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Category: Education

  • MIL-OSI: Organizations race to embed AI into enterprise workflows, EXL study finds

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    NEW YORK, May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Organizations are changing the ways they work, sometimes radically, to embed AI throughout their workflows and to scale and maximize ROI, according to new research by EXL [NASDAQ: EXLS], a global data and AI company. A 90% majority of organizations have significantly changed their operating model to accommodate AI, with 39% having completely redesigned how they work. Over the next year, companies expect over half of their processes will include AI.

    The second annual EXL Enterprise AI Study: Driving Execution at Scale is based on a survey of 290 C-suite and other senior decision makers across the banking and finance, insurance, retail, utilities, and healthcare payer industries. Its findings shine a spotlight on the massive growth of enterprise GenAI implementations to date but also warn of data quality issues, talent shortages, and other roadblocks that could curtail some of the early progress companies have made as they move deeper into company-wide enterprise AI initiatives.

    The following are some of the report’s key findings:

    • Confident AI Leaders Emerge: Respondents in this year’s survey are feeling confident in how they’re faring on AI adoption. More than half (54%) believe they are “a little ahead” of their competitors in AI implementation and 22% believe they are “far ahead.” Leaders in the field have been able to create a new operating model by embedding AI into their business workflows. These organizations are capitalizing on AI and are able to effectively manage and make available the data AI needs to excel at scale.
    • New Customers, Improved Margins Among Top AI Priorities: Half (50%) of business leaders say that improving ways to target and attract new customers are their top priority for AI technology. Executives also say they hope AI can help them improve margins and profitability (47%) and reduce operating costs (47%). 
    • Some AI Integrations Stuck in Neutral: While many organizations have quickly adopted GenAI, companies reported AI initiatives across roughly 60% of their enterprise remain stuck in pilot mode. What’s more, some executives fear the speed of these adoptions may soon be interrupted due to talent, user adoption, and data quality obstacles, with 73% of organizations of the belief that improving their data capabilities will present a moderate or significant challenge. Just 30% of respondents said their company’s data is accessible on an enterprise-wide basis.
    • Talent Tops Cost as Biggest Barrier to AI Adoption: The biggest single barrier to AI adoption is shortage of talent or skills for AI use (31%), followed by concerns about data privacy and security (30%) and cost or budget constraints (30%).

    “The true power of AI can only truly be unlocked when it is seamlessly embedded into workflows—fueled by data that is AI ready, enabled by the right technology and infrastructure and powered by skilled talent,” said Anand “Andy” Logani, chief data and AI officer at EXL. “When executed effectively, it delivers meaningful business value without disruption.”

    The full report, 2025 EXL Enterprise AI Study: Bridging Strategy and Operations, can be accessed here.

    About EXL

    EXL (NASDAQ: EXLS) is a global data and AI company that offers services and solutions to reinvent client business models, drive better outcomes and unlock growth with speed. EXL harnesses the power of data, AI, and deep industry knowledge to transform businesses, including the world’s leading corporations in industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and capital markets, retail, communications and media, and energy and infrastructure, among others. EXL was founded in 1999 with the core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and respect. We are headquartered in New York and have approximately 60,000 employees spanning six continents. For more information, visit www.exlservice.com.

    Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

    This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You should not place undue reliance on those statements because they are subject to numerous uncertainties and factors relating to EXL’s operations and business environment, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond EXL’s control. Forward-looking statements include information concerning EXL’s possible or assumed future results of operations, including descriptions of its business strategy. These statements may include words such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “estimate” or similar expressions. These statements are based on assumptions that we have made in light of management’s experience in the industry as well as its perceptions of historical trends, current conditions, expected future developments and other factors it believes are appropriate under the circumstances. You should understand that these statements are not guarantees of performance or results. They involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Although EXL believes that these forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, you should be aware that many factors could affect EXL’s actual financial results or results of operations and could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors, which include our ability to maintain and grow client demand, our ability to hire and retain sufficiently trained employees, and our ability to accurately estimate and/or manage costs, rising interest rates, rising inflation and recessionary economic trends, are discussed in more detail in EXL’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including EXL’s Annual Report on Form 10-K. You should keep in mind that any forward-looking statement made herein, or elsewhere, speaks only as of the date on which it is made. New risks and uncertainties come up from time to time, and it is impossible to predict these events or how they may affect EXL. EXL has no obligation to update any forward-looking statements after the date hereof, except as required by federal securities laws.

    Contacts
    Media
    Keith Little
    +1 703-598-0980
    media.relations@exlservice.com

    Investor Relations
    John Kristoff
    +1 212 209 4613
    IR@exlservice.com

    PDF available: http://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/4e977a3b-6c39-4444-a5ef-b4859e3e2a1e

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI: TopLine Financial Credit Union Receives Statewide Recognition for Member Service Initiatives

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    MAPLE GROVE, Minn., May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — TopLine Financial Credit Union, a Twin Cities-based member-owned financial services cooperative, was named winner of the Louise Herring Philosophy-in-Action Member Service Award, sponsored by the Minnesota Credit Union Network (MnCUN). The Louise Herring award recognizes credit unions that demonstrate in an extraordinary way the practical application of the movement’s principles in serving their members.

    Topline was awarded in the Louise Herring Category for the credit union’s partnership with Rondo Community Land Trust (RCLT), a non-profit in St. Paul, to help make homeownership more affordable for individuals and families earning low-to-moderate incomes, and to preserve affordability for small businesses operated by people of color and non-profits at risk of displacement from rising rents.

    TopLine joined forces with Rondo Community Land Trust as the first credit union to be one of their approved mortgage lenders for their Homebuyer Initiated Program (HIP). This program assists home buyers at or below 80% area median income (AMI) to purchase and make repairs on a single-family home (including duplexes) in St. Paul or Suburban Ramsey County.

    “We are honored to be recognized for our partnership with Rondo Community Land Trust,” said Mick Olson, TopLine Financial Credit Union President and CEO. “We are committed to building strong connections with nonprofit community partners such as RCLT. By working together, we can drive economic growth and diversity, promote financial inclusion and access, and help more individuals achieve their financial dream of homeownership.”

    The Minnesota Credit Union Network is the statewide trade association that works to ensure the success, growth and vitality of Minnesota credit unions. For more information, visit www.mncun.org.

    Rondo Community Land Trust (CLT) is a community based affordable housing and commercial land trust operating in St. Paul and Suburban Ramsey County. For more information, visit www.rondoclt.org.

    TopLine Financial Credit Union, a Twin Cities-based credit union, is Minnesota’s 9th largest credit union, with assets of over $1.1 billion and serves over 70,000 members. Established in 1935, the not-for-profit financial cooperative offers a complete line of financial services from its ten branch locations — in Bloomington, Brooklyn Park, Champlin, Circle Pines, Coon Rapids, Forest Lake, Maple Grove, Plymouth, St. Francis and in St. Paul’s Como Park — as well as by phone and online at www.TopLinecu.com or www.ahcu.coop. Membership is available to anyone who lives, works, worships, attends school or volunteers in Anoka, Benton, Carver, Chisago, Dakota, Hennepin, Isanti, Kanabec, Mille Lacs, Pine, Ramsey, Scott, Sherburne, Washington and Wright counties in Minnesota and their immediate family members, as well as employees and retirees of Anoka Hennepin School District #11, Anoka Technical College, Federal Premium Ammunition, Hoffman Enclosures, Inc., GRACO, Inc., and their subsidiaries. Visit us on our Facebook or Instagram. To learn more about the credit union’s foundation, visit www.TopLinecu.com/Foundation.

    CONTACT:
    Vicki Roscoe Erickson
    Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
    TopLine Financial Credit Union
    verickson@toplinecu.com | 763.391.0872

    A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/52c4da82-782a-4a8f-9324-2650a4257373

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The UK might have accepted the idea of youth mobility with the EU, but it’s not happening any time soon

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics & International Studies, The Open University

    View Apart/Shutterstock

    The language might be dry, but the political shift is significant. Monday’s summit between the UK and EU leaders in London resulted in an acknowledgement of the “mutual interest to deepen our people-to-people ties, particularly for the younger generation”.

    This announcement is an important step forward in the creation of a youth mobility scheme between the EU and UK, even if it has required a name change to become a “youth experience scheme”. It is the first time that a British government has formally accepted this as something to negotiate and implement.

    However, there is scant detail about how it will work in practice and what the inevitable limits will be. While the permitted activities (“work, studies, au-pairing, volunteering, or simply travelling”) seem extensive, they are prefaced with the dreaded words “such as” – which means no one has actually agreed any of it.

    It was clear over a year ago that the basic models that the two sides have for youth mobility differ. The EU wants lengthy exchange periods and home tuition fees for students; the UK wants shorter stays, caps on numbers and retention of international fees for EU students at UK universities. The achievement of a deal would require at least one of them to move. This week makes this difference now the formal position, rather than showing whether movement is possible.

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    It’s possible that discussion of British participation in the Erasmus+ scheme for student mobility might be a partial stopgap, making exchanges within study programmes easier. However, the ambition for creating those deeper people-to-people ties will need more to make it meaningful.

    As the troubled history of this idea should indicate, there’s still a very long way to go before anyone gets to use the scheme in practice.

    The founding irony of a youth mobility scheme with the EU after Brexit is that it was originally a British idea. It was produced under Rishi Sunak following his conclusion of the Windsor Framework on Northern Ireland, when he was looking for areas to rebuild ties with Europe.

    In 2023, feelers had been put out to various EU member states about concluding bilateral deals with the UK. While there was some interest, the general feeling was that this was best handled at an EU level, to avoid any cherrypicking of countries by London.

    A summary of UK-EU youth mobility proposals.
    Simon Usherwood, CC BY-NC-SA

    In April 2024, the European Commission produced an ambitious proposal for a scheme. It put forward that 18- to 30-year-olds would be able to get a visa for up to four years for any purpose – work, study, travel – without quotas on numbers.

    Both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition had rejected the proposal out of hand. This was partly out of concerns over the potential impact on immigration figures and on student finances: the commission suggested EU students should be able to pay UK university fees. Mostly, however, it came from a desire not to be seen to make a big agreement with the EU that looked a bit like freedom of movement.

    To be clear, youth mobility is very much not freedom of movement. The latter implies no limits on entry, length or purpose of stay, as well as access to any kinds of public services as if you were a resident national. The former still means paying for a visa and strict limits on those services. But such legal points remain rather marginal in the British political and media debate.

    Since last year, there has been some to and fro, but largely behind closed doors and with the incoming Labour government continuing the line that such a scheme wasn’t on the cards. While the UK has a number of youth mobility schemes with countries around the world, these are typically limited by quotas and time (normally to two years) and require the person to be working or studying.

    Moving on?

    On the British side, Home Office concern about immigration figures is clearly still critical, especially in the context of the recent white paper that aims to cut back migration. Universities too have been vocal about the financial impact of losing tuition fee income from EU students.

    But on the EU side, the matter is seen very differently. To some extent, the interest is in maintaining the links with the UK, especially for young people that could gain from experiencing more of how their neighbours live. But much more than this is the sense that youth mobility has become something of a test for the British government.

    Labour’s return to office last July marked the unleashing of a significant diplomatic effort to engage with European counterparts and to talk up the value of working together. Youth mobility is a test of that value for some in European capitals, both in terms of being able to negotiate an agreement and of being able to sell it to the British public.

    The coming weeks and months will therefore be a key period if the reset is to result in more sustainably improved relations. Even if the basic shape of UK-EU relations isn’t about to shift, the ability for both sides to be able to talk and act constructively will still matter in delivering from that long list of summit ambitions.

    Simon Usherwood receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, as a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.

    – ref. The UK might have accepted the idea of youth mobility with the EU, but it’s not happening any time soon – https://theconversation.com/the-uk-might-have-accepted-the-idea-of-youth-mobility-with-the-eu-but-its-not-happening-any-time-soon-256628

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The DIY guide to checking how well you’re ageing

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marco Arkesteijn, Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Biomechanics, Aberystwyth University

    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    A few years ago, a social media trend challenged people to see if they could stand up from the floor without using their hands. Now, it’s all about how long you can balance on one leg while brushing your teeth. These quirky “tests” promise to tell us how well we’re ageing – but do they really?

    When we talk about “ageing well”, we’re usually referring to both physical and psychological wellbeing. That includes feeling good (hedonic wellbeing) and finding meaning and purpose (eudaimonic wellbeing). Engaging in activities and monitoring ourselves plays a role in both.

    But ageing isn’t just about how strong your grip is or how fast you can walk. It’s a complex mix of physical, cognitive, emotional and social changes – and no single test captures the whole picture.

    Physically, one simple measure that gets a lot of attention is walking speed. According to one famous study, people who walk faster than 1.32 metres per second were less likely to die in the next three years – jokingly framed as “too fast for the Grim Reaper to catch”.

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    On the flip side, a slower walking speed – below 0.8 metres per second – can be a sign of sarcopenia, a condition involving reduced muscle mass, muscle strength and physical function. These are all important indicators of age-related decline.

    But while these markers are useful, they’re not easy to measure at home. Most research relies on specialist equipment and your local GP probably doesn’t have a grip-strength dynamometer sitting in a drawer. But they could time how long it takes you to stand up and sit down five times from a chair.

    How to do a DIY MOT

    So, what can you realistically do to track your own ageing?

    To truly understand how you’re ageing, it helps to think beyond physical health. Mental sharpness, emotional resilience and social connection matter just as much. One helpful idea is to assess your cognitive fitness, which includes skills like attention, memory and flexibility.

    Here are some cognitive tests you can try at home:

    Trail making test: connect numbers and letters in sequence (1, A, 2, B, etc.) and time how long it takes. This measures your ability to switch between tasks.

    Stroop task: challenges your ability to ignore competing information. Try saying the colour of a word, not the word itself – like saying “red” when you see the word “blue” printed in red ink. It’s harder than it sounds!

    Dual-task challenge: walk at your normal speed while counting backwards from 100 in threes. If your walking speed changes significantly, it could indicate cognitive strain.

    These kinds of tasks test how well your brain handles competing demands – a key ability that becomes even more important as we age. This skill is known as cognitive flexibility, and it helps you adapt to changing situations, switch between tasks and manage distractions.

    Trying out these tests is great, but how do you know if you’re improving? After all, when you have spent time trying to improve your walking speed, or Stroop ability – or even rubbing your head, patting your belly while saying the Finnish alphabet out loud – it’s important to know if you are seeing benefits.

    Some measures, like single-leg stance, can vary wildly from day to day – or even hour to hour. You might get better just from repeating it, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ageing better, just that you’ve practised.

    Others, like grip strength, change very slowly even with regular strength training. And some improvements are task-specific: getting better at the trail making test doesn’t necessarily make you sharper at doing Wordle.

    That’s why it helps to complete the test a few times at the start, then retest yourself once a month or so – again, doing it a couple of times – to track any improvements. Cognitive changes may be slower to notice than physical ones, so regular checks can help reveal progress over time.

    More of a puzzle than a test

    There’s no single test or score that can capture how well you’re ageing. Think of it more like a jigsaw puzzle. Physical health, mental agility, emotional balance, social connection – they all matter, and they all interact. And, of course, even if you perform well now, some changes in the future may be beyond your control. No test can fully predict what lies ahead.

    At the end of the day, maybe the best sign of ageing well isn’t how fast you walk or how long you can stand on one leg – it’s how you feel about your life. Are you feeling engaged, content, connected?

    Tools like the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience can help you take stock of your emotional wellbeing. This short, 12-question survey asks about your everyday feelings – from joy and calm to sadness and frustration – offering insight into both the pleasurable (hedonic) and meaningful (eudaimonic) sides of wellbeing.

    Ageing well isn’t about beating a stopwatch or acing a memory test. It’s about knowing yourself – your body, your mind and your values – and making small, meaningful changes that help you feel more you.

    So, go ahead, stand on one leg if you like. But don’t forget to check in with your brain, body, emotions and your sense of purpose too.

    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. The DIY guide to checking how well you’re ageing – https://theconversation.com/the-diy-guide-to-checking-how-well-youre-ageing-256297

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How to tackle new strains of potato blight and avoid another great famine

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By David O’Connor, Associate Professor, School of Chemical Sciences, Dublin City University

    A new aggressive potato blight strain was detected in Wales and eastern Scotland earlier this year. The strain, identified as EU 46, can withstand certain fungicides, making it harder to control. It serves as a stark reminder that nearly 175 years after Ireland’s great famine, this destructive pathogen continues to evolve and endanger crops around the world.

    Each year, farmers lose an estimated US$6–7 billion (£4.5-5.2 billion) worth of crops due to this disease. In Europe alone, direct losses and control costs amount to over €1 billion (£800 million) annually. That includes the cost of expensive fungicide sprays that farmers rely on for protection.

    In developing countries, the stakes are even higher. Many smallhold farmers lack resources for intensive disease management. In Uganda, potato blight can destroy up to 100% of a farmer’s crop, endangering livelihoods and local food security.

    Just as in the Irish famine, dependence on a single crop is risky. When blight strikes these vulnerable communities, the consequences can be devastating.

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    After decades of research, blight remains hard to defeat, partly due to the pathogen’s remarkable adaptability. Over the years, Phytophthora infestans (late blight) has repeatedly evolved new genetic strains that overcome both chemical fungicides and the resistant potato varieties bred to fend it off.

    The newly identified EU 46 strain is just one example of how quickly blight can develop resistance. In this case, tolerating a key fungicide and showing reduced sensitivity to others.

    Meanwhile, environmental changes and global trade create opportunities for wind-blown spores to migrate into new regions. All of this means farmers must remain vigilant; what worked against blight last year might not work today.

    After the Irish famine of the 1840s, science eventually identified its microscopic culprit and ways to fight it, but innovation didn’t stop there. Today, researchers and farmers are enlisting cutting-edge technology to stay ahead of blight.

    One promising tool is real-time spore detection. Devices like the SwisensPoleno, a monitor developed in Switzerland, can constantly scan the air on farms and spot signs of P. infestans spores as they appear.

    In Ireland, I’m leading a project testing this technology out on farms. These sensors rely on advanced imaging and AI to tell blight spores apart from other particles, giving farmers an early warning so they can act before the disease spreads.

    Potato blight is caused by a pathogen called Phytophthora Infestans.
    Elena Masiutkina/Shutterstock, CC BY-NC-ND

    Equally, new rapid DNA diagnostics can detect blight more quickly than traditional lab tests which take days to identify new strains. Portable testing kits are bringing diagnostics to the field. My colleagues and I have developed a simple in-field test (like COVID-19 lateral flow tests) that detects specific blight strains from a crushed leaf or air samples in under 30 minutes.

    Such tests not only confirm the presence of blight but can tell if the strain is one known to resist certain fungicides. This information allows farmers to choose the right treatment immediately, targeting the pathogen’s weaknesses and avoiding wasted effort.

    Farmers are also using data and computer modelling to anticipate outbreaks of the disease allowing them to act before it can takes hold. Sophisticated forecasting systems crunch weather data (temperature, humidity, rainfall) and spore counts to predict when and where blight is likely to strike next.

    By pinpointing high-risk periods, these models help schedule fungicide applications more strategically – only when needed, rather than on a fixed calendar. This not only cuts costs and environmental damage by reducing unnecessary sprays, but also slows down resistance development in the pathogen.

    Digital tech can help farmers detect crop diseases like potato blight quickly and accurately.
    Andrii Medvediuk/Shutterstock

    A global fight

    Defeating potato blight demands international efforts. There’s no wonder drug or magic gene that can eliminate this ever-changing pathogen. Like other experts, I advocate for an integrated pest-management approach.

    This combines cultural practices (like crop rotation and destroying infected plant debris) alongside biological controls (naturally occurring microbes, like beneficial bacteria, to help suppress the disease and limit its impact on crops). Judicious fungicide use to reduce the chances of blight taking hold is also effective.

    Using technology to leverage real-time data enables farmers to act on early warnings and apply treatments in a targeted way, preserving yields while minimising environmental damage.

    Investing in research and farmer education is essential too – from developing resistant potato breeds to training farmers in remote areas on how to use new diagnostic kits.

    The fight against potato blight is global by necessity. An airborne spore originating in one country can hop to another on the wind, as Europe’s experience shows. Likewise, breakthroughs in one lab or farm – whether a new sensor, a resistant potato variety, or an effective organic spray – need to be shared and supported across borders.

    International initiatives are putting the latest blight-fighting tools into the hands of farmers around the world. Supporting smallhold farmers in developing countries is especially vital, because they often face blight with limited resources and far more is at stake in terms of food security.

    In the mid-19th century, Ireland’s potato-dependent society was caught tragically off guard. Today, we have knowledge, technology and hard-earned lessons on our side.

    By embracing an integrated, technology driven strategy and ensuring it reaches farmers everywhere, that blight cycle could be broken. The continued emergence of strains like EU 46 is a warning, but also a call to action. One that we are now better equipped than ever to answer.

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

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    David O’Connor receives funding from Research Ireland and Irish EPA.

    – ref. How to tackle new strains of potato blight and avoid another great famine – https://theconversation.com/how-to-tackle-new-strains-of-potato-blight-and-avoid-another-great-famine-256926

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Coin by Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher wins the 20th Dylan Thomas Prize – an expert from the judging panel explains why

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel G. Williams, Professor of English Literature, Swansea University

    Yasmin Zaher’s remarkable novel The Coin has won the 20th International Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 40.

    This is not a story that begins at the beginning. Instead, its narrator starts with dirt and an obsession with cleanliness, but suggests later that the coin of the title – an Israeli shekel that she accidentally swallowed on a family road trip in which her parents were killed in a car crash – would have been an equally appropriate place to begin.

    Long forgotten, the swallowed coin begins to make its presence felt, somewhere in her body, following her move to America. The narrator is a wealthy young Palestinian woman, teaching boys at a New York City middle school. Her wealth, however, is in the hands of a brother who controls her allowance. She responds by developing a scheme to resell luxury handbags with a homeless con-artist, known throughout as “Trenchcoat”.

    This is one of several attempts at shaping the world around her: she revels in her sexuality and ability to redefine herself through fashionable clothes and accessories; she teaches her class about black power and takes them on a trip to listen to the “dagger poems” of a black nationalist poet in New Jersey.

    I assume this poet is Amiri Baraka since they eat “Black Dada Nihilismus” burgers, a reference to his poem of the same name. But such acts of resistance, if not futile, are limited. Like the swallowed coin, the levers of control, whether material or psychic, lie out of reach as we witness the narrator’s gradual unravelling.

    It is perhaps appropriate that a novel set in New York should win the prize named after Swansea’s most famous poet. New York both enticed and frightened Dylan Thomas. It was the city in which he died. The city, also, in which he recorded the ground-breaking reading of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

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    In that story, as in his earlier Return Journey, his childhood self is a ghostly presence wandering among the “blitzed flat graves” of shops “marbled with snow and headstoned with fences”. The snow hides devastation. The destruction of the city that Thomas knew as a child. The 44 air raids mounted on Swansea between 1940 and 1943 killed 390 people. And it’s the similar loss of people and places, and the suffering in Gaza today, which Zaher’s novel examines.

    Palestine is a persistent and troubling presence in the The Coin. For Dylan the devastation of Swansea was a metonym for a wider world where civilians were increasingly the victims of war. His world is, regrettably, still ours in that sense. The Coin is a profound meditation on our contemporary world and our complicity in the destruction of another place and people.

    In a moving scene, the narrator recalls a Jewish friend, “a very gentle girl who dreamed of becoming a ballerina”. She lived in a house that once belonged to “a Palestinian family that had been expelled in 1948”. The friend tells her about two underground rooms in the garden. One of the rooms, “the poop room”, allows access to the second which contains “a big wooden chest full of treasures and gold”. The narrator keeps “thinking of that secret chamber off the shit room, the wooden chest inside, full of silverware and gold of the family who thought they would return.”

    The swallowed coin. The inaccessible allowance. The wooden chest full of treasures and gold. Unreachable currency functions as a powerful symbolic centre connecting the brief scenes and meditations that constitute this appropriately fragmented novel. Lost somewhere in the narrator’s entrails, removed from economic exchange, the coin belongs with the excrement and detritus of urban life, which is the object of the narrator’s disgusted obsessions.

    New York in this novel is a repository of failed circulation – the filth of the city’s streets offering a gothic underside to the endless flows of capitalism, frustrating the narrator’s obsessive attempts at keeping herself clean. Narratives and circulation end in the stasis of dirt. Palestinian history ends in dispossession. Swallowed coin, inaccessible allowance and a buried treasure chest are symbolic repositories of Palestinian traumatic memory.

    Zaher shows us how the novel form can still offer a unique way of understanding the world, of mapping our contemporary disorientation. It does this not by offering clarity, but by lingering in the spaces where movement, value and meaning break down. This is a novel about circulation – of money, of bodies and of meaning.

    The swallowed coin is itself a kind of resistance, a refusal to go along with the restless movement of capital that defines our world. The coin refuses liquidity and thereby refuses complicity; its removal from the economic system mimics a kind of muted protest. Beneath the novel’s often frenetic and energetic surface hides a resistant counter-politics of inaction.

    Daniel G. Williams was a judge of this years’ Dylan Thomas Prize.

    – ref. The Coin by Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher wins the 20th Dylan Thomas Prize – an expert from the judging panel explains why – https://theconversation.com/the-coin-by-palestinian-writer-yasmin-zaher-wins-the-20th-dylan-thomas-prize-an-expert-from-the-judging-panel-explains-why-257063

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: International Booker prize 2025: six experts review the shortlisted novels

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Helen Vassallo, Associate Professor of French and Translation, University of Exeter

    From a longlist of 13, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on May 20.

    Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda

    Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird offers us glimpses of one imagined future for earth and humanity.

    Its vision could be described as post-apocalyptic. After unspecified cataclysmic events, humans exist only in tiny, scattered communities and extinction seems imminent. But this is also a beautiful, if dreamlike, world and one in which humanity still has the potential for astonishing growth and change.

    Each chapter introduces something new and startling to the reader. Many of the tropes are familiar – cloning, superpowers, mutation, AI. Yet they are configured in unfamiliar ways and prompt reflections on the nature of humanity and our relationship with the rest of creation – as well as on time, religion and the possibility of an afterlife.

    Despite grappling with so many huge questions, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is an accessible and absorbing novel. And, although tragedy is never far away, there remains humour – and hope.

    Sarah Annes Brown, Professor of English Literature

    Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

    Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp shines a light on the lives of Muslim women in rural India. In a bold and memorable translation from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, this quietly powerful collection of short stories opens up the intimate space of domestic rituals and family tensions.

    Mushtaq’s fervent advocacy of women’s rights is evident in the compassion with which she brings to life the women in the stories: from the lack of autonomy suffered by young girls forced into wedlock to the indignity of an older woman obliged to accept her husband taking a second wife or a widow whose son arranges a new marriage for her, the women’s lives are dictated by men.

    Heart Lamp is perhaps best summed up in the final story, “Be a Woman Once, O Lord!” Throughout these stories, Mushtaq invites us – and whichever male deity might be listening – to walk in the shoes of women overlooked by an unquestioned patriarchal hierarchy.

    Helen Vassallo, Associate Professor of French and Translation

    A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson

    Published in France in 2008 as Un chapeau léopard, A Leopard-Skin Hat is a novel about a friendship spanning 20 years between a woman called Fanny and a man known throughout only as “the Narrator”. He is not, though, the narrator of the novel. Rather, an unknown storyteller tells us how the Narrator sees Fanny gradually lose the fight against madness (the novel’s word) and, in the end, death.

    This is a novel about the mystery of other people, about how unknowable others are to us. It explores how we narrate to try to understand people who are not us, but whom we love. What is most extraordinary about Serre’s novel is the way it shows us two friends doing very ordinary things – going out for dinner, going on holiday, walking in the countryside and swimming in lakes – but shows us through this the strangeness and complexity of friendship, love and life.

    Leigh Wilson, Professor of English Literature

    Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

    Perfection is a slim account of the way that time “disappears” for Anna and Tom, an expat couple living in Berlin as creative freelancers in the 2010s.

    Written in homage to Georges Perec’s Things: The Story of the Sixties (1965), the novel opens with an overbearing description of the items in their apartment, moving in and out of the characters’ dissatisfaction with the aesthetic, social, creative, economic and political routes open to them in 120 pages spanning a little over 10 years.

    As international elections, the European refugee crises and climate catastrophe dance in and out of their peripheral vision, Anna and Tom find neither satisfaction with their current moment nor successfully imagine a better one. As such, Latronico gently, but with an increasing sense of fatalism, considers the stagnation of a millennial creative class whose views on influence, status, power and happiness remain deeply linked to the “new emotions” of digital mediation.

    By Rachel Sykes, Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature and Culture

    On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland

    In On The Calculation of Volume, a woman, Tara Selter, finds herself trapped in an endlessly repeating day, November 18. Volume I, the first of seven books, recounts the first 365 days of this time loop, with Tara attempting to make sense of her predicament, to explain it to her husband – who is still bound by the normal rules of time – and to try to fix whatever has initiated this situation.

    As the novel continues, it becomes less focused on the novelty of the situation and more on the philosophical questions it raises: the alternate claustrophobia and liberation of replaying the same day; how our friends and partners sometimes feel like they inhabit a different reality; the way in which time pulls things and people apart; of the importance we place in the idea of “tomorrow”.

    What’s remarkable about Balle’s novel is how compulsive it is – even though we know time is standing still, we still want to know what will happen next.

    David Hering, Senior Lecturer in English Literature

    Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson

    Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat is a slim, bruising novel that centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 migrants in the English Channel in November 2021. In a small, inflatable craft, they reached out over crackling radio lines, asking for help that never came.

    Small Boat focuses not on the migrants themselves, but on a French coastguard operator who spent that night on the radio, fielding their calls for rescue. Delecroix’s brilliance lies in showing how violence at the border is carried out not by villains, but by workers. It was not evil that allowed those people to die in the water, it was a string of decisions made by people in warm rooms who believed they were doing their jobs.

    In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix’s novel is a necessary – and merciless – indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too.

    Fiona Murphy, Assistant Professor in Refugee and Intercultural Studies

    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. International Booker prize 2025: six experts review the shortlisted novels – https://theconversation.com/international-booker-prize-2025-six-experts-review-the-shortlisted-novels-255464

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: In ‘Paying For It,’ ex-lovers reimagine friendship, family and the meaning of sex work

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ummni Khan, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University

    Emily Lê and Daniel Beirne star in the film that sees director and multidisciplinary artist Sook-Lin Yee adapt the graphic memoir of her ex-lover, Chester Brown, for the screen. (Wilding Pictures & Hawkeye Pictures)

    The film Paying For It, Sook-Yin Lee’s live-action adaptation of cartoonist Chester Brown’s 2011 graphic memoir, reveals unexpected overlaps between paid sexual encounters and romantic relationships.

    Lee, a boundary-shattering artist working across film, music, acting and broadcast, has never shied away from taboo. With Paying For It, she takes on sex work, romance and the messy labour of chosen family by adapting her ex-lover’s memoir for the screen.

    ‘Paying For It,’ graphic memoir by Chester Brown.
    (Drawn & Quarterly)

    In my 2019 article “Chester Brown and the Queerness of Johns,” I analyze Brown’s original book, which traces his pivot from monogamy with Lee to regularly seeing sex workers in the late 1990s.

    Both a memoir and a manifesto, the book pairs accounts of paid sex with arguments for decriminalizing sex work, voiced through debates with friends and a detailed appendix. In my analysis, I frame Brown’s memoir as a queer intervention, one that disrupts heteronormative ideals of romantic relations, intimate exchanges and sexual propriety.

    Lee’s cinematic version of Paying For It affirms Brown’s stance, but filters the story through her own perceptions and snapshots of her love life. In doing so, she traces how she and Brown reinvented their relationship, while portraying his encounters with sex workers with nuance and care.

    Drawing on my research in sexuality — including scholarship on sex work, client surveillance and client regulation — I see the film as a defiant celebration of unconventional bonds between exes who remain best friends, and between clients and sex workers, where even purchased orgasms can carry moments of tenderness and mutual respect.

    Radical relationship honesty

    The film opens with Sonny (Lee’s fictional persona, played by Emily Lê) confessing to live-in boyfriend Chester (Daniel Beirne) that she’s falling in love with someone else.

    Rather than erupting in rage or jealousy, Chester remains composed. Together, they choose to see what might come next. As Sonny begins seeing other people, Chester continues living in the house and becomes privy to her romantic sagas, from the steamy beginnings to the bitter blowouts. To the bewilderment of his friends, he remains content with the arrangement.

    Eventually, Chester decides to pay for sex, a decision he shares with Sonny.
    What emerges is a portrait of creative kinship where two people refuse the usual scripts and choose radical openness instead.

    Unconventional bond

    Decades after the events depicted in the film, Lee has described Brown as her “best friend” and “as family.”

    Lee and Brown shape personal histories into overlapping narratives. That they’ve promoted the film together, and appeared in joint interviews and public discussions, suggests a sense of mutual trust at the heart of their collaboration.

    Probing the meanings of sex and intimacy

    Chester moves — and sometimes stumbles — through criminalized terrain, figuring out how to find sex workers, engage respectfully and follow the unspoken rules of the exchange. The film suggests sometimes it’s just sex for Chester, and at other times, the exchange carries an emotional connection for him.

    With one sex worker, Chester shares his real name and gifts a book he wrote about Louis Riel.

    Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein has analyzed how sex workers are sometimes paid to offer their clients an erotic experience “premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection.”

    In the film, a potential for emotional reciprocity between Chester and a sex worker becomes evident. Without giving too much away, by the film’s end we see how a casual and transactional beginning transforms into something more enduring for both parties.

    ‘Paying For It,’ trailer.

    Risks in both romance and sex work

    The film also highlights the risks running through both sex work and romance.

    Sex workers face threats of abuse, arrest, disrespect and boundary violations. The film gestures to these realities in a scene following a police raid on a sex work venue.

    But the film also shows Sonny’s relationships aren’t immune to danger either. One boyfriend’s rage nearly results in harm to her pet.

    Just as navigating risk is part of both romance and sex work, so too is grappling with the social forces that shape desire. In one pointed exchange, Sonny calls out Chester for only paying young, conventionally attractive women. He counters by asking why she doesn’t date Asian men, forcing them both to confront their own biases.

    Sex worker rights

    While Paying For It is deeply personal, it is also unmistakably political, especially in its implicit advocacy for sex worker rights.

    To navigate the ethical complexities of depicting sex work, Lee consulted with performer, activist and author Andrea Werhurn, who wrote a memoir about being a former escort; Werhurn stars in the film as the sex worker Denise.

    Lee also interviewed Valerie Scott — one of the applicants who challenged Canada’s prostitution laws in the Bedford case.

    The film presents sex work as legitimate labour, highlighting the skills and emotional intelligence it demands. At the same time, it underscores how sex workers remain vulnerable to police harassment, violence and social stigma.

    Canada’s perverse laws on sex work

    The marginalized status of sex work, as dramatized in the film, is shaped by a legal system structured by moralism and hypocrisy.

    Set in the 1990s, Paying For It takes place at a time when Canada didn’t criminalize the sale of sex directly but prohibited nearly everything around it, including soliciting, working indoors and operating brothels.

    These contradictions pushed the industry underground, exposing sex workers to abuse, police harassment, sting operations and heightened health risks, while often branding them with criminal records.

    Sex work kept in the shadows

    In 2013, the Supreme Court’s Bedford decision struck down these provisions, ruling that they violated sex workers’ constitutional rights, most importantly, the right to security of the person.

    But the legal victory was short-lived. In 2014, the Conservative government introduced the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, which criminalized the purchase of sexual services while ostensibly decriminalizing its sale.

    In practice, the model keeps paid sex in the shadows, where workers face ongoing risks, limited negotiating power and barriers to reporting abuse or working in safer indoor settings. What’s being protected isn’t sex workers, but a puritanical social order.



    Read more:
    Sex workers are left out in the cold by Ottawa’s unjust conviction amendments

    This puritanical approach also underpins the newly criminalized status of clients. In my chapter “From Average Joe to Deviant John,” I trace how western attitudes toward men who pay for sex evolved from a “boys will be boys” tolerance to a framework that pathologizes and vilifies them.

    Paying For It resists this framing. The film presents Chester as awkward but principled: a considerate client navigating desire in a criminalized and judgmental culture.

    The price of choosing love freely

    Paying For It offers an alternative kind of love story. It spotlights a relationship where former lovers honour the heart (their continued commitment to one another), the body (respecting each other’s sexual autonomy) and the mind (their willingness to question social norms).

    In this way, the film redefines “paying for it” not as a burden but as a conscious and liberating investment in diverse forms of love and intimacy.

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

    – ref. In ‘Paying For It,’ ex-lovers reimagine friendship, family and the meaning of sex work – https://theconversation.com/in-paying-for-it-ex-lovers-reimagine-friendship-family-and-the-meaning-of-sex-work-255294

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Meta’s Community Notes program is promising, but needs to prioritize transparency

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sameer Borwankar, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, McGill University

    Meta has changed its approach to fact-checking, moving away from platform-controlled moderation. (Shutterstock)

    Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has more than 3.35 billion combined monthly active users. Recently, Meta has changed its approach to fact-checking in response to criticisms of its role in circulating fake news and disinformation. The company frames its Community Notes program as a way to uphold free expression.

    Although Meta has not officially announced a launch date for Community Notes in Canada, interested users can join the waitlist via Meta’s Community Notes page.



    Read more:
    Meta shift from fact-checking to crowdsourcing spotlights competing approaches in fight against misinformation and hate speech

    The initiative was first launched in the United States, and will be expanding globally. Meanwhile, X (formerly Twitter) has already experimented with a similar program, with mixed results. The experience of X’s Community Notes (previously known as Birdwatch) underscores that both platforms and regulators must take an active role in refining these programs.

    Meta has the opportunity to learn from four years of Community Notes evolution at X and improve upon its shortcomings. This involves adjusting features, addressing algorithmic biases and ensuring that they function as effective tools rather than mere symbolic gestures.

    CBC reports on Meta ending its fact-checking program.

    Community-driven moderation

    X launched Birdwatch in January 2021 when it was known as Twitter. Marketed as a way to broaden the range of voices beyond platform-based and centralized fact-checking efforts, the program aimed to curb the spread of misinformation through community-driven moderation.

    Over time, the team refined many of its features based on feedback from pilot participants and internal research. When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he implemented major changes, including a rebranding of the program’s name.

    Community Notes operates on the principles of crowdsourcing, a method proven effective in various domains. Research has shown that groups of users can collectively identify low-quality news sources and misleading content.

    On X, users participating in the Community Notes program contribute additional context to posts in the form of notes. They can also rate others’ contributions. Notes that receive supportive ratings from a diverse group of users become publicly visible. Once approved, they appear directly beneath the original post, providing added context for the broader audience.

    However, even if a post is widely deemed misleading by Community Notes contributors, the platform does not take action against the post itself or the individuals who spread misinformation. Instead, the program relies solely on surfacing user-generated context rather than the company moderating content.

    Positive impact?

    Preliminary research suggests that the Community Notes program has had a positive impact on curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform. Recent work shows that when a note is attached to a post, authors often voluntarily retract their posts by deleting them.

    On the content creation aspect, participation in the program appears to influence user behaviour: contributors tend to adopt a more measured tone, reducing extreme sentiment in their writing after engaging with the system.

    One of the most notable strengths of X’s Community Notes is its transparency. Since the program’s inception, X has provided public access to both the data and the algorithms that determine which fact-checks are displayed.

    This open-source approach has allowed researchers — both within and outside the company — to study the program and propose improvements. This stands in contrast to the recent trend of social media platforms rolling back data-sharing partnerships.

    Prior to Musk’s acquisition, X also had a dedicated team researching the impact of the program. Early changes to the program were shaped by feedback from participants and internal research.

    For example, in November 2021, X introduced anonymity for fact-checkers to prevent trolling and harassment. This decoupling of roles between content creators and fact-checkers has had a positive effect, reducing the risk of retaliation and fostering a more positive content creation by the participants of the program.

    Groups of users can collectively identify low-quality news sources and misleading content.
    (Shutterstock)

    Challenges and limitations

    Despite its potential, X’s Community Notes program faces several significant challenges, including its low popularity among users. Meta now has an opportunity to address these shortcomings from the outset.

    One of the biggest concerns is manipulation by co-ordination. Given the presence of organized troll networks on social media, there is a high risk that co-ordinated groups could misuse the program to flag legitimate content as misinformation.

    To counteract this, X implemented a consensus-based approach, where a note is only made visible if users with diverse viewpoints agree on its accuracy.

    While this system appears sound in theory, in practice it has led to a severe lack of approved notes as less than nine per cent of submitted notes reach the general audience. Many contributions never gain visibility, often due to insufficient ratings from diverse users.

    Another limitation of the consensus approach is that the algorithm must first recognize diverse viewpoints, which are not always straightforward. Social media platforms operate across hundreds of countries, where political, cultural and social divisions can be complex and nuanced. In such cases, enforcing consensus among a diverse audience may be highly unreliable and require reassessment.

    Shifting responsibility

    There is also the risk that Community Notes serve as a smokescreen, allowing platforms to shift responsibility away from active misinformation management. Since taking over X, Musk has laid off more than 80 per cent of the company’s Trust and Safety team.

    This included members of the Community Notes team, leaving critical gaps in oversight and research. Meta’s recent move to distance itself from third-party fact-checkers suggests a similar retreat from proactive intervention.

    Legal frameworks across different countries add further complications. Although Community Notes contributors remain anonymous to the public, it is unclear how platforms will respond if governments demand access to contributor identities.

    The Wikipedia legal case in India serves as a cautionary example of how platforms may be pressured into compliance. In September 2024, the Delhi High Court issued a contempt-of-court notice to Wikipedia over the site’s delay in providing identifying information about edits.

    No real consequences

    Finally, these programs are further weakened by the platforms’ explicit assurance that they will not take enforcement action based on Community Notes outcomes. Without real consequences for those spreading misinformation, the program risks being a symbolic effort rather than an effective tool for content moderation.

    Overall, there is hope that Meta’s Community Notes program can be effective, but its success will depend on continuous experimentation and improvement. The company must prioritize transparency to rebuild public trust and ensure the program does not become another performative gesture.

    Regulators also have a crucial role in holding platforms accountable, ensuring that data from these programs remains accessible to independent researchers and that the algorithms determining which notes are displayed are fair and unbiased.

    Without these safeguards, Community Notes risks becoming yet another tool that platforms use to shift responsibility rather than a meaningful solution to misinformation.

    Sameer Borwankar receives funding from SSHRC.

    – ref. Meta’s Community Notes program is promising, but needs to prioritize transparency – https://theconversation.com/metas-community-notes-program-is-promising-but-needs-to-prioritize-transparency-248324

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: The results of the qualifying TIM championship among students of St. Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering have been summed up

    Translation. Region: Russian Federal

    Source: Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Winning Team

    The qualifying TIM championship among students of our university has ended. Deputy Director of the Educational Center for Digital Competencies of SPbGASU Denis Nizhegorodtsev recalled that for two weeks in absentia and one week in person, the participants designed a multifunctional residential complex with built-in premises. The teams consisted of seven people: an architect, a designer, a heating and ventilation engineer, a water supply and sanitation engineer, an electrical supply engineer, an estimator, and a TIM coordinator. A total of six teams took part in the competition.

    Director of the Educational Center for Digital Competencies of SPbGASU Inna Sukhanova emphasized that only domestic software was used within the TIM Championship. There were different opinions on this matter: for some it was easy to work with it, for others there were difficulties, but everyone coped.

    The TIM Championship was supported by industrial partners. Dmitry Zhigalov, Technical Director of VALTEC, clarified that software is just a working tool, so success in design depends on the skills of specialists. To complete a large amount of work in such a short time is a confirmation of good competencies, Dmitry Zhigalov summed up.

    Head of the department for work with design institutes at ROSTERM, Anatoly Yurkov, added that this event helps to evaluate the capabilities of specialists and improve the level of promising projects.

    General Director of Infraeco Nikolay Matsukov emphasized that while such events are being held and such specialists are being identified, the Russian engineering school is alive, but in order to always achieve success, it is necessary to continue working and developing.

    Nikolay Samopal, Deputy General Director for Development at WIZARDSOFT, noted that difficulties are a good tool for both professional and personal development: by overcoming them, you learn something new.

    All participants agreed with their partners: the TIM Championship became an effective platform for improving their skills, the ability to cope with difficulties and work in a team.

    “We won thanks to our well-coordinated teamwork, although we met each other only a few weeks ago in a virtual environment, and on the first day of the TIM Championship we saw each other for the first time. In addition, each of us has the necessary competencies in our area and conscientiously completed the assigned tasks. Difficulties arose only because of the specifics of the software, since it is relatively new to us. But the main goal of our team was not even to win the TIM Championship, but to participate in it: it is important for us to gain experience working in a team, in the interaction of related departments. It is great that we really got such experience,” said the members of the winning team.

    The winners and prize winners were awarded diplomas and prizes, and the partners and experts received letters of thanks.

    Winners and prize winners of the championship

    The first place was taken by the team consisting of: architect Yana Safonova, designer Konstantin Duryagin, heating and ventilation engineer Sofia Kozlik, water supply and sanitation engineer Sofia Golovanova, electrical supply engineer Nikita Lesin, TIM coordinator Grigory Vorozhtsov, estimator Sofia Mityagina.

    The second place was taken by the team consisting of: architect Sofia Nikolaeva, designer Vasily Goryunov, heating and ventilation engineer Daniil Abdulin, water supply and sanitation engineer Egor Kvasha, electrical supply engineer Ilya Zakharov, TIM coordinator Ekaterina Dobrovolskaya, estimator Alexandra Kovalchuk.

    The third place was taken by the team consisting of: architect Maria Kayurova, designer Tamara Alafyorova, heating and ventilation engineer Nikita Ufimtsev, water supply and sanitation engineer Ilsur Kamaletdinov, electrical supply engineer Alexandra Kreitzer, TIM coordinator Nikita Lyamshev, estimator Andrey Orlov.

    Andrey Orlov was recognized as the best estimator. Polina Yurevich took second place, and Sofia Mityagina took third.

    Nikita Ufimtsev became the best heating and ventilation engineer. In second place was Yulia Bocharova, in third place was Nikita Prokopenko.

    The best water supply and sanitation engineer is Egor Kvasha. In second place is Sofia Golovanova, in third place is Olivia Tsvetkova.

    The best TIM coordinator is Grigory Vorozhtsov. Nikita Lyamshev took second place, and Polina Lyakh took third place.

    The best power supply engineer is Andrey Kostikov. Second place went to Anton Klyuev, third to Ilya Zakharov.

    The best designer is Konstantin Duryagin. In second place is Vasily Goryunov, in third place is Adelina Khalikova.

    The best architect is Yana Safonova. Second place went to Sofia Nikolaeva, third to Adelia Yakubova.

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: SPbGASU Master’s Student: “Internship in India Gave Good Experience”

    Translation. Region: Russian Federal

    Source: Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering – Mikhail Zheltov

    Mikhail Zheltov, a second-year master’s student at the SPbGASU Faculty of Architecture, visited India as part of an internship program, where he studied local architectural traditions. He studied at Parula University in Vadodara, one of the country’s leading educational institutions.

    “I had previously visited China on a student exchange program, so I wanted to see another country with great potential. India, with its rich architectural history and cultural diversity, attracted me with its unique combination of ancient and modern trends. Parula University holds many interesting festivals, which makes the learning process exciting and rich. The program allowed me not only to deepen my knowledge in the field of architecture, but also to get acquainted with the unique cultural traditions that influence construction and urban development in India,” said Mikhail.

    Mikhail has traveled most of western India – from Delhi to Goa. He admits that this trip gave him the opportunity to meet many interesting people and improve his English. He saw both ancient and modern architecture of India, acquired new friends and partners.

    “Earlier, I fell in love with the kindness of Chinese hospitality: I was treated very warmly in China. The head of the exchange program, Li Xiaodong, did a great job to ensure that everything went smoothly. I am very grateful to him for such an unforgettable trip. In India, unfortunately, I had to solve many issues on my own. However, I believe that the experience of international communication and intercultural relations that I received will be very useful for me in the future. The skills I acquired will help me better interact with people of different cultures and create more successful architectural projects,” Mikhail shared.

    As the head of the international activities department of our university, Shuainat Akhmadulaeva, clarified, Henan University of Urban Development (China) and Parula University (India), where Mikhail Zheltov completed an internship as part of the academic mobility program, are partner universities of SPbGASU.

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI Canada: Free Shingles Vaccine Available This Month

    Source: Government of Canada regional news

    Starting today, May 20, Nova Scotians aged 65 and older can book their free shingles vaccine appointment. The first appointments will be May 28.

    “Across Canada, nearly one in three people develop shingles, despite the availability of the vaccine,” said Premier Tim Houston. “That’s why we are delivering on our promise of removing barriers to access and making the shingles vaccine free.”

    The vaccine costs about $400 but will be free for seniors starting May 28. People can book an appointment by calling their primary health care provider or at https://novascotia.ca/routinevaccine

    Shingles is a viral infection that causes an extremely painful, burning skin rash and nerve pain that can last 90 days or more. For many people, it is debilitating. Anyone who has had chickenpox or has been exposed to the virus is at risk of developing shingles later in life.

    Quotes:

    “We are committed to investing in things that matter and that make a real impact on the day-to-day lives of Nova Scotians. We know how severe the symptoms of shingles are, and the good news is that it can be easily prevented.”
    — Michelle Thompson, Minister of Health and Wellness

    “The free shingles vaccine is life changing for older Nova Scotians. For many people, the high cost made the vaccine out of reach. By breaking down barriers to care, we are protecting more older Nova Scotians from the needless suffering that comes with this awful virus.”
    — Barbara Adams, Minister of Seniors and Long-Term Care

    “CARP is extremely pleased to hear this announcement. The free shingles vaccine is great news for older Nova Scotians, who are at risk for developing this awful life-impacting disease. By removing the cost, this will open the door for more seniors to have access to the vaccine.”
    — Bill VanGorder, Advocacy and Education Officer, Canadian Association of Retired Persons

    “Seniors of Nova Scotia welcome the announcement of free shingles vaccine available to all people over 65. We recognize the impact of this debilitating and disabling virus, the effects of which can last weeks, months and can cause lifelong nerve pain. This vaccine will enable seniors to protect themselves from such serious life-altering effects and decrease their vulnerability to chronic problems, enabling seniors to enjoy a higher quality of life.”
    — Alyson Hillier, co-Chair, Seniors Advisory Council of Nova Scotia

    Quick Facts:

    • the government is investing more than $26 million in fiscal 2025-2026 in the rollout of the free shingles vaccine
    • people aged 65 and older are at highest risk for severe disease, and that age group has the highest hospitalization rates
    • the vaccine, called Shingrix, prevents shingles complications, which can ease pressure on emergency departments, primary care and the overall health system
    • two doses are needed for full protection

    Additional Resources:

    Information on shingles vaccine eligibility is available at: https://www.nshealth.ca/public-health/immunizations

    MIL OSI Canada News –

  • MIL-OSI: Payscale Leads the Way with New Innovative Compensation Solutions That Solve Critical Data Gaps

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    SEATTLE, May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Payscale Inc., the leading compensation data technology company, today announced the availability of two new data sets and two new integrated AI solutions to empower organizations to make strategic pay decisions with confidence, as part of its new approach to compensation intelligence.

    These industry-leading solutions come as Payscale research reveals compensation decision makers are grappling with a significant pay data confidence gap. Almost half (47 percent) of the HR and business leaders surveyed by the company reported that despite the significant amount of data and surveys available, it’s not what they need to produce effective compensation insights.

    The survey of 500 compensation decision makers across HR and business leadership shows openness to AI, with two thirds (64 percent) stating they would turn to AI to fill critical compensation data gaps.

    “Compensation is any organization’s largest investment and its greatest opportunity,” said Payscale CEO, Chris Hays. “While fair pay remains a constant priority, relying on inaccurate or incomplete data costs employers in wages, retention, and overall performance. Our groundbreaking data model combines advanced AI with real-world data to provide detailed insights so HR and business leaders can confidently make decisions about any job, anytime, anywhere.”

    Timely, trusted data augmented with AI

    To help organizations address these challenges and make more confident compensation decisions, Payscale’s innovative new data approach goes beyond traditional compensation data sets to combine trusted data with advanced AI modelling for the highest level of accuracy, depth, and transparency. The two datasets leveraging this approach are Payscale Verse and Payscale Pulse.

    • Payscale Verse: Now available as part of Payscale Payfactors, the company’s scalable compensation management platform, Payscale Verse is one of the most innovative datasets on the market. Verse merges Payscale Peer data, a revolutionary approach to the compensation survey, with advanced AI modeling to enable organizations to price any job across any level, industry, size, or location.
    • Payscale Pulse: Industry surveys for business services, colleges and universities, construction, healthcare, and retail have been added to AI-enhanced dataset, Payscale Pulse. This dataset is updated quarterly with fresh data and new jobs, that includes industry and international surveys.

    “Raw compensation data is not enough. Businesses need true compensation intelligence to make confident and strategic pay decisions,” said Payscale Chief Product Officer, Peh Teh. “By combining trusted, real-world data with industry-leading AI, organizations can make decisions with unmatched transparency and unparalleled insights. This is different than anything else in the market today.”

    Intelligent compensation insights and intuitive automation

    New, intelligent solutions will deliver a next-generation user experience that streamlines the way organizations gather compensation insights, ensuring the process is efficient, consistent, and intuitive as organizations scale.

    • Payfactors Explore is a groundbreaking new experience combining fresh market data and tailored insights, transforming how users interact with real-time compensation information. Integrating AI, Payfactors Explore surfaces insights that offer a dynamic view of the market. Organizations can try Explore with three complimentary searches in Payfactors Free, Payscale’s entry-level compensation tool.
    • Price at Scale delivers a faster, more consistent way to apply an organization’s unique pricing philosophy across groups of jobs without losing job match quality. This solution, available in both Payscale Payfactors and Payscale Marketpay, prioritizes efficiency without sacrificing precision, and empowers customers to self-manage the process with technology instead of needing to outsource the work or rely on service teams.

    Payscale unveils new brand identity at WorldatWork

    To reinforce its commitment to innovation and intelligent compensation solutions, Payscale has unveiled a bold refresh to its brand identity. The new look reflects Payscale’s category leadership and track record for delivering compensation confidence to the market.

    Payscale is showcasing its innovative product lineup and refreshed brand identity at this year’s WorldatWork Total Rewards Conference on May 19-21, 2025. Learn more by visiting booth #1119 or request a demo.

    About Payscale

    Payscale stands at the forefront of compensation data technology, pioneering an innovative approach that harnesses advanced AI and up-to-date and reliable market data to align employee and employer expectations. With its suite of solutions—Payfactors, Marketpay, and Paycycle—Payscale empowers 65% of Fortune 500 companies to make strategic compensation decisions. Organizations like Panasonic, ZoomInfo, Chipotle, AccentCare, University of Washington, American Airlines, and Rite Aid rely on its unique combination of actionable data and insights, experienced compensation services, and scalable software to drive business success. By partnering with Payscale, businesses can make confident compensation decisions that fuel growth for both their organization and their people.

    Create confidence in your compensation. Payscale.

    To learn more, visit www.payscale.com.

    Contact: Press@Payscale.com

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Do photons wear out? An astrophysicist explains light’s ability to travel vast cosmic distances without losing energy

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jarred Roberts, Project Scientist, University of California, San Diego

    Light, whether from a star or your flashlight, travels at 186,000 miles per second. Artur Debat/Moment via Getty Images

    My telescope, set up for astrophotography in my light-polluted San Diego backyard, was pointed at a galaxy unfathomably far from Earth. My wife, Cristina, walked up just as the first space photo streamed to my tablet. It sparkled on the screen in front of us.

    “That’s the Pinwheel galaxy,” I said. The name is derived from its shape – albeit this pinwheel contains about a trillion stars.

    The light from the Pinwheel traveled for 25 million years across the universe – about 150 quintillion miles – to get to my telescope.

    My wife wondered: “Doesn’t light get tired during such a long journey?”

    Her curiosity triggered a thought-provoking conversation about light. Ultimately, why doesn’t light wear out and lose energy over time?

    Let’s talk about light

    I am an astrophysicist, and one of the first things I learned in my studies is how light often behaves in ways that defy our intuitions.

    The author’s photo of the Pinwheel galaxy.
    Jarred Roberts

    Light is electromagnetic radiation: basically, an electric wave and a magnetic wave coupled together and traveling through space-time. It has no mass. That point is critical because the mass of an object, whether a speck of dust or a spaceship, limits the top speed it can travel through space.

    But because light is massless, it’s able to reach the maximum speed limit in a vacuum – about 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second, or almost 6 trillion miles per year (9.6 trillion kilometers). Nothing traveling through space is faster. To put that into perspective: In the time it takes you to blink your eyes, a particle of light travels around the circumference of the Earth more than twice.

    As incredibly fast as that is, space is incredibly spread out. Light from the Sun, which is 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers) from Earth, takes just over eight minutes to reach us. In other words, the sunlight you see is eight minutes old.

    Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us after the Sun, is 26 trillion miles away (about 41 trillion kilometers). So by the time you see it in the night sky, its light is just over four years old. Or, as astronomers say, it’s four light years away.

    Imagine – a trip around the world at the speed of light.

    With those enormous distances in mind, consider Cristina’s question: How can light travel across the universe and not slowly lose energy?

    Actually, some light does lose energy. This happens when it bounces off something, such as interstellar dust, and is scattered about.

    But most light just goes and goes, without colliding with anything. This is almost always the case because space is mostly empty – nothingness. So there’s nothing in the way.

    When light travels unimpeded, it loses no energy. It can maintain that 186,000-mile-per-second speed forever.

    It’s about time

    Here’s another concept: Picture yourself as an astronaut on board the International Space Station. You’re orbiting at 17,000 miles (about 27,000 kilometers) per hour. Compared with someone on Earth, your wristwatch will tick 0.01 seconds slower over one year.

    That’s an example of time dilation – time moving at different speeds under different conditions. If you’re moving really fast, or close to a large gravitational field, your clock will tick more slowly than someone moving slower than you, or who is further from a large gravitational field. To say it succinctly, time is relative.

    Even astronauts aboard the International Space Station experience time dilation, although the effect is extremely small.
    NASA

    Now consider that light is inextricably connected to time.
    Picture sitting on a photon, a fundamental particle of light; here, you’d experience maximum time dilation. Everyone on Earth would clock you at the speed of light, but from your reference frame, time would completely stop.

    That’s because the “clocks” measuring time are in two different places going vastly different speeds: the photon moving at the speed of light, and the comparatively slowpoke speed of Earth going around the Sun.

    What’s more, when you’re traveling at or close to the speed of light, the distance between where you are and where you’re going gets shorter. That is, space itself becomes more compact in the direction of motion – so the faster you can go, the shorter your journey has to be. In other words, for the photon, space gets squished.

    Which brings us back to my picture of the Pinwheel galaxy. From the photon’s perspective, a star within the galaxy emitted it, and then a single pixel in my backyard camera absorbed it, at exactly the same time. Because space is squished, to the photon the journey was infinitely fast and infinitely short, a tiny fraction of a second.

    But from our perspective on Earth, the photon left the galaxy 25 million years ago and traveled 25 million light years across space until it landed on my tablet in my backyard.

    And there, on a cool spring night, its stunning image inspired a delightful conversation between a nerdy scientist and his curious wife.

    Jarred Roberts receives funding from NASA.

    – ref. Do photons wear out? An astrophysicist explains light’s ability to travel vast cosmic distances without losing energy – https://theconversation.com/do-photons-wear-out-an-astrophysicist-explains-lights-ability-to-travel-vast-cosmic-distances-without-losing-energy-252880

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Best in Advertising: GUU Students Win FROG Festival

    Translation. Region: Russian Federal

    Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –

    Students of the State University of Management won the All-Russian festival-competition of journalists, advertisers and PR people “Life in creative flight!”, which was held at the Voronezh State University.

    In total, almost 400 works from students of Russian universities studying in areas of training related to communication technologies were submitted to the competition’s organizing committee.

    The jury evaluated projects in 19 nominations of the Mass Media Master competition in the categories of Television and Radio Broadcasting and Press and Internet Publications and 8 nominations of the FROG competition, which includes advertising and PR materials.

    Creative projects by students of the Institute of Marketing of the State University of Management became winners and prize winners in several nominations of the festival.

    In the nomination “Printed and polygraphic advertising” 1st place was taken by the project of students of the State University of Management “Live here and now”. Authors: Maria Stefani and Violetta Vdovitsa. Supervisor – Alexandra Timokhovich.

    “According to VTsIOM statistics, every second Russian is dissatisfied with their lives. One of the reasons is the syndrome of postponed life. In the developed digital layouts of social advertising, we used the technique of analogy with an airport board, where flights with symbolic destinations of “dream”, “success”, “chance”, “love” are postponed and cancelled. Just as flight delays cause anticipation, disappointment, so postponing goals does not allow them to be realized,” Maria Stefani explained the idea of the project.

    In the nomination “Radio Advertising” (radio commercial) our students took several prizes at once:

    1st place – project “Don’t forget your elders”. Authors: Dmitry Denisov, Pavel Polyakov, Riad Gubatov, Viktor Lozovsky. Leader – Alexandra Timokhovich.

    “In modern society, there are frequent situations when representatives of the older generation are left without due attention and care from their relatives. Literally, elderly people are left to their own devices, forced to cope with everyday life, illnesses, and financial difficulties on their own. In the audio clip, we urge you to think about this problem, to become more sensitive and attentive to the elderly,” shared Pavel Polyakov.

    2nd place – project “Take your eyes off the screen”. Authors: Maria Bychenkova, Elizaveta Ruzanova, Alena Kladnitskaya. Leader – Alexandra Timokhovich.

    3rd place – project “Let’s save food from the trash”. Authors: Yulia Talishevskaya, Ekaterina Tkacheva, Marina Belova. Leader – Alexandra Timokhovich.

    3rd place – project “Doxing is the scourge of the modern Internet community”. Author: Anastasia Lilyakova. Leader – Alexandra Timokhovich.

    Congratulations to the winners and the head of the student projects! We wish you interesting projects and further victories!

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Liang Zhang Appointed as New Electrical and Computer Engineering Head

    Source: US State of Connecticut

    Dean JC Zhao of the UConn College of Engineering is pleased to appoint Professor Liang Zhang as the new head of the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department. Zhang’s appointment will start in August 2025. 

    “I am honored to lead the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UConn, where our commitment to innovation and education continues to drive impactful research and student success,” Zhang said. “Together with the talented faculty and staff of the ECE department, we will advance the field of electrical and computer engineering to meet the challenges of tomorrow.” 

    Liang Zhang (Christopher LaRosa/UConn photo).

    Zhang joined UConn Engineering in 2013 as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

    Since then, he has held various positions within the department, including the director of undergraduate studies, Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor in Advanced Systems Engineering, and director of the Department of Energy Southern New England Industrial Training and Assessment Center. He also holds an affiliated position with the management and engineering for manufacturing program. 

    “Dr. Zhang exemplifies the strengths we value at the UConn College of Engineering—rigorous research, deep commitment to student success, and impactful engagement with industry,” said Dean JC Zhao. “His leadership will play a vital role in advancing the department’s strategic goals and driving innovation that benefits both Connecticut and the broader engineering community.” 

    Zhang’s research focuses on smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0, with an emphasis on energy-efficient operations, human-robot collaboration, industrial data analytics, and the resilience of cyber-physical systems. 

    Before arriving at UConn, he was an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 2009 through 2013. 

    Zhang earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering systems from the University of Michigan in 2009. Previously, he earned a master’s in control theory and engineering and a bachelor’s in automation from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China in 2004 and 2002, respectively. 

    Zhang will take the reins from John Chandy, the outgoing department head who has served since 2018. 

    “Dr. Zhang has been an integral part of our department’s success, leading impactful research, mentoring students, and building strong industry partnerships,” says Chandy. “His vision, dedication, and collaborative spirit make him the ideal leader to guide ECE into its next chapter.” 

    According to Chandy, the department is in good hands.

    “I would like to take the opportunity to thank Professor John Chandy for his leadership and service as head of the ECE Department here at UConn,” says Zhao. “John devoted his time and energy for the betterment of the department and is highly respected by his colleagues at peers.” 

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Culture at the core: examining journalism values in the Pacific

    ANALYSIS: By Birte Leonhardt, Folker Hanusch and Shailendra B. Singh

    The role of journalism in society is shaped not only by professional norms but also by deeply held cultural values. This is particularly evident in the Pacific Islands region, where journalists operate in media environments that are often small, tight-knit and embedded within traditional communities.

    Our survey of journalists across Pacific Island countries provides new insight into how cultural values influence journalists’ self-perceptions and practices in the region. The findings are now available as an open access article in the journal Journalism.

    Cultural factors are particularly observable in many collectivist societies, where journalists emphasise their intrinsic connection to their communities. This includes the small and micro-media systems of the Pacific, where “high social integration” includes close familial ties, as well as traditional and cultural affiliations.

    The culture of the Pacific Islands is markedly distinct from Western cultures due to its collectivist nature, which prioritises group aspirations over individual aspirations. By foregrounding culture and values, our study demonstrates that the perception of their local cultural role is a dominant consideration for journalists, and we also see significant correlations between it and the cultural-value orientations of journalists.

    We approach the concept of culture from the viewpoint of journalistic embeddedness, that is, “the extent to which journalists are enmeshed in the communities, cultures, and structures in which and on whom they report, and the extent to which this may both enable and constrain their work”.

    The term embeddedness has often been considered undesirable in mainstream journalism, given ideals of detachment and objectivity which originated in the West and experiences of how journalists were embedded with military forces, such as the Iraq War.

    Yet, in alternative approaches to journalism, being close to those on whom they report has been a desirable value, such as in community journalism, whereas a critique of mainstream journalism has tended to be that those reporters do not really understand local communities.

    Cultural detachment both impractical and undesirable
     What is more, in the Global South, embeddedness is often viewed as an intrinsic element of journalists’ identity, making cultural detachment both impractical and undesirable.

    Recent research highlights that journalists in many regions of the world, including in unstable democracies, often experience more pronounced cultural influences on their work compared to their Western counterparts.

    To explore how cultural values and identity shape journalism in the region, we surveyed 206 journalists across nine countries: Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru and the Marshall Islands.

    The study was conducted as part of a broader project about Pacific Islands journalists between mid-2016 and mid-2018. About four in five of journalists in targeted newsrooms agreed to participate, making this one of the largest surveys of journalists in the region.

    Respondents were asked about their perceptions of journalism’s role in society and the extent to which cultural values inform their work.

    Our respondents averaged just under 37 years of age and were relatively evenly split in terms of gender (49 percent identified as female) with most in full-time employment (94 percent). They had an average of nine years of work experience. Around seven in 10 had studied at university, but only two-thirds of those had completed a university degree.

    The findings showed that Pacific Islands journalists overwhelmingly supported ideas related to a local cultural role in reporting. A vast majority — 88 percent agreed that it was important for them to reflect local culture in reporting, while 75 percent also thought it was important to defend local traditions and values.

    Important to preserve local culture
    Further, 71 percent agreed it was important for journalists to preserve local culture. Together, these roles were considered substantially more important than traditional roles such as the monitorial role, where journalists pursue media’s watchdog function.

    This suggests Pacific islands journalists see themselves not just as neutral observers or critics but as active cultural participants — conveying stories that strengthen identity, continuity and community cohesion.

    To understand why journalists adopt this local cultural role, we looked at which values best predicted their orientation. We used a regression model to account for a range of potential influences, including socio-demographic aspects such as work experience, education, gender, the importance of religion and journalists’ cultural-value orientations.

    Our results showed that the best predictor for whether journalists thought it was important to pursue a local cultural role lay in their own value system. In fact, the extent to which journalists adhered to so-called conservative values like self-restraint, the preservation of tradition and resistance to change emerged as the strongest predictors.

    Hence, our findings suggest that journalists who emphasise tradition and social stability in their personal value systems are significantly more likely to prioritise a local cultural role.

    These values reflect a preference for preserving the status quo, respecting established customs, and fostering social harmony — all consistent with Pacific cultural norms.

    While the importance of cultural values was clear in how journalists perceive their role, the findings were more mixed when it came to reporting practices. In general, we found that such practices were valued.

    Considerable consensus on customs
    There was considerable consensus regarding the importance of respecting traditional customs in reporting, which 87 percent agreed with. A further 68 percent said that their traditional values guided their behaviour when reporting.

    At the same time, only 29 percent agreed with the statement that they were a member of their cultural group first and a journalist second, whereas 44 percent disagreed. Conversely, 52 percent agreed that the story was more important than respecting traditional customs and values, while 27 percent disagreed.

    These variations suggest that while Pacific journalists broadly endorse cultural preservation as a goal, the practical realities of journalism — such as covering conflict, corruption or political issues — may sometimes create tensions with cultural expectations.

    Our findings support the notion that Pacific Islands journalists are deeply embedded in local culture, informed by collective values, strong community ties and a commitment to tradition.

    Models of journalism training and institution-building that originated in the West often prioritise norms such as objectivity, autonomy and detached reporting, but in the Pacific such models may fall short or at least clash with the cultural values that underpin journalistic identity.

    These aspects need to be taken into account when examining journalism in the region.

    Recognising and respecting local value systems is not about compromising press freedom — it’s about contextualising journalism within its social environment. Effective support for journalism in the region must account for the realities of cultural embeddedness, where being a journalist often means being a community member as well.

    Understanding the values that motivate journalists — particularly the desire to preserve tradition and promote social stability — can help actors and policymakers engage more meaningfully with media practitioners in the region.

    Birte Leonhardt is a PhD candidate at the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on journalistic cultures, values and practices, as well as interventionist journalism.

    Folker Hanusch is professor of journalism and heads the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also editor-in-chief of Journalism Studies, and vice-chair of the Worlds of Journalism Study.

    Shailendra B. Singh is associate professor of Pacific journalism at the University of the South Pacific, based in Suva, Fiji, and a member of the advisory board of the Pacific Journalism Review.

    This article appeared first on Devpolicy Blog, from the Development Policy Centre at The Australian National University and is republished under Creative Commons.

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Nonprofit news media leaders are struggling to stop leaning on the foundations that say they should branch out more

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Katherine Fink, Associate Professor of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts, Pace University

    If the basket falls, at least there are some other eggs on hand that might not break. Iryna Veklich/Moment via Getty Images

    You’ve probably heard the adage about not putting all your eggs in one basket.

    It’s an especially meaningful one for newspapers. For decades, they relied heavily on advertising revenue. That arrangement stopped working about 20 years ago, as audiences moved online and advertisers followed. News media outlets moved online as well, but they found themselves in a losing battle for advertising dollars against new digital competitors such as Craigslist, Facebook and Google. One-third of U.S. newspapers have closed in the past two decades, most of them local.

    As their income from ads and subscriptions has dwindled, some news organizations that used to rely mainly on ad revenue, such as The Salt Lake Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, have become nonprofits – opening the door to other sources of revenue. And interest in launching news organizations as nonprofits has been growing. Meanwhile, some for-profit media outlets have begun to obtain some philanthropic support and ask for donations from readers and subscribers.

    I’m a journalism studies researcher and a former journalist myself. To better understand how news leaders were thinking about their future in this ever-evolving landscape, I researched the fundraising approaches of local nonprofit news outlets across the U.S.

    I interviewed 23 local news leaders about their fundraising strategies and their views on the best way to balance their sources of funding in the long term. What I found is that nonprofit news media outlets are finding it necessary to pursue multiple streams of revenue, including from foundations, in the search for sustainable business models. But the ideal revenue mix may look different for each organization.

    Foundations are footing half the bill

    Foundations, especially the Knight Foundation, have become major supporters of nonprofit news media in recent years. According to the Institute for Nonprofit News, foundations provided about half of all revenue for nonprofit news media in 2023. Another 29% came from individual donations. And 17% came from ads and other sources of earned, rather than donated, revenue.

    Money raised through grants from foundations can arrive in larger amounts and be more predictable than advertising revenue. But it often comes with strings attached. For example, in exchange for a grant, a media outlet might be pressured to adjust its editorial priorities or adopt specific technologies.

    The nonprofit news leaders I interviewed also said foundations tend to be more interested in starting new organizations than sustaining media outlets that are already up and running.

    Some foundations are now making that point clearer than ever by telling the nonprofit news organizations they have supported not to depend too much on them anymore. The Knight Foundation and other funders have informed potential applicants they must demonstrate they are pursuing revenue diversity as a condition for getting a grant.

    In other words, nonprofit media shouldn’t put all of their eggs in the foundation basket, either.

    Branching out

    The local news leaders I interviewed said they didn’t necessarily see having a variety of revenue sources as a path to sustainability. And adding new revenue streams comes with costs, such as hiring membership directors or advertising salespeople. Local news leaders said it’s hard to know whether making those investments will pay off.

    Still, under pressure to rely less on foundations and more on other types of revenue, they’ve been branching out in recent years. According to the Institute for Nonprofit News, foundations provided 57% of nonprofit news revenue in 2018; in 2024, that share had declined to 51%.

    But it’s not clear how much more revenue could come from other sources. Donations from readers tend to be provided in small amounts, so news organizations need a lot of them. And individuals donate to news organizations for a variety of reasons, so news organizations need to hire fundraisers who can craft a variety of messages. Getting large numbers of readers to donate is hard, however, because audiences for local news tend to be small.

    Nonprofit news organizations can also accept advertising. However, advertising is a taxable form of revenue, unlike donations. The IRS has also warned organizations that they can lose their tax-exempt status if they accept too much income that is “unrelated” to their nonprofit missions, including advertising.

    Pooling donor funds

    Ultimately, the nonprofit news leaders I interviewed say every type of revenue has its drawbacks. And the more complicated their revenue mix becomes, the more complicated their approach to fundraising has to be.

    Local news organizations already operating on shoestring budgets don’t have the capacity to complicate their fundraising, even though they say they agree with the general principle of revenue diversity.

    The nonprofit news leaders did have encouraging things to say about a newer fundraising trend: pooled donor funds. With pooled donor funds, multiple donors contribute to a single charity that serves as an intermediary that disburses that donated money to a particular kind of nonprofit.

    For the media, examples include the Institute for Nonprofit News’ NewsMatch and Press Forward, a coalition of 20 foundations.

    Pooled donor funds can be considered a form of revenue diversity, since they combine contributions from multiple sources and are used to persuade individual readers to “match” donations from the pooled funds with their own contributions. That can potentially insulate news organizations from major changes as grants from individual foundations come and go.

    Researching the role of ‘earned revenue’

    I plan to publish the results of another study soon. It’s about the role that “earned revenue,” meaning advertising, sponsorships and other entrepreneurial sources of money, is playing in the funding of nonprofit news media.

    The Institute for Nonprofit News has called it “perhaps the most underutilized revenue stream for nonprofit news.”

    But the nonprofit news leaders I interviewed had mixed feelings about earned revenue. In part, that was because of ambiguous guidance about how much of it news organizations may accept without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

    Given President Donald Trump’s recent threats against other nonprofits, including universities and hospitals, news organizations may be even more reluctant to test those limits.

    Katherine Fink 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. Nonprofit news media leaders are struggling to stop leaning on the foundations that say they should branch out more – https://theconversation.com/nonprofit-news-media-leaders-are-struggling-to-stop-leaning-on-the-foundations-that-say-they-should-branch-out-more-255821

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The one-size-fits-all diversity training model is broken – here’s a better alternative

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Radostina Purvanova, Professor of Management and Organizational Leadership, Drake University

    Diversity training is more effective when it’s personalized, according to my new research in the peer-reviewed journal Applied Psychology.

    As a professor of management, I partnered with Andrew Bryant, who studies social marketing, to develop an algorithm that identifies people’s “personas,” or psychological profiles, as they participate in diversity training in real time. We embedded this algorithm into a training system that dynamically assigned participants to tailored versions of the training based on their personas.

    We found that this personalized approach worked especially well for one particular group: the “skeptics.” When skeptics received training tailored to them, they responded more positively – and expressed a stronger desire to support their organizations’ diversity efforts – than those who received the same training as everyone else.

    In the age of social media, where just about everything is customized and personalized, this sounds like a no-brainer. But with diversity training, where the one-size-fits-all approach still rules, this is radical. In most diversity trainings, all participants hear the same message, regardless of their preexisting beliefs and attitudes toward diversity. Why would we assume that this would work?

    Thankfully, the field is realizing the importance of a learner-centric approach. Researchers have theorized that several diversity trainee personas exist. These include the resistant trainee, who feels defensive; the overzealous trainee, who is hyper-engaged; and the anxious trainee, who is uncomfortable with diversity topics. Our algorithm, based on real-world data, identified two personas with empirical backing: skeptics and believers. This is proof of concept that trainee personas aren’t just theoretical – they’re real, and we can detect them in real time.

    But identifying personas is just the beginning. What comes next is tailoring the message. To learn more about tailoring, we looked to the theory of jujitsu persuasion. In jujitsu, fighters don’t strike. They use their opponent’s energy to win. Similarly, in jujitsu persuasion, you yield to the audience, not challenge it. You use the audience’s beliefs, knowledge and values as leverage to make change.

    In terms of diversity training, this doesn’t mean changing what the message is. It means changing how the message is framed. For example, the skeptics in our study still learned about the devastating harms of workplace bias. But they were more persuaded when the message was framed as a “business case” for diversity, rather than a “moral justice” message. The “business case” message is tailored to skeptics’ practical orientation. If diversity training researchers and practitioners embrace tailoring diversity training to different trainee personas, more creative approaches to tailoring will surely be designed.

    Why it matters

    The Trump administration is leading a backlash against diversity initiatives, and a backlash to that backlash is emerging. This isn’t entirely new: Diversity has long been a contentious issue.

    Organizations like the Pew Research Center, the United Nations and others have consistently reported a conservative-liberal split, as well as a male-female split, around diversity. Diversity training has done little to bridge these gaps.

    For one, diversity training is often ineffective at reducing bias and improving diversity metrics in organizations. Many organizations treat diversity training efforts as a box-checking exercise. Worse, it’s not unusual for such efforts to backfire.

    Our research offers a solution: Identify the trainee personas represented in your audience and customize your training accordingly. This is what social media platforms like Facebook do: They learn about people in real time and then tailor the content they see.

    To illustrate the importance of tailoring diversity training specifically, consider how differently skeptics and believers think. One skeptic in our study – which focused on gender diversity training – said: “The issue isn’t as great as feminists try to force us to believe. Women simply focus on other things in life; men focus on career first.” In contrast, a believer said: “In my own organization, all CEOs and managers are men. Women are not respected or promoted very often, if at all.”

    Clearly, trainees are different. Tailoring the training to different personas, jujitsu style, may be how we change hearts and minds.

    What still isn’t known

    Algorithms are only as good as the data they rely on. Our algorithm identified personas based on information the trainees reported about themselves. More objective data, such as data culled from human resources systems, may identify personas more reliably.

    Algorithms also improve as they learn over time. As artificial intelligence tools become more widely used in HR, persona-identifying algorithms will get smarter and faster. The training itself needs to get smarter. A one-time training session, even a tailored one, stands less of a chance at long-term change compared with periodic nudges. Nudges are bite-sized interventions that are unobtrusively delivered over time. Now, think about tailored nudges. They could be a game changer.

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

    Radostina Purvanova 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. The one-size-fits-all diversity training model is broken – here’s a better alternative – https://theconversation.com/the-one-size-fits-all-diversity-training-model-is-broken-heres-a-better-alternative-250495

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Upcoming US Law Webinars – June 2025

    Source: US Global Legal Monitor

    We hope you will join us in June for the next offering of our Orientation to Legal Research webinar, focusing on U.S. case law, followed by the next entry into the Introduction to Congress.gov webinars. These webinars are designed to give a basic introduction on how to use Congress.gov and other legal sources when conducting research, as well as to provide updates on the new features available at the Law Library and through Congress.gov. For more information and to register, please visit the links below.

    An Orientation to Legal Research: U.S. Case Law

    Date: Thursday, June 5, 2025, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EDT

    Content: This webinar is designed to give a basic introduction to legal sources and research techniques. This entry in the series provides an overview of U.S. case law research, including information about the U.S. federal court system, the publication of court opinions, methods for researching case law, and information about locating records and briefs.

    Instructor: Olivia Kane-Cruz. Olivia Kane-Cruz is a legal reference librarian at the Law Library of Congress. Olivia holds a B.A. in political science from Humboldt State University (Cal Poly Humboldt), a J.D. and a master’s of environmental law and policy from Vermont Law School, and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Washington.

    Register here. 

    An Introduction to Congress.gov Webinar

    Date: Thursday, June 12, 2025, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EDT

    Content: This orientation is designed to give a basic overview of Congress.gov. While the focus of the session will be searching legislation and the congressional member information attached to the legislation, the new features of Congress.gov will also be highlighted.

    Instructors: Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer. Barbara is the bibliographic and research instruction librarian at the Law Library. She holds a B.A. in history from Duke University, a J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law, and a Master of Science in library and information science specializing in law librarianship from Catholic University. Robert is the chief of the Law Library’s Office of External Relations. He holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Kentucky, a J.D. from Wayne State University, and a Master of Library Science from Florida State University.

    Register here.

    To learn about other upcoming classes on domestic and foreign law topics, visit the Legal Research Institute. Please request ADA accommodations at least five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or [email protected].

    Subscribe to In Custodia Legis – it’s free! – to receive interesting posts drawn from the Law Library of Congress’s vast collections and our staff’s expertise in U.S., foreign, and international law.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Refining industry risks from 2025 hurricane season

    Source: US Energy Information Administration

    In-depth analysis

    May 20, 2025

    Colorado State University’s hurricane forecast estimates the 2025 hurricane season will exceed the 1991–2020 average, with an estimate of 17 named storms, compared with a historical average of 14 storms. Meteorologists expect 13–18 named storms, including 3–6 storms with direct impacts on the United States, during this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, according to reports from AccuWeather in April.

    The potential for a stronger hurricane season suggests heightened risk for weather-related production outages in the U.S. oil industry, including potential refinery outages along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Last year, five hurricanes made landfall in the United States, shutting in some upstream crude oil and natural gas production temporarily and disrupting petroleum product supply chains in Florida.

    What is hurricane season?

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center defines the Atlantic hurricane season as running from June 1 through November 30. Generally, June is the month when the earliest named storms begin forming in the Atlantic Basin, and the most severe hurricanes usually form in August and early September. In the United States, hurricanes most often hit the Southeast (PADD 1C) and the U.S. Gulf Coast (PADD 3).

    How do hurricanes affect petroleum refining?

    The U.S. Gulf Coast accounts for 55% of total U.S. refining capacity, with the Texas Gulf Coast and Louisiana Gulf Coast refining regions combined accounting for 49% of total U.S. refinery capacity. These facilities risk flooding or power outages associated with major storms or hurricanes. Many refinery operators will evacuate nonessential personnel and temporarily stop production if they believe severe weather might injure employees or damage their facilities.

    Refineries that sustain major damage or flooding may be taken offline for longer periods. In 2021, Phillips 66’s Alliance refinery in Belle Chase, Louisiana, permanently closed and was transitioned into a storage terminal following significant storm damage.

    What determines the scale of a weather-related impact on markets?

    A storm’s location is the main determining factor of its impact on petroleum markets, followed by the storm’s intensity. An intense storm that affects a region without refining capacity is unlikely to significantly affect overall U.S. refined petroleum supplies.

    Hurricanes can affect local logistics, distribution, and consumption in any affected area. In regions facing an impending major hurricane or other emergency, consumer behavior can also lead to regionalized price increases, local supply shortfalls, panic-buying, and spikes in fuel demand for evacuation purposes.

    Hurricanes can also disrupt supply chains for petroleum products. Fuel supplies in Florida are primarily shipped on barges from Gulf Coast refineries, such as those in Texas and Louisiana. Hurricanes and tropical storms can lead to disruptions in these transfers. Retail stations in other regions can also be affected by logistical disruptions or power outages, which occurred in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy.

    How much refinery capacity is at risk from hurricanes?

    The path of a single hurricane or major storm is unlikely to affect more than a single cluster of refineries along the Gulf Coast. However, because of the total volume of refining capacity in each region, more than 1.0 million barrels per day of capacity could be temporarily taken offline in anticipation of a major storm.

    Hurricanes don’t often hinder refining operations in the mid-Atlantic (PADD 1B) region, although what is now the largest refinery on the East Coast—the Bayway refinery in New Jersey operated by Phillips 66—was affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Similar incidents or storms that limit imports into New York Harbor also present a potential risk to U.S. petroleum supplies.

    More information on energy infrastructure and potential storm risks is available in our U.S. Energy Atlas.

    Principal contributor: Kevin Hack

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI: Trio enters into Letter of Intent to acquire 2000 acres in P.R. Spring Utah, one of largest tar-sand deposits in North America outside of Canada.

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    California, May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Trio Petroleum Corp (NYSE American: TPET) (“Trio” or the “Company”), a California-based oil and gas company, is pleased to announce it has entered into a Letter of Intent to acquire 2000 acres at P.R. Spring, Unita Basin, Utah from Heavy Sweet Oil LLC. (HSO). According to a report provided by Dr. Douglas S. Hamilton, who holds Bachelor’s (HONs) and Ph.D. degrees in Geology from the University of Sydney, Australia, P.R. Spring area contains an estimated 6.75 billion barrels of OOIP within its basin boundary limits. This information was ascertained through detailed mapping of bitumen outcrops by various authors*, analysis of historical core hole and petroleum exploration wells, and examination of laboratory-derived measurements of porosity and oil saturation from 100’s of cores.

    An Optimization Study conducted by Dr Amanda Bustin, President of Bustin Earth Science Consultants, indicated a typical project well has an estimated ultimate recovery (“EUR”) of 300,000 barrels of oil with stable production rate exceeding approximately 40 barrels of oil per day. The 2000-acre parcel will support up to 1000 wells in seven well pods. Once complete Trio believes that the project, fully developed, could provide upwards of 50,000 barrels a day with an approximate 20-year life. With an expected initial total drilling and completion cost of less than $800,000 per well and declining with scale, we believe the economics and size of the opportunity are superlative and transformative for a company like Trio.

    The initial product from these wells will be commercial grade asphalt directly from the site for 90% of the production with an estimated 10% balance being a diesel range product. Both products are low sulfur and are expected to demonstrate a very low carbon footprint. This may enable our project to sell both spec commercial grade asphalt binder, which is expected to sell locally at a premium to WTI, as well as green diesel that is expected to sell at an even higher margin to WTI (per Valkor Oil and Gas LLC project developer and operator).

    Samples of produced oil from Heavy Sweet’s Asphalt Ridge project, which is located next to the P.R. Spring in the Unita Basin, confirm oil composition and above-ground facilities have been designed allowing for the separation of the two products, asphalt and diesel, providing the ability to capture product prices superior to WTI.

    The Operator is Heavy Sweet Oil, LLC, in partnerships with Valkor Oil and Gas LLC, a vertically integrated project development company with expertise in shallow heavy oil and in green and socially beneficial hydrocarbon projects.

    According to J. Wallace Gwynn of Energy News, the P.R. Spring Project is known to be one of the largest tar-sand deposits in North America outside of Canada, making it a potential giant oilfield, and is distinctive given its low wax and negligible sulfur content, which is expected to make the oil very desirable for many industries, including shipping. The project has the potential to be both large and highly profitable.

    As a result of this new opportunity, Trio allowed its option for an additional 77.75% in Asphalt Ridge to expire.

    Terms of Acquisition

    Upon the execution of the LOI by the Parties, Trio paid HSO a non-refundable payment of $150,000 for the option to acquire 2,000 acres of Trio’s choice and develop the P.R. Spring Project.

    Upon Trio entering into a Definitive Agreement with HSO for the P.R. Spring Project, at the closing of the Proposed Transaction (“Closing”) it is expected that Trio shall (i) issue to HSO 1,492,272 restricted shares of Trio’s common stock and (ii) pay to HSO $850,000, in cash, which shall be applied toward the acquisition and development of the P.R. Spring Project.

    It is also expected that Trio will provide 100% of the required capital expenditures for the development of the P.R. Spring Project, and Trio and HSO will each be entitled to 50% of the net profits derived from the P.R. Spring Project.

    Pursuant to the terms and conditions of the Definitive Agreement, it is intended that Trio will construct a minimum of seven production wells in connection with the P.R. Spring Project, during the two-year period after the Closing.

    It is also expected that the Definitive Agreement will contain such other terms and conditions as are customary in an acquisition of this nature including, without limitation, representations and warranties, conditions for Closing and applicable indemnifications.

    Trio’s obligation to enter into the Definitive Agreement shall be subject to delivery of evidence of a minimum sustained production rate of 40 barrels per day for a continuous 30-day period from each of the two wells at the Asphalt Ridge site.

    *Gwynn published a Utah Geological Survey Open-File Report (no. 527) in 2008 that exhaustively compiled tar sand data for the P.R. Spring area from numerous resource-characterization and hydrocarbon reserve investigations. This compilation defines the area of the tar sand deposit at P.R. Spring (figure 4). Geological maps and measured sections of the tar sand deposits are presented in Whittier and Becker (1962) and Byrd (1967), and Gwynn (1971) and Clem (1984) attempted correlation of the bitumen-bearing sandstone units. Properties of the tar sand deposits are published in Johnson and others (1975a, b, c), Dana and Sinks (1984a, b), and Sinks (1985). Analysis of oil extracted from the tar sands is documented in Wood and Ritzma (1972). Reserves and economic potential are discussed in Dahm (1980) and Clem (1984).

    About Trio Petroleum Corp
    Trio Petroleum Corp is an oil and gas exploration and development company in California, Saskatchewan and Utah.

    Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
    All statements in this press release of Trio Petroleum Corp (“Trio”) and its representatives and partners that are not based on historical fact are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and the provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Acts”). In particular, when used in the preceding discussion, the words “estimates,” “believes,” “hopes,” “expects,” “intends,” “on-track”, “plans,” “anticipates,” or “may,” and similar conditional expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Acts and are subject to the safe harbor created by the Acts. Any statements made in this news release other than those of historical fact, about an action, event or development, are forward-looking statements. While management has based any forward-looking statements contained herein on its current expectations, the information on which such expectations were based may change. These forward-looking statements rely on a number of assumptions concerning future events and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are outside of the Trio’s control, that could cause actual results to materially and adversely differ from such statements. Such risks, uncertainties, and other factors include, but are not necessarily limited to, those set forth in the Risk Factors sections of the Trio reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Copies of such documents are available on the SEC’s website, www.sec.gov. Trio undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release, except as required by law.

    Investor Relations Contact:
    Redwood Empire Financial Communications
    Michael Bayes
    (404) 809 4172
    michael@redwoodefc.com

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Ancient pollen reveals stories about Earth’s history, from the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs to the Mayan collapse

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Francisca Oboh Ikuenobe, Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Missouri University of Science and Technology

    An electron microscope image, colorized, shows different structures of pollen grains, including sunflower, morning glory and primrose. Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility

    If you are sneezing this spring, you are not alone. Every year, plants release billions of pollen grains into the air, specks of male reproductive material that many of us notice only when we get watery eyes and runny noses.

    However, pollen grains are far more than allergens – they are nature’s time capsules, preserving clues about Earth’s past environments for millions of years.

    Pollen’s tough outer shell enables it to survive long after its parent plants have disappeared. When pollen grains become trapped in sediments at the bottom of lakes, oceans and riverbeds, fossil pollen can provide scientists with a unique history of the environments those pollen-producing plants were born into. They can tell us about the vegetation, climate and even human activity through time.

    Fossil pollen grains of Carya (hickory) have been found in southeastern Missouri that are millions of years old.
    Francisca Oboh Ikuenobe

    The types of pollen and the quantities of pollen grains found at a site help researchers reconstruct ancient forests, track sea-level changes and identify the fingerprints of significant events, such as asteroid impacts or civilizations collapsing.

    As palynologists, we study these ancient pollen fossils around the world. Here are a few examples of what we can learn from these microscopic pollen grains.

    Missouri: Pollen and the asteroid

    When an asteroid struck Earth some 66 million years ago, the one blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, it is believed to have sent a tidal wave crashing onto North America.

    Marine fossils and rock fragments found in southeastern Missouri appear to have been deposited there by a massive wave generated by the asteroid hitting what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

    Among the rocks and marine fossils, scientists have found fossilized pollen from the Late Cretaceous and Early Paleocene periods that reflects changes in the surrounding ecosystems. The pollen reveals how ecosystems were instantly disrupted at the time of the asteroid, before gradually rebounding over hundreds to thousands of years.

    A University of Michigan-led study using data from the Chicxulub asteroid impact crater modeled how far the resulting tsunami likely would have reached. Ancient pollen grains and marine fossils found in southeastern Missouri and analyzed by scientists at the Missouri University of Science and Technology offer hard evidence of the flooding.
    Molly M. Range, et al., 2022, CC BY

    Pollen from gymnosperms, such as pines, as well as ferns and flowering plants, such as grasses, herbs and palm trees, all record a clear pattern: Some forest pollen disappeared after the impact, suggesting that the regions’ vegetation changed. Then the pollen slowly began to reemerge as the environment stabilized.

    US Gulf Coast: Sequoia pollen and sea-level rise

    Fossilized pollen grains have also helped scientists trace slower but equally dramatic changes along the eastern Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Alabama.

    During the Early Oligocene, around 33.9 to 28 million years ago, sea levels rose and flooded low-lying conifer forests in the region. Researchers identified a distinct change in pollen released by Sequoia-type trees, giant conifers that once dominated the coastal plains.

    Scientists have been able to use those pollen records to reconstruct how far the shoreline moved inland by tracking the proportion of pollen grains in the geologic record to the rise of marine microfossils.

    The evidence shows how the sea flooded land ecosystems hundreds of miles from today’s coast. Pollen is a biological marker and geographic tracer of this ancient change.

    Western Australia: From swamp to salinity

    In Western Australia, sediment cores from the beds of Lake Aerodrome, Gastropod Lake and Prado Lake reveal how long-term drying can change the ecology of a region.

    During the Eocene, a period from about 55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago, lush swamp forests surrounded freshwater lakes there. That’s reflected by abundant pollen from tropical trees and moisture-loving shrubs and fern spores at that time. However, vegetation changed dramatically as the Australian tectonic plate drifted northward and the climate became more arid.

    The upper layers of the sediment cores, which capture more recent times, contain pollen mostly from wind-pollinated, salt- and drought-tolerant plants – evidence of shifting vegetation under growing environmental stress.

    Magnified images of fossil pollen studied in Australia. Clockwise from upper left, they are pollen from acacia, aglaonema and eucalyptus.
    Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe

    The presence of Dunaliella, a green alga that thrives in very salty water, alongside sparse pollen from plants that could survive dry environments, confirms that lakes that once supported forests became highly saline.

    Guatemala: Maya history and forest recovery

    Closer to the tropics, Lake Izabal in Guatemala offers a more recent archive spanning the past 1,300 years. This sediment record reflects both natural climate variation and the profound impact of human land use, especially during the rise and fall of the Maya civilization.

    Around 1,125 to 1,200 years ago, pollen from crops such as maize and opportunistic herbs surged, at the same time tree pollen dropped, reflecting widespread deforestation. Historical records show political centers in the region collapsed not long afterward.

    Quiriguá was an ancient Mayan city near Lake Izabal, where pollen studies show the rise in deforestation and the recovery. Quiriguá began to decline in the ninth century and was eventually abandoned.
    Daniel Mennerich/Flickr, CC BY-SA

    Only after population pressure eased did the forest begin to recover. Pollen from hardwood tropical trees increased, indicating vegetation rebounded even as rainfall declined during the Little Ice Age between the 14th and mid-19th centuries.

    The fossil pollen shows how ancient societies transformed their landscapes, and how ecosystems responded, providing more evidence and explanations for other historical accounts.

    Modern pollen tells a story, too

    These studies relied on analyzing fossil pollen grains based on their shapes, surface features and wall structures. By counting grains – hundreds to thousands per sample – scientists can statistically build pictures of ancient vegetation, the species present, their abundances, and how the composition of each shifted with the climate, sea-level changes or human activity.

    This is why modern pollen also tells a story. As today’s climate warms, the behavior of pollen-producing plants is changing. In temperate regions such as the U.S., pollen seasons start earlier and last longer due to warming temperatures and rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from vehicles, factories and other human activities.

    All of that is being recorded in the fossil pollen record in the sediment layers at the bottoms of lakes around the world.

    So, the next time you suffer from allergies, remember that the tiny grains floating in the air are biological time capsules that may one day tell future inhabitants about Earth’s environmental changes.

    Francisca Oboh Ikuenobe receives funding from the National Science Foundation, American Chemical Society-Petroleum Research Fund, and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. She is affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union Geological Society of America, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Association for Women Geoscientists, Geological Society of Nigeria, AASP – The Palynological Society, SEPM – Society for Sedimentary Geology, and The Paleontological Society.

    Linus Victor Anyanna receives research support from the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Geological Society of America, AASP-The Palynological Society, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and the Geological Society of Nigeria.

    – ref. Ancient pollen reveals stories about Earth’s history, from the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs to the Mayan collapse – https://theconversation.com/ancient-pollen-reveals-stories-about-earths-history-from-the-asteroid-strike-that-killed-the-dinosaurs-to-the-mayan-collapse-254190

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: An 18th-century rebellion for liberty, equality and freedom − not in France or the United States, but Ireland

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Joseph Patrick Kelly, Professor of Literature and Director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston

    A sculpture in Wexford, Ireland, by Eamonn O’Doherty, called ‘Fuascailt,’ commemorates the 1798 rebellion. Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images

    Shortly before midnight on May 23, 1798, highwaymen just north of Dublin intercepted and set on fire a mail coach headed to Belfast.

    It was the signal meant to ignite revolution across all Ireland.

    At the time, Ireland was a kingdom within the state of Great Britain. The island’s three religious factions had long been divided. Families who belonged to the Anglican Church of Ireland made up the aristocratic landlords and colonial administrators. Presbyterians, concentrated in the north, boasted a robust middle class. But as “dissenters” from the Anglican church, they were second-class citizens.

    And most of the remaining 80% of the population, the “native” Catholics, were near-destitute farmers. For more than a hundred years, they had lived under debilitating penal laws meant to keep Catholics out of economic and political power.

    Portrait of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, painted by Hugh Douglas Hamilton.
    Gallery of the Masters via Wikimedia Commons

    A new organization, the Society of United Irishmen, was established in the early 1890s in Belfast, and chapters quickly spread to Dublin and across the country. Anyone could join, so long as they dreamed of making Ireland a republic, like the United States and France, where the people had dispensed with the monarch and ruled themselves.

    Catholics and Presbyterians flocked to the cause, and even a few Anglicans joined up. The handsome and charismatic Lord Edward Fitzgerald, an Anglican son of a duke, renounced his title and commanded the society’s militia.

    By 1798, a quarter of a million men, many armed with long-handled, iron-tipped pikes, awaited the summons.

    It was the last time Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland would unite under one banner in a really meaningful way until 1998, when a majority of both factions signed on to the Good Friday Agreement.

    As an Irish studies scholar, I’d argue the nationalist movement was symbolized best by revolutionary Theobald Wolfe Tone, whose father was an Anglican tradesman and whose mother was born and raised a Catholic.

    “I am a Protestant,” Tone wrote in his most famous political pamphlet, but also “a lover of justice and a steady detester of tyranny.”

    Enlightenment ideals

    Ever since King Henry VIII severed his nation’s ties to Roman Catholicism in the 16th century, Irish Catholics had suffered for their faith. Their lands were confiscated. They couldn’t bear arms. They couldn’t run schools or build churches. Though the worst of these laws had been reformed by the end of the 18th century and a small Catholic middle class was emerging, they were still barred from political office.

    Inspired by the American and French revolutions, the United Irishmen wanted a secular republic that separated church from state. They professed the Enlightenment principles of equality, liberty and government by the people – and thought citizens had a duty to abolish any government destructive of their rights.

    Their creed was a secular catechism, often expressed in the form of a question-and-answer text:

    What is in your hand? It is a branch.
    Of what? Of the Tree of Liberty
    Where did it first grow? In America.
    Where did it bloom? In France.
    Where did the seeds fall? In Ireland.

    Transcending sectarian differences, these Irish patriots took green as the color of their national flag. Upon this field they imposed an ancient symbol of Ireland, the harp.

    The rebellion

    The English began to suspect a revolt, and in 1787 they decided to strike first, unleashing a brutal crackdown. Redcoats “dragooned” the country, ransacking and burning homes, and flogging and summarily executing suspects.

    The Irish still sing about it today in the ballad “The Wearing of the Green”:

    I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand,
    He said, “How’s dear old Ireland and how does she stand?”
    “She’s the most distressful country that you have ever seen,

    They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.”

    Young Wolfe Tones singing ‘The Wearing of the Green.’

    Most of the United Irishmen’s leaders, including Fitzgerald, were arrested or killed in the dragnet. As a result, when the signal finally came, the flaming mail coach proved a fizzle rather than a rocket.

    Like guttering candles, the rebellion spent itself in uncoordinated risings at different times in different parts of the country. Help from France, which was then at war with Great Britain, came too little and too late. By October, Ireland’s revolution had been brutally suppressed.

    Historical memory

    Even before the conflict was over, aristocratic Anglican writers such as Sir Richard Musgrave spun the rebellion as an uprising of disgruntled Catholics. Reprisal killings, like rebels’ massacre of government supporters in County Wexford, helped them portray the rebellion as a religious war: Catholics against Protestants.

    Cynical English policies further dissolved the Presbyterian-Catholic alliance. An “Act of Union” in 1800 rewarded Irish Presbyterians with full citizenship – not in an Irish republic, but in the Protestant, monarchical state of Great Britain.

    Catholics, still oppressed and impoverished, had yet to face their most difficult trial: An Gorta Mor, the potato famine of the 1840s. About a million people, nearly all of them Catholic, died of starvation or disease, and another 2 million emigrated. Ireland’s population was reduced by a third.

    Because Irish nationalism became synonymous with Catholic liberation, it was mostly Catholics who celebrated the memory of the United Irishmen. The “Fenians,” a nationalist brotherhood who fought for Irish independence in the 1860s, used the United Irishmen for inspiration. Their famous ballad “The Rising of the Moon” laments, “What glorious pride and sorrow/ Fill the name of Ninety-Eight!”

    A memorial in County Wicklow to mark the 200th anniversary of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion.
    Hugh Rooney/Eye Ubiquitous/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Religious states

    On Easter Monday 1916, Irish republicans rose up again in Dublin, beginning the revolution that would lead, finally, to Irish independence. One portion of their forces, the Citizen Army, raised the old United Irishmen’s banner above their headquarters in Dublin, Liberty Hall.

    But when the Irish got their “Free State,” they did not build the kind of secular republic envisioned by the United Irishmen. The new country was a decidedly Catholic nation.

    The nation’s new flag, the Irish tricolor, included green for Catholics, orange for Protestants and white to represent peace between them. But it was a largely empty gesture. Today only about 4% of the population of the Republic of Ireland identify as Protestant, while another 15% say they have no religion.

    A parade in Dublin in 1948 commemorates the 150th anniversary of the 1798 rebellion.
    Independent News And Media/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

    That’s mostly because in 1922 the British carved out an enclave of six northern counties where most of the Presbyterians and many Anglicans lived. This political entity, “Northern Ireland,” stayed united to England. Protestants outnumbered Catholics 2-to-1, and the minority faced widespread discrimination.

    Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Catholics in Northern Ireland began a campaign for equal rights in 1968. But when their acts of civil disobedience were met with violence, peaceful protest devolved into “the Troubles,” a guerrilla war to get the British out.

    Making peace

    A ceasefire was called in 1994, not long before the bicentennial of Ireland’s 1798 rebellion.

    To coincide with the anniversary, historian Kevin Whelan published an influential book, “The Tree of Liberty,” which emphasized the 1798 rebellion’s Enlightenment foundation. Catholics and Protestants together, Whelan argued, had fought to construct a secular nation based on equal rights.

    In 1998, people all over the country commemorated the rebellion, though the sectarian divisions and the violence of the Troubles loomed large.

    Almost exactly 200 years after the United Irishmen rose up, the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Though Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom today, the treaty secured the main goal of the 1798 rebellion: equal rights and self-determination for all citizens, no matter their religion.

    Joseph Patrick Kelly 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. An 18th-century rebellion for liberty, equality and freedom − not in France or the United States, but Ireland – https://theconversation.com/an-18th-century-rebellion-for-liberty-equality-and-freedom-not-in-france-or-the-united-states-but-ireland-249817

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Teens of any age who drink alcohol with their parents’ permission drink more as young adults, new research shows

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Bernard Pereda, Doctoral Student in Psychoolgy, University at Buffalo

    Parents play an important role in teaching their children about alcohol. StockPlanets/E+ via Getty Images

    Children and teenagers of any age who sip or taste alcohol with their parents’ permission are more likely to engage in risky drinking in young adulthood. That was the finding of a new study my colleagues and I published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

    In the study, we examined questionnaires filled out annually between 2009 and 2018 by 387 adolescents starting at age 11 and an accompanying parent. Topics included history of child and parent alcohol use, beliefs about alcohol and rules about alcohol in the home. The questionnaires also asked adolescents if they ever drank alcohol with their parents’ permission, even just a few sips – and if yes, at what age they first did so.

    We analyzed whether drinking alcohol with parental permission during adolescence predicted alcohol outcomes in young adulthood, at ages 18 to 20. These outcomes included how often and how much they drank, alcohol use disorder symptoms and negative consequences such as self-injury and regretting things said while drinking.

    Then, we looked at whether the age at which this practice began affected likelihood of risky drinking. In our analysis, we also accounted for factors such as peer alcohol use, parental alcohol use and personality.

    In our sample, drinking with parental permission began anywhere from age 5 to age 17, but typically started around age 12. We found that about 80% of the adolescents responded that they had drunk alcohol with parental permission. That number is higher than in some other studies, most likely because our study had a wide age range. Research exploring this topic generally focuses on younger adolescents, who are less likely to be allowed to try alcohol by their parents, but this practice becomes more common as adolescents get older.

    We found that adolescents were more likely in young adulthood to drink more often and in greater amounts in families that allowed this practice compared with those that did not. The risk of experiencing symptoms of alcohol use disorder and negative consequences from drinking in young adulthood was also higher. Importantly, the age at which drinking with parents’ permission began did not change this effect.

    Alcohol slows down the brain by affecting brain chemicals called neurotransmitters.

    Why it matters

    Parents play a critical role in teaching their children about alcohol. The family is often the first context in which children are introduced to alcohol, either by trying it themselves or by observing others drinking. In the U.S., studies suggest that 30% to 40% of children under age 13 try alcohol with parental permission.

    Many parents view this as a protective strategy, believing that it reduces curiosity about alcohol and provides an opportunity to supervise safe drinking. Yet studies from several research groups have found that parents providing alcohol, even just sips or tastes, actually increases rather than decreases future drinking.

    Our study is the first to explore whether the age that trying alcohol with parental permission makes a difference for increased potential of later alcohol use. Overall, the findings can inform public health messages explaining the risks of allowing adolescents to try alcohol at any age.

    Why might parental permission to sip or taste alcohol increase risk? Some scientists have speculated that it may promote the belief that parents approve of underage drinking and shift children’s attitudes and beliefs to be more pro-alcohol.

    Ongoing and still unpublished work in our lab supports this. Namely, it strengthens their beliefs in the potential positive outcomes of drinking, such as making parties more fun, and weakens their beliefs in the potential negative outcomes, such as getting in trouble.

    What still isn’t known

    Future studies can shed light on whether regularly sipping and tasting alcohol in adolescence is more risky than doing it just once or twice.

    Additionally, how harmful the practice is may depend on adolescents’ personalities as well as the context in which parents allow it. For example, it may be particularly harmful for children who are inclined to seek out novel and exciting experiences. On the other hand, in highly structured settings such as religious events, it may be less risky.

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

    Bernard Pereda 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. Teens of any age who drink alcohol with their parents’ permission drink more as young adults, new research shows – https://theconversation.com/teens-of-any-age-who-drink-alcohol-with-their-parents-permission-drink-more-as-young-adults-new-research-shows-254789

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How 3D printing is personalizing health care

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Anne Schmitz, Associate Professor of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Stout

    A girl, wearing her prosthetic hands, walks to school in Uruguay. AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico

    Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.

    These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.

    We are a biomedical engineer and chemist who work with 3D printing. We study how this rapidly evolving technology provides new options not just for prosthetics but for implants, surgical planning, drug manufacturing and other health care needs. The ability of 3D printing to make precisely shaped objects in a wide range of materials has led to, for example, custom replacement joints and custom-dosage, multidrug pills.

    Better body parts

    Three-dimensional printing in health care started in the 1980s with scientists using technologies such as stereolithography to create prototypes layer by layer. Stereolithography uses a computer-controlled laser beam to solidify a liquid material into specific 3D shapes. The medical field quickly saw the potential of this technology to create implants and prosthetics designed specifically for each patient.

    One of the first applications was creating tissue scaffolds, which are structures that support cell growth. Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital combined these scaffolds with patients’ own cells to build replacement bladders. The patients remained healthy for years after receiving their implants, demonstrating that 3D-printed structures could become durable body parts.

    As technology progressed, the focus shifted to bioprinting, which uses living cells to create working anatomical structures. In 2013, Organovo created the world’s first 3D-bioprinted liver tissue, opening up exciting possibilities for creating organs and tissues for transplantation. But while significant advances have been made in bioprinting, creating full, functional organs such as livers for transplantation remains experimental. Current research focuses on developing smaller, simpler tissues and refining bioprinting techniques to improve cell viability and functionality. These efforts aim to bridge the gap between laboratory success and clinical application, with the ultimate goal of providing viable organ replacements for patients in need.

    Three-dimensional printing already has revolutionized the creation of prosthetics. It allows prosthetics makers to produce affordable custom-made devices that fit the patient perfectly. They can tailor prosthetic hands and limbs to each individual and easily replace them as a child grows.

    Three-dimensionally printed implants, such as hip replacements and spine implants, offer a more precise fit, which can improve how well they integrate with the body. Traditional implants often come only in standard shapes and sizes.

    Surgeons are able to use 3D printing to make medical implants to fit individual patients.

    Some patients have received custom titanium facial implants after accidents. Others had portions of their skulls replaced with 3D-printed implants.

    Additionally, 3D printing is making significant strides in dentistry. Companies such as Invisalign use 3D printing to create custom-fit aligners for teeth straightening, demonstrating the ability to personalize dental care.

    Scientists are also exploring new materials for 3D printing, such as self-healing bioglass that might replace damaged cartilage. Moreover, researchers are developing 4D printing, which creates objects that can change shape over time, potentially leading to medical devices that can adapt to the body’s needs.

    For example, researchers are working on 3D-printed stents that can respond to changes in blood flow. These stents are designed to expand or contract as needed, reducing the risk of blockage and improving long-term patient outcomes.

    Simulating surgeries

    Three-dimensionally printed anatomical models often help surgeons understand complex cases and improve surgical outcomes. These models, created from medical images such as X-rays and CT scans, allow surgeons to practice procedures before operating.

    For instance, a 3D-printed model of a child’s heart enables surgeons to simulate complex surgeries. This approach can lead to shorter operating times, fewer complications and lower costs.

    Personalized pharmaceuticals

    In the pharmaceutical industry, drugmakers can three-dimensionally print personalized drug dosages and delivery systems. The ability to precisely layer each component of a drug means that they can make medicines with the exact dose needed for each patient. The 3D-printed anti-epileptic drug Spritam was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015 to deliver very high dosages of its active ingredient.

    Drug production systems that use 3D printing are finding homes outside pharmaceutical factories. The drugs potentially can be made and delivered by community pharmacies. Hospitals are starting to use 3D printing to make medicine on-site, allowing for personalized treatment plans based on factors such as the patient’s age and health.

    Three-dimensionally printed pharmaceuticals make it possible to customize the types, doses and release times of drugs.

    However, it’s important to note that regulations for 3D-printed drugs are still being developed. One concern is that postprinting processing may affect the stability of drug ingredients. It’s also important to establish clear guidelines and decide where 3D printing should take place – whether in pharmacies, hospitals or even at home. Additionally, pharmacists will need rigorous training in these new systems.

    Printing for the future

    Despite the extraordinarily rapid progress overall in 3D printing for health care, major challenges and opportunities remain. Among them is the need to develop better ways to ensure the quality and safety of 3D-printed medical products. Affordability and accessibility also remain significant concerns. Long-term safety concerns regarding implant materials, such as potential biocompatibility issues and the release of nanoparticles, require rigorous testing and validation.

    While 3D printing has the potential to reduce manufacturing costs, the initial investment in equipment and materials can be a barrier for many health care providers and patients, especially in underserved communities. Furthermore, the lack of standardized workflows and trained personnel can limit the widespread adoption of 3D printing in clinical settings, hindering access for those who could benefit most.

    On the bright side, artificial intelligence techniques that can effectively leverage vast amounts of highly detailed medical data are likely to prove critical in developing improved 3D-printed medical products. Specifically, AI algorithms can analyze patient-specific data to optimize the design and fabrication of 3D-printed implants and prosthetics. For instance, implant makers can use AI-driven image analysis to create highly accurate 3D models from CT scans and MRIs that they can use to design customized implants.

    Furthermore, machine learning algorithms can predict the long-term performance and potential failure points of 3D-printed prosthetics, allowing prosthetics designers to optimize for improved durability and patient safety.

    Three-dimensional printing continues to break boundaries, including the boundary of the body itself. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a technique that uses ultrasound to turn a liquid injected into the body into a gel in 3D shapes. The method could be used one day for delivering drugs or replacing tissue.

    Overall, the field is moving quickly toward personalized treatment plans that are closely adapted to each patient’s unique needs and preferences, made possible by the precision and flexibility of 3D printing.

    Daniel Freedman has received funding related to 3D printing from IBM, Braskem and Mediprint and is affiliated with the Stratasys Educational Community Advisory Board.

    Anne Schmitz 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. How 3D printing is personalizing health care – https://theconversation.com/how-3d-printing-is-personalizing-health-care-249106

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: 9 tourist hotspots unveiled

    Source: Hong Kong Information Services

    Deputy Chief Secretary Cheuk Wing-hing announced today that nine projects will be implemented by the Working Group on Developing Tourist Hotspots with the aim of bringing economic benefits, boosting consumption sentiment and stimulating the economy.

     

    Mr Cheuk explained at a press conference this afternoon that new travel patterns and tourists’ preferences increasingly value hotspots with unique features that are part of the flavour of Hong Kong.

     

    He pointed out that as there are many treasured tourist attractions in Hong Kong, the Government considers that in addition to creating new hotspots, current tourism resources should be consolidated and enriched to maximise the value of such hotspots and create attractions that tourists cannot miss.

     

    Hong Kong Industrial Brand Tourism is one of the projects to be implemented. Given that Hong Kong’s industrial story fully embodies the spirit of the Lion Rock, the tourism industry is forming groups to develop “Made in Hong Kong” industrial tourism, creating hotspots for visitors to tour, experience and shop.

     

    Industrial brands that can be visited include Lee Kum Kee, Kee Wah, Pat Chun and Yakult. A trial launch is expected in the third quarter.

     

    Meanwhile, a Victoria Park Bazaar will be implemented in the fourth quarter. Some 30 stalls with themed activities will be set up at Victoria Park on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

     

    Another project calls for creating a Pink Trumpet Tree Garden, with pink trumpet trees and bougainvillea extensively planted near the habourfront of Tamar Park to create a colourful viewing area that brings synergy with the Central harbourfront. The planting work is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

     

    The working group has also selected two featured communities for in-depth tourism, one in Central and the other in Kowloon City.

     

    In view of the fact that Hong Kong’s disciplinary services enjoy international acclaim among tourists from the Mainland and overseas, disciplinary services pioneer tours will be launched in the second quarter.

     

    The Police Museum, the Correctional Services Museum and the Fire & Ambulance Services Education Centre & Museum will, in collaboration with the tourism sector, develop and launch tourism products.

     

    Moreover, the former Yau Ma Tei Police Station will be partially opened to tourists who can see for themselves the layout and atmosphere of an old police station, which has served as a famous setting for police movies and dramas.

     

    By the fourth quarter, the ground floor will be opened to the public, featuring a replica report room, cellblocks, additional photo booths employing augmented reality technology and more.

     

    The projects selected also cover green tourism – “Four Peaks” Tourism. The four peaks for development include the Peak, Lantau Peak, Sai Kung Hoi and Tai Mo Shan. Considering the popularity of hiking trails, touring across the four selected peaks will be characterised by their unique scenery, easy and short routes, convenient transportation and comfort for travellers.

     

    The remaining project involves revistalising the former Hung Hom Railway Freight Yard Pier. The yard will be developed into a character-filled space for organising different activities so that the public can take pictures and appreciate the panoramic views of Victoria Harbour and Hong Kong Island. The target opening date will be the first quarter of next year.

     

    Mr Cheuk said that these particular hotspots span across the city, underlining the concept of “tourism is everywhere in Hong Kong”.

     

    The Government will engage the trade proactively, making good use of various resources for marketing and promotions, creating innovative travelling routes and new products for tourist groups.

     

    The Deputy Chief Secretary emphasised that he firmly believes Hong Kong’s tourism industry will attain a new level of prosperity.

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI: Best Loans for Bad Credit: Upstart’s No Credit Check Loans Guaranteed Approval Direct Lender

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    Looking for the best loan options for bad credit? Upstart offers personal loans with guaranteed approval and fast funding, ideal for urgent needs like debt consolidation or medical bills. Apply today and take control of your finances.

    SAN CARLOS, Calif., May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — When you’re struggling with bad credit, applying for a loan can feel like facing a locked door. Traditional banks often reject applications based solely on credit scores, leaving many people feeling like they’ve run out of options.

    But having a low credit score doesn’t mean you’re out of choices. The lending landscape has evolved, with several companies now using more holistic approaches to evaluate borrowers beyond just their credit scores.

    CHECK YOUR ELIGIBILITY WITH A SIMPLE APPLICATION

    Here, we’ll explore best loans for bad credit, with a particular focus on Upstart’s AI-powered lending platform. We’ll examine what makes certain loans more suitable for bad credit situations, how to apply, and provide honest comparisons to help you make an informed decision.

    Key Takeaways

    • Bad credit (scores below 580) makes traditional loans difficult but not impossible to obtain
    • Several lenders now use alternative approval factors beyond just credit scores, including no credit check payday loans guaranteed approval.
    • Upstart uses AI technology to consider education, employment history, and income alongside credit
    • Interest rates for bad credit loans typically range from 8.99% to 35.99% APR
    • Understanding the full cost of loans, including origination fees, is essential before applying for no credit check payday loans guaranteed approval.
    • Avoiding predatory lenders with extremely high APRs (above 36%) is crucial

    What Is a “Bad Credit” Score and How Does It Affect You?

    Before diving into the best loans for bad credit, it’s important to understand what lenders mean by “bad credit” and how it affects your borrowing potential. Credit scores typically range from 300 to 850, with higher scores indicating better creditworthiness. Here’s how scores are generally categorized:

    Credit Score Range Category Typical Loan Accessibility
    740+ Excellent Easily approved with best rates
    670-739 Good Good approval odds with competitive rates
    580-669 Fair Limited options with higher rates
    Below 580 Poor/Bad Specialized lenders, highest rates

    A score below 580 is typically considered “bad credit” and results from factors such as:

    • Late or missed payments on existing accounts
    • High credit utilization (using most of your available credit)
    • Recent bankruptcies or collections
    • Limited credit history
    • Multiple recent credit applications

    A low score can be a hurdle, but it’s not the end of your options. Many people have successfully rebuilt their credit over time, and some lenders specifically focus on helping borrowers during this rebuilding phase. These include no credit check loans guaranteed approval direct lender options, which help provide access to necessary funds.

    >>> TAKE THE FIRST STEP WITH OUR EASY ELIGIBILITY CHECK <<<

    Upstart: AI-Powered Best Loans For Bad Credit

    After researching multiple lenders that work with bad credit borrowers, Upstart stands out for its innovative approach to loan approvals as the best loan option for bad credit scores.

    How Upstart Differs from Traditional Lenders

    Unlike conventional banks that rely heavily on credit scores, Upstart uses artificial intelligence to evaluate loan applications. Their technology considers over 1,000 data points, including:

    • Education level and field of study
    • Employment history and stability
    • Income and future earning potential
    • Debt-to-income ratio
    • Recent financial behavior

    This means that even if your credit score is below 580, other positive factors in your profile could help you qualify for a loan with more reasonable terms than you might expect.

    FIND YOUR PERFECT MATCH WITH OUR QUICK TOOL

    Upstart Loan Details

    Loan amounts $1,000 to $50,000
    APR range 6.70% to 35.99% (rates vary based on creditworthiness and loan terms)
    Repayment terms 36 or 60 months (fixed)
    Origination fee 0% to 12% (deducted from loan proceeds)
    Minimum credit score Officially none, but realistically 300+ for most approvals
    Funding time As soon as one business day after approval
    Prepayment penalty None

    Real Customer Experience: Michael’s Story

    Michael, a 34-year-old electrician from Ohio, faced a tough financial period after a divorce and a medical emergency. His credit score dropped to 540, and he found himself paying high interest rates on credit cards and other debt.

    “I needed $12,000 to consolidate my high-interest debt and stop the cycle of falling behind,” Michael said. “I applied to my local bank, but they rejected me. Payday loan places wanted to charge me insane interest rates.”

    After applying with Upstart, Michael was approved for a $12,000 loan at a 24.5% APR with a 36-month term. While the rate was higher than prime loans, it was significantly lower than the rates he was paying on credit cards and much better than the 400%+ APR payday loans he had considered.

    “The application took just 10 minutes, and the funds were in my account the next day. After eight months of on-time payments, my credit score has already improved by 45 points.

    CHECK HOW MUCH YOU CAN BORROW WITHOUT AFFECTING YOUR CREDIT

    How Upstart Compares to Alternatives

    To help you understand your options, we’ve compared the best loans for bad credit, highlighting Upstart alongside other common lending sources for borrowers with low credit scores.

    As the comparison shows, Upstart offers a middle ground between traditional banks—which often deny applications—and predatory lenders that charge excessive rates. Upstart’s AI-based approach means many borrowers with sub-580 credit scores can secure better rates than with other lenders.

    In contrast, no credit check payday loans guaranteed approval often come with significantly higher interest rates.

    Upstart:

    • Provides some of the best loans for bad credit by using AI to assess your full financial profile, including education and income—not just your credit score.
    • Offers faster approvals and funding, often within 1-2 business days.
    • Has no prepayment penalties and flexible loan amounts tailored to your needs.
    • Is accessible to borrowers with credit scores as low as 300.

    Traditional Banks:

    • Rely heavily on credit scores, typically requiring 630 or higher for approval.
    • Have slower approval processes, often taking several days or weeks.
    • Offer limited options for those with bad credit.
    • Require extensive documentation and stricter eligibility criteria.

    The Application Process: What to Expect

    If you’re considering applying for best personal loan with bad credit, understanding the process can help reduce anxiety and increase your chances of approval.

    Required Documentation

    For an Upstart application, you’ll need:

    • Valid government-issued ID
    • Social Security Number
    • Personal contact information
    • Proof of regular income (pay stubs, tax returns, or bank statements)
    • Personal bank account details (for deposit of funds)
    • Details about your education and employment

    TAKE THE FIRST STEP TOWARD YOUR LOAN TODAY

    Step-by-Step Application Process

    1. Pre-qualification check: Upstart offers a “soft pull” pre-qualification that won’t impact your credit score but gives you an estimate of your potential loan terms.
    2. Complete the online application: The full application takes about 10-15 minutes and includes questions about your education, employment, and financial situation.
    3. Verification and approval: Upstart may request additional documentation to verify your information. Most decisions come within minutes, though some applications require 1-2 days for review.
    4. Accepting terms and receiving funds: Once approved, you’ll review the final loan offer, including the interest rate, term, and any origination fee. If you accept, funds are typically deposited within one business day.

    “The application process was much less stressful than I expected,” shared Jamie, a teacher from Florida with a 565 credit score who borrowed $8,000 for home repairs. “I thought I’d need to explain my credit mistakes, but the system seemed more interested in my stable job history and education.”

    CHECK IF YOU QUALIFY WITH NO IMPACT TO YOUR CREDIT SCORE

    Warning Signs of Predatory Lenders

    When searching for loans, it’s important to avoid predatory lenders who charge exorbitant rates. Look out for:

    • APR above 36%: These are considered high-risk loans and should be avoided.
    • Hidden fees: Legitimate lenders disclose all fees upfront.
    • Pressure tactics: If a lender is pushing you to make a quick decision, it’s a red flag.
    • Guaranteed approval claims: No reputable lender guarantees approval before reviewing your application.

    Using Loans to Rebuild Your Credit

    A personal loan isn’t just a way to get money—it’s a tool for financial recovery. When looking for the best loans for bad credit, here’s how to make the most of your loan:

    • Debt consolidation: Combine high-interest debts into one manageable payment.
    • Emergency expenses: Use your loan for medical bills, car repairs, or urgent home repairs.
    • Improve credit: On-time payments can help improve your credit score, making it easier to get better loans in the future.

    Is Upstart Right for You?

    Upstart is a great option if:

    • You have a steady income and are looking to rebuild your credit.
    • You need funds quickly (within 1-2 business days).
    • You’re seeking a loan with no prepayment penalties and the ability to build your credit.

    It may not be ideal if:

    • You have no stable income.
    • You need a loan term shorter than 36 months or longer than 60 months.
    • You’re borrowing a small amount, and a high origination fee would make it too costly.

    CHECK YOUR RATES WITH NO RISK TO YOUR CREDIT SCORE.

    Final Thoughts: Finding the Right Path Forward

    Bad credit doesn’t have to be a roadblock to financial freedom. With Upstart, you have a chance to access the best loans for bad credit that consider more than just your credit score—an opportunity to rebuild your credit, consolidate debt, and cover emergency expenses.

    Whether you need funds for medical bills, home repairs, or even debt consolidation, Upstart’s AI-powered platform evaluates your full financial picture, offering loan options with fairer terms than traditional lenders. With fast approval and funding within one business day, you’re never left waiting for a lifeline.

    But it’s more than just getting a loan—it’s about regaining control of your financial future. By making timely payments, you can improve your credit score and open doors to better financial opportunities down the road.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Q: Is Upstart legit?
    A: Yes, Upstart is a legitimate and reputable online lender. Founded in 2012, Upstart is a fully licensed lender that uses an AI-driven model to evaluate loan applicants based on more than just their credit score, including factors like education, income, and employment history. Upstart is a member of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and operates with transparency, making it a trustworthy option for borrowers with bad credit looking for personal loans.

    Q: Does applying affect my credit score?
    A: The initial pre-qualification uses a soft credit check that doesn’t impact your score. If you proceed with a full application, a hard inquiry will be placed on your credit report, which typically has a small, temporary impact.

    Q: What if I’m self-employed?
    A: Self-employed individuals can qualify, but you’ll need to provide documentation of steady income, typically through tax returns or bank statements showing consistent deposits.

    Q: Can I pay off my loan early to save on interest?
    A: Yes, Upstart has no prepayment penalties, so you can pay extra or pay off the entire balance early without additional fees.

    Q: How does Upstart determine my interest rate?
    A: Rates are determined by analyzing your credit profile, education, employment history, income, and other factors using their proprietary AI algorithm.

    QUICK AND EASY APPLICATION—GET YOUR LOAN APPROVED FAST

    Email: support@upstart.com

    Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Interest rates, loan terms, and approval criteria mentioned are approximate and may vary based on individual circumstances and market conditions. Always review the full terms and conditions before applying for any loan and consider consulting with a financial advisor regarding your specific situation. This article may contain affiliate links, meaning we may receive compensation if you apply through these links. This compensation does not affect our editorial opinions or recommendations.

    Photos accompanying this announcement are available at

    https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/dba4f282-d36a-4f65-90a1-9c62b168a010

    https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f39018e2-3ddc-4056-b1bf-f5573340ac1f

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI: Duos Technologies Appoints Retired Brigadier General Craig Nixon as Chairman of the Board of Directors

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    JACKSONVILLE, Fla., May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Duos Technologies Group, Inc. (“Duos” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: DUOT), today announced the appointment of Brigadier General (Ret.) James Craig Nixon as the new Chairman of its Board of Directors, effective immediately.

    Brigadier General Nixon succeeds Kenneth Ehrman, who has served as Chairman since 2020. Mr. Ehrman stepped down from the Board to focus on the continued growth of Halo Collar, a leading provider of smart pet safety solutions. Duos sincerely appreciates his leadership and contributions during a pivotal period in the Company’s development.

    “We are honored to welcome Brigadier General Craig Nixon as our new Chairman,” said Chuck Ferry, CEO of Duos. “Craig brings a distinguished track record of leadership and operational excellence from both the military and private sectors. His strategic mindset and business acumen will be invaluable as we continue scaling our data infrastructure and energy businesses alongside our established AI technology platforms. We are equally grateful to Kenneth Ehrman for his leadership and support during a pivotal phase in Duos’ growth, and we wish him continued success with Halo Collar.”

    Brigadier General Nixon is a decorated special operations veteran with over 29 years of military service, including seven tours in elite units such as the 75th Ranger Regiment and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Following his retirement in 2011, he transitioned into business leadership, serving as CEO of ACADEMI and later building Constellis Group into a global leader in security and training with over $1 billion in annual revenue.

    In addition to his military and executive career, Nixon was one of the founding partners of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consultancy, and currently serves as CEO of Nixon Six Solutions, a growth and strategy advisory firm. He is also a board member and advisor to multiple government and technology organizations and a recognized speaker on geopolitics, leadership, and veterans’ issues.

    “I’m honored to step into the role of Chairman at such a transformational time in Duos’ journey,” said Nixon. “The Company’s expansion into critical infrastructure sectors like edge data centers and power generations, coupled with its deep foundation in AI and machine vision, positions it for long-term opportunities. I look forward to supporting Chuck and the entire Duos team as we build on this momentum.”

    Nixon is a graduate of Auburn University, holds two master’s degrees in military art and science and strategic studies, and was inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame. He brings a unique combination of decorated military service, entrepreneurial success, and board governance experience to the Company.

    About Duos Technologies Group, Inc.
    Duos Technologies Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: DUOT), based in Jacksonville, Florida, through its wholly owned subsidiaries, Duos Technologies, Inc., Duos Edge AI, Inc., and Duos Energy Corporation, designs, develops, deploys and operates intelligent technology solutions for Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) applications including real-time analysis of fast-moving vehicles, Edge Data Centers and power consulting. For more information, visit www.duostech.com , www.duosedge.ai and www.duosenergycorp.com.

    Forward- Looking Statements
    This news release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, regarding, among other things our plans, strategies and prospects — both business and financial. Although we believe that our plans, intentions and expectations reflected in or suggested by these forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot assure you that we will achieve or realize these plans, intentions or expectations. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Many of the forward-looking statements contained in this news release may be identified by the use of forward-looking words such as “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “should,” “planned,” “will,” “may,” “intend,” “estimated,” and “potential,” among others. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements we make in this news release include market conditions and those set forth in reports or documents that we file from time to time with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as required by law. All forward-looking statements attributable to Duos Technologies Group, Inc. or a person acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary language.

    A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4bffaa21-c5a2-4fc8-9655-e641c3c76852

    This press release was published by a CLEAR® Verified individual.

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: expert reaction to an atypical case of BSE detected on a farm in Essex

    Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments

    Scientists comment on an atypical case of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) detected on a farm in Essex. 

    Prof Neil Mabbott, Personal Chair in Immunopathology and Head of Immunology Division, The Roslin Institute & Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Sciences, University of Edinburgh, said:

    “Atypical BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is a rare disease of cattle.  The disease is considered to occur sporadically and it is not acquired between cattle as an infection.  Atypical BSE differs from the classical BSE which caused the outbreak in the UK cattle herd in the 1980s and 1990s.  Classical BSE was considered by scientists to be spread amongst cattle through use of feed BSE-contaminated (meat and bone meal), and is estimated to have caused infection in up to half a million cattle during that period. 

    “Very occasionally, rare atypical cases of BSE are sporadically detected in cattle, but these are considered non-contagious and are not linked to an infectious origin.  Four cases of atypical BSE have been detected in the UK in the past ten years.  This current case was detected through the routine surveillance and testing brain tissues from fallen stock animals. 

    “The detection of this isolated case of atypical BSE shows that the UK’s surveillance programme is working well.  There is no risk to the public, as the animal’s carcass will have been destroyed and no tissues will have entered the food chain. 

    “BSE is a devastating neurological disease in cattle affecting the brain, spinal cord and some other organs.  Control measures remain in place to exclude these organs from the food chain to prevent the spread of BSE amongst cattle and to humans.  A measure of their success, is that there have been no cases of variant CJD (linked to consumption of BSE infected food) in people born after these controls were put in place in the UK in the 1990s.”

     

     

    Declared interests

    Prof Neil Mabbott: “I have no conflicts of interest to declare”

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –