, with computers.

    Designing enzymes with computers

    The first attempts to computationally design enzymes still largely relied on natural enzymes as a starting point, focusing on placing enzyme active sites into natural proteins.

    This approach is akin to trying to find a suit at a thrift store: It is unlikely you will find a perfect fit because the geometry of an enzyme’s active site (your body in this analogy) is highly specific, so a random protein with a rigidly fixed structure (a suit with random measurements) is unlikely to perfectly accommodate it. The resulting enzymes from these efforts performed much more slowly than those found in nature, requiring further optimization with directed evolution to reach speeds common among natural enzymes.

    Recent advances in deep learning have dramatically changed the landscape of designing enzymes with computers. Enzymes can now be generated in much the same way that AI models such as ChatGPT and DALL-E generate text or images, and you don’t need to use native protein structures to support your active site.

    AI tools are helping researchers design new proteins.

    Our team showed that when we prompt an AI model, called RFdiffusion, with the structure and amino acid sequence of an active site, it can generate the rest of the enzyme structure that would perfectly support it. This is equivalent to prompting ChatGPT to write an entire short story based on a prompt that only says to include the line “And sadly, the eggs never showed up.”

    We used this AI model specifically to generate enzymes called serine hydrolases, a group of proteins that have potential applications in medicine and plastic recycling. After designing the enzymes, we mixed them with their intended molecular target to see whether they could catalyze its breakdown. Encouragingly, many of the designs we tested were able to break down the molecule, and better than previously designed enzymes for the same reaction.

    To see how accurate our computational designs were, we used a method called X-ray crystallography to determine the shapes of these enzymes. We found that many of them were a nearly perfect match to what we digitally designed.

    Our findings mark a key advance in enzyme design, highlighting how AI can help scientists start to tackle complex problems. Machine learning tools could help more researchers access enzyme design and tap into the full potential of enzymes to solve modern-day problems.

    Sam Pellock receives funding from the Washington Research Foundation and Schmidt Futures program.

    – ref. Enzymes are the engines of life − machine learning tools could help scientists design new ones to tackle disease and climate change – https://theconversation.com/enzymes-are-the-engines-of-life-machine-learning-tools-could-help-scientists-design-new-ones-to-tackle-disease-and-climate-change-249565

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘Mum, what’s the meaning of life?’ How to talk about philosophy with little kids

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Kilby, PhD candidate in Education, Monash University

    Charles Parker/ Pexels , CC BY

    If your young child asks “what’s the meaning of life?” you might laugh it off (how cute!) or freeze in panic (where do I even begin?).

    It’s tempting to dismiss these big questions as too advanced for kids. Plato and Aristotle both believed children weren’t ready for philosophy. In fact, they didn’t think people were ready to study philosophy until they turned 30.

    But children know otherwise. They ask big questions like “Why are we here?” and “What does it mean to be fair?” and “Why do we keep feeding the cat, even though she never says thank you?”

    American researcher and author Jana Mohr Lone has taught philosophy to young children for more than 20 years. As one second-grade child told her:

    […] children don’t know as many things about the world and so our minds are more free to imagine.

    This openness makes children natural philosophers. By encouraging these conversations, you can help them grow into curious, thoughtful and reflective individuals.

    How can parents do this?



    Read more:
    Who am I? Why am I here? Why children should be taught philosophy (beyond better test scores)

    3 steps for philosophical dialogue

    One of the difficulties of engaging in philosophy is people may be unfamiliar with how it works.

    But you can have a philosophical discussion by following three steps:

    • reflection
    • generalisation
    • abstraction.

    When your child asks a deep question like “What’s the meaning of life?” you don’t need to have the answer, you just need to start a conversation.

    First, prompt your child to reflect on the question. You could ask: “What do you think?”

    This allows your child to explore their own experiences. They might say, “I live for football and Bluey!”

    Second, move to generalisation. You can ask, “Do you think that’s the meaning of life for everyone?” This opens up a philosophical discussion beyond the self. Your child might say, “Well, Stella lives for gymnastics and cheese.”

    Finally, prompt towards abstraction, by asking “What makes life meaningful for all people?”

    Football, Bluey and handstands won’t appeal to everyone, but something else might. Now we’re looking for examples (or counter-examples) as a method of inquiry.

    This prompts your child to look for what is common to all people in living a meaningful life. They may respond with something like:

    A lot of people love chocolate but not Aunty Grace. Most people love dogs but maybe not people who really love cats. Everyone loves time with their friends and family.

    Suddenly, you’re having a rich philosophical dialogue. You can continue further inquiry into what really is love, or what makes certain relationships more important than others.

    What we’re doing here is having a dialogue through concepts, academically known as conceptual analysis.

    Philosophy explores concepts like love and kindness that children encounter every day.
    RDNE Stock Project/ Pexels, CC BY



    Read more:
    What is love? A philosopher explains it’s not a choice or a feeling − it’s a practice

    Why should you do this?

    Educational research has found philosophical dialogue improves children’s logical reasoning, reading and maths comprehension, self-esteem and turn-taking.

    Studies have found it benefits children’s academic and social development in early childhood, primary school and high school.

    But beyond these skills, philosophy empowers children to engage meaningfully with the world around them.

    Happiness, identity, fairness, death, reality, time, nature, good, knowledge and purpose are all things children encounter every day. Philosophy with your child can simply be the exploration of what these concepts mean and how they impact our lives.

    Understanding concepts and being able to apply that understanding to life is the foundation of philosophy.

    Kids can ask tricky quesitons. But philosophical approaches prompt them to think through an answer.
    Kampus Productions/ Pexels, CC BY

    Questions to ask your child

    To engage your child in philosophy, start a conversation with them about the concepts they’re encountering.

    If they’re drawing, you could ask what is art? What is imagination?.

    If they don’t want to share their favourite toy: what is fairness? What is kindness?

    If they’re talking to the dog: what is language? What is understanding?

    If they’re emotional: what is happiness? What is sadness?

    If they want to know why they should go to school: what is knowledge?

    If they’re telling you about their dream: what is real?

    Next time your child asks a big question, embrace the moment. By exploring concepts like fairness, love and happiness, you’re helping them interpret the world and become more thoughtful people.

    By asking them to reflect, explore different perspectives and consider the bigger picture, you’ll embark on a philosophical journey that can grow into something meaningful for you both.

    Ben Kilby is the Chair of the Victorian Association for Philosophy in Schools

    – ref. ‘Mum, what’s the meaning of life?’ How to talk about philosophy with little kids – https://theconversation.com/mum-whats-the-meaning-of-life-how-to-talk-about-philosophy-with-little-kids-248231

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: As new charter schools open, we still know too little about how they worked last time

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jude MacArthur, Senior Lecturer, School of Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

    Phil Walter/Getty Images

    Seven new charter schools are opening their gates, and ACT leader and Associate Education Minister David Seymour – the politician responsible for their existence – has been singing their praises.

    He says some will deliver “new and innovative ways to help students who are struggling at school to succeed, especially neurodiverse students, where there is huge need”.

    Seymour also says charter schools will free teachers from “constant upheavals in education” policy and provide the flexibility to “allow them to better cater to students who are priority learners” – the term charter schools use for “those with neurodiversity and a background of disadvantage and poverty”.

    Such innovation will raise overall educational achievement, he says, particularly for students who are underachieving, disengaged or neurodivergent. It may be too early to tell whether this optimism is justified, but it seems the new charter schools will enjoy a range of benefits unavailable to state schools.

    For example, Seymour recently praised Arapaki School in Christchurch for its teaching ratio of one teacher and three teacher aides for every 25 students. Australian students with this level of resourcing, he said, learned up to 60% faster than those in state schools.

    But teachers, principals and researchers in the state system have been asking for reduced class sizes and one teacher aide per classroom for years. So we need to ask why the resources and privileges being channelled into charter schools can’t be made available to the state school system instead.

    An underfunded education system

    The coalition government has set aside NZ$153 million to fund charter schools over the next four years. These schools are state funded but operated by a “sponsor”: 75% of their teachers must be qualified and 25% can be permanently employed with a “limited authority to teach”.

    The government’s Charter School Agency describes considerable flexibility around teaching, curriculum, governance, hours and days of operation, and how funding is spent.

    According to chief executive Jane Lee, this flexibility supports innovation and provides opportunities for students to learn differently. And there is little doubt a sizeable minority of pupils are not well served in the mainstream system.

    One in five children and young people in our schools need extra support for their learning. For decades, official reports have documented inequities in this area, including poor achievement for disabled and neurodivergent students.

    The problems and solutions are well understood. Disabled and neurodivergent students face barriers to learning because funding, resources and timely support for them and their teachers are inadequate.

    This includes a shortage of teacher aides, specialist teachers and therapists, and class sizes being too big.

    Many teachers try to compensate for these challenges. But research undertaken for the New Zealand Educational Institute warns that without the extra support they can come close to burnout. A damning 2024 report from the Education Hub described the experiences of neurodivergent pupils, their whānau and teachers who viewed

    the current education system as outdated and heading towards major crises, with many seeing home schooling as the only option.

    Lack of supporting evidence

    Rather than addressing under-resourcing in the state system, however, charter school advocates view the problem as a lack of choice, exacerbated by constant upheavals in education policy.

    Associate Education Minister David Seymour.
    Getty Images

    So, what can we learn from the last time charter schools operated between 2012 and 2018? The evidence is mixed, according to an evaluation of eight charter schools undertaken for the Ministry of Education.

    While whānau and student experiences appeared positive, low and uneven response rates from these groups make drawing any conclusion difficult.

    There was evidence of innovative practices in school governance and management, and to a lesser extent in staffing, student engagement and support, teaching and learning. The schools were least innovative in curriculum design and engagement with their communities.

    The schools themselves felt small school rolls and class sizes contributed to their successful operation. As for the key aim of charter school policy supporting priority learners, the report described a good understanding of their needs.

    But insufficient data mean we don’t know whether student achievement improved overall, and we know nothing about the achievement of students who received learning support.

    Focus on state schools instead

    Other questions remain, too. As the New Zealand Educational Institute pointed out last year, the $153 million being spent on charter schools would pay for more than 700 teacher aides in the state system.

    Given the existing shortage of learning-support resources overall, will charter schools (which will also have access to those resources) simply add another layer of competition for state schools?

    And if charter schools themselves struggle to recruit the necessary expertise, will their staff have the professional knowledge of student diversity and inclusion that’s needed to support students and whānau well, and who will judge that?

    Finally, charter schools must select priority group applicants by ballot if there are more applicants than capacity allows. How will they decide on the number of available places?

    At the risk of answering these questions with another question, wouldn’t our thinking be better directed at improving the public education system?

    All children – including those needing learning support – deserve to belong and learn well in their local school, with all the checks and balances that currently ensure equity, inclusion and a fully qualified teaching staff.

    Jude MacArthur currently receives funding from The Teaching and Learning Research Initiative. She has previously received Marsden funding. She is a member of the Teaching Council’s Inclusive Education Advisory Group; The Inclusive Education Action Group; and was a member of the Ministry of Education’s Bicultural and Inclusive Working Group as part of the curriculum refresh.

    – ref. As new charter schools open, we still know too little about how they worked last time – https://theconversation.com/as-new-charter-schools-open-we-still-know-too-little-about-how-they-worked-last-time-249474

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Want to make sure you don’t swelter in your next home? Check these 12 features before you rent or buy

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Robertson, Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

    Harley Kingston, Shutterstock

    Hot on the heels of the warmest spring on record, Australia is baking through another scorching summer. Heatwaves around the country contributed to the second-warmest January on record. Hot, dry, windy weather again swept across the country this week.

    Finding a home that stays cool in this heat is a real challenge. Homebuyers and renters face two problems: a shortage of heat-resistant homes, and a lack of reliable, independent information about how homes perform in the heat.

    So, how can you avoid buying or renting a “hot box”? Here’s a handy list of 12 features to check next time you’re searching for a place to live.

    Ask these 4 questions before you inspect

    1. Does the house have insulation? Ceiling, wall and underfloor insulation seals the indoor environment, slowing or preventing heat from leaking in or out.

    2. Does it have double-glazed windows? Insulated glass, made from two or more window panes with a space in between, keeps heat out in summer and inside during winter.

    3. How big is the house? Australian homes are among the largest in the world. Cooling a large home with air conditioning can be costly. Check the floor plan to see if you can shut doors and close off internal spaces, so you only cool the parts you need during hot spells.

    4. Has the house had an energy and thermal performance assessment? The Residential Efficiency Scorecard is delivered by the Victorian government on behalf of all Australian governments. The report, undertaken by an accredited assessor, rates a home’s energy use and comfort, and recommends improvements. Other assessments also exist.

    Look for these 8 things during an inspection

    1. Check the colour and nature of external walls, roof and surrounding surfaces. Dark-coloured roofs or walls, and other hard surfaces such as concrete, absorb more heat. This heat builds up during the day and radiates out at night, causing what’s known as the heat island effect.

    2. Look at internal floors and surfaces. Brick walls or concrete surfaces inside can be a good thing, if the hot weather doesn’t last too long. That’s because the home will take longer to heat up. But these heavy materials will also take longer to cool down once the heatwave is over. Good ventilation may compensate for that.

    3. Consider the size and position of windows and doors. Openings on each side of rooms and the house as a whole allows cooling through natural ventilation. You can open up the house and let the cool air flow from one side to the other during the night, or once the cool change comes. Security doors and fly screens will keep insects and potential intruders out.

    4. Is there external shading, such as blinds or greenery? Ensuring windows and walls are shaded on the outside is the best way to keep the heat out, particularly on the west-facing side. Large unshaded glass windows facing north and west can cause the home to heat up in summer. Vertical blinds work well on west-facing windows. On the north side, horizontal shading such as a pergola blocks out the sun in summer – when it is higher in the sky. It also lets the sun in during winter when the sun is lower in the sky, to gently warm the home.

    5. Check for ceiling fans. Ceiling fans cool a home and use little energy. Check how many are installed and where they are located. Ceiling fans are ideal in living spaces, but also work well in bedrooms to help you stay comfortable on hot nights.

    Ceiling fans can make you feel cooler without costing a lot of money.
    Artazum, Shutterstock

    6. Investigate the air-con. If the house has air-conditioning, ask about its age, and look up its energy rating on energyrating.gov.au.

    7. Consider garden spaces. Plants and trees can creating a “microclimate” around your home, keeping it cool. Also look at the landscape beyond the property – a tree-lined street can reduce temperatures and improve thermal comfort during a heatwave.

    8. Note the position of the afternoon sun. Visit potential homes during the mid-late afternoon or check the sun’s path through the home – perhaps using a sun tracking app. If air conditioners are turned on, consider what this might mean for energy bills. What would the home feel like without it? Are there other ways to keep the building cool?

    For more information about home energy efficiency, visit YourHome, Renew, Scorecard, and read the Cooling your Home report.

    Passive Cooling (Your Home)

    Setting higher standards

    Most Australian homes perform poorly when it comes to maintaining a comfortable temperature range indoors. This is particularly true for those built before the 1990s, when minimum energy performance standards were introduced. But these standards set a low bar compared with those overseas.

    This, coupled with the absence of requirements for landlords or sellers (except in the ACT) to have the home assessed or declare a rating, means buyers and renters are left in the dark when it comes to making informed choices.

    Renters and lower-income households are at greatest risk of living in a home that is too hot or too cold. The private rental stock in Australia is among the poorest, most uncomfortable housing in the Western world.

    While the ACT has introduced minimum energy efficiency standards for rental properties, standards across the country contain few provisions that promise improved thermal comfort.

    Until the regulatory landscape changes and energy performance must be disclosed, we hope these tips will help you avoid the worst of Australia’s hot boxes.



    Read more:
    Victorian households are poorly prepared for longer, more frequent heatwaves – here’s what needs to change

    Sarah Robertson has received funding from various sources, including the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and the Fuel Poverty Research Network. She has benefitted from Australian Research Council, Victorian government and various local government and industry partnerships to support research related to this topic.

    Nicola Willand receives funding for research from various organisations, including the Australian Research Council, the Victorian state government, the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, the Future Fuels Collaborative Research Centre and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a trustee of the Fuel Poverty Research Network charity and affiliated with the Australian Institute of Architects.

    Ralph Horne has received funding from various sources including the Australian Research Council, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Victorian government to support research related to this topic.

    Trivess Moore has received funding from various organisations including the Australian Research Council, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Victorian government and various industry partners. He is a trustee of the Fuel Poverty Research Network.

    – ref. Want to make sure you don’t swelter in your next home? Check these 12 features before you rent or buy – https://theconversation.com/want-to-make-sure-you-dont-swelter-in-your-next-home-check-these-12-features-before-you-rent-or-buy-249494

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: 3 statistical stuff-ups that made everyday items look healthier (or riskier) than they really are

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia

    VLADIMIR VK/Shutterstock

    Conducting scientific studies is never easy, and there are often major disasters along the way. A researcher accidentally spills coffee on a keyboard, destroying the data. Or one of the chemicals used in the analysis is contaminated, and the list goes on.

    However, when we read the results of the study in a scientific paper, it always looks pristine. The study went smoothly with no hiccups, and here are our results.

    But studies can contain errors, not all of which independent experts or “peer reviewers” weed out before publication.

    Statistical stuff-ups can be difficult to find as it really takes someone trained in statistics to notice something wrong.

    When statistical mistakes are made and found, it can have profound impacts on people who may have changed their lifestyle as a result of the flawed study.

    These three examples of inadvertent statistical mistakes have had major consequences for our health and shopping habits.

    1. Did you throw out your black plastic spoons?

    Late last year, I came across a news article about how black plastic kitchen utensils were dangerous as they could potentially leak toxic flame-retardant chemicals into your food.

    Being a natural sceptic, I looked up the original paper, which was published in the journal Chemosphere. The article looked genuine, the journal was reputable. So – like perhaps many other people – I threw out my black plastic kitchen utensils and replaced them with silicone ones.

    In the study, the authors screened 203 household products (about half were kitchen utensils) made from black plastic.

    The authors found toxic flame retardants in 85% of the products tested, with levels approaching the maximum daily limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

    Unfortunately, the authors made a mistake in their calculations. They were out by a factor of ten. This meant the level of toxic chemicals was well under the daily safety limits.

    In recent weeks, the authors apologised and corrected their paper.

    2. Did you avoid HRT?

    A landmark study raised safety concerns about hormone replacement therapy or HRT (now also known as menopausal hormone therapy). This highlights a different type of statistical error.

    The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study involved 10,739 postmenopausal women aged 50-79 recruited from 40 clinical centres in the US. It compared the health of women randomised to take HRT with those who took the placebo. Neither the researchers nor the women knew which treatment had been given.

    In their 2002 paper, the authors reported higher rates of invasive breast cancers in the HRT group. They used a unit called “person-years”. Person-years is a way to measure the total time a group of people spends in a study. For example, if 100 people are in a study for one year each, that makes 100 person-years. If someone leaves the trial after only six months, only that half-year is counted for them.

    The authors showed a rate of 38 invasive breast cancers per 10,000 person-years in the HRT group, compared to 30 per 10,000 person-years in the placebo group. This gives a rate ratio of 1.26 (one rate divided by the other).

    This fairly large increase in breast cancer rates, also expressed as a 26% increase, caused widespread panic around the world, and led to thousands of women stopping HRT.

    But the actual risk of breast cancer in each group is low. The rate of 38 per 10,000 person-years is equivalent to an annual rate of 0.38%. With very small rates like this, the authors should really have used the rate difference rather than the rate ratio. The rate difference is one rate subtracted from the other, rather than divided by it. This equates to an annual increase of 0.08% breast cancer cases in the HRT group – much more modest.

    The authors of the 2002 paper also pointed out that the 26% increase in the rate of breast cancer “almost reached nominal statistical significance”. Almost is not statistical significance, and formally, this means there was no difference in breast cancer rates between the two groups. In other words, the difference between the two groups could have happened by chance.

    The authors should have been more careful when describing their results.

    3. Did Popeye’s spinach change your meals?

    Cartoon character Popeye is a one-eyed, pipe-smoking sailor with mangled English, in love with the willowy Olive Oyl. He is constantly getting into trouble, and when he needs extra energy, he opens a can of spinach and swallows the contents. His biceps immediately bulge, and off he goes to sort out the problem.

    When Popeye ate spinach, his muscles bulged. No wonder sales of spinach rose.

    But why does Popeye eat spinach?

    The story begins in about 1870, with a German chemist, Erich von Wolf or Emil von Wolff, depending on which version of events you read.

    He was measuring the amount of iron in different types of leafy vegetables. According to legend, which some dispute, he was writing the iron content of spinach down in a notebook and got the decimal point wrong, writing 35 milligrams instead of 3.5 milligrams per 100 gram serve of spinach. The error was found and corrected in 1937.

    By then the Popeye character had been created and spinach became incredibly popular with children. Apparently, consumption of spinach in the US went up by a third as a result of the cartoon.

    This story had gained legendary status but has one tiny flaw. In a 1932 cartoon, Popeye explains exactly why he eats spinach, and it’s nothing to do with iron. He says in his garbled English:

    Spinach is full of Vitamin A. An’tha’s what makes hoomans strong an’ helty!

    Adrian Esterman receives funding from the NHMRC, MRFF and ARC.

    – ref. 3 statistical stuff-ups that made everyday items look healthier (or riskier) than they really are – https://theconversation.com/3-statistical-stuff-ups-that-made-everyday-items-look-healthier-or-riskier-than-they-really-are-249367

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is AI making us stupider? Maybe, according to one of the world’s biggest AI companies

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Brown, Professor in Philosophy, Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland

    Nadia Piet + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI/Better Images of AI, CC BY-SA

    There is only so much thinking most of us can do in our heads. Try dividing 16,951 by 67 without reaching for a pen and paper. Or a calculator. Try doing the weekly shopping without a list on the back of last week’s receipt. Or on your phone.

    By relying on these devices to help make our lives easier, are we making ourselves smarter or dumber? Have we traded efficiency gains for inching ever closer to idiocy as a species?

    This question is especially important to consider with regard to generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology such as ChatGPT, an AI chatbot owned by tech company OpenAI, which at the time of writing is used by 300 million people each week.

    According to a recent paper by a team of researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, the answer might be yes. But there’s more to the story.

    Thinking well

    The researchers assessed how users perceive the effect of generative AI on their own critical thinking.

    Generally speaking, critical thinking has to do with thinking well.

    One way we do this is by judging our own thinking processes against established norms and methods of good reasoning. These norms include values such as precision, clarity, accuracy, breadth, depth, relevance, significance and cogency of arguments.

    Other factors that can affect quality of thinking include the influence of our existing world views, cognitive biases, and reliance on incomplete or inaccurate mental models.

    The authors of the recent study adopt a definition of critical thinking developed by American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and colleagues in 1956. It’s not really a definition at all. Rather it’s a hierarchical way to categorise cognitive skills, including recall of information, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

    The authors state they prefer this categorisation, also known as a “taxonomy”, because it’s simple and easy to apply. However, since it was devised it has fallen out of favour and has been discredited by Robert Marzano and indeed by Bloom himself.

    In particular, it assumes there is a hierarchy of cognitive skills in which so-called “higher-order” skills are built upon “lower-order” skills. This does not hold on logical or evidence-based grounds. For example, evaluation, usually seen as a culminating or higher-order process, can be the beginning of inquiry or very easy to perform in some contexts. It is more the context than the cognition that determines the sophistication of thinking.

    An issue with using this taxonomy in the study is that many generative AI products also seem to use it to guide their own output. So you could interpret this study as testing whether generative AI, by the way it’s designed, is effective at framing how users think about critical thinking.

    Also missing from Bloom’s taxonomy is a fundamental aspect of critical thinking: the fact that the critical thinker not only performs these and many other cognitive skills, but performs them well. They do this because they have an overarching concern for the truth, which is something AI systems do not have.

    ChatGPT is used by 300 million people each week.
    Alex Photo Stock/Shutterstock

    Higher confidence in AI equals less critical thinking

    Research published earlier this year revealed “a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities”.

    The new study further explores this idea. It surveyed 319 knowledge workers such as healthcare practitioners, educators and engineers who discussed 936 tasks they conducted with the help of generative AI. Interestingly, the study found users consider themselves to use critical thinking less in the execution of the task, than in providing oversight at the verification and editing stages.

    In high-stakes work environments, the desire to produce high-quality work combined with fear of reprisals serve as powerful motivators for users to engage their critical thinking in reviewing the outputs of AI.

    But overall, participants believe the increases in efficiency more than compensate for the effort expended in providing such oversight.

    The study found people who had higher confidence in AI generally displayed less critical thinking, while people with higher confidence in themselves tended to display more critical thinking.

    This suggests generative AI does not harm one’s critical thinking – provided one has it to begin with.

    Problematically, the study relied too much on self-reporting, which can be subject to a range of biases and interpretation issues. Putting this aside, critical thinking was defined by users as “setting clear goals, refining prompts, and assessing generated content to meet specific criteria and standards”.

    “Criteria and standards” here refer more to the purposes of the task than to the purposes of critical thinking. For example, an output meets the criteria if it “complies with their queries”, and the standards if the “generated artefact is functional” for the workplace.

    This raises the question of whether the study was really measuring critical thinking at all.

    The research found that people with higher confidence in themselves tended to display more critical thinking.
    ImYanis/Shutterstock

    Becoming a critical thinker

    Implicit in the new study is the idea that exercising critical thinking at the oversight stage is at least better than an unreflective over-reliance on generative AI.

    The authors recommend generative AI developers add features to trigger users’ critical oversight. But is this enough?

    Critical thinking is needed at every stage before and while using AI – when formulating questions and hypotheses to be tested, and when interrogating outputs for bias and accuracy.

    The only way to ensure generative AI does not harm your critical thinking is to become a critical thinker before you use it.

    Becoming a critical thinker requires identifying and challenging unstated assumptions behind claims and evaluating diverse perspectives. It also requires practising systematic and methodical reasoning and reasoning collaboratively to test your ideas and thinking with others.

    Chalk and chalkboards made us better at mathematics. Can generative AI make us better at critical thinking? Maybe – if we are careful, we might be able to use generative AI to challenge ourselves and augment our critical thinking.

    But in the meantime, there are always steps we can, and should, take to improve our critical thinking instead of letting an AI do the thinking for us.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Is AI making us stupider? Maybe, according to one of the world’s biggest AI companies – https://theconversation.com/is-ai-making-us-stupider-maybe-according-to-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-ai-companies-249586

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: What we learned from Trump and Putin’s phone call

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor

    Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, spoke for much of the European diplomatic community when she reacted to news of Donald Trump’s phone chat with Vladimir Putin: “This is the way the Trump administration operates,” she declared. “This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality.”

    The resigned tone of Baerbock’s words was not matched by her colleague, defence minister Boris Pistorius, whose criticism that “the Trump administration has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun” was rather more direct.

    Their sentiments were echoed, not only by European leaders, but in the US itself: “Putin Scores a Big Victory, and Not on the Battlefield” read a headline in the New York Times. The newspaper opined that Trump’s call had succeeded in bringing Putin back in from the cold after three years in which Russia had become increasingly isolated both politically and economically.

    This was not lost on the Russian media, where commentators boasted that the phone call “broke the west’s blockade”. The stock market gained 5% and the rouble strengthened against the dollar as a result.

    Reflecting on the call, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, continued with operation flatter Donald Trump by comparing his attitude favourably with that of his predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden. “The previous US administration held the view that everything needed to be done to keep the war going. The current administration, as far as we understand, adheres to the point of view that everything must be done to stop the war and for peace to prevail.

    “We are more impressed with the position of the current administration, and we are open to dialogue.”

    Trump’s conversation with Putin roughly coincided with a meeting of senior European defence officials in Brussels which heard the new US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, outline America’s radical new outlook when it comes to European security. Namely that it’s not really America’s problem any more.

    Hegseth also told the meeting in Brussels yesterday that the Trump administration’s position is that Nato membership for Ukraine has been taken off the table, that the idea it would get its 2014 borders back was unrealistic and that if Europe wanted to guarantee Ukraine’s security as part of any peace deal, that would be its business. Any peacekeeping force would not involve American troops and would not be a Nato operation, so it would not involve collective defence.

    Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

    International security expert David Dunn believes that the fact that Trump considers himself a consummate deal maker makes the fact that his administration is willing to concede so much ground before negotiations proper have even got underway is remarkable. And not in a good way.

    Dunn, who specialises in US foreign and security policy at the University of Birmingham, finds it significant that Trump spoke with Putin first and then called Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to fill him in on the call. This order of priority, says Dunn, is a sign of the subordination of Ukraine’s role in the talks.

    He concludes that “for the present at least, it appears that negotiations will be less about pressuring Putin to bring a just end to the war he started than forcing Ukraine to give in to the Russian leader’s demands”.



    Read more:
    Trump phone call with Putin leaves Ukraine reeling and European leaders stunned

    Hegseth’s briefing to European defence officials, meanwhile, came as little surprise to David Galbreath. Writing here, Galbreath – who specialises in defence and security at the University of Bath – says the US pivot away from a focus on Europe has been years in the making – “since the very end of the cold war”.

    There has long been a feeling in Washington that the US has borne too much of the financial burden for European security. This is not just a Donald Trump thing, he believes, but an attitude percolating in US security circles for some decades. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, the focus for Nato become not so much collective defence as collective security, where “conflict would be managed on Nato’s borders”.

    But it was then the US which invoked article 5 of the Nato treaty, which establishes that “an armed attack against one or more [member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. The Bush government invoked Article 5 the day after the 9/11 attacks and Nato responded by patrolling US skies to provide security.

    Pete Hegseth dashes Ukraine’s hopes of a future guaranteed by Nato.

    Galbreath notes that many European countries, particularly the newer ones such as Estonia and Latvia, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. “The persistent justification I heard in the Baltic states was “we need to be there when the US needs us so that they will be there when we need them”.

    That looks set to change.



    Read more:
    US says European security no longer its primary focus – the shift has been years in the making

    The prospect of a profound shift in the world order are daunting after 80 years in which security – in Europe certainly – was guaranteed by successive US administrations and underpinned, not just by Nato but by a whole set of international agreements.

    Now, instead of the US acting as the “world’s policeman”, we have a president talking seriously about taking control of Greenland, one way or another, who won’t rule out using force to seize the Panama Canal and who dreams of turning Gaza into a coastal “riviera” development.

    Meanwhile Russia is engaged in a brutal war of conquest in Ukraine and is actively meddling in the affairs of several other countries. And in China, Xi Jinping regularly talks up the idea of reunifying with Taiwan, by force if necessary, and is fortifying islands in the South China Sea with a view to aggressively pursuing territorial claims there as well.

    And we thought the age of empires was in the rear view mirror, writes historian Eric Storm of Leiden University. Storm, whose speciality is the rise of nation states, has discerned a resurgence of imperial tendencies around the world and fears that the rules-based order that has dominated the decades since the second world war now appears increasingly tenuous.



    Read more:
    How Putin, Xi and now Trump are ushering in a new imperial age

    Gaza: the horror continues

    In any given week, you’d expect the imminent prospect of the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire to be the big international story. And certainly, while Trump and Putin were “flooding the zone” (see last week’s round-up for the origins of this phrase) the prospects of the deal lasting beyond its first phase have become more and more uncertain.

    Hamas has recently pulled back from its threat not to release any more hostages. Earlier in the week it threatened to call a halt to the hostage-prisoner exchange, claiming that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had breached the terms of the ceasefire deal. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded – with Trump’s backing – saying that unless all hostages were released on Saturday, all bets were off and the IDF would resume its military operations in the Gaza Strip. Trump added that “all hell is going to break out”.

    The US president has also doubled down on his idea for a redeveloped Gaza and has continued to pressure Jordan and Egypt to accept millions of Palestinian refugees. This, as you would expect, has not made the population of Gaza feel any more secure.

    Nils Mallock and Jeremy Ginges, behavioural psychologists at the London School of Economics, were in the region last month and conducted a survey of Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza to get a feel for how the two populations regard each other. It makes for depressing reading.

    The number of Israelis who reject the idea of a two-state solution has risen sharply since the October 7 2023 attacks by Hamas, from 46% to 62%. And roughly the same proportion of people in Gaza can now no longer envisage living side by side with Israelis. Both sides think that the other side is motivated by hatred, something which is known to make any diplomatic solution less feasible.



    Read more:
    We interviewed hundreds of Israelis and Gazans – here’s why we fear for the ceasefire

    We also asked Scott Lucas, a Middle East specialist at University College Dublin, to assess the likelihood of the ceasefire lasting into phase two, which is when the IDF is supposed to pull out of Gaza, allowing the people there room to being to rebuild, both physically and in terms of governance.

    He responded with a hollow laugh and a shake of the head, before sending us this digest of the key developments in the Middle East crisis this week.



    Read more:
    Will the Gaza ceasefire hold? Where does Trump’s takeover proposal stand? Expert Q&A

    We’ve become very used to seeing apocalyptic photos of the devastation of Gaza: the pulverised streets, choked with rubble, that make the idea of rebuilding seem so remote. But the people of Gaza also cultivated a huge amount of crops – about half the food they ate was grown there. Gazan farmers grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries in open fields as well as cultivating olive and citrus trees.

    Geographers Lina Eklund, He Yin and Jamon Van Den Hoek have analysed satellite images across the Gaza Strip over the past 17 months to work out the scale of agricultural destruction. It makes for terrifying reading.



    Read more:
    Gaza: we analysed a year of satellite images to map the scale of agricultural destruction

    World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox.

    – ref. What we learned from Trump and Putin’s phone call – https://theconversation.com/what-we-learned-from-trump-and-putins-phone-call-249902

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Living to tell the story: Lawsuit accuses ER doctor of anti-Indigenous racism

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Professor of History, University of Winnipeg

    On Jan. 15, 2023, Justin Flett arrived at the emergency room at St. Anthony’s Hospital, in the Pas, Manitoba.

    According to Flett’s statement of claim, submitted to the Court of King’s Bench of Manitoba in December and as reported by CBC News and APTN, he told the triage nurse he was experiencing distressing abdominal pain.

    Flett was assigned a triage score of five, which is intended for non-urgent low-priority cases. The statement of claim alleges that the physician who finally saw Flett insinuated that he was hungover, saying something to the effect of: “I don’t know what to tell you, we don’t treat you here for hangovers.”. Flett was not given diagnostic tests, imaging, a physical examination or pain medication.

    In a statement made through his lawyer, Flett said, “I knew that there was something seriously wrong with me and this doctor didn’t seem to want to take me seriously or help me. In that moment, I just felt worthless.”

    Flett is a father of six, a building contractor, a resident of Winnipeg and a citizen of Tataskweyak First Nation.

    Flett’s statement of claim says he endured an 11-hour bus trip to Winnipeg to seek the care he needed while in severe pain and without other healthcare alternatives.

    Once in Winnipeg, Flett called 911 and requested an ambulance. He was instructed by the operator to take a taxi to Seven Oaks Hospital. There he was triaged as a priority but still told to wait.

    He finally underwent surgery for acute appendicitis more than 30 hours after he first sought care. The surgery left Flett with complications.

    Flett is suing the Winnipeg and Northern Regional health authorities as well as an ER doctor, accusing them of racism and failing to provide timely care.

    As scholars of Indigenous and settler colonial history, we see Flett’s story within an enduring pattern of anti-Indigenous medical racism.

    A pattern of anti-Indigenous medical racism

    Brian Sinclair is not here to personally tell his version of what happened in the 34 hours he spent in September 2008 in the emergency room of a major Winnipeg hospital.

    Structures of Indifference by Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry.

    Sinclair, a middle-aged Anishinaabe man, died from what is normally an easily treated infection. In our 2018 book, Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City, we show how Sinclair’s tragic and unnecessary death reveals some painful truths about the ongoing history of settler colonialism, and how its legacies continue to devalue Indigenous life.

    Sinclair’s death and Flett’s accusations can only be understood within a history of settler colonialism and segregated medical care that is exemplified by the “Indian hospitals” that ran from the 1920s to the 1980s. They must also be understood in context of a society that blames Indigenous people for their own deaths.

    Sinclair was assumed to be drunk by medical staff and did not receive timely or adequate care, while Flett accuses medical authorities in Manitoba of the same treatment.

    These types of experiences are not particular to Manitoba, but are mirrored by incidents of medical racism across Canada.

    Tania Dick, Dzawada̱ʼenux̱w registered nurse and current Indigenous Nursing Lead at the University of British Columbia, explained to CBC’s The Current in 2018 that many Indigenous families have their own “Brian Sinclair story.”

    This includes the family of Joyce Echaquan. Echaquan was a 34-year-old Atikamew mother of six, who recorded hospital staff hurling racial slurs at her while withholding medical treatment causing her death in a hospital north of Montréal in September 2020.

    Inadequate treatment

    Both Echequan’s and Sinclair’s families and communities made sure that their deaths did not go unnoticed.

    In Sinclair’s case, an inquest and a number of reports resulted in significant changes to the way that patients are triaged and managed.

    Echaquan’s experience led to an inquest and the development of Joyce’s Principle, which aims to “guarantee to all Indigenous people the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services.”

    These cases have helped fuel a growing awareness about anti-Indigenous medical racism, including among organizations of medical professionals.

    Apologies and pledges

    Two years ago, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba (CPSM) apologized and accepted responsibility for failing to fairly treat Indigenous patients and they pledged to take action against anti-Indigenous racism.

    And last year, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) also acknowledged the racism and discrimination that Indigenous patients and health care providers face. They apologized and pledged to “act against anti-Indigenous racism in health care.”

    When we discuss these stories and the apologies in our classrooms we find our students know it is time to think beyond quick fixes and surface remedies. Rather, we need to address racism and colonialism as powerful determinants of health.

    The inquests, reports and apologies appear to have fallen short. Flett’s lawsuit claims that his treatment violated Sections 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It seeks damages under Section 24.1, which says that those whose rights or freedoms have been violated can seek remedies from the courts.

    It is a good time for us all to think about the ongoing costs of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada’s past and present.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Living to tell the story: Lawsuit accuses ER doctor of anti-Indigenous racism – https://theconversation.com/living-to-tell-the-story-lawsuit-accuses-er-doctor-of-anti-indigenous-racism-247078

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Captain America: what the evolution of the superhero says about the US

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura Crossley, Senior Lecturer in Film, Bournemouth University

    The first time comic fans saw Captain America, he was punching Adolf Hitler. It was 1940 and the image was the cover of the first volume of the Captain America Comics.

    Now, 85 years later, many people know “Cap” best from his depiction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The first film to bring the character to the big screen was Captain America: The First Avenger, in 2011. The film establishes what is probably the best known iteration of Captain America, a mantle taken up by the second world war “super-soldier” Steve Rogers (Chris Evans).

    Each iteration of Captain America correlates to the real US of their time. For Trump’s America, that iteration is played by Anthony Mackie. His MCU character, Sam Wilson, formerly known as Falcon, takes up the mantle in Avengers: Endgame (2019). Mackie now appears in his first standalone film in the role, Captain America: Brave New World.

    But what do other MCU wielders of the shield reveal about their respective era of US history?

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    Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain America, conceived him explicitly as the antithesis to Hitler. By draping Steve Roger in stars and stripes and giving him the name Captain America, their superhero became the symbol of a nation.

    With his origins in the second world war, the Steve Rogers iteration of Captain America is a fairly uncomplicated piece of propaganda, representing the righteousness of the US and its fight against Nazism. Captain America is the archetype of the nationalist superhero. He’s embodiment of the nation state and therefore represents and defends the ideal version of it.

    However, as cultural geographer Jason Dittmer points out in his book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero (2013), the state and the nation are not necessarily the same thing. The state is the governmental apparatus while the nation is the identity of its people.

    Erskine explains why Rogers was chosen as a super-solder.

    This difference is articulated, to an extent, in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). The creator of the super-soldier serum, Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) explains that the weak, sickly Rogers was chosen to become the first super-soldier because he understands the value of power. Having never had it, Erskine argues, he would not be corrupted by it. Rogers is not a perfect soldier, but he is a good man and that is more important.

    If we map this onto the US, the implication is that America as a nation is fundamentally good and just, and therefore separate from any potentially problematic policies set by America the state.

    As Rogers’ arc progresses across successive movies, the character becomes increasingly disillusioned with state power and control. His relationship with his own identity as Captain America fluctuates, with his ambivalence often symbolised by his either giving up or reclaiming the shield.

    Enter Sam Wilson

    In one of the closing scenes of Avengers: Endgame (2019), an aged Steve Rogers passes his shield to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), the African-American superhero known as the Falcon.

    In the world of the MCU, Captain America’s shield has never just been a shield – it is a symbol of heroism, of moral values and of “American-ness”. It can be read as a symbol of what America is, and what it could be.

    Captain America: Brave New World is Anthony Mackie’s first standalone film in the role.

    The legacy of Steve Rogers’ Captain America was explored in the TV show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021). The series interrogated topics such as race, patriotism and American identity through the story arcs of two versions of Captain America: the Rogers-approved Wilson and the state-sponsored John Walker (Wyatt Russell). The series explores the concept of heroism and links it to questions of race.

    In American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (2003), associate professor of American studies Holly Allen argues that: “The basis of American notions of both heroism and manliness has been a tension between virtuous devotion to a higher cause and the quest for personal achievement.”

    This tension is palpably played out in the narrative arc of Rogers and in some ways resolved across the course of his films. His personal achievement (thanks to the super-soldier serum) is put in service of a higher cause, first during the second world war, later with the Avengers and finally in passing the shield to Wilson.

    The state-sponsored shield

    Despite his disillusionment, Rogers is positioned as being the living embodiment of the American dream, rather than a tool of the state. The same cannot be said of Walker, the white, blond, blue-eyed, highly decorated soldier selected to be the next Captain America by the US government.

    Rogers’ Captain America was conceived of to fight against and be ideologically opposed to fascism. But Walker’s short-lived tenure sees him – with the backing of the “Global Repatriation Council” – carrying out raids on safe houses and refuges. He angrily demands that the people he is brutalising show him respect purely because he is Captain America.

    Walker becomes, effectively, the public face of the Global Repatriation Council. Armed with the shield and dubbed the new “Star Spangled Man”, he embodies a particularly American brand of aggressive insertion into global politics. This can be interpreted as a critique of the positioning of America as “the world’s policeman”.

    Wilson’s speech in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.

    During the show, Walker’s murder of an unarmed dissident brings his stint as Captain America to an end. The shield, mantle and title of Captain America therefore return to Wilson, whose climatic speech in the series’ finale articulates the hostility and judgment he faces as a black man wearing the stars and stripes.

    During the recent promotional tour for Brave New World, Mackie stated that Captain America was a man with “honour, dignity and integrity”, noting that these are virtues not currently embodied by America the state.

    He added that while Cap represents many things, “America” as it currently is should not be one of them. It looks likely then that Wilson’s Captain will return the character to the ideal of the nation as it should be, rather than a tool of state propaganda and repression.

    Unsurprisingly, Mackie has faced enormous backlash to his comments – despite them being almost identical to sentiments expressed by Evans in 2011. Whatever the future of the character in the MCU, ideas around heroism, patriotism and race will be central to the continuing evolution of Captain America.

    Laura Crossley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Captain America: what the evolution of the superhero says about the US – https://theconversation.com/captain-america-what-the-evolution-of-the-superhero-says-about-the-us-249635

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: We have always used music to express our love – we can now use AI too

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Hussein Boon, Principal Lecturer – Music, University of Westminster

    GoodStudio/Shutterstock

    As a nine-year-old, I loved singing and took every chance to do so enthusiastically during school assemblies and end-of-year shows. I developed a bit of a reputation, so much so that one day, a classmate asked me to serenade him and a girl. Cut to me belting Donna by 10CC from behind a bush outside his bedroom window.

    My classmate was lacking in musical or lyrical abilities to write and perform his own song. However, if he found himself in a similar position this Valentine’s Day, he could get a little help from AI, and so can you.

    Suno’s Valentine’s Day Experience is a tool to create personalised love songs in response to a three-question prompt. Keenan Freyberg, one of Suno’s co-founders, noted that their generator is similar to a mixtape, a curated collection of songs that can reflect the compiler’s feelings and intentions.

    Music and dance have long served as mediators in matters of love. A British music publisher, writing in 1912, recounted in Pete Doggett’s Electric Shock, noted that music was essential at the start of a courtship, with song lyrics needing to be a blend of directness and obliqueness. This balance should allow the message to be understood while providing a safe way to ignore it if the sentiment is not reciprocated.

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    So, for instance, if you send someone At Last by Etta James you can plausibly deny that it meant anything. You were just sharing a great song. If, however, they share the sentiment and hear a ring of reciprocal feeling in James’s voice then you can bond in a burgeoning romance where “life is like a song”.

    Many of us have probably been guilty of doing this and there are so many love songs out there that there is quite possibly one to help convey every sort of romantic feeling.

    A recent survey by the UK’s Performing Rights Society of 2,000 British respondents identified All of Me by John Legend as the UK’s favourite love song. The song was prompted by an old friend of Legend’s who suggested that he write one for his future-wife, Chrissy Teigen, that conveyed a similar message as Billy Joel’s She’s Always A Woman To Me. The idea that you could love someone, flaws and all, is a pretty powerful and universal sentiment.

    In the US, a similar chart compiled by Billboard of the top 50 songs with love in their title, spanned hits from 1958 to 2011. The top track was Endless Love by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, a true classic about undying feelings and commitment.

    The most recently released song in the list was Rhianna’s We Found Love featuring Calvin Harris from 2011. The song’s lyrics and central hook, “We found love in a hopeless place,” were written by Calvin Harris and conveys perhaps a more youthful, possibly hedonistic message of love in a club based track.

    All of these songs have really strong sentiments, but they aren’t quite the same as expressing your unique thoughts and feelings for your intended yourself. But if, like my 10CC-loving friend, you lack the skill, AI could help you craft something a bit more specific for your intended.

    Suno’s love song generator asks for you to plug in your love interest’s name, where you met and something nice about them. The product is a personalised love song. While you might not be able to hide your feelings in the words of others with this AI-generated song, there is something brave and worthy about being so forthright.

    Such a direct show of emotion might not be for you but this new development in AI makes clear that music and words have long been essential in the expression of love through the ages. As my experience at the tender age of nine confirms, providing the right words, with a suitable melody, at crucial moments mitigates the awkwardness of males, of all ages, where matters of the heart are concerned. Even in the age of AI.

    Hussein Boon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. We have always used music to express our love – we can now use AI too – https://theconversation.com/we-have-always-used-music-to-express-our-love-we-can-now-use-ai-too-249523

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Valentine’s Day: the economic value of romantic tradition

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sameer Hosany, Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London

    Evgeny Karandaev/Shutterstock

    We may never know if St Valentine, a martyr beheaded for officiating the forbidden weddings of persecuted Christians, was keen on chocolate and flowers. But we do know that millions of people around the world will be using those very items to celebrate his name on February 14.

    In the UK, it is estimated that 60% of the population will celebrate Valentine’s Day this year, each spending around £52 on gifts and other romantic gestures. The total spend in the US will be about US$27 billion (£22 bilion), including roughly $US500 million on roses.

    So the tradition of spending money on your romantic partner on February 14 seems fairly well established. But it is hard to know exactly when the link began.

    Up until the late 14th century, Valentine’s Day was solely a commemoration of his martyrdom. The shift toward an association with romantic love emerged in the Middle Ages, and is often attributed to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who linked Valentine’s Day to romance in his poem Parliament of Fowls.

    But it was the 19th century industrial revolution which brought about the mass production of romantic gifts. Cadbury was the first chocolate maker to commercialise the association between romance and confectionery by producing heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for Valentine’s Day in 1868. These boxes were decorated with images of Cupid, roses and hearts, and would sometimes be kept to store romantic letters and mementos.

    And while Hallmark did not invent the occasion, it played a big part in bolstering its popularity by selling Valentine’s Day postcards in 1910, and then printing its own greetings cards from 1916.

    Now in the US, around 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each year, making it the second largest annual occasion for card giving (after Christmas).

    But it’s not just car sellers, florists and chocolate-makers who seek to benefit from the commercial opportunities Valentine’s Day provides. This year for example, IKEA has partnered with a dating app to give nine British couples a “once-in-a-lifetime” first date in an Ikea store, where they will share a meatball dinner for two in bed.

    Lego has launched a travelling campaign in major cities around the world to show off its floral designs, and Coca-Cola has teamed up with a fast-food brand to create a Valentine-themed drive-thru experience.

    Chocolate and marshmallows

    These kinds of one-off marketing campaigns are only possible thanks to a long history of Valentine’s traditions, which vary around the world.

    In Japan for example, it is a two-part celebration. On February 14, women often give “Giri-choco” (“obligation chocolate”) to friends and colleagues, while “home-choco” (“true-feeling chocolate”) is reserved for romantic partners. On March 14, known as White Day, men reciprocate by giving jewellery and less-expensive gifts that are white (marshmallows are a popular choice).

    Celebrations in South Korea are similar to those in Japan, but with the addition of Black Day on April 14 when single people gather at restaurants to eat black noodles (jajangmyeon). In the Philippines, Valentine’s Day is marked by mass weddings organised by the government.

    In Finland and Estonia, Valentine’s Day is known as “Friend’s Day” with the focus on celebrating non-romantic love and friendship. A similar idea, “Galentine’s Day”, which featured in a 2010 episode of the US sitcom Parks and Recreation, has become a popular way of celebrating female friendship.

    Love for sale

    Of course, not all consumers enjoy Valentine’s Day rituals. For many, there is pressure attached to romantic shopping, while for others it is just an unwelcome reminder of their single status.

    It can also bring social pressure, and lead to feelings of obligation and self-loathing.

    But there is a market for that too. Anti-Valentine’s day sentiment has inspired other ways to (not) celebrate, including a box of chocolates aimed at single people.

    And it can be a very valuable day for businesses, large and small. With high levels of participation and spending, Valentine’s Day brings a major surge in revenue for sectors including retail, hospitality and entertainment.

    So although it might not sound very romantic, it’s worth remembering that while money can’t buy you love, love can provide a significant boost to the economy.

    Sameer Hosany does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Valentine’s Day: the economic value of romantic tradition – https://theconversation.com/valentines-day-the-economic-value-of-romantic-tradition-248594

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Five ways humans have scuppered the love lives of animals

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Louise Gentle, Principal Lecturer in Wildlife Conservation, Nottingham Trent University

    In Canada, male bears are becoming more nocturnal and overlapping less with females. Erik Mandre / shutterstock

    Frustrated with which dating app to use? Unable to find “the one”? Spare a thought for some of the animal kingdom, where humanity has hampered their efforts to find a mate.

    Humans have destroyed or polluted animal habitats. But perhaps the most obvious way that we have affected animals is by placing barriers, such as roads, between populations, making it hard for individual animals to reach each other. In response to this habitat fragmentation, reptile and bird species have increased the distances they move by 35% and 50% respectively.

    Here are five more ways that humans have scuppered the love lives of animals.

    Noise pollution causes animals to sing louder

    Song is hugely important for birds and some other animals, as it indicates their fitness – those who sing louder, or more elaborately, are better able to defend territories against rivals and attract higher quality mates. But city-living great tits have to sing at a higher frequency than those in rural areas, in order to be heard over the sound of low frequency urban noises, such as traffic and machinery. They also sing faster, shorter songs.

    Songbirds have learned to survive in a noisy world.
    Bildagentur Zoonar GmbH / shutterstock

    And its not just terrestrial animals that have changed their behaviour in response to humans. As oceans are largely dark, most marine animals rely on non-visual cues, such as sound, to help them find food, navigate and attract mates. Although some whale song can be over 180 decibels in volume – comparable to the sound of a rocket launch – and heard thousands of miles away, ocean noises caused by humans can be even louder.

    Not only does noise pollution make it much harder to communicate to potential mates, it has also been linked to more frequent strandings, reduced growth and low fertility in whales and dolphins. Narwhals, for example, have even responded to loud noises by diving deeper into the oceans, using up vital resources that they could be putting into reproducing.

    Human disturbance makes mammals more nocturnal

    Given that humans are daytime dwellers, it’s not surprising that some animals have developed nocturnal habits to avoid coming into contact with us. Animals often practice this sort of risk avoidance, but typically they move in space – away from us. With a reduction in available space, animals are also moving in time.

    Mammals have been found to become more nocturnal in response to human disturbance. This disturbance could be anything from hiking to hunting: animals tend to view all human activity as threatening, whether it is or not.

    For example, large male brown bears become more nocturnal when humans are present. But this creates less competition for food during the day. Consequently, the females stick to their daytime activity, essentially separating the males and females in time, and making it increasing difficult to find a mate that won’t fall asleep on them.

    Introduced species hybridise with locals

    Species that are introduced to areas where they are not usually found, whether on purpose or by accident, often wreak havoc on the native animals, spreading disease and out-competing, or even preying, on them.

    The white headed duck is endangered, thanks to hunting, habitat loss, and the new thread of interbreeding with ruddy ducks.
    smutan / shutterstock

    The ruddy duck was unintentionally introduced to Great Britain from North America around 75 years ago, and quickly spread throughout western Europe. After finding their way to Spain, they mated with the endangered white-headed duck, managing to produce fertile offspring and a new hybrid duck. This is pushing the white-headed duck to extinction – not good if you are a white-headed duck looking for love.

    Chemical pollution turns males into females

    Imagine searching for a reproductive partner only to find none of the opposite sex. This is the unfortunate situation some fish have found themselves in.

    Some streams, containing wastewater or effluents, are polluted with synthetic oestrogens from birth-control pills. A study on fathead minnow fish found that increased levels of synthetic oestrogens caused males to have less developed testicles and early-stage eggs. The fish that developed these intersex traits – both male and female characteristics – were found to have fewer and less mobile sperm, which reduced their fertilisation success. This can lead to less sustainable populations, ultimately resulting in extinctions – hardly a good way to find love.

    A rubbish Valentine’s Day gift

    Animals often ingest plastic and other rubbish, or becoming tangled in it. But rubbish isn’t entirely bad news for all animals.

    For instance, birds often use human-made materials when building nests, implying that some species are intentionally using rubbish to show off to members of the opposite sex. One particular species, the satin bower bird, constructs highly ornate bowers – stages where the males show off to the females – decorated with blue items. The more complex the bower, the better the mating success.

    Bower building, with blue plastic litter.
    Ken Griffiths / shutterstock

    But, as there are relatively few blue items in nature, the males now decorate their bowers with as many bright blue items of human rubbish as possible, including bottles tops, crisp packets, pegs and even blue condom wrappers. So, although humans are making it increasingly difficult for animals to survive and reproduce, for this particular bird, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

    Louise Gentle works for Nottingham Trent University

    – ref. Five ways humans have scuppered the love lives of animals – https://theconversation.com/five-ways-humans-have-scuppered-the-love-lives-of-animals-249425

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –