NewzIntel.com

Category: Analysis

  • MIL-Evening Report: ER Report: A Roundup of Significant Articles on EveningReport.nz for July 17, 2025

    ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on July 17, 2025.

    Do women really need more sleep than men? A sleep psychologist explains
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amelia Scott, Honorary Affiliate and Clinical Psychologist at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, and Macquarie University Research Fellow, Macquarie University klebercordeiro/Getty If you spend any time in the wellness corners of TikTok or Instagram, you’ll see claims women need one to two hours more sleep than

    I created a Vivaldi-inspired sound artwork for the Venice Biennale. The star of the show is an endangered bush-cricket
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miriama Young, Associate Professor Music Composition, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, The University of Melbourne Marco Zorzanello It was late January when I got the call. I’m asked to bring my sound art to a collaborative ecology and design project, Song of the Cricket, for the Venice Biennale

    Is it okay to boil water more than once, or should you empty the kettle every time?
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Faisal Hai, Professor and Head of School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Wollongong Avocado_studio/Shutterstock The kettle is a household staple practically everywhere – how else would we make our hot drinks? But is it okay to re-boil water that’s already in the kettle

    What does Australian law have to say about sovereign citizens and ‘pseudolaw’?
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madeleine Perrett, PhD Candidate in Law, University of Adelaide Armed with obscure legal jargon and fringe interpretations of the law, “sovereign citizens” are continuing to test the limits of the Australian justice system’s patience and power. A few weeks ago, two Western Australians were jailed for 30

    Is childbirth really safer for women and babies in private hospitals?
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University A study published this week in the international obstetrics and gynaecology journal BJOG has raised concerns among women due to give birth in Australia’s public hospitals. The study compared the outcomes

    We were part of the world heritage listing of Murujuga. Here’s why all Australians should be proud
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo McDonald, Professor, Director of Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia Senior Ranger, Mardudunhera man Peter Cooper, oversees the Murujuga landscape Jo McDonald, CC BY-SA On Friday, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape in northwest Western Australia was inscribed on the UNESCO World

    Is our mental health determined by where we live – or is it the other way round? New research sheds more light
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Hobbs, Associate Professor and Transforming Lives Fellow, Spatial Data Science and Planetary Health, Sheffield Hallam University Photon-Photos/Getty Images Ever felt like where you live is having an impact on your mental health? Turns out, you’re not imagining things. Our new analysis of eight years of data

    The secret stories of trees are written in the knots and swirls of your floorboards. An expert explains how to read them
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne Magda Ehlers/Pexels, CC BY Have you ever examined timber floorboards and pondered why they look the way they do? Perhaps you admired the super-fine grain, a stunning red hue or a

    Tasmania is limping towards an election nobody wants. Here’s the state of play
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Hortle, Deputy Director, Tasmanian Policy Exchange, University of Tasmania In the darkest and coldest months of the year, Tasmanians have been slogging through an election campaign no one wanted. It’s been a curious mix of humdrum plodding laced with cyanide levels of bitterness, with the most

    What is astigmatism? Why does it make my vision blurry? And how did I get it?
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flora Hui, Research Fellow, Centre for Eye Research Australia and Honorary Fellow, Department of Surgery (Ophthalmology), The University of Melbourne Ground Picture/Shutterstock Have you ever gone to the optometrist for an eye test and were told your eye was shaped like a football? Or perhaps you’ve noticed

    From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama: how electric guitarists challenge expectations of gender
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janelle K Johnstone, Associate Lecturer Crime, Justice and Legal Studies, PhD Candidate School of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University American gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar on stage in 1957. Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images I’ve been playing a

    Ken Henry urges nature law reform after decades of ‘intergenerational bastardry’
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phillipa C. McCormack, Future Making Fellow, Environment Institute, University of Adelaide Former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry has warned Australia’s global environmental reputation is at risk if the Albanese government fails to reform nature laws this term. In his speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, Henry

    David Robie: New Zealand must do more for Pacific and confront nuclear powers
    Rongelap Islanders on board the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior travelling to their new home on Mejatto Island in 1985 — less than two months before the bombing. Image: ©1985 David Robie/Eyes of Fire He accused the coalition government of being “too timid” and “afraid of offending President Donald Trump” to make a stand on the

    First-hand view of peacemaking challenge in the ‘Holy Land’
    Occupied West Bank-based New Zealand journalist Cole Martin asks who are the peacemakers? BEARING WITNESS: By Cole Martin As a Kiwi journalist living in the occupied West Bank, I can list endless reasons why there is no peace in the “Holy Land”. I live in a refugee camp, alongside families who were expelled from their

    Politics with Michelle Grattan: Malcolm Turnbull on Australia’s ‘dumb’ defence debate
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The Albanese government remains in complicated territory on the international stage. It has to tread carefully with China, despite the marked warming of the bilateral relationship. It is yet to find its line and length with the unpredictable Trump administration.

    Why is Israel bombing Syria?
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ali Mamouri, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies, Deakin University Conflict in Syria has escalated with Israel launching bombing raids against its northern neighbour. It follows months of fluctuating tensions in southern Syria between the Druze minority and forces aligned with the new government in Damascus. Clashes erupted

    Bougainville election: More than 400 candidates vie for parliament
    By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist More than 400 candidates have put their hands up to contest the Bougainville general election in September, hoping to enter Parliament. Incumbent President Ishmael Toroama is among the 404 people lining up to win a seat. Bougainville is involved in the process of achieving independence from Papua New

    Scientists could be accidentally damaging fossils with a method we thought was safe
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mathieu Duval, Adjunct Senior Researcher at Griffith University and La Trobe University, and Ramón y Cajal (Senior) Research Fellow, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) 185,000-year-old human fossil jawbone from Misliya Cave, Israel. Gerhard Weber, University of Vienna, CC BY-ND Fossils are invaluable archives

    Right-wing political group Advance is in the headlines. What is it and what does it stand for?
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Riboldi, Lecturer in Social Impact and Social Change, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney Advance/Facebook Political lobby group Advance has been back in the headlines this week. It was revealed an organisation headed by the husband of the Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism, Jillian Segal,

    We travelled to Antarctica to see if a Māori lunar calendar might help track environmental change
    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Holly Winton, Senior Research Fellow in Climatology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Holly Winton, CC BY-SA Antarctica’s patterns of stark seasonal changes, with months of darkness followed by a summer of 24-hour daylight, prompted us to explore how a Māori lunar and environmental calendar

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • Catholic clergy are speaking out on immigration − more than any other political issue except abortion

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Evan Stewart, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UMass Boston

    Catholic bishops invited by Mark Seitz, center, the bishop of El Paso, Texas, lead a march in solidarity with migrants on March 24, 2025, in downtown El Paso. AP Photo/Andres Leighton

    Catholic priests across the U.S. discuss immigration with their congregations more than leaders in many other faith traditions, according to our new research published in the journal Sociological Focus.

    Catholic priests also said they discussed immigration more than nearly all other political issues, including hunger in their communities, capital punishment, health care and the environment. Abortion was the only one priests discussed slightly more often.

    Our study, which uses data from the 2022 National Survey of Religious Leaders, found that 71% of Catholic priests surveyed said they spoke about any political issue with their congregations. Among them, just over half talked about immigration.

    In white conservative Protestant congregations, Black Protestant congregations and non-Christian congregations, only about a quarter of leaders who discussed political issues said they talked about immigration. Leaders of white liberal Protestant congregations, however, talked about the topic almost as much as Catholic leaders did.

    Why it matters

    The United States has a long history of religious leaders addressing political matters, on both the left and the right – and today is no different.

    With immigration raids on the rise across the country and an unprecedented level of funding approved for deportations, Catholic bishops in the U.S. are speaking out. Many of them have called for compassion and care for migrants and the need to uphold human dignity and due process, regardless of someone’s immigration status – in line with Catholic social teaching.

    As sociologists who study politics and religion, we wanted to know what is happening on the ground in congregations. Given the church’s teachings about caring for the vulnerable, we expected that Catholic clergy might be particularly likely to speak out.

    However, the percentage of people affiliated with a religious congregation is decreasing, and those who do attend are increasingly politically conservative. Rank and file Catholics are very divided on their support for immigrants, according to a 2024 national survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

    In this context, we were curious about whether clergy would discuss a political issue such as immigration with their congregations or say they avoid it altogether.

    What still isn’t known

    The survey we used is from 2022, before some of today’s immigration enforcement policies took effect. That said, these findings demonstrate that immigration was on the radar for Catholic leaders before the recent changes under the current administration.

    Because we focused on survey data, we got a good picture of trends among Catholic leaders nationwide. However, we could look only at whether religious leaders reported discussing immigration; we could not know exactly what they said, or how. There is much more to learn about what kinds of political messages come from the pulpit today and what messages tend to stick with congregants.

    We did find that Catholic leaders of congregations where the majority of worshipers are Hispanic were much more likely to talk about immigration, compared with leaders of non-Catholic Hispanic congregations and Catholic leaders of mostly white congregations. Because Hispanic communities in the U.S. are facing the brunt of the immigration crackdown, this finding shows that Catholic leaders have been addressing the needs of their communities.

    What’s next

    Catholic parishioners may be exposed to different opinions about immigration from religious and political leaders. Diane, one of the authors, is furthering this research by conducting interviews with Catholics in Greater Boston. By asking church members to talk through their attitudes toward immigrants, we can learn more about how people make sense of complicated ethical questions.

    The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

    The Conversation

    Diane Beckman received funding from Duke University to conduct research using data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders.

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

    – ref. Catholic clergy are speaking out on immigration − more than any other political issue except abortion – https://theconversation.com/catholic-clergy-are-speaking-out-on-immigration-more-than-any-other-political-issue-except-abortion-260485

  • MIL-Evening Report: I created a Vivaldi-inspired sound artwork for the Venice Biennale. The star of the show is an endangered bush-cricket

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miriama Young, Associate Professor Music Composition, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, The University of Melbourne

    Marco Zorzanello

    It was late January when I got the call. I’m asked to bring my sound art to a collaborative ecology and design project, Song of the Cricket, for the Venice Biennale of Architecture. When such as invitation arrives, you have no choice but to jump in.

    I see an image of the site for the project: the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale – a medieval shipyard that serviced the Venetian military at its imperial peak.

    Once a resplendent hive of industry, it is even detailed by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy:

    As in the arsenal of the Venetians,
    all winter long a stew of sticky pitch
    boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships
    that cannot sail (instead of voyaging,
    some build new keels, some tow and tar the ribs
    of hulls worn out by too much journeying;
    some hammer at the prow, some at the stern,
    and some make oars, and some braid ropes and cords;
    one mends the jib, another, the mainsail)

    The Gaggiandre is a cavernous, church-like space flanked by stone colonnades, wooden roof beams, and situated, in true Venetian style, on a bed of water. With long reverberation times, music in this space would need to be slowly unfolding, drawing the listener in and inviting them to meditate.

    It is a place of reflection, both metaphorically and physically. To a sound artist, creating for the Gaggiandre is a dream.

    Art and the Anthropocene

    The Song of the Cricket exhibit has been on display at the Biennale since May. Its purpose is to bridge ecological research with sound art to raise awareness for our fragile biodiversity, with a focus on the critically endangered Adriatic bush-cricket, Zeuneriana marmorata.

    Zeuneriana marmorata is a rare species found in wetlands in north-eastern Italy and Slovenia.
    Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

    What better place than Venice – a city slowly sinking – to reflect on where we stand in this moment of environmental collapse?

    The exhibit was created by a large team of collaborators. It features several mobile habitats populated with Zeuneriana. Some of these habitats sit on the Arsenale lawn, while other symbolic habitats float on the water as life rafts. Alongside the enclosures, my pre-composed “sound garden” plays through speakers onto the lawn.

    At the end of the Biennale, the team, led by landscape architect and ecologist Alex Felson, intends to use the life rafts to ceremonially transport incubated eggs to a new home on the mainland.

    The installation features mobile cricket habitats on the lawn, as well as symbolic life rafts on the water.
    Miriama Young

    Sounds of nature and Vivaldi

    On the lawn, the chirrup of live courting bush-crickets blends with pre-recorded sounds of their ancestors. These ancestral sounds might double as a lullaby for newly orphaned eggs, as adults only live a few months.

    The accompanying sound garden is richly diverse, created from an array of fauna sounds drawn from Northern Italian wetland environments, including the Eurasian reed warbler, the cuckoo and, my personal favourite, the green toad.

    My intention is for the soundscape to transport audiences to a different time and place: to a future where these species thrive in a healthy ecology.

    Excerpt from the Song of Crickets sound installation.
    Miriama Young and Monica Lim1.73 MB (download)

    There is a second element to the sound installation, created with support from sound technologist Monica Lim. Informed by the music of Antonio Vivaldi, this element serves to further activate the untapped airspace and enhance visitors’ experience of the site.

    Born in Venice in 1678, Vivaldi is a ubiquitous and avoidable cliché for locals. Yet his music was the perfect inspiration for this project, as it encodes a hidden ecological story.

    Vivaldi incorporated the literal sounds of nature into The Four Seasons (1723), with particular species’ songs annotated onto the score.

    The Song of the Cricket borrows elements from Vivaldi’s Summer: Allegro non Molto. In the short section I drew from, the cuckoo, turtledove and goldfinch are all musically described and credited by Vivaldi.

    And although they are not expressly mentioned, I imagine bush-crickets also pervade Vivaldi’s Summer movement, as we know they were once prolific in the Venice lagoon, and would have filled the summer air during his lifetime. You might hear them in the rapidly repeating (tremolo) string gestures.

    The cricket’s song serves as a indicator of an ecosystem’s health. But the sound of crickets in Venice today is largely missing.

    Our take on Vivaldi is slowed down 30 times, magnified and fragmented, voiced through synthesizers, and piped into the Gaggiandre through five speakers – creating an immersive experience that feels at once futuristic and Baroque.

    Mobile habitats awaiting the Zeuneriana marmorata eggs float on the water.
    Marco Zorzanello

    Bridging the past and an imagined future

    The decision to borrow from music of the Western historical canon (in this case Vivaldi) fits into a burgeoning movement that composer Valentin Silvestrov coined “eschatophony”.

    This is presumably a portmanteau of “eschatology”, the study of the end of the world, and “phony”, which in this case relates to sound (such as symphony). Here, we are left only to wrestle with and re-contextualise our musical past, to create “echoes of history”.

    The inclusion of sound is still a novelty at the architecture Biennale. Of the 300 exhibits this year, I can count on one hand the projects that incorporated sound. All of them were special.

    Sound creates a remarkable theatre, both through its immediacy, as well as its capacity to elevate a project beyond the prosaic, into the poetic.

    Venice is a city where history pervades at every turn. The Song of the Cricket invites listeners in, offering them space to reflect, and to imagine a future where ecosystems might once again thrive.

    This article is part of Making Art Work, our series on what inspires artists and the process of their work.

    Miriama Young 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. I created a Vivaldi-inspired sound artwork for the Venice Biennale. The star of the show is an endangered bush-cricket – https://theconversation.com/i-created-a-vivaldi-inspired-sound-artwork-for-the-venice-biennale-the-star-of-the-show-is-an-endangered-bush-cricket-259681

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: I created a Vivaldi-inspired sound artwork for the Venice Biennale. The star of the show is an endangered bush-cricket

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miriama Young, Associate Professor Music Composition, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, The University of Melbourne

    Marco Zorzanello

    It was late January when I got the call. I’m asked to bring my sound art to a collaborative ecology and design project, Song of the Cricket, for the Venice Biennale of Architecture. When such as invitation arrives, you have no choice but to jump in.

    I see an image of the site for the project: the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale – a medieval shipyard that serviced the Venetian military at its imperial peak.

    Once a resplendent hive of industry, it is even detailed by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy:

    As in the arsenal of the Venetians,
    all winter long a stew of sticky pitch
    boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships
    that cannot sail (instead of voyaging,
    some build new keels, some tow and tar the ribs
    of hulls worn out by too much journeying;
    some hammer at the prow, some at the stern,
    and some make oars, and some braid ropes and cords;
    one mends the jib, another, the mainsail)

    The Gaggiandre is a cavernous, church-like space flanked by stone colonnades, wooden roof beams, and situated, in true Venetian style, on a bed of water. With long reverberation times, music in this space would need to be slowly unfolding, drawing the listener in and inviting them to meditate.

    It is a place of reflection, both metaphorically and physically. To a sound artist, creating for the Gaggiandre is a dream.

    Art and the Anthropocene

    The Song of the Cricket exhibit has been on display at the Biennale since May. Its purpose is to bridge ecological research with sound art to raise awareness for our fragile biodiversity, with a focus on the critically endangered Adriatic bush-cricket, Zeuneriana marmorata.

    Zeuneriana marmorata is a rare species found in wetlands in north-eastern Italy and Slovenia.
    Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

    What better place than Venice – a city slowly sinking – to reflect on where we stand in this moment of environmental collapse?

    The exhibit was created by a large team of collaborators. It features several mobile habitats populated with Zeuneriana. Some of these habitats sit on the Arsenale lawn, while other symbolic habitats float on the water as life rafts. Alongside the enclosures, my pre-composed “sound garden” plays through speakers onto the lawn.

    At the end of the Biennale, the team, led by landscape architect and ecologist Alex Felson, intends to use the life rafts to ceremonially transport incubated eggs to a new home on the mainland.

    The installation features mobile cricket habitats on the lawn, as well as symbolic life rafts on the water.
    Miriama Young

    Sounds of nature and Vivaldi

    On the lawn, the chirrup of live courting bush-crickets blends with pre-recorded sounds of their ancestors. These ancestral sounds might double as a lullaby for newly orphaned eggs, as adults only live a few months.

    The accompanying sound garden is richly diverse, created from an array of fauna sounds drawn from Northern Italian wetland environments, including the Eurasian reed warbler, the cuckoo and, my personal favourite, the green toad.

    My intention is for the soundscape to transport audiences to a different time and place: to a future where these species thrive in a healthy ecology.

    Excerpt from the Song of Crickets sound installation.
    Miriama Young and Monica Lim1.73 MB (download)

    There is a second element to the sound installation, created with support from sound technologist Monica Lim. Informed by the music of Antonio Vivaldi, this element serves to further activate the untapped airspace and enhance visitors’ experience of the site.

    Born in Venice in 1678, Vivaldi is a ubiquitous and avoidable cliché for locals. Yet his music was the perfect inspiration for this project, as it encodes a hidden ecological story.

    Vivaldi incorporated the literal sounds of nature into The Four Seasons (1723), with particular species’ songs annotated onto the score.

    The Song of the Cricket borrows elements from Vivaldi’s Summer: Allegro non Molto. In the short section I drew from, the cuckoo, turtledove and goldfinch are all musically described and credited by Vivaldi.

    And although they are not expressly mentioned, I imagine bush-crickets also pervade Vivaldi’s Summer movement, as we know they were once prolific in the Venice lagoon, and would have filled the summer air during his lifetime. You might hear them in the rapidly repeating (tremolo) string gestures.

    The cricket’s song serves as a indicator of an ecosystem’s health. But the sound of crickets in Venice today is largely missing.

    Our take on Vivaldi is slowed down 30 times, magnified and fragmented, voiced through synthesizers, and piped into the Gaggiandre through five speakers – creating an immersive experience that feels at once futuristic and Baroque.

    Mobile habitats awaiting the Zeuneriana marmorata eggs float on the water.
    Marco Zorzanello

    Bridging the past and an imagined future

    The decision to borrow from music of the Western historical canon (in this case Vivaldi) fits into a burgeoning movement that composer Valentin Silvestrov coined “eschatophony”.

    This is presumably a portmanteau of “eschatology”, the study of the end of the world, and “phony”, which in this case relates to sound (such as symphony). Here, we are left only to wrestle with and re-contextualise our musical past, to create “echoes of history”.

    The inclusion of sound is still a novelty at the architecture Biennale. Of the 300 exhibits this year, I can count on one hand the projects that incorporated sound. All of them were special.

    Sound creates a remarkable theatre, both through its immediacy, as well as its capacity to elevate a project beyond the prosaic, into the poetic.

    Venice is a city where history pervades at every turn. The Song of the Cricket invites listeners in, offering them space to reflect, and to imagine a future where ecosystems might once again thrive.

    This article is part of Making Art Work, our series on what inspires artists and the process of their work.

    Miriama Young 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. I created a Vivaldi-inspired sound artwork for the Venice Biennale. The star of the show is an endangered bush-cricket – https://theconversation.com/i-created-a-vivaldi-inspired-sound-artwork-for-the-venice-biennale-the-star-of-the-show-is-an-endangered-bush-cricket-259681

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Do women really need more sleep than men? A sleep psychologist explains

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amelia Scott, Honorary Affiliate and Clinical Psychologist at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, and Macquarie University Research Fellow, Macquarie University

    klebercordeiro/Getty

    If you spend any time in the wellness corners of TikTok or Instagram, you’ll see claims women need one to two hours more sleep than men.

    But what does the research actually say? And how does this relate to what’s going on in real life?

    As we’ll see, who gets to sleep, and for how long, is a complex mix of biology, psychology and societal expectations. It also depends on how you measure sleep.

    What does the evidence say?

    Researchers usually measure sleep in two ways:

    • by asking people how much they sleep (known as self-reporting). But people are surprisingly inaccurate at estimating how much sleep they get

    • using objective tools, such as research-grade, wearable sleep trackers or the gold-standard polysomnography, which records brain waves, breathing and movement while you sleep during a sleep study in a lab or clinic.

    Looking at the objective data, well-conducted studies usually show women sleep about 20 minutes more than men.

    One global study of nearly 70,000 people who wore wearable sleep trackers found a consistent, small difference between men and women across age groups. For example, the sleep difference between men and women aged 40–44 was about 23–29 minutes.

    Another large study using polysomnography found women slept about 19 minutes longer than men. In this study, women also spent more time in deep sleep: about 23% of the night compared to about 14% for men. The study also found only men’s quality of sleep declined with age.

    The key caveat to these findings is that our individual sleep needs vary considerably. Women may sleep slightly more on average, just as they are slightly shorter on average. But there is no one-size-fits-all sleep duration, just as there is no universal height.

    Suggesting every woman needs 20 extra minutes (let alone two hours) misses the point. It’s the same as insisting all women should be shorter than all men.

    Even though women tend to sleep a little longer and deeper, they consistently report poorer sleep quality. They’re also about 40% more likely to be diagnosed with insomnia.

    This mismatch between lab findings and the real world is a well-known puzzle in sleep research, and there are many reasons for it.

    For instance, many research studies don’t consider mental health problems, medications, alcohol use and hormonal fluctuations. This filters out the very factors that shape sleep in the real world.

    This mismatch between the lab and the bedroom also reminds us sleep doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Women’s sleep is shaped by a complex mix of biological, psychological and social factors, and this complexity is hard to capture in individual studies.

    Let’s start with biology

    Sleep problems begin to diverge between the sexes around puberty. They spike again during pregnancy, after birth and during perimenopause.

    Fluctuating levels of ovarian hormones, particularly oestrogen and progesterone, seem to explain some of these sex differences in sleep.

    For example, many girls and women report poorer sleep during the premenstrual phase just before their periods, when oestrogen and progesterone begin to fall.

    Perhaps the most well-documented hormonal influence on our sleep is the decline in oestrogen during perimenopause. This is linked to increased sleep disturbances, particularly waking at 3am and struggling to get back to sleep.

    Some health conditions also play a part in women’s sleep health. Thyroid disorders and iron deficiency, for instance, are more common in women and are closely linked to fatigue and disrupted sleep.

    How about psychology?

    Women are at much higher risk of depression, anxiety and trauma-related disorders. These very often accompany sleep problems and fatigue. Cognitive patterns, such as worry and rumination, are also more common in women and known to affect sleep.

    Women are also prescribed antidepressants more often than men, and these medications tend to affect sleep.

    Society also plays a role

    Caregiving and emotional labour still fall disproportionately on women. Government data released this year suggests Australian women perform an average nine more hours of unpaid care and work each week than men.

    While many women manage to put enough time aside for sleep, their opportunities for daytime rest are often scarce. This puts a lot of pressure on sleep to deliver all the restoration women need.

    In my work with patients, we often untangle the threads woven into their experience of fatigue. While poor sleep is the obvious culprit, fatigue can also signal something deeper, such as underlying health issues, emotional strain, or too-high expectations of themselves. Sleep is certainly part of the picture, but it’s rarely the whole story.

    For instance, rates of iron deficiency (which we know is more common in women and linked to sleep problems) are also higher in the reproductive years. This is just as many women are raising children and grappling with the “juggle” and the “mental load”.

    Women in perimenopause are often navigating full-time work, teenagers, ageing parents and 3am hot flashes. These women may have adequate or even high-quality sleep (according to objective measures), but that doesn’t mean they wake feeling restored.

    Most existing research also ignores gender-diverse populations. This limits our understanding of how sleep is shaped not just by biology, but by things such as identity and social context.

    So where does this leave us?

    While women sleep longer and better in the lab, they face more barriers to feeling rested in everyday life.

    So, do women need more sleep than men? On average, yes, a little. But more importantly, women need more support and opportunity to recharge and recover across the day, and at night.

    Amelia Scott is a member of the psychology education subcommittee of the Australasian Sleep Association. She receives funding from Macquarie University.

    – ref. Do women really need more sleep than men? A sleep psychologist explains – https://theconversation.com/do-women-really-need-more-sleep-than-men-a-sleep-psychologist-explains-259985

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Do women really need more sleep than men? A sleep psychologist explains

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amelia Scott, Honorary Affiliate and Clinical Psychologist at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, and Macquarie University Research Fellow, Macquarie University

    klebercordeiro/Getty

    If you spend any time in the wellness corners of TikTok or Instagram, you’ll see claims women need one to two hours more sleep than men.

    But what does the research actually say? And how does this relate to what’s going on in real life?

    As we’ll see, who gets to sleep, and for how long, is a complex mix of biology, psychology and societal expectations. It also depends on how you measure sleep.

    What does the evidence say?

    Researchers usually measure sleep in two ways:

    • by asking people how much they sleep (known as self-reporting). But people are surprisingly inaccurate at estimating how much sleep they get

    • using objective tools, such as research-grade, wearable sleep trackers or the gold-standard polysomnography, which records brain waves, breathing and movement while you sleep during a sleep study in a lab or clinic.

    Looking at the objective data, well-conducted studies usually show women sleep about 20 minutes more than men.

    One global study of nearly 70,000 people who wore wearable sleep trackers found a consistent, small difference between men and women across age groups. For example, the sleep difference between men and women aged 40–44 was about 23–29 minutes.

    Another large study using polysomnography found women slept about 19 minutes longer than men. In this study, women also spent more time in deep sleep: about 23% of the night compared to about 14% for men. The study also found only men’s quality of sleep declined with age.

    The key caveat to these findings is that our individual sleep needs vary considerably. Women may sleep slightly more on average, just as they are slightly shorter on average. But there is no one-size-fits-all sleep duration, just as there is no universal height.

    Suggesting every woman needs 20 extra minutes (let alone two hours) misses the point. It’s the same as insisting all women should be shorter than all men.

    Even though women tend to sleep a little longer and deeper, they consistently report poorer sleep quality. They’re also about 40% more likely to be diagnosed with insomnia.

    This mismatch between lab findings and the real world is a well-known puzzle in sleep research, and there are many reasons for it.

    For instance, many research studies don’t consider mental health problems, medications, alcohol use and hormonal fluctuations. This filters out the very factors that shape sleep in the real world.

    This mismatch between the lab and the bedroom also reminds us sleep doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Women’s sleep is shaped by a complex mix of biological, psychological and social factors, and this complexity is hard to capture in individual studies.

    Let’s start with biology

    Sleep problems begin to diverge between the sexes around puberty. They spike again during pregnancy, after birth and during perimenopause.

    Fluctuating levels of ovarian hormones, particularly oestrogen and progesterone, seem to explain some of these sex differences in sleep.

    For example, many girls and women report poorer sleep during the premenstrual phase just before their periods, when oestrogen and progesterone begin to fall.

    Perhaps the most well-documented hormonal influence on our sleep is the decline in oestrogen during perimenopause. This is linked to increased sleep disturbances, particularly waking at 3am and struggling to get back to sleep.

    Some health conditions also play a part in women’s sleep health. Thyroid disorders and iron deficiency, for instance, are more common in women and are closely linked to fatigue and disrupted sleep.

    How about psychology?

    Women are at much higher risk of depression, anxiety and trauma-related disorders. These very often accompany sleep problems and fatigue. Cognitive patterns, such as worry and rumination, are also more common in women and known to affect sleep.

    Women are also prescribed antidepressants more often than men, and these medications tend to affect sleep.

    Society also plays a role

    Caregiving and emotional labour still fall disproportionately on women. Government data released this year suggests Australian women perform an average nine more hours of unpaid care and work each week than men.

    While many women manage to put enough time aside for sleep, their opportunities for daytime rest are often scarce. This puts a lot of pressure on sleep to deliver all the restoration women need.

    In my work with patients, we often untangle the threads woven into their experience of fatigue. While poor sleep is the obvious culprit, fatigue can also signal something deeper, such as underlying health issues, emotional strain, or too-high expectations of themselves. Sleep is certainly part of the picture, but it’s rarely the whole story.

    For instance, rates of iron deficiency (which we know is more common in women and linked to sleep problems) are also higher in the reproductive years. This is just as many women are raising children and grappling with the “juggle” and the “mental load”.

    Women in perimenopause are often navigating full-time work, teenagers, ageing parents and 3am hot flashes. These women may have adequate or even high-quality sleep (according to objective measures), but that doesn’t mean they wake feeling restored.

    Most existing research also ignores gender-diverse populations. This limits our understanding of how sleep is shaped not just by biology, but by things such as identity and social context.

    So where does this leave us?

    While women sleep longer and better in the lab, they face more barriers to feeling rested in everyday life.

    So, do women need more sleep than men? On average, yes, a little. But more importantly, women need more support and opportunity to recharge and recover across the day, and at night.

    Amelia Scott is a member of the psychology education subcommittee of the Australasian Sleep Association. She receives funding from Macquarie University.

    – ref. Do women really need more sleep than men? A sleep psychologist explains – https://theconversation.com/do-women-really-need-more-sleep-than-men-a-sleep-psychologist-explains-259985

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Submissions: Catholic clergy are speaking out on immigration − more than any other political issue except abortion

    Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Evan Stewart, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UMass Boston

    Catholic bishops invited by Mark Seitz, center, the bishop of El Paso, Texas, lead a march in solidarity with migrants on March 24, 2025, in downtown El Paso. AP Photo/Andres Leighton

    Catholic priests across the U.S. discuss immigration with their congregations more than leaders in many other faith traditions, according to our new research published in the journal Sociological Focus.

    Catholic priests also said they discussed immigration more than nearly all other political issues, including hunger in their communities, capital punishment, health care and the environment. Abortion was the only one priests discussed slightly more often.

    Our study, which uses data from the 2022 National Survey of Religious Leaders, found that 71% of Catholic priests surveyed said they spoke about any political issue with their congregations. Among them, just over half talked about immigration.

    In white conservative Protestant congregations, Black Protestant congregations and non-Christian congregations, only about a quarter of leaders who discussed political issues said they talked about immigration. Leaders of white liberal Protestant congregations, however, talked about the topic almost as much as Catholic leaders did.

    Why it matters

    The United States has a long history of religious leaders addressing political matters, on both the left and the right – and today is no different.

    With immigration raids on the rise across the country and an unprecedented level of funding approved for deportations, Catholic bishops in the U.S. are speaking out. Many of them have called for compassion and care for migrants and the need to uphold human dignity and due process, regardless of someone’s immigration status – in line with Catholic social teaching.

    As sociologists who study politics and religion, we wanted to know what is happening on the ground in congregations. Given the church’s teachings about caring for the vulnerable, we expected that Catholic clergy might be particularly likely to speak out.

    However, the percentage of people affiliated with a religious congregation is decreasing, and those who do attend are increasingly politically conservative. Rank and file Catholics are very divided on their support for immigrants, according to a 2024 national survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

    In this context, we were curious about whether clergy would discuss a political issue such as immigration with their congregations or say they avoid it altogether.

    What still isn’t known

    The survey we used is from 2022, before some of today’s immigration enforcement policies took effect. That said, these findings demonstrate that immigration was on the radar for Catholic leaders before the recent changes under the current administration.

    Because we focused on survey data, we got a good picture of trends among Catholic leaders nationwide. However, we could look only at whether religious leaders reported discussing immigration; we could not know exactly what they said, or how. There is much more to learn about what kinds of political messages come from the pulpit today and what messages tend to stick with congregants.

    We did find that Catholic leaders of congregations where the majority of worshipers are Hispanic were much more likely to talk about immigration, compared with leaders of non-Catholic Hispanic congregations and Catholic leaders of mostly white congregations. Because Hispanic communities in the U.S. are facing the brunt of the immigration crackdown, this finding shows that Catholic leaders have been addressing the needs of their communities.

    What’s next

    Catholic parishioners may be exposed to different opinions about immigration from religious and political leaders. Diane, one of the authors, is furthering this research by conducting interviews with Catholics in Greater Boston. By asking church members to talk through their attitudes toward immigrants, we can learn more about how people make sense of complicated ethical questions.

    The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

    Diane Beckman received funding from Duke University to conduct research using data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders.

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

    – ref. Catholic clergy are speaking out on immigration − more than any other political issue except abortion – https://theconversation.com/catholic-clergy-are-speaking-out-on-immigration-more-than-any-other-political-issue-except-abortion-260485

    MIL OSI –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is childbirth really safer for women and babies in private hospitals?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

    A study published this week in the international obstetrics and gynaecology journal BJOG has raised concerns among women due to give birth in Australia’s public hospitals.

    The study compared the outcomes of mothers and babies, as well as the costs, of standard public maternity care versus private obstetric-led care from 2016 to 2019 in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

    It found women who gave birth in the public system were more likely to haemorrhage, sustain a third or fourth degree tear, and were less likely to have a caesarean than those who birthed in the private system. It found their babies were more likely to be deprived of oxygen, to be admitted to intensive care and to die.

    But the study and subsequent media reports don’t tell the whole story. There are also several reasons to be cautious about this data.

    And it’s important to keep in mind that while things sometimes go wrong during childbirth, the majority of women who give birth in Australia do so safely.

    Birth options in Australia

    Australia has a two-tiered system of health care:

    • a publicly funded system that provides care for free, or limited out-of-pocket costs, to patients in public hospitals

    • a private system where patients with private health insurance access care from doctors mainly in private hospitals. They face varying out-of-pocket costs.

    There are multiple models of maternity care in Australia, but these can be grouped into:

    • fragmented care models, where women see many different care providers. Fragmented models include medical and midwifery care, and GP shared care (shared between GPs, obstetricians and midwives)

    • continuity of care models where one (or a small number of providers) provide the majority of the care throughout the antenatal, birth and postnatal period. This includes continuity of midwifery care in the public system, private obstetric care, or care from a privately practising midwife in the private system.

    Women favour continuity of care and they and their babies experience better outcomes in these models, especially under midwifery continuity of care.

    However, continuity of midwifery care can be difficult to access, despite calls to expand this model worldwide.

    Digging into the data

    The BJOG paper examined the outcomes for 368,292 births selected out of a bigger data set of 867,334 women who gave birth in NSW, Queensland and Victoria between January 2016 and December 2019.

    It used publicly available data collected on each birth in three states in Australia, as well as Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) data linked to these cases to help examine cost.

    The study grouped all the models of care together in the public system and compared them to one model of private obstetric care (excluding the privately practising midwifery model altogether).

    A major problem with doing research with big data sets is they do not contain the many medical and social complexities that inform health outcomes. These complexities are much more prevalent in the public system and impact on health outcomes.

    Only diabetes and blood pressure problems were included in medical complications controlled for in this paper.

    But there are others that impact on outcomes. There was no controlling for drug and alcohol use, mental health, refugee status and many more significant factors impacting health outcomes for mothers and babies.

    On the other hand, women who give birth in private hospitals are more likely to be socially advantaged (with higher incomes, more education, and greater access to health care, transport and safe housing), which also impacts on birth outcomes.

    While the researchers attempted to “match” the population groups to be as similar as possible and reduce these differences, some of the variables were not included in the data sets. Data on artificial reproductive technology, body mass index and smoking, for example, were not available in all three states. These variables impact outcomes.

    The study did not consider some key outcomes often used to measure maternity care, such as rates of episiotomies (surgical cuts to the perineum). Rates of episiotomies are higher in the private sector.

    The findings of the study also differ from other research on some measurements, such as third and fourth degree perineal tears. The BJOG paper reports severe perineal tearing is lower in private hospitals, while other earlier research shows the opposite.

    Severe perineal tearing does, however, occur more often among some ethnic groups who are more likely to have public health care.

    More c-sections

    The study found women in private hospitals were more likely to have a caesarean section (47.9%) than in the public system (31.6%). There were also higher rates of caesarean sections undertaken before 39 weeks in private obstetric-led care.

    It was beyond the scope of the paper to examine the impacts of this on children, however previous research shows early births are linked to an increased risk of developmental problems, such as poorer school performance.

    While caesarean sections are generally safe, past research as found c-sections can increase risks for women’s future pregnancies and births and can have long-term impacts on children’s health.

    Our previous research showed low-risk women who gave birth in private hospitals had higher rates of intervention but earlier research showed no difference in the rate of deaths. Thankfully, baby deaths are very rare in Australia’s high-quality health system.

    It’s important that women have a choice in how they give birth, and for that choice to be informed and supported. Australian women can also be reassured that Australia is one of the safest countries in which to give birth.

    Hannah Dahlen receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, and the Medical Research Future Fund. She is a member of the Australian College of Midwives.

    Jenny Gamble receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a member of the Australian College of Midwives. She is a co-author of the BJOG study.

    – ref. Is childbirth really safer for women and babies in private hospitals? – https://theconversation.com/is-childbirth-really-safer-for-women-and-babies-in-private-hospitals-261179

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: What does Australian law have to say about sovereign citizens and ‘pseudolaw’?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madeleine Perrett, PhD Candidate in Law, University of Adelaide

    Armed with obscure legal jargon and fringe interpretations of the law, “sovereign citizens” are continuing to test the limits of the Australian justice system’s patience and power.

    A few weeks ago, two Western Australians were jailed for 30 days after defying a Supreme Court order and refusing to acknowledge the court’s authority.

    Weeks earlier, former AFL footballer Warren Tredrea told the Federal Court he could not pay his legal costs to his former employer, Channel 9, because he did not believe in Australian legal tender.

    And former One Nation senator Rod Culleton is currently fighting the Australian Federal Police, arguing his court-declared bankruptcy is not legally binding and therefore should not affect his federal election nomination.

    These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a growing trend known as “pseudolaw”.

    What is ‘pseudolaw’?

    Pseudolaw describes the practice of constructing legal arguments that sound convincing but are fundamentally wrong.

    It often relies on real law or cases, twisting them through bizarre or inaccurate interpretations. It looks like law, but isn’t.

    Common pseudolegal arguments include:

    • governments have no authority over “natural persons”
    • writing a legal name in all capital letters creates a separate legal entity (a “strawman”), which is not subject to state authority
    • money is not real and anything can be legal tender
    • tax laws only apply to federal entities, not individuals
    • “natural rights” override statutes and court-made rules.

    Not one of these arguments has ever succeeded in an Australian court.

    What are ‘sovereign citizens’?

    Those who believe and engage in pseudolaw are sometimes termed “sovereign citizens” or “SovCits”, a label imported from the United States during the 1970s.

    The sovereign citizen “movement” reached Australia in the late 1990s.

    As the Australian Federal Police explain, sovereign citizens believe they are morally and legally correct, and are quite open about their beliefs and plans.

    They reject government authority, refuse to comply with laws and rely on complex but false legal theories to justify their actions.

    Because many social media platforms ban their content, sovereign citizens frequently communicate through encrypted messaging apps or gather in person at protests and “common law courts” – unofficial tribunals based on a distorted reading of historical legal principles. These “courts” claim to operate outside state authority and often “try” public officials, file false claims against property and carry out other pseudolegal actions with no real legal force.

    They claim to be peaceful and say they are acting in “self-defence” against perceived government overreach. But a small number turn violent.

    The rise of pseudolaw in Australia

    In the 1970s, WA farmer Leonard Casley labelled his farm the “Hutt River Province”, then attempted to secede from the Commonwealth of Australia and the State of Western Australia.

    A curiosity back then, but a warning sign.

    For years, fringe tax protesters and anti-government groups quietly pushed these ideas.

    Then the COVID pandemic hit: lockdowns, mandates and rising distrust meant pseudolaw went more viral. Social media lit up with people claiming they weren’t subject to Australian law.

    They spouted strawman theories, cited fake laws and filmed themselves refusing police orders.

    Now it’s in the courts, on the streets and in online echo chambers.

    It is not just noise. It is congesting the judicial system and putting people, including adherents, at risk.

    A recent South Australian study highlights how pseudolaw is increasingly disrupting legal processes in that state.

    The law, however, still stands, no matter what those on YouTube say.

    What the ‘real’ law says

    To be clear, pseudolaw looks real but isn’t; the real law is clear on many of the points raised by sovereign citizens.

    For example, the federal government derives its authority to govern from the Commonwealth Constitution. This document clearly states the government has executive authority and can make laws that bind all Australians.

    This includes tax laws and laws declaring Australian money as legal tender: in 2007, the Federal Court flatly rejected arguments that income tax and currency laws were invalid.

    The “strawman theory” – which states someone has two personas, one of real flesh and blood and the other a separate legal personality, who is the “strawman” – has also been debunked by the courts countless times. The West Australian Supreme Court recently called it “fundamentally misguided”.

    And does capitalising your name on official documents like your birth certificate or driver’s licence affect your rights? The courts have categorically said “no”.

    Pseudolaw is, as one Victorian judge described it last year, nothing more than “nonsense”, “gibberish”, and “gobbledygook”.

    Why sovereign citizens are a threat

    While this might seem eccentric, or even harmless, pseudolaw poses real risks.

    The Judicial Commission of New South Wales warns it’s not just a nuisance – it’s clogging up courts, wasting police resources and putting public officials at risk.

    But the danger isn’t only to others – it is to the followers too.

    Adherents lose more than arguments. Some have racked up massive legal bills fighting fines. Others have lost custody in family court or been imprisoned for ignoring court orders.

    Pseudolaw is a dangerous ideology.

    It is crucial all Australians recognise that pseudolaw not only threatens your credibility but can land you in hot water under the real law.

    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. What does Australian law have to say about sovereign citizens and ‘pseudolaw’? – https://theconversation.com/what-does-australian-law-have-to-say-about-sovereign-citizens-and-pseudolaw-260289

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is it okay to boil water more than once, or should you empty the kettle every time?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Faisal Hai, Professor and Head of School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Wollongong

    Avocado_studio/Shutterstock

    The kettle is a household staple practically everywhere – how else would we make our hot drinks?

    But is it okay to re-boil water that’s already in the kettle from last time? While bringing water to a boil disinfects it, you may have heard that boiling water more than once will somehow make the water harmful and therefore you should empty the kettle each time.

    Such claims are often accompanied by the argument that re-boiled water leads to the accumulation of allegedly hazardous substances including metals such as arsenic, or salts such as nitrates and fluoride.

    This isn’t true. To understand why, let’s look at what is in our tap water and what really happens when we boil it.

    What’s in our tap water?

    Let’s take the example of tap water supplied by Sydney Water, Australia’s largest water utility which supplies water to Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra region.

    From the publicly available data for the January to March 2025 quarter for the Illawarra region, these were the average water quality results:

    • pH was slightly alkaline
    • total dissolved solids were low enough to avoid causing scaling in pipes or appliances
    • fluoride content was appropriate to improve dental health, and
    • it was “soft” water with a total hardness value below 40mg of calcium carbonate per litre.

    The water contained trace amounts of metals such as iron and lead, low enough magnesium levels that it can’t be tasted, and sodium levels substantially lower than those in popular soft drinks.

    These and all other monitored quality parameters were well within the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines during that period. If you were to make tea with this water, re-boiling would not cause a health problem. Here’s why.

    It’s difficult to concentrate such low levels of chemicals

    To concentrate substances in the water, you’d need to evaporate some of the liquid while the chemicals stay behind. Water evaporates at any temperature, but the vast majority of evaporation happens at the boiling point – when water turns into steam.

    During boiling, some volatile organic compounds might escape into the air, but the amount of the inorganic compounds (such as metals and salts) remains unchanged.

    While the concentration of inorganic compounds might increase as drinking water evaporates when boiled, evidence shows it doesn’t happen to such an extent that it would be hazardous.

    Let’s say you boil one litre of tap water in a kettle in the morning, and your tap water has a fluoride content of 1mg per litre, which is within the limits of Australian guidelines.

    You make a cup of tea taking 200ml of the boiled water. You then make another cup of tea in the afternoon by re-boiling the remaining water.

    On both occasions, if heating was stopped soon after boiling started, the loss of water by evaporation would be small, and the fluoride content in each cup of tea would be similar.

    But let’s assume that when making the second cup, you let the water keep boiling until 100ml of what’s in the kettle evaporates. Even then, the amount of fluoride you would consume with the second cup (0.23mg) would not be significantly higher than the fluoride you consumed with the first cup of tea (0.20mg).

    The same applies to any other minerals or organics the supplied water may have contained. Let’s take lead: the water supplied in the Illawarra region as mentioned above, had a lead concentration of less than 0.0001mg per litre. To reach an unsafe lead concentration (0.01mg per litre, according to Australian guidelines) in a cup of water, you’d need to boil down roughly 20 litres of tap water to just that cup of 200ml.

    Practically that is unlikely to happen – most electric kettles are designed to boil briefly before automatically shutting off. As long as the water you’re using is within the guidelines for drinking water, you can’t really concentrate it to harmful levels within your kettle.

    But what about taste?

    Whether re-boiled water actually affects the taste of your drinks will depend entirely on the specifics of your local water supply and your personal preferences.

    The slight change in mineral concentration, or the loss of dissolved oxygen from water during boiling may affect the taste for some people – although there are a lot of other factors that contribute to the taste of your tap water.

    The bottom line is that as long as the water in your kettle was originally compliant with guidelines for safe drinking water, it will remain safe and potable even after repeated boiling.

    Faisal Hai 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. Is it okay to boil water more than once, or should you empty the kettle every time? – https://theconversation.com/is-it-okay-to-boil-water-more-than-once-or-should-you-empty-the-kettle-every-time-260293

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: We were part of the world heritage listing of Murujuga. Here’s why all Australians should be proud

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo McDonald, Professor, Director of Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia

    Senior Ranger, Mardudunhera man Peter Cooper, oversees the Murujuga landscape Jo McDonald, CC BY-SA

    On Friday, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape in northwest Western Australia was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We were in Paris to see Murujuga become Australia’s 21st world heritage property, but only our second property listed exclusively for its Indigenous cultural values.

    Murujuga, meaning “hip bone sticking out”, is an ancient rocky landscape rising out of the Indian Ocean in northwest Australia.

    Murujuga is shaped by the Lore and the presence of Ngarda-Ngarli – the collective term for the Traditional Owner groups of the coastal Pilbara – since Ngurra Nyujunggamu, when the earth was soft, the beginning of time.

    Murujuga includes the Burrup Peninsula, the Dampier Archipelago’s 42 islands and the listed property covers almost 100,000 hectares of land and sea country. Across this cultural landscape are between one to two million petroglyphs – rock art – created by carving designs into rock surfaces. The petroglyphs record Ngarda Ngarli’s attachment and adaptation to a changing environment through deep time.

    The UNESCO listing recognises the “outstanding universal value” of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape. This value lies in the traditional system governing it, in tangible and intangible attributes that attest to 50,000 years of Ngarda-Ngarli using and caring for the land and seascape.

    The Ngarda-Ngarli have campaigned for World Heritage Listing of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape for more than 20 years.

    Murujuga Board and Circle of Elders members in Sydney at the ICOMOS General Assembly, where they hosted a Symposium on the Cultural Landscape nomination.
    Jo McDonald, CC BY-SA

    A controversial nomination

    While the outstanding universal values of this place were not in question, the nomination became mired with broader climate concerns.

    Industrial development began at Murujuga in the 1950s and was established before Traditional Owners had decision-making authority. The Dampier Archipelago, as well as housing petroglyphs across 42 islands, is also home to one of the largest industrial hubs in the southern hemisphere.

    The recent approval for the North-West Gas Hub has elevated climate change concerns and raised questions about whether the government is serious about protecting Murujuga.

    The Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program (MRAMP) year two report was released around the same time as the north west gas hub announcement.

    While acidic pollution has been suggested by some, our work on the monitoring program found rain and dust at the site was pH neutral, and there is no acid rain impacting on the petroglyphs.

    Other criticism included that the air quality at the site is compromised by local gas production. The research found the air quality at Murujuga is “good” to “very good” by international standards. We also found average annual nitrogen dioxide levels − the emission under most scrutiny − is five times lower than World Health Organisation guidelines.

    According to MRAMP research, Murujuga’s air quality is well within national standards. Nitrogen dioxide is 16 times lower than the national standard, and sulphur dioxide never exceeding 10% of the national standard.

    Importantly, the research program is ongoing and will transition to monitoring led by the Ngarda-Ngarli with support and training from the scientists. And this ongoing monitoring will be part of the management regime in place to protect Murujuga as a world heritage listed site.

    The MRAMP monitoring team in action at Murujuga.
    Ben Mullins, CC BY-SA

    Ngard-Ngarli leadership

    Traditional Owners and Custodians led the world heritage nomination, supported by State and Commonwealth governments.

    Traditional Owners consider the listing will better protect Ngarda-Ngarli knowledge, lore and culture as expressed through the landscape and in the petroglyphs.

    World heritage recognition will support Ngarda-Ngarli decision-making and ongoing management across the Murujuga Cultural Landscape.

    This global recognition is a mechanism to help Ngarda-Ngarli do what they have always done: protect their culture and decide what is right for Country for future generations.

    The inscription is a testament to the old people who started this quest decades ago, many of whom have not lived to celebrate this victory.

    The Australian delegation on the floor of UNESCO during the inscription session.
    Jo McDonald, CC BY

    Australia’s deep time heritage

    Australia now has two places on the World Heritage List which are exclusively listed as Indigenous sites of outstanding universal value to all humanity.

    The Murujuga Cultural Landscape joins on the list the southwestern Victorian site Budj Bim, one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems.

    Murujuga Aboriginal Custodians celebrate the Word Heritage listing decision in Paris this week.
    Jo McDonald, CC BY

    By this listing, the world has recognised the deep time creative genius and ongoing connection of Ngarda-Ngarli to the Murujuga Cultural Landscape.

    This international acclaim recognises the extraordinary resilience of Australia’s First Nations peoples and should be a source of pride and celebration for all Australians.

    Jo McDonald is an employee of the University of Western Australia and receives funding from the Australian Research Council.The Centre for Rock Art Research and Management receives funding for its research and training operations from Rio Tinto. Jo was a member of the World Heritage committee and contributed to the writing of the dossier.

    Amy Stevens is an employee of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, which receives funding from the Australian Government, the WA Government and industry and was a lead author on the Murujuga Cultural Landscape World Heritage nomination.

    Belinda Churnside serves as Deputy Chair. Board Directors are remunerated for their duties in accordance with community-approved sitting fees. These payments are made from MAC’s operational income.

    MAC receives funding support for a range of projects from both State and Federal government departments, as well as from industry partners operating within the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estate Agreement (BMIEA) area.

    The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation provides operational and strategic support for the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program. The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions funds MAC’s National Park Ranger Team, while other funding bodies contribute to the Murujuga Land and Sea Unit Rangers.

    All funding sources and expenditures are transparently reported in MAC’s annual financial report, which is audited each year by an independent external auditor.

    Ben Mullins is the lead scientist on the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Project, which is funded by the Government of Western Australia.

    Peter Hicks is the Chair of the Board of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC). Board Directors are remunerated for their duties in accordance with community-approved sitting fees. These payments are made from MAC’s operational income.

    MAC receives funding support for a range of projects from both State and Federal government departments, as well as from industry partners operating within the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estate Agreement (BMIEA) area.

    The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation provides operational and strategic support for the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program. The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions funds MAC’s National Park Ranger Team, while other funding bodies contribute to the Murujuga Land and Sea Unit Rangers.

    All funding sources and expenditures are transparently reported in MAC’s annual financial report, which is audited each year by an independent external auditor.

    Terry Bailey is a World Heritage advisor to Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and WA Government and was lead editor and co-author of Murujuga Cultural Landscape World Heritage nomination. His appointment is funded by the WA Government.

    – ref. We were part of the world heritage listing of Murujuga. Here’s why all Australians should be proud – https://theconversation.com/we-were-part-of-the-world-heritage-listing-of-murujuga-heres-why-all-australians-should-be-proud-261066

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: We were part of the world heritage listing of Murujuga. Here’s why all Australians should be proud

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo McDonald, Professor, Director of Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia

    Senior Ranger, Mardudunhera man Peter Cooper, oversees the Murujuga landscape Jo McDonald, CC BY-SA

    On Friday, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape in northwest Western Australia was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We were in Paris to see Murujuga become Australia’s 21st world heritage property, but only our second property listed exclusively for its Indigenous cultural values.

    Murujuga, meaning “hip bone sticking out”, is an ancient rocky landscape rising out of the Indian Ocean in northwest Australia.

    Murujuga is shaped by the Lore and the presence of Ngarda-Ngarli – the collective term for the Traditional Owner groups of the coastal Pilbara – since Ngurra Nyujunggamu, when the earth was soft, the beginning of time.

    Murujuga includes the Burrup Peninsula, the Dampier Archipelago’s 42 islands and the listed property covers almost 100,000 hectares of land and sea country. Across this cultural landscape are between one to two million petroglyphs – rock art – created by carving designs into rock surfaces. The petroglyphs record Ngarda Ngarli’s attachment and adaptation to a changing environment through deep time.

    The UNESCO listing recognises the “outstanding universal value” of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape. This value lies in the traditional system governing it, in tangible and intangible attributes that attest to 50,000 years of Ngarda-Ngarli using and caring for the land and seascape.

    The Ngarda-Ngarli have campaigned for World Heritage Listing of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape for more than 20 years.

    Murujuga Board and Circle of Elders members in Sydney at the ICOMOS General Assembly, where they hosted a Symposium on the Cultural Landscape nomination.
    Jo McDonald, CC BY-SA

    A controversial nomination

    While the outstanding universal values of this place were not in question, the nomination became mired with broader climate concerns.

    Industrial development began at Murujuga in the 1950s and was established before Traditional Owners had decision-making authority. The Dampier Archipelago, as well as housing petroglyphs across 42 islands, is also home to one of the largest industrial hubs in the southern hemisphere.

    The recent approval for the North-West Gas Hub has elevated climate change concerns and raised questions about whether the government is serious about protecting Murujuga.

    The Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program (MRAMP) year two report was released around the same time as the north west gas hub announcement.

    While acidic pollution has been suggested by some, our work on the monitoring program found rain and dust at the site was pH neutral, and there is no acid rain impacting on the petroglyphs.

    Other criticism included that the air quality at the site is compromised by local gas production. The research found the air quality at Murujuga is “good” to “very good” by international standards. We also found average annual nitrogen dioxide levels − the emission under most scrutiny − is five times lower than World Health Organisation guidelines.

    According to MRAMP research, Murujuga’s air quality is well within national standards. Nitrogen dioxide is 16 times lower than the national standard, and sulphur dioxide never exceeding 10% of the national standard.

    Importantly, the research program is ongoing and will transition to monitoring led by the Ngarda-Ngarli with support and training from the scientists. And this ongoing monitoring will be part of the management regime in place to protect Murujuga as a world heritage listed site.

    The MRAMP monitoring team in action at Murujuga.
    Ben Mullins, CC BY-SA

    Ngard-Ngarli leadership

    Traditional Owners and Custodians led the world heritage nomination, supported by State and Commonwealth governments.

    Traditional Owners consider the listing will better protect Ngarda-Ngarli knowledge, lore and culture as expressed through the landscape and in the petroglyphs.

    World heritage recognition will support Ngarda-Ngarli decision-making and ongoing management across the Murujuga Cultural Landscape.

    This global recognition is a mechanism to help Ngarda-Ngarli do what they have always done: protect their culture and decide what is right for Country for future generations.

    The inscription is a testament to the old people who started this quest decades ago, many of whom have not lived to celebrate this victory.

    The Australian delegation on the floor of UNESCO during the inscription session.
    Jo McDonald, CC BY

    Australia’s deep time heritage

    Australia now has two places on the World Heritage List which are exclusively listed as Indigenous sites of outstanding universal value to all humanity.

    The Murujuga Cultural Landscape joins on the list the southwestern Victorian site Budj Bim, one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems.

    Murujuga Aboriginal Custodians celebrate the Word Heritage listing decision in Paris this week.
    Jo McDonald, CC BY

    By this listing, the world has recognised the deep time creative genius and ongoing connection of Ngarda-Ngarli to the Murujuga Cultural Landscape.

    This international acclaim recognises the extraordinary resilience of Australia’s First Nations peoples and should be a source of pride and celebration for all Australians.

    Jo McDonald is an employee of the University of Western Australia and receives funding from the Australian Research Council.The Centre for Rock Art Research and Management receives funding for its research and training operations from Rio Tinto. Jo was a member of the World Heritage committee and contributed to the writing of the dossier.

    Amy Stevens is an employee of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, which receives funding from the Australian Government, the WA Government and industry and was a lead author on the Murujuga Cultural Landscape World Heritage nomination.

    Belinda Churnside serves as Deputy Chair. Board Directors are remunerated for their duties in accordance with community-approved sitting fees. These payments are made from MAC’s operational income.

    MAC receives funding support for a range of projects from both State and Federal government departments, as well as from industry partners operating within the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estate Agreement (BMIEA) area.

    The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation provides operational and strategic support for the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program. The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions funds MAC’s National Park Ranger Team, while other funding bodies contribute to the Murujuga Land and Sea Unit Rangers.

    All funding sources and expenditures are transparently reported in MAC’s annual financial report, which is audited each year by an independent external auditor.

    Ben Mullins is the lead scientist on the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Project, which is funded by the Government of Western Australia.

    Peter Hicks is the Chair of the Board of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC). Board Directors are remunerated for their duties in accordance with community-approved sitting fees. These payments are made from MAC’s operational income.

    MAC receives funding support for a range of projects from both State and Federal government departments, as well as from industry partners operating within the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estate Agreement (BMIEA) area.

    The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation provides operational and strategic support for the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program. The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions funds MAC’s National Park Ranger Team, while other funding bodies contribute to the Murujuga Land and Sea Unit Rangers.

    All funding sources and expenditures are transparently reported in MAC’s annual financial report, which is audited each year by an independent external auditor.

    Terry Bailey is a World Heritage advisor to Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and WA Government and was lead editor and co-author of Murujuga Cultural Landscape World Heritage nomination. His appointment is funded by the WA Government.

    – ref. We were part of the world heritage listing of Murujuga. Here’s why all Australians should be proud – https://theconversation.com/we-were-part-of-the-world-heritage-listing-of-murujuga-heres-why-all-australians-should-be-proud-261066

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is our mental health determined by where we live – or is it the other way round? New research sheds more light

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Hobbs, Associate Professor and Transforming Lives Fellow, Spatial Data Science and Planetary Health, Sheffield Hallam University

    Photon-Photos/Getty Images

    Ever felt like where you live is having an impact on your mental health? Turns out, you’re not imagining things.

    Our new analysis of eight years of data from the New Zealand Attitude and Values Study found how often we move and where we live are intertwined with our mental health.

    In some respects, this finding might seem obvious. Does a person feel the same living in a walkable and leafy suburb with parks and stable neighbours as they would in a more transient neighbourhood with few local services and busy highways?

    Probably not. The built and natural environment shapes how safe, supported and settled a person feels.

    We wanted to know to what extent a person’s mental health is shaped by where they live – and to what degree a person’s mental health determines where they end up living.

    Patterns over time

    Most research on the environmental influences on mental health gives us a snapshot of people’s lives at a single point in time. That’s useful, but it doesn’t show how things change over time or how the past may affect the future.

    Our study took a slightly different approach. By tracking the same people year after year, we looked at patterns over time: how their mental health shifted, whether they moved house, their access to positive and negative environmental features, and how the areas they lived in changed when it came to factors such as poverty, unemployment and overcrowding.

    We also looked at things like age, body size and how much people exercised, all of which can influence mental health, too.

    To make sense of such complex and interconnected data, we turned to modern machine learning tools – in particular Random Forest algorithms. These tools allowed us to build a lot of individual models (trees) looking at how various factors affect mental health.

    We could then see which factors come up most often to evaluate both their relative importance and the likely extent of their influence.

    We also ran Monte Carlo simulations. Think of these like a high-tech crystal ball, to explore what might happen to mental health over time if neighbourhood conditions improved.

    These simulations produced multiple future scenarios with better neighbourhood conditions, used Random Forest to forecast mental health outcomes in each, and then averaged the results.

    A negative feedback loop

    What we uncovered was a potential negative feedback loop. People who had depression or anxiety were more likely to move house, and those who moved were, on average, more likely to experience worsening mental health later on.

    And there’s more. People with persistent mental health issues weren’t just moving more often, they were also more likely to move into a more deprived area. In other words, poorer mental health was related to a higher likelihood of ending up in places where resources were scarcer and the risk of ongoing stress was potentially higher.

    Our study was unable to say why the moves occurred, but it may be that mental health challenges were related to unstable housing, financial strain, or the need for a fresh start. Our future research will try to unpick some of this.

    On the flip side, people who didn’t relocate as often, especially those in lower-deprivation areas, tended to have better long-term mental health. So, stability matters. So does the neighbourhood.

    Where we live matters

    These findings challenge the idea that mental health is just about what’s inside us. Where we live plays a key role in shaping how we feel. But it’s not just that our environment affects our minds. Our minds can also steer us into different environments, too.

    Our study shows that mental health and place are potentially locked in a feedback loop. One influences the other and the cycle can either support wellbeing or drive decline.

    That has real implications for how we support people with mental health challenges.

    In this study, if a person was already struggling, they were more likely to move and more likely to end up somewhere that made life harder.

    This isn’t just about individual choice. It’s about the systems we’ve built, housing markets, income inequality, access to care and more. If we want better mental health at a population level, we need to think beyond the individual level. We need to think about place.

    Because in the end, mental health doesn’t just live in the mind; it’s also rooted in the places we live.

    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 our mental health determined by where we live – or is it the other way round? New research sheds more light – https://theconversation.com/is-our-mental-health-determined-by-where-we-live-or-is-it-the-other-way-round-new-research-sheds-more-light-260491

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The secret stories of trees are written in the knots and swirls of your floorboards. An expert explains how to read them

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne

    Magda Ehlers/Pexels, CC BY

    Have you ever examined timber floorboards and pondered why they look the way they do? Perhaps you admired the super-fine grain, a stunning red hue or a swirling knot, and wondered how it came to be?

    Or perhaps you don’t know what tree species your floorboards are made from, and how to best look after them?

    Finely polished floorboards reveal detail about the timber that can be much harder to detect in unpolished boards or other sawn timbers.

    “Reading” the knots, stubs and other characteristics of floorboards can reveal what type of tree produced it and how it grew. It can also reveal fascinating details about the lives of the trees they once were.

    Reading floorboards can reveal what type of tree produced it, and how it grew.
    Greta Hoffman/Pexels, CC BY

    Telling soft from hard

    A variety of tree species are used to make timber floors. Hardwood species include the pale cream of Tasmanian oak, the honeyed hues of spotted gum and the deep red of jarrah.

    Other times, softwood such as pine or spruce is used. Such species are often fast-growing, and prized for their availability and affordability.

    Hardwoods are, by definition, flowering trees, while softwoods are from cone-bearing trees. Paradoxically, not all softwoods are soft or hardwoods hard. The balsa tree, for example, is a fast-growing hardwood tree renowned for its soft wood.

    It’s not always easy to tell if a floor is hardwood or softwood, but there are discernible differences in their appearance.

    Softwood such as pine or spruce is often fast-growing.
    Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Tales in the grain

    The real differences between softwood and hardwood lie in the anatomy and structure of the “xylem tissues” that make up the wood. These tissues transported water and nutrients from the roots to the rest of the plant when the tree was alive.

    The arrangement of xylem tissue in the tree largely determines the “grain” in your floorboards. The grain is the appearance of wood fibres in the timber. The grain can be straight, wavy or spiralled.

    In floorboards with straight grains, a tree’s growth history may be clear. As a tree trunk grows in diameter, it typically produces a layer of bark on the outside and a lighter layer of xylem tissue on the inside. When a tree is cut horizontally, the growth appears as rings. In a tree cut lengthwise (which happens when floorboards are milled) the growth appears as long lines in the timber.

    If the lines in floorboards are very close together, this indicates the tree grew slowly. Wider lines suggest the tree grew rapidly.

    Vessels in a tree’s xylem transport water from the roots to the rest of the plant. Hardwood tree species tend to have large vessels. This gives hardwood floorboards a coarser-grained and less uniform appearance. In contrast, softwood species such as conifers have smaller, dispersed vessels and produce more fine-grained, smoother timber.

    Close lines in floorboards indicate the tree grew slowly.
    Magda Ehlers/Pexels, CC BY

    Knotty histories

    Knots in floorboards occur when a branch dies or is cut, then tissue grows over the stub. The bigger the missing branch, the more substantial the knot.

    Knots in floorboards can reveal much about the source tree. Pine, for example, often features multiple small knots originating from a common point. This reflects the growth pattern of young plantation pines, where several branches grow out from the trunk at the same height from the ground.

    Often, the distance between knots tells us how quickly the tree grew. The greater the distance between the knots, the faster the tree grew in height.

    Knots in floorboards occur when a branch dies or is cut.
    eminumana/Pexels, CC BY

    Clever chemical defence

    The presence of a tree’s “defence chemicals”, known as polyphenols, can be seen clearly in some floorboards.

    Polyphenols in floorboards sometimes appear as dark brown verging on black.
    Author provided

    Polyphenols protect plants against stressors such as pathogens, drought and UV radiation.

    The chemicals contribute to the red hue in some floorboards. Because polyphenols have a preservative effect, they can also make timber more durable.

    Dark reddish or brown timbers containing a high concentration of polyphenols include mahogany, merbau, red gum, ironbark and conifers such as cedar and cypress.

    In cases where a tree is burnt by fire, or attacked by insects or fungus, it produces a lot of polyphenols at the site of the damage.

    In these cases, the presence of polyphenols in floorboards can be very obvious – sometimes appearing as a section that is dark brown verging on black.

    Keeping your floorboards for longer

    It’s widely known that living trees store carbon, and that this helps limit climate change. It’s less well known that timber floorboards also store carbon. And as long as that timber is preserved – and not destroyed by fire, decay or wood rot – that carbon will stay there.

    If floorboards have to be removed, try to make sure the timber is reused or repurposed into other products.

    And if you are installing a new polished timber floor, or already have one, there are steps you can take to make it last for a long time.

    Softwood boards will benefit from a hard surface coating, especially in high-use areas.

    Reducing the exposure of the floor to bright sunlight can preserve the colour of the floorboards and prolong the life of the coating and the timber itself.

    Large knots in floorboards can twist and start to protrude from the surface. To ensure the floor remains even and safe, and to prevent the board from splitting, secure the knot to a floor joist with a nail or glue.

    And take the time to understand the lessons embedded in your floorboards. They have much to teach us about biology and history, if we take the time to read them.

    Gregory Moore 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. The secret stories of trees are written in the knots and swirls of your floorboards. An expert explains how to read them – https://theconversation.com/the-secret-stories-of-trees-are-written-in-the-knots-and-swirls-of-your-floorboards-an-expert-explains-how-to-read-them-250776

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama: how electric guitarists challenge expectations of gender

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janelle K Johnstone, Associate Lecturer Crime, Justice and Legal Studies, PhD Candidate School of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University

    American gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar on stage in 1957. Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

    I’ve been playing a 1963 Maton FyrByrd guitar since I was 14 years old. It’s Australian designed and made with the unique sharkbite body, and pickups named cool, midway and hi-fi.

    With only 1,160 of this model produced between 1962 and 1965, it’s a rarity. But so too is its provenance. In lieu of jewellery, cabinet crystal or other family heirlooms, I inherited my mother’s electric guitar.

    The electric guitar is synonymous with rock’n’roll genres emerging from the 1950s. It’s also become one of the most potent icons of masculine heroism in popular music culture. Stereotypical imagery circulates around riffs, shredding and posturing.

    The wailing guitar solo has become a signature feature of virtuosity, a spotlight of grandeur setting the male guitarist apart from the band with a distinctive textural line.

    These characteristics mean the electric guitar takes up space – something traditionally associated with masculine performance.

    But the paradox about the gendering of “the axe” is that a leading, stylistic founder was a woman – and many follow in her footsteps today.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe

    The guitar has been an important instrument of music making for centuries, but the 1930s marked the invention of the electric guitar.

    Amplifying the guitar produced its distinctive feature: the capacity for sustain. This enabled sounds to siren out, dive and waver – often at high volume.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe emerged alongside the electrification of the guitar.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe photographed in November 1957.
    Henry How/Mirrorpix/Getty Images

    Her style developed over four decades from the 1930s to 1960s with fluid fretboard prowess and a percussive right hand, leaning into the hover of distortion. Tharpe influenced big names of contemporary music such as Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

    Audiences loved her.

    However, a woman (also queer, and a person of colour) “owning” the electric guitar challenged the patriarchal music industry who tended to frame her as a singer, rather than a prolific instrumentalist.

    DIY learning systems

    While stereotypes such as “masculine” taking up space might help to explain a lack of women and gender diverse electric guitarists (and indeed other instrumentalists in rock tropes), their absence also stems from the way that skills are developed and subsequently valued.

    In rock and punk music, learning to play often comes via friendship groups where knowledge is passed around and learnt using do-it-yourself (DIY) methods.

    These processes are often associated with rites of passage into adulthood.

    But these social networks are also gendered. Women and gender diverse people are often excluded from informal channels that create opportunities, or relegated to support roles, a reflection of mainstream ideas that set “women’s roles” to passive. This starts from a young age.

    My research (to be published) shows that, for those who do pick up a guitar, DIY (and punk sentiment) is an effective tool to circumvent social barriers to skill acquisition.

    Yet women and gender diverse guitarists are constantly compared to a male cannon of music history, scrutinised as an exception, but rarely exceptional.

    Gendered divisions of labour that see women carry a greater weight of unpaid labour further impact the time available to hone a craft. These are the double gates of sexism and ageism that make becoming a music legend a masculine, middle aged, luxury.

    Despite this, a treasure trove of musical elders have distorted the way that guitar playing is historically and sentimentally wedded to masculine expertise.

    The axe in different hands

    When Joan Jett burst onto the punk scene in the 1970s with her low-slung electric guitar, she had the look and attitude of her male counterparts. But she carved a style centred on solid, rhythmic blocks, saturating accents with power chords in lieu of complex, single note techniques.

    Joan Jett plays guitar for The Runaways, Chicago 1977.
    Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

    Later, Kurt Cobain adopted a similar technique, perhaps explaining Jett’s appearance in Nirvana’s recent 30th album anniversary special.

    In subcultural spaces, artists like Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama from Japanese cult band the 5, 6, 7, 8s, now in her mid 70s, shape-shifts her way through a range of genre bending musical statements that challenge stereotypical guitar playing with signature guitar pedals, and joyous virtuosity.

    Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama performing during the The Carling Weekend: Reading Festival in 2004.
    Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images

    On her recent album tour, Kim Gordon, one of the most recognisable women in punk, now also in her 70s, ditched her bass for the electric guitar.

    She ended her shows standing on her amp holding her guitar overhead. She’s doing what she’s always done: querying the boundaries of culture tropes, cementing her iconic status.

    These artists and countless others challenge expectations of gender via the symbolism projected through the electric guitar.

    And they go a step further in rejecting pressures for older women to be sidelined.

    Kim Gordon as a member of the super-group Free Kitten performs in concert in Milan, 2024.
    Elena Di Vincenzo/Archivio Elena Di Vincenzo/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

    The Australian soundscape

    Australian music culture has a rich and diverse heritage. However, the same touchstones tend to be used to produce a particular narrative about musical connoisseurship that enables (mostly) men to be elevated through to legendary status.

    It’s annoying. Because in the context of rock guitar playing, the local talent pool is extensive. Current stars Courtney Barnett, Erica Dunn, and emerging musicians like Jaybird Bryne represent a legacy to the work of artists such as Suze DeMarchi, Orianthi, Adalita, Barb Waters and Sarah McLeod, all sharing commercial success as guitarists.

    They sit alongside well-established independent artists really stretching the sonic parameters of the electric guitar in DIY/punk traditions including Penny Ikinger, Lisa Mackinney, Sarah Hardiman, Claire Birchall, Bonnie Mercer and Sarah Blaby.

    Moving past the musical bias of the great, white, male not only expands our sonic palettes – it might also help us to rethink the limitations of binary gender roles more broadly. This means querying cultural inheritances like the axe, re-imagining who an elder might be, and embracing what they sound like.

    Janelle K Johnstone receives funding from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council.

    – ref. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama: how electric guitarists challenge expectations of gender – https://theconversation.com/from-sister-rosetta-tharpe-to-ronnie-yoshiko-fujiyama-how-electric-guitarists-challenge-expectations-of-gender-254704

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama: how electric guitarists challenge expectations of gender

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janelle K Johnstone, Associate Lecturer Crime, Justice and Legal Studies, PhD Candidate School of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University

    American gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar on stage in 1957. Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

    I’ve been playing a 1963 Maton FyrByrd guitar since I was 14 years old. It’s Australian designed and made with the unique sharkbite body, and pickups named cool, midway and hi-fi.

    With only 1,160 of this model produced between 1962 and 1965, it’s a rarity. But so too is its provenance. In lieu of jewellery, cabinet crystal or other family heirlooms, I inherited my mother’s electric guitar.

    The electric guitar is synonymous with rock’n’roll genres emerging from the 1950s. It’s also become one of the most potent icons of masculine heroism in popular music culture. Stereotypical imagery circulates around riffs, shredding and posturing.

    The wailing guitar solo has become a signature feature of virtuosity, a spotlight of grandeur setting the male guitarist apart from the band with a distinctive textural line.

    These characteristics mean the electric guitar takes up space – something traditionally associated with masculine performance.

    But the paradox about the gendering of “the axe” is that a leading, stylistic founder was a woman – and many follow in her footsteps today.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe

    The guitar has been an important instrument of music making for centuries, but the 1930s marked the invention of the electric guitar.

    Amplifying the guitar produced its distinctive feature: the capacity for sustain. This enabled sounds to siren out, dive and waver – often at high volume.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe emerged alongside the electrification of the guitar.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe photographed in November 1957.
    Henry How/Mirrorpix/Getty Images

    Her style developed over four decades from the 1930s to 1960s with fluid fretboard prowess and a percussive right hand, leaning into the hover of distortion. Tharpe influenced big names of contemporary music such as Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

    Audiences loved her.

    However, a woman (also queer, and a person of colour) “owning” the electric guitar challenged the patriarchal music industry who tended to frame her as a singer, rather than a prolific instrumentalist.

    DIY learning systems

    While stereotypes such as “masculine” taking up space might help to explain a lack of women and gender diverse electric guitarists (and indeed other instrumentalists in rock tropes), their absence also stems from the way that skills are developed and subsequently valued.

    In rock and punk music, learning to play often comes via friendship groups where knowledge is passed around and learnt using do-it-yourself (DIY) methods.

    These processes are often associated with rites of passage into adulthood.

    But these social networks are also gendered. Women and gender diverse people are often excluded from informal channels that create opportunities, or relegated to support roles, a reflection of mainstream ideas that set “women’s roles” to passive. This starts from a young age.

    My research (to be published) shows that, for those who do pick up a guitar, DIY (and punk sentiment) is an effective tool to circumvent social barriers to skill acquisition.

    Yet women and gender diverse guitarists are constantly compared to a male cannon of music history, scrutinised as an exception, but rarely exceptional.

    Gendered divisions of labour that see women carry a greater weight of unpaid labour further impact the time available to hone a craft. These are the double gates of sexism and ageism that make becoming a music legend a masculine, middle aged, luxury.

    Despite this, a treasure trove of musical elders have distorted the way that guitar playing is historically and sentimentally wedded to masculine expertise.

    The axe in different hands

    When Joan Jett burst onto the punk scene in the 1970s with her low-slung electric guitar, she had the look and attitude of her male counterparts. But she carved a style centred on solid, rhythmic blocks, saturating accents with power chords in lieu of complex, single note techniques.

    Joan Jett plays guitar for The Runaways, Chicago 1977.
    Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

    Later, Kurt Cobain adopted a similar technique, perhaps explaining Jett’s appearance in Nirvana’s recent 30th album anniversary special.

    In subcultural spaces, artists like Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama from Japanese cult band the 5, 6, 7, 8s, now in her mid 70s, shape-shifts her way through a range of genre bending musical statements that challenge stereotypical guitar playing with signature guitar pedals, and joyous virtuosity.

    Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama performing during the The Carling Weekend: Reading Festival in 2004.
    Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images

    On her recent album tour, Kim Gordon, one of the most recognisable women in punk, now also in her 70s, ditched her bass for the electric guitar.

    She ended her shows standing on her amp holding her guitar overhead. She’s doing what she’s always done: querying the boundaries of culture tropes, cementing her iconic status.

    These artists and countless others challenge expectations of gender via the symbolism projected through the electric guitar.

    And they go a step further in rejecting pressures for older women to be sidelined.

    Kim Gordon as a member of the super-group Free Kitten performs in concert in Milan, 2024.
    Elena Di Vincenzo/Archivio Elena Di Vincenzo/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

    The Australian soundscape

    Australian music culture has a rich and diverse heritage. However, the same touchstones tend to be used to produce a particular narrative about musical connoisseurship that enables (mostly) men to be elevated through to legendary status.

    It’s annoying. Because in the context of rock guitar playing, the local talent pool is extensive. Current stars Courtney Barnett, Erica Dunn, and emerging musicians like Jaybird Bryne represent a legacy to the work of artists such as Suze DeMarchi, Orianthi, Adalita, Barb Waters and Sarah McLeod, all sharing commercial success as guitarists.

    They sit alongside well-established independent artists really stretching the sonic parameters of the electric guitar in DIY/punk traditions including Penny Ikinger, Lisa Mackinney, Sarah Hardiman, Claire Birchall, Bonnie Mercer and Sarah Blaby.

    Moving past the musical bias of the great, white, male not only expands our sonic palettes – it might also help us to rethink the limitations of binary gender roles more broadly. This means querying cultural inheritances like the axe, re-imagining who an elder might be, and embracing what they sound like.

    Janelle K Johnstone receives funding from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council.

    – ref. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama: how electric guitarists challenge expectations of gender – https://theconversation.com/from-sister-rosetta-tharpe-to-ronnie-yoshiko-fujiyama-how-electric-guitarists-challenge-expectations-of-gender-254704

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: What is astigmatism? Why does it make my vision blurry? And how did I get it?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flora Hui, Research Fellow, Centre for Eye Research Australia and Honorary Fellow, Department of Surgery (Ophthalmology), The University of Melbourne

    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    Have you ever gone to the optometrist for an eye test and were told your eye was shaped like a football?

    Or perhaps you’ve noticed your vision is becoming increasingly blurry or hard to focus?

    You might be among the 40% of people in the world who live with astigmatism.

    What causes astigmatism?

    The eye acts like a camera, capturing light through the front surface (the cornea) and focusing it onto the “film” at the back of the eye (retina).

    To get a clear picture, the eyeball and all of its surfaces (cornea, lens and retina) have to meet certain specifications of size and shape.

    Otherwise, vision can appear blurred and out-of-focus, known as “refractive error”.

    Astigmatism (uh-STIG-muh-tiz-um) is a type of refractive error where one or more of the eye’s surfaces are not smooth and/or round. It is broadly classified into two types: regular and irregular.

    Regular astigmatism is the most common. It typically comes from changes in the shape of the cornea. Instead of being round, it is more oval, like a football or an egg. We don’t fully understand why some people develop regular astigmatism, but it’s partly due to genetics.

    Irregular astigmatism is rarer. It occurs when a part of the cornea is no longer smooth (from scarring or growths on the cornea), or its shape has changed in an uneven or asymmetrical way.

    Eye conditions such as keratoconus – where the cornea weakens over time and becomes cone-like in shape – causes irregular astigmatism.

    If the cornea is no longer round or smooth, light entering the eye is scattered across the retina. This can cause blurry or distorted vision, reduced sensitivity to contrast, shadows or double vision and increased sensitivity to bright lights.

    Is astigmatism a new condition?

    In 1727, Sir Isaac Newton was the first to describe the physics of how an irregular surface might affect the focus of light passing through it.

    This was followed in 1800 by Thomas Young, a scientist who had astigmatism and described how it affected his vision in a lecture.

    In 1825, Sir George Airy, an astronomer who also had astigmatism, discovered he could see more clearly when he tilted his glasses on an angle. He became the first person to suggest using cylindrical lenses to correct for astigmatism. These are still used today.

    The name “astigmatism” came last, coined by William Whewell in 1846. The name was derived from Greek: “a-” (“without”), and “stigma” (“a mark/spot”), literally translating as “without a point”, referring to the lack of a single, clear focal point of vision.

    How is astigmatism measured?

    Optometrists usually detect and measure regular astigmatism during refraction, when they place different lenses in front of the eye to determine a spectacle prescription.

    As irregular astigmatism can involve very small rough patches or bumps, it is best seen with specialised imaging such as corneal topography. This creates a 3-dimensional map to show local bumps and irregularities on the cornea.

    I’ve got astigmatism, what do I need to know?

    Astigmatism can present at any age but becomes more common as we get older.

    You can develop astigmatism over time, and the level of astigmatism can change as well.

    With mild astigmatism, you may not notice any problems with your vision. With increasing levels of astigmatism, your vision becomes less crisp. This can lead to reduced vision, eye strain, or fatigue.

    You may need astigmatism correction to see clearly and effortlessly. Correcting astigmatism aims to compensate for the differing curvatures of the cornea, to ensure that light entering the eye focuses correctly on the retina.

    To correct regular astigmatism, cylindrical lenses compensate for each curvature in the “football”. Cylindrical lenses are prescribed as either glasses, contact lenses.

    Astigmatism can also be corrected with laser eye surgery.

    Orthokeratology (ortho-k) can also be used. This involves wearing specialised hard contact lenses overnight. These hard contact lenses temporarily reshape the cornea, allowing the wearer to be glasses-free during the day.

    To manage irregular astigmatism, it is important to treat the underlying condition causing astigmatism as well. But often, hard contact lenses are needed for clear vision during the day, as they can sit on the surface of the eye to compensate for local uneven patches in a way that glasses or soft contact lenses cannot.

    Surgery, such as corneal transplants, is also sometimes needed as a last resort to replace a damaged, misshapen cornea and manage the irregular astigmatism.

    Do I need to worry about astigmatism in my children?

    In children, if there is enough astigmatism present to cause blurred or distorted vision, it can impact their learning and development both in the classroom and during sporting activities.

    Untreated astigmatism is not dangerous, but high levels of astigmatism in young children can cause other vision problems such as “eye turns” or “lazy eye” (amblyopia).

    But don’t worry, regular eye checks with the optometrist for children (and adults as well) allows for early detection and management, when needed.

    Flora Hui works part-time in private practice as an optometrist.

    Angelina Duan works in private practice as an optometrist.

    – ref. What is astigmatism? Why does it make my vision blurry? And how did I get it? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-astigmatism-why-does-it-make-my-vision-blurry-and-how-did-i-get-it-256235

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: What is astigmatism? Why does it make my vision blurry? And how did I get it?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flora Hui, Research Fellow, Centre for Eye Research Australia and Honorary Fellow, Department of Surgery (Ophthalmology), The University of Melbourne

    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    Have you ever gone to the optometrist for an eye test and were told your eye was shaped like a football?

    Or perhaps you’ve noticed your vision is becoming increasingly blurry or hard to focus?

    You might be among the 40% of people in the world who live with astigmatism.

    What causes astigmatism?

    The eye acts like a camera, capturing light through the front surface (the cornea) and focusing it onto the “film” at the back of the eye (retina).

    To get a clear picture, the eyeball and all of its surfaces (cornea, lens and retina) have to meet certain specifications of size and shape.

    Otherwise, vision can appear blurred and out-of-focus, known as “refractive error”.

    Astigmatism (uh-STIG-muh-tiz-um) is a type of refractive error where one or more of the eye’s surfaces are not smooth and/or round. It is broadly classified into two types: regular and irregular.

    Regular astigmatism is the most common. It typically comes from changes in the shape of the cornea. Instead of being round, it is more oval, like a football or an egg. We don’t fully understand why some people develop regular astigmatism, but it’s partly due to genetics.

    Irregular astigmatism is rarer. It occurs when a part of the cornea is no longer smooth (from scarring or growths on the cornea), or its shape has changed in an uneven or asymmetrical way.

    Eye conditions such as keratoconus – where the cornea weakens over time and becomes cone-like in shape – causes irregular astigmatism.

    If the cornea is no longer round or smooth, light entering the eye is scattered across the retina. This can cause blurry or distorted vision, reduced sensitivity to contrast, shadows or double vision and increased sensitivity to bright lights.

    Is astigmatism a new condition?

    In 1727, Sir Isaac Newton was the first to describe the physics of how an irregular surface might affect the focus of light passing through it.

    This was followed in 1800 by Thomas Young, a scientist who had astigmatism and described how it affected his vision in a lecture.

    In 1825, Sir George Airy, an astronomer who also had astigmatism, discovered he could see more clearly when he tilted his glasses on an angle. He became the first person to suggest using cylindrical lenses to correct for astigmatism. These are still used today.

    The name “astigmatism” came last, coined by William Whewell in 1846. The name was derived from Greek: “a-” (“without”), and “stigma” (“a mark/spot”), literally translating as “without a point”, referring to the lack of a single, clear focal point of vision.

    How is astigmatism measured?

    Optometrists usually detect and measure regular astigmatism during refraction, when they place different lenses in front of the eye to determine a spectacle prescription.

    As irregular astigmatism can involve very small rough patches or bumps, it is best seen with specialised imaging such as corneal topography. This creates a 3-dimensional map to show local bumps and irregularities on the cornea.

    I’ve got astigmatism, what do I need to know?

    Astigmatism can present at any age but becomes more common as we get older.

    You can develop astigmatism over time, and the level of astigmatism can change as well.

    With mild astigmatism, you may not notice any problems with your vision. With increasing levels of astigmatism, your vision becomes less crisp. This can lead to reduced vision, eye strain, or fatigue.

    You may need astigmatism correction to see clearly and effortlessly. Correcting astigmatism aims to compensate for the differing curvatures of the cornea, to ensure that light entering the eye focuses correctly on the retina.

    To correct regular astigmatism, cylindrical lenses compensate for each curvature in the “football”. Cylindrical lenses are prescribed as either glasses, contact lenses.

    Astigmatism can also be corrected with laser eye surgery.

    Orthokeratology (ortho-k) can also be used. This involves wearing specialised hard contact lenses overnight. These hard contact lenses temporarily reshape the cornea, allowing the wearer to be glasses-free during the day.

    To manage irregular astigmatism, it is important to treat the underlying condition causing astigmatism as well. But often, hard contact lenses are needed for clear vision during the day, as they can sit on the surface of the eye to compensate for local uneven patches in a way that glasses or soft contact lenses cannot.

    Surgery, such as corneal transplants, is also sometimes needed as a last resort to replace a damaged, misshapen cornea and manage the irregular astigmatism.

    Do I need to worry about astigmatism in my children?

    In children, if there is enough astigmatism present to cause blurred or distorted vision, it can impact their learning and development both in the classroom and during sporting activities.

    Untreated astigmatism is not dangerous, but high levels of astigmatism in young children can cause other vision problems such as “eye turns” or “lazy eye” (amblyopia).

    But don’t worry, regular eye checks with the optometrist for children (and adults as well) allows for early detection and management, when needed.

    Flora Hui works part-time in private practice as an optometrist.

    Angelina Duan works in private practice as an optometrist.

    – ref. What is astigmatism? Why does it make my vision blurry? And how did I get it? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-astigmatism-why-does-it-make-my-vision-blurry-and-how-did-i-get-it-256235

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Tasmania is limping towards an election nobody wants. Here’s the state of play

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Hortle, Deputy Director, Tasmanian Policy Exchange, University of Tasmania

    In the darkest and coldest months of the year, Tasmanians have been slogging through an election campaign no one wanted.

    It’s been a curious mix of humdrum plodding laced with cyanide levels of bitterness, with the most likely result being another hung parliament.

    How did we get here?

    It’s a long and sordid tale, but here’s the quick version.

    In early June, the Labor opposition moved a motion of no confidence in the Liberal Premier, Jeremy Rockliff. The motion passed with the support of three crossbench MPs, the Greens, and a casting vote from the speaker.



    Read more:
    After weeks of confusion and chaos, Tasmania heads back to the polls on July 19

    Rockliff refused to step aside and Opposition Leader Dean Winter ruled out doing a deal with the Greens to govern in minority, which left the Governor with no choice but to call an election just 16 months after the last.

    Some Tasmanians would be forgiven for feeling a bit of election fatigue. On top of the March 2024 state election, there was the federal election on May 3, voting for three legislative council seats on May 24 and now this poll.

    Trudging along the campaign trail

    The vibe of the campaign has veered wildly between pedestrian and acrimonious.
    Candidates have struggled to connect with a disgruntled public, and a combination of the stadium saga and political mudslinging have distracted from Tasmania’s serious challenges.

    Despite the election being brought about by Labor’s no confidence motion, the party seemed curiously unprepared. Its candidate announcements were slow and disjointed, and red corflutes have been greatly outnumbered by blue.

    Labor’s campaign has picked up some momentum in recent weeks by following the federal party’s playbook of making big health policy announcements.

    In contrast to Labor, the Liberals hit the ground running with a slew of candidate announcements. They have presented themselves as the only party with a realistic chance of winning a majority, and sought to frame Labor’s Dean Winter as a power-hungry wrecker. They have also campaigned hard on health, attempting to neutralise Labor’s traditional strength in this area.

    A bevy of former federal candidates are running, which could lead to changes in personnel, if not a big shift in the distribution of seats in parliament. Ones to watch include:

    • Liberal’s Bridget Archer (who lost her seat of Bass in May) and Gavin Pearce (retired Braddon MP)

    • Labor’s Brian Mitchell, the Lyons MP who stood aside for Rebecca White

    • Peter George, the anti-salmon farming independent in Franklin

    • and Vanessa Bleyer, a two-time Greens Senate candidate running in Braddon.

    The Nationals are also in the mix following the latest in a series of Tasmanian “reboots” over the past few decades. Their candidate list includes former Jacqui Lambie Network and Liberal MPs, which could create a tense and chaotic party room if they win seats.

    Disappointingly, both Labor and Liberal leaders have repeatedly demanded the other side stop playing “political games”, while merrily engaging in skulduggery of their own.

    Labor was indignant when the Liberals challenged the eligibility of one of their star candidates, unionist Jessica Munday.

    A few days later, Rockliff was righteously outraged when Labor grandee and former premier Paul Lennon registered the business “Tasinsure” – the name of the Liberals’ proposed state-owned insurance company.

    Subpar signage

    It’s fair to say no one has covered themselves in glory here.

    The Liberals went with “Let’s finish the job for Tasmania”. I’m sure this isn’t meant to be read as a threat, but I can’t help but hear it in Alan Rickman’s voice.

    Even if we leave aside the (unintended?) menacing implications, the slogan encourages voters to wonder why the job hasn’t been finished in the previous 11 years of Liberal government.

    Labor is using “A Fresh Start for Tasmania”: a cliche, but serviceably simple.

    The problem is, they stretched the slogan to the point of collapse by applying it to all of their policy headings. This meant that we ended up enduring “a fresh start for cost of living relief”, “a fresh start for our society”, and so on.

    A special mention to Labor’s social media ads, which had all the gravitas of a toddler demanding their turn on the playground swings.

    The Greens didn’t limit themselves to one slogan. Instead, they used various taglines on the theme of “the mess made by the major parties”, or simply stated their main policy pillars: stopping the stadium, investing in health and housing, protecting the environment, and stopping privatisation.

    There were also some questionable offerings from the menagerie of independents. Surely the voters are entitled to expect more from their MPs than the “familiar face in Clark” offered by former Liberal MP Elise Archer? And as an experienced journalist, I’m sure Peter George could have done better than the derivative “Time for Change”.

    What can we expect?

    What will Tasmanians end up with after a campaign that has been less sound and fury and more white noise and niggle?

    It looks like more of the same.

    Polling shows that the two major parties are on the nose, particularly with younger voters. Labor and Liberal are fairly aligned on some of the headline issues that divide the electorate, including the stadium and salmon farming.

    All this points to no party winning a majority of the 35 seats. If this happens, the convention is that the Governor gives the party with the most seats the first crack at cobbling together enough support from the crossbench to form a minority government.

    Minority governments can come in lots of different shapes and sizes, from loose “confidence and supply” agreements to more formal power-sharing coalitions.

    If the party with the most seats fails to form government, the Governor would typically let the second-largest party try.

    Both the Liberals and Labor will face big challenges if they are given the opportunity to form minority government.

    The Liberal Party has its nose ahead in most polls. However, several of the crossbench MPs the previous Liberal government relied on for support voted in favour of the no confidence motion in Rockliff.

    Most of these MPs are likely to be re-elected, and will be wary of doing deals that essentially put in place the same government that they recently helped to bring down.



    Read more:
    Hung parliament still likely outcome of Tasmanian election, with Liberals well ahead of Labor in new poll

    Labor have backed themselves into a corner by repeatedly ruling out working with the Greens. This would leave them needing to negotiate with a diverse array of crossbench MPs. Depending on the final distribution of seats, this might not secure them enough votes on the floor of parliament.

    If – as seems likely – Tasmania ends up with another hung parliament, it will fall to our MPs to move beyond point scoring and gamesmanship. We urgently need budget repair, alongside ambitious reforms in health, housing, education, sustainability and productivity.

    Here’s hoping that the next government is willing to collaborate and compromise – for the good of the state and to restore trust in our political system.

    Robert Hortle 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. Tasmania is limping towards an election nobody wants. Here’s the state of play – https://theconversation.com/tasmania-is-limping-towards-an-election-nobody-wants-heres-the-state-of-play-260504

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Tasmania is limping towards an election nobody wants. Here’s the state of play

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Hortle, Deputy Director, Tasmanian Policy Exchange, University of Tasmania

    In the darkest and coldest months of the year, Tasmanians have been slogging through an election campaign no one wanted.

    It’s been a curious mix of humdrum plodding laced with cyanide levels of bitterness, with the most likely result being another hung parliament.

    How did we get here?

    It’s a long and sordid tale, but here’s the quick version.

    In early June, the Labor opposition moved a motion of no confidence in the Liberal Premier, Jeremy Rockliff. The motion passed with the support of three crossbench MPs, the Greens, and a casting vote from the speaker.



    Read more:
    After weeks of confusion and chaos, Tasmania heads back to the polls on July 19

    Rockliff refused to step aside and Opposition Leader Dean Winter ruled out doing a deal with the Greens to govern in minority, which left the Governor with no choice but to call an election just 16 months after the last.

    Some Tasmanians would be forgiven for feeling a bit of election fatigue. On top of the March 2024 state election, there was the federal election on May 3, voting for three legislative council seats on May 24 and now this poll.

    Trudging along the campaign trail

    The vibe of the campaign has veered wildly between pedestrian and acrimonious.
    Candidates have struggled to connect with a disgruntled public, and a combination of the stadium saga and political mudslinging have distracted from Tasmania’s serious challenges.

    Despite the election being brought about by Labor’s no confidence motion, the party seemed curiously unprepared. Its candidate announcements were slow and disjointed, and red corflutes have been greatly outnumbered by blue.

    Labor’s campaign has picked up some momentum in recent weeks by following the federal party’s playbook of making big health policy announcements.

    In contrast to Labor, the Liberals hit the ground running with a slew of candidate announcements. They have presented themselves as the only party with a realistic chance of winning a majority, and sought to frame Labor’s Dean Winter as a power-hungry wrecker. They have also campaigned hard on health, attempting to neutralise Labor’s traditional strength in this area.

    A bevy of former federal candidates are running, which could lead to changes in personnel, if not a big shift in the distribution of seats in parliament. Ones to watch include:

    • Liberal’s Bridget Archer (who lost her seat of Bass in May) and Gavin Pearce (retired Braddon MP)

    • Labor’s Brian Mitchell, the Lyons MP who stood aside for Rebecca White

    • Peter George, the anti-salmon farming independent in Franklin

    • and Vanessa Bleyer, a two-time Greens Senate candidate running in Braddon.

    The Nationals are also in the mix following the latest in a series of Tasmanian “reboots” over the past few decades. Their candidate list includes former Jacqui Lambie Network and Liberal MPs, which could create a tense and chaotic party room if they win seats.

    Disappointingly, both Labor and Liberal leaders have repeatedly demanded the other side stop playing “political games”, while merrily engaging in skulduggery of their own.

    Labor was indignant when the Liberals challenged the eligibility of one of their star candidates, unionist Jessica Munday.

    A few days later, Rockliff was righteously outraged when Labor grandee and former premier Paul Lennon registered the business “Tasinsure” – the name of the Liberals’ proposed state-owned insurance company.

    Subpar signage

    It’s fair to say no one has covered themselves in glory here.

    The Liberals went with “Let’s finish the job for Tasmania”. I’m sure this isn’t meant to be read as a threat, but I can’t help but hear it in Alan Rickman’s voice.

    Even if we leave aside the (unintended?) menacing implications, the slogan encourages voters to wonder why the job hasn’t been finished in the previous 11 years of Liberal government.

    Labor is using “A Fresh Start for Tasmania”: a cliche, but serviceably simple.

    The problem is, they stretched the slogan to the point of collapse by applying it to all of their policy headings. This meant that we ended up enduring “a fresh start for cost of living relief”, “a fresh start for our society”, and so on.

    A special mention to Labor’s social media ads, which had all the gravitas of a toddler demanding their turn on the playground swings.

    The Greens didn’t limit themselves to one slogan. Instead, they used various taglines on the theme of “the mess made by the major parties”, or simply stated their main policy pillars: stopping the stadium, investing in health and housing, protecting the environment, and stopping privatisation.

    There were also some questionable offerings from the menagerie of independents. Surely the voters are entitled to expect more from their MPs than the “familiar face in Clark” offered by former Liberal MP Elise Archer? And as an experienced journalist, I’m sure Peter George could have done better than the derivative “Time for Change”.

    What can we expect?

    What will Tasmanians end up with after a campaign that has been less sound and fury and more white noise and niggle?

    It looks like more of the same.

    Polling shows that the two major parties are on the nose, particularly with younger voters. Labor and Liberal are fairly aligned on some of the headline issues that divide the electorate, including the stadium and salmon farming.

    All this points to no party winning a majority of the 35 seats. If this happens, the convention is that the Governor gives the party with the most seats the first crack at cobbling together enough support from the crossbench to form a minority government.

    Minority governments can come in lots of different shapes and sizes, from loose “confidence and supply” agreements to more formal power-sharing coalitions.

    If the party with the most seats fails to form government, the Governor would typically let the second-largest party try.

    Both the Liberals and Labor will face big challenges if they are given the opportunity to form minority government.

    The Liberal Party has its nose ahead in most polls. However, several of the crossbench MPs the previous Liberal government relied on for support voted in favour of the no confidence motion in Rockliff.

    Most of these MPs are likely to be re-elected, and will be wary of doing deals that essentially put in place the same government that they recently helped to bring down.



    Read more:
    Hung parliament still likely outcome of Tasmanian election, with Liberals well ahead of Labor in new poll

    Labor have backed themselves into a corner by repeatedly ruling out working with the Greens. This would leave them needing to negotiate with a diverse array of crossbench MPs. Depending on the final distribution of seats, this might not secure them enough votes on the floor of parliament.

    If – as seems likely – Tasmania ends up with another hung parliament, it will fall to our MPs to move beyond point scoring and gamesmanship. We urgently need budget repair, alongside ambitious reforms in health, housing, education, sustainability and productivity.

    Here’s hoping that the next government is willing to collaborate and compromise – for the good of the state and to restore trust in our political system.

    Robert Hortle 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. Tasmania is limping towards an election nobody wants. Here’s the state of play – https://theconversation.com/tasmania-is-limping-towards-an-election-nobody-wants-heres-the-state-of-play-260504

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • The government wants local authorities to embrace AI – here’s one way it could work in practice

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Lord, Professor, Lever Chair of Urban Planning, University of Liverpool

    Francesco Scatena/Shutterstock

    Few issues ignite communities more fiercely than what to do with land. The prospect of releasing small portions of green belt land for housing developments, a windfarm proposal or plans for a new road can transform mild-mannered citizens into passionate advocates overnight.

    This visceral connection between people and place perfectly illustrates the famous observation that “all politics is local”. In England, the principle that every citizen should be given the opportunity to “have their say” on planning matters is enshrined in law. Before any planning document is adopted, local authorities must give the public the chance to provide feedback.

    The logic for this is based on a common-sense morality: before binding decisions are made about how an area might change, the local people who have to live with those decisions should be given the opportunity to endorse or reject that plan.

    In practice this is a hugely cumbersome process. Local authorities have to make sense of thousands of comments. This prompted my colleagues and I at the University of Liverpool to begin thinking about how AI could be used to make this process more efficient.

    Once a local authority publishes the relevant local planning document, every citizen, company, public, private or third sector organisation has the right to submit a written response. These may address the entire document or focus on a specific issue.

    In all cases, the local authority is obliged to collate, comprehend and concisely summarise all public submissions. They will then decide whether the document requires amendments or if further evidence is needed to justify the proposals.

    This creates an overwhelming burden for planning departments up and down the country. In high-development areas, submissions often number in the tens of thousands. And individual submissions range from a few sentences to over 100 pages.

    Planners must read, absorb and synthesise all this information into a final report which will be used to make a decision. This report must fairly represent the aggregate views across all submissions.

    Beyond the sheer volume of responses, human cognitive limitations and biases further complicate the process. Some submissions may be given greater emphasis than others. Recently read submissions are likely to have a greater influence on the reader than those reviewed earlier.

    A digital solution

    These challenges prompted us to explore alternatives. We partnered with Greater Cambridge Shared Planning – the planning authority for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils – to develop an AI-powered solution. Our tool, Plan AI, would read and summarise public submissions to the planning process.

    In 2025, my colleagues and I conducted a real-world experiment. Three live public consultation exercises were processed in parallel – once by planners and once by Plan AI.

    It took a planning officer just over 60 hours in total to download and process 320 submissions. Eighteen hours of this time was used to summarise each submission – a task that took Plan AI only 16 minutes. In that time, the AI tool was also able to create comprehensive reports identifying key themes, referenced sources and geographic analysis of the submissions.

    A subsequent qualitative assessment found there to be no discernible difference in the quality of the summaries produced by the human planning officer and those by Plan AI. In fact, the general overview document produced by Plan AI is a significant addition to what would normally be produced. It included a geographic analysis of the origins of submissions – crucial information for planners to understand which communities and demographic groups were participating in the consultation.

    Close up of a solar farm
    Controversial planning proposals can attract tens of thousands of public comments.
    pjhpix/Shutterstock

    The future of planning

    The UK government has set out a vision for local authorities to embrace AI for reducing administrative burden and improving the efficiency of government. For example, it recently rolled out an AI tool, developed with Google DeepMind, to digitise planning records.

    The implications of experiments like these are far reaching. Planners can focus on their core expertise – assessing applications and supporting government priorities for housing, new towns and infrastructure renewal – rather than spending countless hours processing public comments.

    AI can process vast amounts of text more consistently and comprehensively than humans. It can also identify connections between submissions that might otherwise be missed.

    With the administrative burden drastically reduced, local authorities could potentially consult citizens more frequently across a wider range of planning issues, making planning even more democratic. Planners freed from paperwork could also dedicate more time to meaningful public engagement.

    Of course, one danger with AI is that it could be used on the other side of the consultation, to generate a large volume of submissions in an attempt to over-amplify a particular point of view. However, AI tools could be used to defend against this.

    PlanAI or similar programmes can generate an immediate summary of a comment submission, an ideal opportunity to insert a verification check that the submitter is indeed human. Putting the human back in the loop in this way reduces the potential for AI to be used to skew consultations.

    By building the right tools and systems, we can create planning processes that are both more efficient and more responsive to citizen input – a win for democracy and effective governance alike.

    The Conversation

    PlanAI was developed under a paid contract with Greater Cambridge Shared Planning. At the time of publication, it is not sold or marketed to other governments or authorities, but may be so in the future. Alex Lord and the other researchers involved received funding from the UK government’s PropTech initiative and Greater Cambridge Shared Planning.

    – ref. The government wants local authorities to embrace AI – here’s one way it could work in practice – https://theconversation.com/the-government-wants-local-authorities-to-embrace-ai-heres-one-way-it-could-work-in-practice-258449

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: The government wants local authorities to embrace AI – here’s one way it could work in practice

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Lord, Professor, Lever Chair of Urban Planning, University of Liverpool

    Francesco Scatena/Shutterstock

    Few issues ignite communities more fiercely than what to do with land. The prospect of releasing small portions of green belt land for housing developments, a windfarm proposal or plans for a new road can transform mild-mannered citizens into passionate advocates overnight.

    This visceral connection between people and place perfectly illustrates the famous observation that “all politics is local”. In England, the principle that every citizen should be given the opportunity to “have their say” on planning matters is enshrined in law. Before any planning document is adopted, local authorities must give the public the chance to provide feedback.

    The logic for this is based on a common-sense morality: before binding decisions are made about how an area might change, the local people who have to live with those decisions should be given the opportunity to endorse or reject that plan.

    In practice this is a hugely cumbersome process. Local authorities have to make sense of thousands of comments. This prompted my colleagues and I at the University of Liverpool to begin thinking about how AI could be used to make this process more efficient.

    Once a local authority publishes the relevant local planning document, every citizen, company, public, private or third sector organisation has the right to submit a written response. These may address the entire document or focus on a specific issue.

    In all cases, the local authority is obliged to collate, comprehend and concisely summarise all public submissions. They will then decide whether the document requires amendments or if further evidence is needed to justify the proposals.

    This creates an overwhelming burden for planning departments up and down the country. In high-development areas, submissions often number in the tens of thousands. And individual submissions range from a few sentences to over 100 pages.

    Planners must read, absorb and synthesise all this information into a final report which will be used to make a decision. This report must fairly represent the aggregate views across all submissions.

    Beyond the sheer volume of responses, human cognitive limitations and biases further complicate the process. Some submissions may be given greater emphasis than others. Recently read submissions are likely to have a greater influence on the reader than those reviewed earlier.

    A digital solution

    These challenges prompted us to explore alternatives. We partnered with Greater Cambridge Shared Planning – the planning authority for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils – to develop an AI-powered solution. Our tool, Plan AI, would read and summarise public submissions to the planning process.

    In 2025, my colleagues and I conducted a real-world experiment. Three live public consultation exercises were processed in parallel – once by planners and once by Plan AI.

    It took a planning officer just over 60 hours in total to download and process 320 submissions. Eighteen hours of this time was used to summarise each submission – a task that took Plan AI only 16 minutes. In that time, the AI tool was also able to create comprehensive reports identifying key themes, referenced sources and geographic analysis of the submissions.

    A subsequent qualitative assessment found there to be no discernible difference in the quality of the summaries produced by the human planning officer and those by Plan AI. In fact, the general overview document produced by Plan AI is a significant addition to what would normally be produced. It included a geographic analysis of the origins of submissions – crucial information for planners to understand which communities and demographic groups were participating in the consultation.

    Controversial planning proposals can attract tens of thousands of public comments.
    pjhpix/Shutterstock

    The future of planning

    The UK government has set out a vision for local authorities to embrace AI for reducing administrative burden and improving the efficiency of government. For example, it recently rolled out an AI tool, developed with Google DeepMind, to digitise planning records.

    The implications of experiments like these are far reaching. Planners can focus on their core expertise – assessing applications and supporting government priorities for housing, new towns and infrastructure renewal – rather than spending countless hours processing public comments.

    AI can process vast amounts of text more consistently and comprehensively than humans. It can also identify connections between submissions that might otherwise be missed.

    With the administrative burden drastically reduced, local authorities could potentially consult citizens more frequently across a wider range of planning issues, making planning even more democratic. Planners freed from paperwork could also dedicate more time to meaningful public engagement.

    Of course, one danger with AI is that it could be used on the other side of the consultation, to generate a large volume of submissions in an attempt to over-amplify a particular point of view. However, AI tools could be used to defend against this.

    PlanAI or similar programmes can generate an immediate summary of a comment submission, an ideal opportunity to insert a verification check that the submitter is indeed human. Putting the human back in the loop in this way reduces the potential for AI to be used to skew consultations.

    By building the right tools and systems, we can create planning processes that are both more efficient and more responsive to citizen input – a win for democracy and effective governance alike.

    PlanAI was developed under a paid contract with Greater Cambridge Shared Planning. At the time of publication, it is not sold or marketed to other governments or authorities, but may be so in the future. Alex Lord and the other researchers involved received funding from the UK government’s PropTech initiative and Greater Cambridge Shared Planning.

    – ref. The government wants local authorities to embrace AI – here’s one way it could work in practice – https://theconversation.com/the-government-wants-local-authorities-to-embrace-ai-heres-one-way-it-could-work-in-practice-258449

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • Why drones and AI can’t quickly find missing flood victims, yet

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robin R. Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University

    The landscape In the aftermath of a flood makes it challenging to spot victims. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

    For search and rescue, AI is not more accurate than humans, but it is far faster.

    Recent successes in applying computer vision and machine learning to drone imagery for rapidly determining building and road damage after hurricanes or shifting wildfire lines suggest that artificial intelligence could be valuable in searching for missing persons after a flood.

    Machine learning systems typically take less than one second to scan a high-resolution image from a drone versus one to three minutes for a person. Plus, drones often produce more imagery to view than is humanly possible in the critical first hours of a search when survivors may still be alive.

    Unfortunately, today’s AI systems are not up to the task.

    We are robotics reseachers who study the use of drones in disasters. Our experiences searching for victims of flooding and numerous other events show that current implementations of AI fall short.

    However, the technology can play a role in searching for flood victims. The key is AI-human collaboration.

    a large red SUV with a white horizontal stripe and symbols and lettering along the side
    Drones have become standard equipment for first responders, but floods pose unique challenges.
    Eric Smalley, CC BY-ND

    AI’s potential

    Searching for flood victims is a type of wilderness search and rescue that presents unique challenges. The goal for machine learning scientists is to rank which images have signs of victims and indicate where in those images search-and-rescue personnel should focus. If the responder sees signs of a victim, they pass the GPS location in the image to search teams in the field to check.

    The ranking is done by a classifier, which is an algorithm that learns to identify similar instances of objects – cats, cars, trees – from training data in order to recognize those objects in new images. For example, in a search-and-rescue context, a classifier would spot instances of human activity such as garbage or backpacks to pass to wilderness search-and-rescue teams, or even identify the missing person themselves.

    A classifier is needed because of the sheer volume of imagery that drones can produce. For example, a single 20-minute flight can produce over 800 high-resolution images. If there are 10 flights – a small number – there would be over 8,000 images. If a responder spends only 10 seconds looking at each image, it would take over 22 hours of effort. Even if the task is divided among a group of “squinters,” humans tend to miss areas of images and show cognitive fatigue.

    The ideal solution is an AI system that scans the entire image, prioritizes images that have the strongest signs of victims, and highlights the area of the image for a responder to inspect. It could also decide whether the location should be flagged for special attention by search-and-rescue crews.

    Where AI falls short

    While this seems to be a perfect opportunity for computer vision and machine learning, modern systems have a high error rate. If the system is programmed to overestimate the number of candidate locations in hopes of not missing any victims, it will likely produce too many false candidates. That would mean overloading squinters or, worse, the search-and-rescue teams, which would have to navigate through debris and muck to check the candidate locations.

    Developing computer vision and machine learning systems for finding flood victims is difficult for three reasons.

    One is that while existing computer vision systems are certainly capable of identifying people visible in aerial imagery, the visual indicators of a flood victim are often very different compared with those for a lost hiker or fugitive. Flood victims are often obscured, camouflaged, entangled in debris or submerged in water. These visual challenges increase the possibility that existing classifiers will miss victims.

    Second, machine learning requires training data, but there are no datasets of aerial imagery where humans are tangled in debris, covered in mud and not in normal postures. This lack also increases the possibility of errors in classification.

    Third, many of the drone images often captured by searchers are oblique views, rather than looking straight down. This means the GPS location of a candidate area is not the same as the GPS location of the drone. It is possible to compute the GPS location if the drone’s altitude and camera angle are known, but unfortunately those attributes rarely are. The imprecise GPS location means teams have to spend extra time searching.

    How AI can help

    Fortunately, with humans and AI working together, search-and-rescue teams can successfully use existing systems to help narrow down and prioritize imagery for further inspection.

    In the case of flooding, human remains may be tangled among vegetation and debris. Therefore, a system could identify clumps of debris big enough to contain remains. A common search strategy is to identify the GPS locations of where flotsam has gathered, because victims may be part of these same deposits.

    aerial view of a landscape with green rings superimposed
    A machine learning algorithm identified piles of debris large enough to contain bodies in an aerial image of a flood aftermath.
    Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and University of Maryland

    An AI classifier could find debris commonly associated with remains, such as artificial colors and construction debris with straight lines or 90-degree corners. Responders find these signs as they systematically walk the riverbanks and flood plains, but a classifier could help prioritize areas in the first few hours and days, when there may be survivors, and later could confirm that teams didn’t miss any areas of interest as they navigated the difficult landscape on foot.

    The Conversation

    Robin R. Murphy receives funding from the National Science Foundation. She is affiliated with the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.

    Thomas Manzini is affiliated with the Center for Robot Assisted Search & Rescue (CRASAR), and his work is funded by the National Science Foundation’s AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM).

    – ref. Why drones and AI can’t quickly find missing flood victims, yet – https://theconversation.com/why-drones-and-ai-cant-quickly-find-missing-flood-victims-yet-261035

  • MIL-OSI Submissions: Why drones and AI can’t quickly find missing flood victims, yet

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robin R. Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University

    The landscape In the aftermath of a flood makes it challenging to spot victims. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

    For search and rescue, AI is not more accurate than humans, but it is far faster.

    Recent successes in applying computer vision and machine learning to drone imagery for rapidly determining building and road damage after hurricanes or shifting wildfire lines suggest that artificial intelligence could be valuable in searching for missing persons after a flood.

    Machine learning systems typically take less than one second to scan a high-resolution image from a drone versus one to three minutes for a person. Plus, drones often produce more imagery to view than is humanly possible in the critical first hours of a search when survivors may still be alive.

    Unfortunately, today’s AI systems are not up to the task.

    We are robotics reseachers who study the use of drones in disasters. Our experiences searching for victims of flooding and numerous other events show that current implementations of AI fall short.

    However, the technology can play a role in searching for flood victims. The key is AI-human collaboration.

    Drones have become standard equipment for first responders, but floods pose unique challenges.
    Eric Smalley, CC BY-ND

    AI’s potential

    Searching for flood victims is a type of wilderness search and rescue that presents unique challenges. The goal for machine learning scientists is to rank which images have signs of victims and indicate where in those images search-and-rescue personnel should focus. If the responder sees signs of a victim, they pass the GPS location in the image to search teams in the field to check.

    The ranking is done by a classifier, which is an algorithm that learns to identify similar instances of objects – cats, cars, trees – from training data in order to recognize those objects in new images. For example, in a search-and-rescue context, a classifier would spot instances of human activity such as garbage or backpacks to pass to wilderness search-and-rescue teams, or even identify the missing person themselves.

    A classifier is needed because of the sheer volume of imagery that drones can produce. For example, a single 20-minute flight can produce over 800 high-resolution images. If there are 10 flights – a small number – there would be over 8,000 images. If a responder spends only 10 seconds looking at each image, it would take over 22 hours of effort. Even if the task is divided among a group of “squinters,” humans tend to miss areas of images and show cognitive fatigue.

    The ideal solution is an AI system that scans the entire image, prioritizes images that have the strongest signs of victims, and highlights the area of the image for a responder to inspect. It could also decide whether the location should be flagged for special attention by search-and-rescue crews.

    Where AI falls short

    While this seems to be a perfect opportunity for computer vision and machine learning, modern systems have a high error rate. If the system is programmed to overestimate the number of candidate locations in hopes of not missing any victims, it will likely produce too many false candidates. That would mean overloading squinters or, worse, the search-and-rescue teams, which would have to navigate through debris and muck to check the candidate locations.

    Developing computer vision and machine learning systems for finding flood victims is difficult for three reasons.

    One is that while existing computer vision systems are certainly capable of identifying people visible in aerial imagery, the visual indicators of a flood victim are often very different compared with those for a lost hiker or fugitive. Flood victims are often obscured, camouflaged, entangled in debris or submerged in water. These visual challenges increase the possibility that existing classifiers will miss victims.

    Second, machine learning requires training data, but there are no datasets of aerial imagery where humans are tangled in debris, covered in mud and not in normal postures. This lack also increases the possibility of errors in classification.

    Third, many of the drone images often captured by searchers are oblique views, rather than looking straight down. This means the GPS location of a candidate area is not the same as the GPS location of the drone. It is possible to compute the GPS location if the drone’s altitude and camera angle are known, but unfortunately those attributes rarely are. The imprecise GPS location means teams have to spend extra time searching.

    How AI can help

    Fortunately, with humans and AI working together, search-and-rescue teams can successfully use existing systems to help narrow down and prioritize imagery for further inspection.

    In the case of flooding, human remains may be tangled among vegetation and debris. Therefore, a system could identify clumps of debris big enough to contain remains. A common search strategy is to identify the GPS locations of where flotsam has gathered, because victims may be part of these same deposits.

    A machine learning algorithm identified piles of debris large enough to contain bodies in an aerial image of a flood aftermath.
    Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and University of Maryland

    An AI classifier could find debris commonly associated with remains, such as artificial colors and construction debris with straight lines or 90-degree corners. Responders find these signs as they systematically walk the riverbanks and flood plains, but a classifier could help prioritize areas in the first few hours and days, when there may be survivors, and later could confirm that teams didn’t miss any areas of interest as they navigated the difficult landscape on foot.

    Robin R. Murphy receives funding from the National Science Foundation. She is affiliated with the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.

    Thomas Manzini is affiliated with the Center for Robot Assisted Search & Rescue (CRASAR), and his work is funded by the National Science Foundation’s AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM).

    – ref. Why drones and AI can’t quickly find missing flood victims, yet – https://theconversation.com/why-drones-and-ai-cant-quickly-find-missing-flood-victims-yet-261035

    MIL OSI –

  • From tea towels to TV remotes: eight everyday bacterial hotspots – and how to clean them

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Manal Mohammed, Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster

    Parkin Srihawong/Shutterstock

    From your phone to your sponge, your toothbrush to your trolley handle, invisible armies of bacteria are lurking on the everyday objects you touch the most. Most of these microbes are harmless – some even helpful – but under the right conditions, a few can make you seriously ill.

    But here’s the catch: some of the dirtiest items in your life are the ones you might least expect.

    Here are some of the hidden bacteria magnets in your daily routine, and how simple hygiene tweaks can protect you from infection.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    Shopping trolley handles

    Shopping trolleys are handled by dozens of people each day, yet they’re rarely sanitised. That makes the handles a prime spot for germs, particularly the kind that spread illness.

    One study in the US found that over 70% of shopping carts were contaminated with coliform bacteria, a group that includes strains like E. coli, often linked to faecal contamination. Another study found Klebsiella pneumoniae, Citrobacter freundii and Pseudomonas species on trolleys.

    Protect yourself: Always sanitise trolley handles before use, especially since you’ll probably be handling food, your phone or touching your face.

    Kitchen sponges

    That sponge by your sink? It could be one of the dirtiest items in your home. Sponges are porous, damp and often come into contact with food: ideal conditions for bacteria to thrive.

    After just two weeks, a sponge can harbour millions of bacteria, including coliforms linked to faecal contamination, according to the NSF Household Germ Study and research on faecal coliforms.

    Protect yourself: Disinfect your sponge weekly by microwaving it, soaking it in vinegar, or running it through the dishwasher. Replace it if it smells – even after cleaning. Use different sponges for different tasks (for example, one for dishes, another for cleaning up after raw meat).

    Chopping boards

    Chopping boards can trap bacteria in grooves left by knife cuts. Salmonella and E. coli can survive for hours on dry surfaces and pose a risk if boards aren’t cleaned properly.

    Protect yourself: Use separate boards for raw meat and vegetables. Wash thoroughly with hot, soapy water, rinse well and dry completely. Replace boards that develop deep grooves.

    Tea towels

    Reusable kitchen towels quickly become germ magnets. You use them to dry hands, wipe surfaces and clean up spills – often without washing them often enough.

    Research shows that E. coli and salmonella can live on cloth towels for hours.

    Protect yourself: Use paper towels when possible, or separate cloth towels for different jobs. Wash towels regularly in hot water with bleach or disinfectant.

    Mobile phones

    Phones go everywhere with us – including bathrooms – and we touch them constantly. Their warmth and frequent handling make them ideal for bacterial contamination.

    Research shows phones can carry harmful bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus.

    Protect yourself: Avoid using your phone in bathrooms and wash your hands often. Clean it with a slightly damp microfibre cloth and mild soap. Avoid harsh chemicals or direct sprays.

    Toothbrushes near toilets

    Flushing a toilet releases a plume of microscopic droplets, which can land on nearby toothbrushes. A study found that toothbrushes stored in bathrooms can harbour E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus and other microbes.



    Read more:
    Toothbrushes and showerheads covered in viruses ‘unlike anything we’ve seen before’ – new study

    Protect yourself: Store your toothbrush as far from the toilet as possible. Rinse it after each use, let it air-dry upright and replace it every three months – or sooner if worn.

    Bathmats

    Cloth bathmats absorb water after every shower, creating a warm, damp environment where bacteria and fungi can thrive.

    Protect yourself: Hang your bathmat to dry after each use and wash it weekly in hot water. For a more hygienic option, consider switching to a wooden mat or a bath stone: a mat made from diatomaceous earth, which dries quickly and reduces microbial growth by eliminating lingering moisture.

    Pet towels and toys

    Pet towels and toys stay damp and come into contact with saliva, fur, urine and outdoor bacteria. According to the US national public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pet toys can harbour E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

    Protect your pet (and yourself): Wash pet towels weekly with hot water and pet-safe detergent. Let toys air dry or use a dryer. Replace worn or damaged toys regularly.

    Shared nail and beauty tools

    Nail clippers, cuticle pushers and other grooming tools can spread harmful bacteria if they’re not properly cleaned. Contaminants may include Staphylococcus aureus – including MRSA, a strain resistant to antibiotics – Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the bacteria behind green nail syndrome, and Mycobacterium fortuitum, linked to skin infections from pedicures and footbaths.

    Protect yourself: Bring your own tools to salons or ask how theirs are sterilised. Reputable salons will gladly explain their hygiene practices.

    Airport security trays

    Airport trays are handled by hundreds of people daily – and rarely cleaned. Research has found high levels of bacteria, including E. coli.

    Protect yourself: After security, wash your hands or use sanitiser, especially before eating or touching your face.

    Hotel TV remotes

    Studies show hotel remote controls can be dirtier than toilet seats. They’re touched by many hands and rarely sanitised.

    Common bacteria include E. coli, enterococcus and Staphylococcus aureus, including MRSA, according to research.

    Protect yourself: Wipe the remote with antibacterial wipes when you arrive. Some travellers even put it in a plastic bag. Always wash your hands after using shared items.

    Bacteria are everywhere, including on the items you use every day. You can’t avoid all germs, and most won’t make you sick. But with a few good habits, such as regular hand washing, cleaning and smart storage, you can help protect yourself and others.

    It’s all in your hands.

    The Conversation

    Manal Mohammed 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. From tea towels to TV remotes: eight everyday bacterial hotspots – and how to clean them – https://theconversation.com/from-tea-towels-to-tv-remotes-eight-everyday-bacterial-hotspots-and-how-to-clean-them-260784

  • Worries about the UK economy are justified, but can the government afford to gamble on raising taxes?

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alan Shipman, Senior Lecturer in Economics, The Open University

    Gloomy economic figures have heaped more pressure on the British government and its promise to improve growth. And if that wasn’t enough, there have also been some stark warnings about public finances and the country’s ability to service its debts.

    All of this has led to a growing expectation that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to bring in some significant tax hikes later this year, or reduce government spending.

    But both of these options could worsen the long-term economic outlook, by further constraining GDP growth. That was precisely the fate of governments that pursued an agenda of “austerity” – cuts in spending and higher taxes – to tackle the expanded public debt after the financial crisis of 2008.

    It was a strategy that ultimately led to higher public debt. Put simply, when governments spend less, GDP tends to fall. And when GDP falls and a country is less productive, tax revenues go down too.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    To make things even more complicated for the chancellor, the UK government has also widened its debt risk by changing its fiscal rules to acknowledge extra financial responsibilities.

    This adjustment gave the government more financial assets, including student loans and public pension holdings. But it also meant taking on more liabilities, including the pension schemes it would have to bail out if necessary.

    In July 2025, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) identified several other sectors – including universities, housing associations and water companies – whose large debts could become government liabilities in the future.

    A bigger balance sheet automatically means more public financial risk. And climate change further raises these risks, the OBR says, by forcing the government to spend more on dealing with environmental damage and eroding fossil-fuel taxes, which still raise around £24 billion for the Treasury.

    The OBR is also concerned about the rising cost of pensions for an ageing population. In fact, the UK’s system is not particularly expensive, partly due to its reliance on private pensions (funded by employers and employees).

    Yet this reliance brings a different kind of government cost. For these private sector schemes have attempted to insulate themselves against the strains of an ageing population, as more employees retire than join the workforce (and as retirees live longer).

    Often this has involved shifting from “defined benefit” plans, which guarantee retirement income, to “defined contribution” plans, where payouts depend on how much members pay in and how well funds are invested.

    But that shift has also made it harder for the government to borrow the money it needs for public spending.

    Defined benefit funds, seeking a steady long-term return, used to be big buyers of UK government bonds (gilts) – the financial assets that the government sells to raise money. In contrast, defined contribution funds invest mainly in equities (company shares), which promise a higher return on investment that can grow pension pots faster.

    UK industrial policy supports this shift from gilts to other assets. It wants pension funds to invest in innovation and infrastructure as a way of stimulating its often mentioned mission of economic growth.

    The growth gamble

    Yet the move by pensions towards equities is steadily deflating demand for new government bonds. This then forces the government to pay higher interest rates to attract enough buyers, often from overseas.

    There is also pressure on the government to relax the “triple lock” on state pensions. This pledge – to raise the basic state pension by at least 2.5% every year, and maintained by all parties since 2011 – is costing around three times as much as was projected at launch, despite fewer pensioners escaping poverty since it was introduced.

    Overall, inflation and an ageing population have lifted state spending on pensions to around 5% of GDP.

    These pressures all strengthen the view that the government will need another tax-raising budget this year. How else will it pay for its plans for spending on healthcare, housing, infrastructure and defence?

    Reeves sought to assure voters that £40 billion in tax hikes in October 2024 rises were enough to plug an inherited “black hole”. But she is already struggling to preserve those projections, after a politically painful retreat from welfare changes designed to save £5 billion.

    Hopes that a faster-growing economy would narrow the deficit, by boosting tax receipts and reducing spending requirements, have not been fulfilled.

    Yet calls for significant tax increases – which could dampen growth – may still be be resisted.

    Under pressure, she may well consider a compromise like a “wealth tax” targeting the richest, that would also satisfy the Labour left. Yet the only way to really raise significant extra funds is to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance, which would be extremely risky politically.

    But all economic policy comes with risk. And she may end up sticking with her position and putting her (taxpayers’) money on the hope that today’s deficit will eventually be narrowed by faster growth. Relying on more investment to solve economic problems depends on investors trusting the economic stability of the UK, which is a gamble. But it is a gamble the government may still be willing to take.

    The Conversation

    Alan Shipman has received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

    – ref. Worries about the UK economy are justified, but can the government afford to gamble on raising taxes? – https://theconversation.com/worries-about-the-uk-economy-are-justified-but-can-the-government-afford-to-gamble-on-raising-taxes-260880

  • Britons are less likely than Americans to invest in stocks – but they may not have the full picture

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam Pybis, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Manchester Metropolitan University

    ymgerman/Shutterstock

    UK chancellor Rachel Reeves would like Britons to invest more in stocks – particularly UK stocks – rather than keep their money in cash. She has even urged the UK finance industry to be less negative about investing and highlight the potential gains as well as the risks.

    Stock ownership is important for governments for a variety of reasons. Boosting capital markets can encourage business expansion, job creation and long-term economic growth. It can also give people another source of income in later life, especially as long-term investing can offer greater returns than saving.

    But in the UK, excluding workplace pensions, only 23% of people have invested in the stock market, compared to nearly two-thirds in the US. Survey results suggest that American consumers are generally more comfortable with financial risks.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    And it appears that a greater degree of risk translates into closer political engagement. During market shocks driven by US president Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, many Americans tracked headlines – and their portfolios – closely. This contrasts with the UK, where most people keep their savings in safer assets like cash savings accounts or premium bonds.

    If Britons are more risk-averse, media coverage that tends to be noisier when markets fall than when they recover may be having an impact. While concerns regarding market volatility may be valid, they can overshadow the long-term benefits of investing.

    One key opportunity that many British consumers have missed out on is the rise of low-cost, diversified exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have made investing more accessible and affordable. An ETF allows investors to buy or sell baskets of shares on an exchange. For example, a FTSE100 ETF gives investors exposure to the UK’s top 100 companies without having to buy each one individually.

    This is exactly the kind of long-term, low-cost investing that Reeves appears to be promoting. But should savers be worried about current market volatility – much of it driven by trade tensions and tariff uncertainty? One view, of course, is that volatility is simply part of investing.

    But it could also be argued that big shifts within the space of a single month are often exaggerated. People are also likely to be put off by news headlines, which tend to exaggerate the swings in the market.

    Examining daily excess returns in the US stock market from November 2024 to April 2025, I plotted cumulative returns (which show how an investment grows over time by adding up past returns) within each month. April 2025 stands out. Despite experiencing several sharp daily losses, the market rebounded swiftly in the days that followed.

    This pattern isn’t new. Historically, markets have shown a remarkable ability to recover from short-term shocks. Yet many potential investors could be deterred by alarming headlines that, while factually accurate, often highlight single-day declines without broader context.

    The reality is that the stock market is frequently a series of short-lived storms. These are volatile, yes, but often followed by calm and recovery.

    Fear and caution

    During market downturns, it’s common for people to try to understand why this time is worse or analyse if this crash is more serious than previous ones.

    The fear these headlines generate could feed into barriers to long-term investing in the UK. And that’s one of the challenges the chancellor faces in encouraging more Britons to invest.

    For those already invested in the stock market, short-term declines are part of the journey. They are risks that can be borne with the understanding that markets tend to recover over time.

    My analysis of daily US stock market data since 1926 shows that after sharp daily drops, the market often rebounds quickly (see pie chart below). In fact, more than a quarter of recoveries occur within just a few days.

    But this resilience is rarely the focus of media coverage. It’s far more common to see headlines reporting that the market is down than to see follow-ups highlighting how quickly it bounced back.

    Research has shown that negative economic information is likely to have a greater impact on public attitudes. For example, a sharp drop in the stock market might dominate front pages, while a steady recovery over the following weeks barely gets a mention. The imbalance reinforces a sense of crisis, even when the broader picture is less bleak.

    front page of daily mail newspaper from april 2025 with the headline 'meltdown'
    Markets went on to recover in April 2025… but did the headlines reflect this?
    David G40/Shutterstock

    Unbalanced reporting can distort perceptions, discouraging potential investors who might otherwise benefit from long-term participation in the market. It appears that American perceptions of their finances are also affected by news coverage in a similar way.

    Over the long term, the difference between stock market returns and the generally lower returns from government bonds is known as the “equity risk premium puzzle”. Economists have long debated why this gap is so large. Some observers argue it may narrow in the future. But many others, including the chancellor, believe that investing in the stock market remains a beneficial long-term strategy.

    If more people are to benefit from long-term investing, it’s vital to tell the full story. That means not just highlighting when markets fall, but following up on how they recover afterwards.

    The Conversation

    Sam Pybis 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. Britons are less likely than Americans to invest in stocks – but they may not have the full picture – https://theconversation.com/britons-are-less-likely-than-americans-to-invest-in-stocks-but-they-may-not-have-the-full-picture-259485

  • Design and Disability at the V&A is a rich, thought-provoking exhibition

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laudan Nooshin, Professor of Music, School of Communication and Creativity, City St George’s, University of London

    One of the first things to greet visitors at the V&A’s new Design and Disability exhibition is a striking blue bench by artist Finnegan Shannon titled, Do You Want Us Here Or Not? This exhibit is a response to the often inadequate seating in museums, which not only acts as a barrier to accessibility for many people, but is more widely symptomatic of ableist approaches to museum and exhibition design.

    In this case, the invitation to “Please sit here!” sets the tone for the whole exhibition, which also includes a large sensory map of the layout (located at wheelchair level), a tactile map, and QR codes that link to audio description for blind and partially sighted visitors, and also British Sign Language interpretation.

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    Aiming to showcase the radical contributions of disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people to design history and contemporary culture from the 1940s until the present, the exhibition goes well beyond this, addressing an impressively wide range of issues around access, disability and exclusion. It also reveals how ableism operates across a range of exclusions, such as race, gender, class and more.

    As the introductory notes point out: “Disabled people past and present have challenged and confronted the imbalance of design in society. This exhibition highlights disabled individuals at the heart of design history … It is both a celebration and a call to action.”

    While the fight for disability justice goes back many decades – also documented in the exhibition – it’s only relatively recently that questions of access and equality have gone beyond the physical. These include a wide range of issues related to neuro-inclusion and sensory access, including calm spaces and sensory maps that indicate noisy areas.

    My own interest in sound in museums has come partly out of research focusing on the role of acoustics in creating accessible spaces, and from my own experience of noise sensitivity conditions hyperacusis and misophonia. Inclusive sonic design seeks to address how sound operates as a factor of social inclusion and exclusion in places like museums.

    The V&A exhibition comprises three sections: visibility, tools and living. Visibility focuses on design and art as fundamental tools of activism and includes work created as part of disability justice movements over many decades. This section is a stark reminder of the justice and rights that only come about through extensive struggles.

    Tools highlight the extraordinary contribution to design innovation made by disabled people. Living explores stories of disabled people claiming space and imagining the worlds that they want to live in.

    Sections two and three both advocate for the social model of disability in which people are rendered disabled by their environment, something that calls for design solutions (as opposed to the medical model in which people are required to navigate and find solutions to their “problem”).

    The exhibition draws attention to a wide range of physical and sensory exclusions, both in the displays and the design of the space itself. The in-house design team includes staff with personal experience of disability who also worked closely with external partners living with disability.

    There are plenty of exhibits that can be experienced through touch. For partially sighted visitors, there are strong visual contrasts in the wall colours and the edges of displays are lit up. And there are raised edgings on all exhibits for people using a cane – all of which help with navigation.

    There are also quiet areas and plenty of seating. Some of these features are already being incorporated into gallery and exhibition design, and hopefully will soon become standard.

    I particularly liked the way various issues intersect in the exhibition, in which a range of exclusions are set alongside one another: race, hearing impairment, youth exclusion and stammering, for example.

    Other favourites included the B1 Blue Flame rattling football used for blind football, which visitors can pick up, feel, smell, shake and listen to. The Deaf Rave set and Woojer Vest are designed for deaf clubbers and performers and use vibrating tactile discs that amplify sound vibrations.

    The beautiful blanket and pillow entitled Public S/Pacing by Helen Statford offers an invitation to rest, drawing attention to “crip time”, accepting “a different pace to non-disabled norms, challenging conventions of productivity, and resting in radical ways that would actually benefit society at large”.

    The blanket highlights the failures of the design of public spaces to include disabled people, “challenging ableist assumptions with care and visibility”. The reverse of the blanket has a quotation from Rhiannon Armstrong’s Radical Act of Stopping (2016), embroidered by Poppy Nash.

    The exhibition includes many examples of “disability gain” by which design aimed at a particular group of people unintentionally benefits others, too. An example is the smartphone touchscreen, based on technology developed by engineers Wayne Westerman and John Elias as an alternative to the standard keyboard, which Westerman was unable to use due to severe hand pain.

    Initially marketed to people with hand disabilities, the technology was later sold to Apple where it revolutionised mobile phone technology.

    The final panel of the exhibition is titled Label for Missing Objects, an imaginative and fitting way to mark the continuing story of designing a world that works for “every body and every mind”.

    Design and Disability is a rich, thought-provoking and landmark exhibition. Kudos to the V&A, although its importance is so obvious, I wonder why it took this long to host a show dedicated to disabled artists and designers and the wider social impact of their work.

    I very much hope there are plans for the exhibition to tour the UK and beyond, and to become a permanent gallery at the V&A, so that it can inform curation and design work in other museums.

    Design and Disability at the V&A runs until February 15 2026.

    The Conversation

    Laudan Nooshin received funding from the AHRC for the project Place-making Through Sound: Designing for Inclusivity and Wellbeing (2023-24).

    – ref. Design and Disability at the V&A is a rich, thought-provoking exhibition – https://theconversation.com/design-and-disability-at-the-vanda-is-a-rich-thought-provoking-exhibition-261135

  • Why Russia is not taking Trump’s threats seriously

    Source: ForeignAffairs4

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Patrick E. Shea, Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Global Governance, University of Glasgow

    The US president, Donald Trump, recently announced that Russia had 50 days to end its war in Ukraine. Otherwise it would face comprehensive secondary sanctions targeting countries that continued trading with Moscow.

    On July 15, when describing new measures that would impose 100% tariffs on any country buying Russian exports, Trump warned: “They are very biting. They are very significant. And they are going to be very bad for the countries involved.”

    Secondary sanctions do not just target Russia directly, they threaten to cut off access to US markets for any country maintaining trade relationships with Moscow. The economic consequences would affect global supply chains, targeting major economies like China and India that have become Russia’s commercial lifelines.

    Despite the dire threats, Moscow’s stock exchange increased by 2.7% immediately following Trump’s announcement. The value of the Russian rouble also strengthened. On a global scale, oil markets appear to have relaxed, suggesting traders see no imminent risks.

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    This market reaction coincided with a nonplussed Moscow. While official statements noted that time was needed for Russia to “analyse what was said in Washington”, other statements suggested that the threats would have no effect. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, for example, declared on social media that “Russia didn’t care” about Trump’s threats.

    The positive market reaction and lack of panic from Russian officials tell us more than simple scepticism about Trump’s willingness to follow through.

    If investors doubted Trump’s credibility, we would expect market indifference, not enthusiasm. Instead, the reaction suggests that financial markets expected a stronger response from the US. As Artyom Nikolayev, an analyst from Invest Era, quipped: “Trump performed below market expectations.”

    A reprieve, not a threat

    Trump’s threat isn’t just non-credible – the positive market reaction in Russia suggests it is a gift for Moscow. The 50-day ultimatum is seen not as a deadline but as a reprieve, meaning nearly two months of guaranteed inaction from the US.

    This will allow Russia more time to press its military advantages in Ukraine without facing new economic pressure. Fifty days is also a long time in American politics, where other crises will almost certainly arise to distract attention from the war.

    More importantly, Trump’s threat actively undermines more serious sanctions efforts that were gaining momentum in the US Congress. A bipartisan bill has been advancing a far more severe sanctions package, proposing secondary tariffs of up to 500% and, crucially, severely limiting the president’s ability to waive them.

    By launching his own initiative, Trump seized control of the policy agenda. Once the ultimatum was issued, US Senate majority leader John Thune announced that any vote on the tougher sanctions bill would be delayed until after the 50-day period. This effectively pauses a more credible threat facing the Kremlin.

    This episode highlights a problem for US attempts to use economic statecraft in international relations. Three factors have combined to undermine the credibility of Trump’s threats.

    First, there is Trump’s own track record. Financial markets have become so accustomed to the administration announcing severe tariffs only to delay, water down or abandon them that the jibe “Taco”, short for “Trump always chickens out”, has gained traction in financial circles.

    This reputation for failing to stick to threats means that adversaries and markets alike have learned to price in a high probability of backing down.



    Read more:
    Investors are calling Trump a chicken – here’s why that matters

    Second, the administration’s credibility is weakened by a lack of domestic political accountability. Research on democratic credibility in international relations emphasises how domestic constraints – what political scientists call “audience costs” – can paradoxically strengthen a country’s international commitments.

    When leaders know they will face political punishment from voters or a legislature for backing down from a threat, their threats gain weight. Yet the general reluctance of Congress to constrain Trump undermines this logic. This signals to adversaries that threats can be made without consequence, eroding their effectiveness.

    And third, effective economic coercion requires a robust diplomatic and bureaucratic apparatus to implement and enforce it. The systematic gutting of the State Department and the freezing of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programmes eliminate the diplomatic infrastructure necessary for sustained economic pressure.

    Effective sanctions require careful coordination with allies, which the Trump administration has undermined. In addition, effective economic coercion requires planning and credible commitment to enforcement, all of which are impossible without a professional diplomatic corps.

    Investors and foreign governments appear to be betting that this combination of presidential inconsistency, a lack of domestic accountability, and a weakened diplomatic apparatus makes any threat more political theatre than genuine economic coercion. The rally in Russian markets was a clear signal that American economic threats are becoming less feared.

    The Conversation

    Patrick E. Shea 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. Why Russia is not taking Trump’s threats seriously – https://theconversation.com/why-russia-is-not-taking-trumps-threats-seriously-261296

  • MIL-OSI Submissions: Worries about the UK economy are justified, but can the government afford to gamble on raising taxes?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alan Shipman, Senior Lecturer in Economics, The Open University

    Gloomy economic figures have heaped more pressure on the British government and its promise to improve growth. And if that wasn’t enough, there have also been some stark warnings about public finances and the country’s ability to service its debts.

    All of this has led to a growing expectation that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to bring in some significant tax hikes later this year, or reduce government spending.

    But both of these options could worsen the long-term economic outlook, by further constraining GDP growth. That was precisely the fate of governments that pursued an agenda of “austerity” – cuts in spending and higher taxes – to tackle the expanded public debt after the financial crisis of 2008.

    It was a strategy that ultimately led to higher public debt. Put simply, when governments spend less, GDP tends to fall. And when GDP falls and a country is less productive, tax revenues go down too.

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    To make things even more complicated for the chancellor, the UK government has also widened its debt risk by changing its fiscal rules to acknowledge extra financial responsibilities.

    This adjustment gave the government more financial assets, including student loans and public pension holdings. But it also meant taking on more liabilities, including the pension schemes it would have to bail out if necessary.

    In July 2025, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) identified several other sectors – including universities, housing associations and water companies – whose large debts could become government liabilities in the future.

    A bigger balance sheet automatically means more public financial risk. And climate change further raises these risks, the OBR says, by forcing the government to spend more on dealing with environmental damage and eroding fossil-fuel taxes, which still raise around £24 billion for the Treasury.

    The OBR is also concerned about the rising cost of pensions for an ageing population. In fact, the UK’s system is not particularly expensive, partly due to its reliance on private pensions (funded by employers and employees).

    Yet this reliance brings a different kind of government cost. For these private sector schemes have attempted to insulate themselves against the strains of an ageing population, as more employees retire than join the workforce (and as retirees live longer).

    Often this has involved shifting from “defined benefit” plans, which guarantee retirement income, to “defined contribution” plans, where payouts depend on how much members pay in and how well funds are invested.

    But that shift has also made it harder for the government to borrow the money it needs for public spending.

    Defined benefit funds, seeking a steady long-term return, used to be big buyers of UK government bonds (gilts) – the financial assets that the government sells to raise money. In contrast, defined contribution funds invest mainly in equities (company shares), which promise a higher return on investment that can grow pension pots faster.

    UK industrial policy supports this shift from gilts to other assets. It wants pension funds to invest in innovation and infrastructure as a way of stimulating its often mentioned mission of economic growth.

    The growth gamble

    Yet the move by pensions towards equities is steadily deflating demand for new government bonds. This then forces the government to pay higher interest rates to attract enough buyers, often from overseas.

    There is also pressure on the government to relax the “triple lock” on state pensions. This pledge – to raise the basic state pension by at least 2.5% every year, and maintained by all parties since 2011 – is costing around three times as much as was projected at launch, despite fewer pensioners escaping poverty since it was introduced.

    Overall, inflation and an ageing population have lifted state spending on pensions to around 5% of GDP.

    These pressures all strengthen the view that the government will need another tax-raising budget this year. How else will it pay for its plans for spending on healthcare, housing, infrastructure and defence?

    Reeves sought to assure voters that £40 billion in tax hikes in October 2024 rises were enough to plug an inherited “black hole”. But she is already struggling to preserve those projections, after a politically painful retreat from welfare changes designed to save £5 billion.

    Hopes that a faster-growing economy would narrow the deficit, by boosting tax receipts and reducing spending requirements, have not been fulfilled.

    Yet calls for significant tax increases – which could dampen growth – may still be be resisted.

    Under pressure, she may well consider a compromise like a “wealth tax” targeting the richest, that would also satisfy the Labour left. Yet the only way to really raise significant extra funds is to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance, which would be extremely risky politically.

    But all economic policy comes with risk. And she may end up sticking with her position and putting her (taxpayers’) money on the hope that today’s deficit will eventually be narrowed by faster growth. Relying on more investment to solve economic problems depends on investors trusting the economic stability of the UK, which is a gamble. But it is a gamble the government may still be willing to take.

    Alan Shipman has received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

    – ref. Worries about the UK economy are justified, but can the government afford to gamble on raising taxes? – https://theconversation.com/worries-about-the-uk-economy-are-justified-but-can-the-government-afford-to-gamble-on-raising-taxes-260880

    MIL OSI –