A ‘Team Aberdeen’ of academics, students and energy business experts joined Aberdeen City Council representatives this week at the world’s premier energy conference in Houston.
The Aberdeen delegation at the CERAWeek Conference comprised representatives from the Council, including Council Co-leader Councillor Christian Allard, the Net Zero Technology Centre, Peterson Energy Logistics, Robert Gordon University, and the University of Aberdeen.
Councillor Allard was present during two panel sessions at the conference and the diverse group worked to underline Aberdeen’s credentials as one of the world’s leading energy cities.
Robert Gordon University student Lara Pedrosa, whose participation at the conference along with fellow Msc students Alex Sinclair and Erin Koon was made possible with the support of the SRM Foundation, said before the event: “Absolutely thrilled to be part of the NEXTGen cohort.”
“I’m looking forward to understanding how energy leaders are using data and AI to aid energy transition and what may be applicable to Aberdeen in its own journey.
“I’m excited to engage with experts and academics from a range of disciplines centred around energy transition. I am extremely grateful to the SRM Foundation and Robert Gordon University for creating this opportunity and supporting me throughout the week.”
Councillor Allard said: “The world faces the pressing challenges of climate change and the need for sustainable and secure energy solutions. The importance of collaboration in the energy transition has never been more critical.
“We seek to innovate, implement, and scale the technologies and practices that will drive a cleaner, more resilient energy future investment in the city, bringing the world of oil gas and renewable energy together for a just transition as well as bringing people back to Offshore Europe in Aberdeen in September.
“No single organisation will achieve Net Zero on their own, all of the energy sector is mobilised to achieve this in Aberdeen. It’s collaboration from the public and private sector, like we’re seeing here in Houston this week, and a ‘Team Aberdeen’ approach that will ensure we meet our Net Zero and Climate goals.”
As a founding member of the World Energy Cities Partnership (WECP), Aberdeen attends CERAWeek in Houston to participate in the conference and the annual WECP Board Working Group.
The world cities of the partnership are home to many of the world’s largest energy companies which are leading initiatives to build a lower-carbon energy future, developing the full range of energy sources to power the world today and into tomorrow.
Photograph shows: Aberdeen City Council Co-leader, Councillor Christian Allard (2nd from left) with mayors from the World Energy Cities Partnership
Pupils fromBraeviewAcademy and Craigie High School have been working with Hayley Scanlan, alongside V&A Dundee, to create a new tie for Greenfield Academy.
S3 and S4 pupils from both schoolswere challenged to design the tartan which will be used as part of the identity of the new secondary school.
The efforts of Eilidh Shearer, an S3 student at Craigie High School were chosen for the tie.
Her design weaves the light blue ofBraeviewand the black of Craigie into a new tartan identify, adding green to represent the new school and white and dark blue to provide contrast and a fresh, natural look.
Hayley Scanlan said: “It was fantastic working with the Greenfield Academy students— they brought so much creativity and enthusiasm to the process. I always find it such a rewarding experience working with younger people, this opportunity will be a story told in generations to come.
“Giving young people a voice in designing their own school tie is incredibly important; it fosters a sense of pride, ownership, and identity within their school community. They all did a wonderful job.”
Eilidh said:“Working with Hayley and the V&A wasreally funand gave us confidence as designers. It’spretty specialto think that the tie will be around for years, something I have designed.”
Greenfield Academy is part of the £100 millionDrumgeithCommunity Campus, which is the largest investment in education, sport and community provision in the city. The flagship campus will bring state-of-the-art facilities and services to the area.
Children, Families and Communities Convener Stewart Hunter said: “Having Hayley Scanlan, one of the country’s top fashion designers, working with our young people on this design is an incredible opportunity and an experience they will treasure.
“I would like to thank Hayley and V&A Dundee for giving up their time to help our young people do this and provide them with a valuable design experience.
“This is another exciting step on the journey to the opening of the new school.”
Julie Muir, Learning Manager, V&A Dundee, said: “V&A Dundee are delighted to support the pupils through their design process with a local expert and designer, Hayley Scanlan. Good design can empower and spark joy within a community which is what we aim to do with every learning project.
“The pupils have had the opportunity to work on a design brief for something they can see and feel in their everyday lives. I hope this process ignites them to become agents of change in their community going forward. We can’t wait to seethe final result.”
Johnny Lothian, Greenfield Academy Headteacher, added: “This co-design project brought together the best of Dundee. Our wonderful design museum, one of the city’s most inspiring international designers, and the brilliant young people of Greenfield Academy. Together they have created a new design that our school community can be proud of for generations to come.”
Heart of England Music, The Music Hub for Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire, hosted a successful Digital Music Festival on Thursday 13 and Friday 14 March.
The event celebrated music making across the Hub where Thursday’s event saw a one-minute music showcase on YouTube. Submissions came from schools, music service groups, individual pupils and music organisations across the Hub region.
Everyone came together to celebrate music education pathways and opportunities across the hub region and share their amazing work.
Earlier today (14 March), the hub facilitated a live streamed free concert. This included Raga Garage – live from The Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa, hosted by Hub partner, Leamington Music, who performed a hot melting pot of musical influences, culminating in a sound both new and unique. Inspirational musicians Jyotsna Srikanth and Robert Atchison Violins, Shadrach Solomon Piano and Karthik Mani Percussion performed.
The musicians have tailored their work to attract both classical and contemporary music fans of all ages and cultures.
Heart of England Music was established in September 2024 and brought together the three local authority areas to work strategically together across the geographical area.
Councillor Dr Kindy Sandhu, Cabinet Member Education and Skills at Coventry City Council said: “It was great that schools experienced a unified moment by joining the live stream together. The Hub works with approximately 22,000 students per week.
“With the live stream showing the fusion between western classical and bhangra music, it has no doubt inspired young people to take their skills further and continue making music with other Hub members or music services.
“There’s something really special about mixing the diversity of music sounds from diverse cultures.”
The festival has been led through the events group in the Hub, with leaders from each music service helping develop the programme.
Mark Steele, Coventry Music Lead at Coventry City Council said: “The event was a great way to enable pupils and families to see the opportunities across the region and to see they are just one of many pupils learning instruments.
“We would encourage all young people to watch the videos and if a music group looks exciting, for them to get in touch and give it a go!”
The Environment Committee will be writing to Heathrow Airport following up on a previous commitment from the airport to provide information on the potential environmental impacts of any runway expansion project.
HMICFRS Inspection and Q&A with the Deputy Mayor for the Fire Service
Fire Committee – The Chamber, City Hall, Kamal Chunchie Way, 10am
The Fire Committee will ask the Deputy Mayor responsible for the Fire Service, HM Inspector Lee Freeman KPM, and senior representatives from the London Fire Brigade about issues arising from the recent His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) inspection report on LFB.
A question-and-answer session with the LFB and Deputy Mayor will follow covering diversifying the workforce, training, evacuation of high-rise buildings and the Professional Standards Unit.
The guests are:
Panel 1 – HMICFRS Inspection:
Jules Pipe CBE, Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and the Fire Service
His Majesty’s Inspector Lee Freeman KPM, HMICFRS.
Jonathan Smith, Deputy Commissioner and Operational Director for Preparedness and Response, LFB
Charlie Pugsley, Deputy Commissioner and Operational Director for Prevention, Protection and Policy, LFB
Panel 2 – Q&A:
Jules Pipe CBE, Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and the Fire Service
Jonathan Smith, Deputy Commissioner and Operational Director for Preparedness and Response, LFB
Charlie Pugsley, Deputy Commissioner and Operational Director for Prevention, Protection and Policy, LFB
Budget and Performance Committee – The Chamber, City Hall, Kamal Chunchie Way, 10am
The Budget and Performance Committee will meet to examine the impact of the Mayor’s Climate Budget and Green Finance Fund, and the impact this has had on achieving London’s net zero 2030 target.
The guests are:
Panel 1:
Heidi Sørensen, Head of the Agency for Climate, City of Oslo
Professor Carly McLachlan, the Director of The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University
Mark Johnson, Public Sector Lead, Association of Chartered Certified Accountants
Panel 2:
Fay Hammond, Chief Finance Officer, GLA
Pete Daw, Head of Climate Change, GLA
Megan Life, Assistant Director of Environment and Energy, GLA
Sam Longman, Head of Sustainability and Corporate Environment, Transport for London
Kenroy Quellennec-Reid, Head of Impact Investment and Analysis, London Treasury, GLA
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments 3
Speech
Report by the Director of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR): UK response, March 2025.
Ambassador Neil Holland reaffirms UK support for the OSCE human dimension and calls on Russia and Belarus to cease human rights violations.
Thank you, Mr Chair. Director Telalian, welcome and thank you for your report. I hear congratulations are in order, so congratulations on receiving an honorary degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki earlier this week – showing your expertise is valued outside as well as within this Council.
No one country has all the answers to global human rights challenges. That is why – as participating States – we agreed that implementation of OSCE human dimension commitments requires ongoing commitment and attention from all participating States and is not solely a matter of internal policy.
The United Kingdom will continue to engage with ODIHR and RFOM in respect of our own approach to human rights, the rule of law and democracy. We see strong synergies between your mandate and our priorities and principles, which include consistency – between domestic policy and what the UK stands for internationally; partnership – listening to others, working together to achieve shared goals; and openness – including towards civil society.
We commend your work to defend civic space and fundamental freedoms, to uphold the rule of law, to champion equal rights for all and to support effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. Rest assured of the UK’s continued support, in this Council and elsewhere.
I am delighted to be able to confirm today that the UK will continue its practice of providing extrabudgetary support for ODIHR’s work during the next three years. I would add that an agreed 2025 Unified Budget is vital. I urge all participating States to stop politicising the budget process and join consensus on a budget for this year
Director, your report leaves no room for doubt. Human rights and fundamental freedoms face growing challenges across our region. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the human rights situation in the Temporarily Occupied Territories has deteriorated significantly, with negative impacts of Russian aggression being felt across Ukraine. We welcome ODIHR’s contribution to monitoring and documenting violations of international law, including mistreatment of civilians and prisoners of war. We continue to support ODIHR’s contribution to international accountability efforts.
In Russia, internal repression has enabled external aggression within our region and undermined our collective security. I call on Russia and Belarus to cease internal repression and release all political prisoners now.
I regret that a number of participating States have failed to co-operate fully with ODIHR on international election observation. Fulfilling these necessary conditions is part of meeting our shared OSCE principles and commitments. I call on the countries concerned to provide the necessary conditions for effective and unrestricted operation of future election observation missions and to engage with ODIHR in support of free and fair elections.
Civic space continues to be challenged across our region, including in Georgia. The UK condemns violence against protestors and use of arbitrary detention and physical violence to silence critics of the Georgian Dream government. Individuals responsible for the unlawful use of force must be held accountable. As a fellow OSCE participating State, we will explore all mechanisms in the OSCE context going forward and encourage Georgia to return to the path of European integration that the vast majority of Georgians desire.
Social Workers in The Highland Council in partnership with NHS Highland are hosting a Joint Social Workers’ Forum to celebrate World Social Worker’s Day 2025 on 18 March 2025 at The Barn Church, Inverness.
This year’s event theme: “Strengthening Intergenerational Solidarity for Enduring Wellbeing” – will see a celebration of the profession. Workers from Justice, Child Health, Adult Services, Children’s Services, and Emergency Social Work Service will come together for a day of inputs and workshops.
In attendance will be, Iain Ramsay, Professional Social Work Adviser Scottish Government and Karin Herber, Professional Officer SASW (Scottish Association of Social Workers) to Highland.
Iain Ramsay will deliver a presentation on the role of Social Workers and their value and positive influence in today’s society. Followed by workshops on the Social Work Education and Learning and how to sustain our love for Social Work and keeping ourselves well.
Also in attendance is Dr Vik Kelly-Teare, Associate Dean of Health Social Care and Life Sciences at UHI who will present her research on Domestic Abuse in Same Sex relationships.
The Forum will be opened by Fiona Duncan, Chief Social Work Officer (Highland Council), alongside Simon Steer, Director of Adult Social Care (NHS Highland).
Fiona Duncan commented “As Social Workers, we are looking forward to this annual conference to share practice both locally and nationally, network within Highland and reflect on the positive and invaluable contributions Social Workers make across the Highlands”.
Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –
The Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation and the State University of Management invite students and employees of higher education institutions to participate in a study of the social and psychological well-being of students and employees of higher education institutions.
In 2025, six anonymous online surveys will be conducted on the research and communications platform “A Caring Person”.
We present to you the topics and schedule of the surveys:
Family Values and Parental Attitudes – March 10-31 (students and postgraduates); Inclusion – April 9-30 (students, staff, teachers); Quality of Education – May 12 – June 9 (students, staff, teachers); Portrait of a First-Year Student – September 15 – October 7 (1st year students); Social and Psychological Well-Being – October 20 – November 17 (students, staff, teachers); *Topic to be determined – November 24 – December 15 (students, staff, teachers).
By taking surveys, you help improve the quality of life of citizens, implement the most important public and state initiatives. And thus become the initiator of changes in public life.
To take surveys, you must register on the “Caring Person” platform.
Look for links to surveys in your electronic personal accounts.
The platform surveys started on April 10, 2023. Respondents answer questions about the quality of education, media consumption, social and psychological well-being, and other topics. More than 450 universities have joined the project to date, and 7 all-Russian surveys have been conducted, with more than 520 thousand respondents taking part.
Subscribe to the tg channel “Our State University” Announcement date: 03/14/2025
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.
Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –
On March 27-28, 2025, the XV International Grushin Sociological Conference will be held in Moscow at the State University of Management (SUM).
The theme of this year’s event is: “Human-centredness vs. socio-centredness: individualization and interaction in the modern world.”
The program included reports, sections and round tables in various areas: technology, public administration, economics, business, personnel, urban space, social connections and cultural changes, new contours of migration processes, modern methods and challenges in sociology, individualization and interaction in the modern world of media, the social effect of public and youth organizations, trends, ethical dilemmas and regulation of the influence of AI on consumer behavior.
Registration is available until March 21 inclusive. Participation is free.
Every year the conference brings together not only representatives of the research industry, but also specialists from science, business, government and the media.
“The Grushinskaya Conference is a traditional platform for discussing the challenges facing the research world and society as a whole. Every year, about 1,500 experts from various fields participate in it. This year, we will discuss human-centrism. What risks and opportunities are opening up thanks to this trend, what problems will we face in the near future? The conference program will be rich, we will discuss the paths to helping sociology, the role of artificial intelligence and media in modern trends, what changes are taking place in cities in the conditions of the new reality and the methodological challenges of the research industry. I am confident that together with the professional community, we will be able to form directions in building a new human-centrism, where everyone will not be an isolated individual, but a full-fledged member of society,” said Valery Fedorov, General Director of VTsIOM.
The full conference program is available on the event website.
The general information partner of the conference is the Russian news agency TASS.
Let us recall that VTsIOM has been holding the Grushin Conference since 2010 with the support of leading scientific, research organizations and universities. The conference is dedicated to the memory of the outstanding Russian sociologist, creator of the first all-Russian network for collecting sociological information Boris Andreevich Grushin (1929-2007).
Subscribe to the tg channel “Our State University” Announcement date: 03/27/2025
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.
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
Specialists Faculty of Computer Science HSE and Sber’s Artificial Intelligence Lab have developed a geometric method for data expansion — Simplicial SMOTE. Tests on different data sets have shown that it significantly improves the quality of AI work. The method is especially useful in situations where rare cases are very important, for example, in the fight against fraud or in the diagnosis of rare diseases. Research results available in the open archive Arxiv.org and will be presented at the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in Toronto in summer 2025.
The problem of imbalanced data is becoming increasingly important in various fields, including banking and medicine. Traditional methods – random duplication or global sampling – often produce low-quality samples or poorly model rare class data.
The new method proposed by scientists from the Higher School of Economics and Sberbank — Simplicial SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) — solves these problems: it provides more accurate modeling of complex topological data structures and increases the quality of classifiers on unbalanced data sets.
It helps to create new examples of a rare class using information from several close examples (“simplex”), and not just from two close points, as in the original version of SMOTE and its well-known analogues. This allows for a better understanding of the data and improves the work of AI. The method helps improve the training of artificial intelligence on imbalanced data, that is, in situations where there are many examples of one class (for example, normal transactions), but few examples of another (for example, fraud).
The researchers have experimentally demonstrated on a large number of test datasets that the proposed approach significantly improves the quality metrics (F1 measure, Matthews correlation coefficient) of both the basic SMOTE and its modifications. In particular, an improvement was recorded for gradient boosting, a classifier often used in practice.
“Our method is especially effective in tasks where unbalanced data is common and where the rare class is more significant. Banks can use Simplicial SMOTE to better detect fraud, and medical centers to diagnose rare diseases,” comments one of the authors of the article, Andrey Savchenko, a leading researcher. Laboratories of theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence modelsInstitute of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Sciences Faculty of Computer Science, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
The new method can be integrated into existing oversampling algorithms (Borderline-SMOTE, Safe-level-SMOTE, and ADASYN), increasing their accuracy without significantly increasing computational complexity. The researchers believe that the developed approach can contribute to the development of more accurate and reliable machine learning models and, therefore, to improved analytics.
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Source: Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University – Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University –
The 1st All-Russian scientific and practical conference “Modern approaches in system engineering and digital modeling of complex production systems” (SEDM-2025) was held in the Research Building of the Polytechnic University. The event was organized by the laboratories “Industrial systems of streaming data processing” and “Digital modeling of industrial systems” of the Advanced Engineering School of SPbPU “Digital Engineering” together with the industrial partner of the SPbPU PISh, the company “Tetracube”.
The conference was dedicated to systems engineering as a methodological approach to the implementation of complex projects in various industries.
Systems engineering is a highly relevant methodological direction in the technological landscape of Russia and the world. It allows implementing complex multi-component projects both for solving frontier engineering problems in the high-tech industry and in other industries – economics, medicine or education. The methodology of systems engineering is universal: it is based on the assessment of all factors, requirements and restrictions that affect the development of the project, and is also a field for the application and development of advanced digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence or mathematical modeling, – noted the chairperson of the conference program committee, head of the Laboratory of PSPOD PISh SPbPU Marina Bolsunovskaya.
The scientific partners of the conference were the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Kazan Federal University, Ivanovo State Polytechnic University and others. The event was supported as industrial partners by the Engineering Center for Textile and Light Industry, the North-West Scientific Center for Hygiene and Public Health of Rospotrebnadzor, Kola MMC, Viziumtex, Olvia and Amdor companies.
SEDM-2025 participants presented scientific research and practical solutions in the field of design, analysis, forecasting and optimization of complex systems in the economy, industry, transport, medicine, social sphere and education. The event attracted more than 200 speakers and listeners – research scientists and representatives of commercial companies and government organizations.
The conference consisted of scientific and practical parts. It was addressed both to “theorists” – specialists who study and develop the methodology of systems engineering, and to practitioners – project managers who use the method of systems engineering to solve specific applied problems at their enterprises.
The presentations were made by recognized experts in the field of studying and implementing approaches to system engineering and digital modeling, theorists and practitioners, as well as students and postgraduates who have chosen system engineering as the direction of their scientific and professional development. For young researchers, the conference became an excellent opportunity to present their research projects to experts, learn their opinions and discuss the practical application of the results.
The plenary session reports presented the main areas of research and development, which were then discussed in more detail in separate sections.
The plenary session was opened by Marina Bolsunovskaya. After welcoming remarks, she spoke about the development of the system engineering methodology using practical examples of the PSPOD Laboratory projects. The speaker noted possible directions for the development of the method and the specifics of its use in implementing complex projects at the enterprises of the laboratory’s industrial partners.
Marina Vladimirovna noted that the requests of enterprises now concern the development of optimization models to identify hidden patterns and develop specific methods for eliminating anomalies. For many customer enterprises, there are no ready-made solutions, so the development of libraries of standard solutions that will allow companies to immediately offer possible solutions for data analysis seems promising.
Elena Tishchenko, Advisor on Digital Economy to the Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University, presented a theoretical report on the method of model-based system engineering (Model Based System Engineering) for synthesizing multi-level economic models. The method involves the widespread use of engineering descriptions of objects in the form of models and their platforms in the economy for analyzing complex economic systems.
Alexey Gintsyak, Head of the Laboratory of Digital Modeling of Industrial Systems at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, spoke about the development of a set of tools for generating schedules in production systems using a multi-agent approach. The work is being carried out with the support of the Russian Science Foundation in 2025-2026. The speaker defined multi-agent systems, highlighted the capabilities and features of the multi-agent approach to the applied task of generating production schedules, and revealed the complexity of generating schedules in a multi-agent environment. In conclusion, Alexey Gintsyak noted that taking multi-agency into account allows for obtaining modeling results that are much more adequate to reality.
The report by the head of the laboratory “System Dynamics” Angi Skhvediani was devoted to the application of methods of systems engineering in agriculture. He spoke about the current work on the platform for automatic prediction of the sorption properties of biochar obtained as a result of processing plant waste of the agro-industrial complex. The project includes the development of a database and a program for the analysis and prediction of the sorption properties of waste using machine learning methods, the development of a recommendation system for enterprises and scientists in terms of selecting optimal technological modes of waste processing to obtain functional materials with the best properties.
Associate Professor of the Higher School of Transport of the Institute of Metallurgical Engineering and Technology Dmitry Plotnikov touched upon the topic of digital modeling in the transport industry. The speaker listed interdisciplinary tasks in the development of unmanned ground transport and noted that digital models in the creation of transport systems and processes can be used as a means of supporting decision-making in the design of the life cycle of a vehicle and transport systems in general, as well as an element of the finished product that determines its operational properties. The speaker shared the experience of creating an unmanned car at the Polytechnic University and the complex tasks that the development team faces.
The conference became a platform for exchanging experience in the field of systems engineering in the transport industry, where there was a place for both experienced professionals and young scientists. Interesting works on the use of simulation modeling for effective traffic management were presented. The reports on the creation of intelligent transport systems deserved special attention, – the speaker noted.
The head of the control and audit department of the enterprise “Gorelektrotrans” Elena Ezhelina made a report on the development of a new model for managing the enterprise of ground urban electric transport for the automation and optimization of its work. One of the first steps in this direction, Elena Aleksandrovna believes, could be the automation of the management of the daily cycle of the enterprise’s work, which will require the creation of a single dispatch service.
Deputy Head of the Traffic Safety Service of Gorelektrotrans Alexey Vishensky spoke about his model for distributing tram and trolleybus drivers on city passenger transportation routes. The model is aimed at ensuring the required volume of transport services while complying with legal requirements. The number of drivers is calculated taking into account the design capacity of the fleet, working time fund, work schedules, vacations, knowledge of routes and other factors.
Anastasia Gorbach, an engineer at Radioavionika JSC, presented an analysis of technologies for implementing artificial intelligence in the process of spelling and punctuation checking using a systems approach. Traditional verification methods based on dictionaries and grammar rules are not effective enough for complex language structures. Using AI to check spelling and punctuation is part of a wider range of technologies that can be applied in the development and optimization of complex technical systems to automate and optimize documentation and communication within the system.
The most popular sections among the participants were on systems engineering in the field of economics and on digital modeling in industry and related industries. More than 40 reports were submitted for some sessions.
Teachers and students from various departments of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, such as the Higher School of Computer Technologies and Information Systems of the IKNK, the Higher School of Project Activity and Innovations in Industry and the Higher School of Transport of the IMMIT SPbPU, the Higher School of Engineering and Economics, the Higher School of Business Engineering and the Laboratory of System Dynamics of the IPMET SPbPU, took an active part in organizing and holding the conference.
Students of the master’s program of the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University “Systems Engineering and Digital Modeling in High-Tech Industries” presented their developments in the field of systems engineering at the conference.
The conference was organized for the first time and, it must be said, exceeded our expectations. We saw great interest in the methodology of systems engineering from industrial partners and university researchers – teachers, researchers, students and postgraduates. Next year, we plan to expand the conference topics. In particular, there will be a hybrid modeling section, entirely dedicated to this promising approach within the framework of systems engineering, which allows combining classical analytics and artificial intelligence technologies, – noted Marina Bolsunovskaya.
Based on the results of the conference, a collection of papers will be published with a DOI and ISBN assigned, and full-text article-by-article placement in the Russian Science Citation Index.
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.
Source: Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University – Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University –
Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University and Gazprom Neft Corporate University have launched the Energy to Teach advanced training program. It is aimed at developing new competencies in teachers of secondary vocational educational institutions — participants in the Gazprom Neft College League educational ecosystem.
The goal of the program: to teach teachers to adapt existing college programs to current business needs and demands of industrial partners and to ensure high demand for graduates in the labor market.
The program is designed for 190 hours and is held in a network format from March to May, includes two face-to-face intensive courses and distance modules. 59 teachers from various regions participate in the training.
Development of professional competencies
The program covers modern educational approaches, corporate standards of professions, project methodology and mechanisms for developing educational materials. This approach helps to systematize knowledge and form effective mechanisms for training specialists.
A systematic approach to developing corporate standards allows not only to structure knowledge, but also to form working mechanisms for training specialists in demand. Interaction with experts and project methodology ensure a high level of development of each aspect, – noted Dmitry Tikhonov, Vice-Rector for Additional and Pre-University Education at SPbPU.
Practice-oriented learning
Particular attention is paid to organizing systemic interaction between college teachers and Gazprom Neft representatives. Current employees of the company conduct seminars within the framework of face-to-face modules, and also interact with participants in the formats of direct and inverted internships: they receive teachers at enterprises and go to colleges.
During the implementation of the program, it is important for us to create conditions for the integration of the College League teachers into the Gazprom Neft educational ecosystem and the development of a sustainable system of communications between the college and the customer enterprise on issues of updating educational programs, organizing internships, and exchanging professional expertise, said Ekaterina Solovyova, Head of Development of the Internal Coaching and Mentoring System at the Gazprom Neft Corporate University.
The Role of the Gazprom Neft Corporate University
The corporate university acts as the main customer of the program, actively participating in its development and implementation. It provides methodological support and attracts experts to integrate corporate practices into the educational process.
The Energy to Train program is one of the elements of systematic work with partner colleges to improve the personnel security of the Gazprom Neft group of companies. It is important for us that the educational experience that students receive at the college contributes to their seamless transition to our enterprises, said Bulat Zaripov, Vice-Rector of the Gazprom Neft Corporate University.
Expected results
The program not only allows to bring together the educational programs of secondary vocational education with the needs of the enterprise, but also serves as a platform for building a constructive dialogue between the educational institution and the industrial partner. Participants in the educational process form mutual agreements on the exchange of best practices in matters of personnel training and development, building an internship system, and equipping training grounds.
Responding to market challenges
“Energy to teach” is a response to modern challenges of the secondary vocational education system and industry. Improving teaching skills directly affects the quality of students’ training, and network interaction between the academic environment and business contributes to the formation of highly qualified personnel.
Teachers form future specialists, passing on not only knowledge but also professional values. Our task is to create conditions in which they can master new methods, adapt educational programs and effectively cooperate with business, – emphasized the program curator, head of the Directorate of Continuing Education and Industry Partnership of SPbPU Ivan Kurta.
It should be added that the League of Colleges is one of the largest communities in the field of secondary vocational education, created on the initiative of Gazprom Neft. It unites 20 colleges in 10 regions, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tyumen, Omsk, Khanty-Mansiysk, Sochi and other large cities of the Russian Federation, as well as one college from Uzbekistan.
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.
Source: Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University – Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University –
March 15, 2025 marks the 95th anniversary of the birth of the Soviet and Russian physicist, academician, Nobel Prize laureate Zhores Ivanovich Alferov. On the eve of the anniversary date, SPbPU employees laid flowers at the memorial plaque of the outstanding scientist, who worked at the Polytechnic University for almost 30 years.
“We remember Zhores Ivanovich as a cheerful person who set ambitious goals for himself and achieved them,” said Vitaly Sergeev, First Vice-Rector of SPbPU, at the beginning of the ceremony. “He did a lot for the Polytechnic University, an entire direction within the Polytechnic was created thanks to Zhores Ivanovich, a huge thank you to him for this and bright memory.”
“For me, Zhores Ivanovich was at first an unattainable star, but then he turned out to be very simple and humane in communication,” shared his memories Vladimir Glukhov, advisor to the rector’s office of SPbPU. “I would like to emphasize that the physics and technology faculty he founded was unusual: there were four departments, and each was headed by an academician. And 80 percent of the teachers were members of the Academy of Sciences. And on the basis of this team, the St. Petersburg Academic University was created. As long as we live, we will remember Zhores Ivanovich Alferov.”
“Zhores Ivanovich was distinguished by a very warm attitude towards students,” added Nikolai Ivanov, acting director of the Physics and Mechanics Institute of SPbPU. “Many departments of the Physics and Engineering Faculty that he created are now in PhysMech. And current teachers who studied with Zhores Ivanovich Alferov say that he had an exceptionally kind attitude towards students. It would seem that the director, an academician, a very busy person, but he found time to talk for a long time with his students and postgraduates.”
Professors of the Higher School of Fundamental Physics Research Nikita Averkiev and Vadim Korablyov also spoke at the ceremony, noting Zhores Alferov’s contribution to the training of scientific personnel and the development of international relations.
Thanks to the inventions of Zhores Alferov and his students, such familiar things as lasers, semiconductors, LEDs, and fiber-optic networks became available to humanity. His discoveries became the basis for the creation of modern electronic devices, including mobile phones, CD players, fiber-optic communications, and much more. Alferov made a significant contribution to the development of electronics and digital technologies.
One of Alferov’s outstanding discoveries is the creation of heterojunctions in semiconductors. These are microstructures in which two or more semiconductors with different chemical compositions are brought into contact. In the 1960s, scientists understood what fantastic prospects the implementation of the idea of semiconductor devices based on heterostructures opened up. The main problem, which could not be solved for a long time, was to select semiconductors ideally suited for this. Alferov’s merit lies precisely in the fact that he was the first to succeed in doing this.
In 1967, he and his colleagues created heterostructures with the required properties, and in 1970, the first semiconductor heterolaser operating in continuous mode at room temperature. In 1972, Alferov was awarded the highest scientific award of the USSR – the Lenin Prize, and in the same year he became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. And in 1979, he was elected an academician, this happened on his birthday, March 15. In 2000, Alferov’s contribution was also recognized by the highest world scientific award – the Nobel Prize. The scientist received it for the development of semiconductor heterostructures and the creation of fast opto- and microelectronic components.
Zhores Alferov had scientific intuition and was one of the first to appreciate the prospects for the development of quantum dots. His work on heterostructure lasers was continued in the development of quantum dot lasers.
Alferov’s legacy included not only his outstanding scientific works, but also a school for training scientific personnel. In 1988, he created the Physics and Technology Department at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. Its graduates had encyclopedic knowledge in the field of physics and practical skills in working with modern measuring equipment. The department consisted of four departments: plasma physics, space research, solid-state microelectronics, and solid-state physics. In 2015, the department became part of the Institute of Physics, Nanotechnology, and Telecommunications of SPbPU (now the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications – Ed.), and Alferov became its scientific director.
Zhores Ivanovich understood that the development of science and the success of its practical use are impossible without an effective system for training scientific and pedagogical personnel in universities. That is why, despite his enormous workload, he agreed to be the chairman of the Scientific and Methodological Council for Physics at the Ministry of Education and Science. His name attracted many famous scientists, leaders and organizers of higher education to work at the NMS. Current issues of teaching physics were discussed at the meetings of the Presidium of the NMS.
Zhores Ivanovich was not only an outstanding scientist, but also a wonderful storyteller and loved to cite real-life stories in his reports and official speeches, and he always did so with great humor. Many stories are collected in the book “Alferov Gate”, compiled by Arkady Sosnov. For Zhores Ivanovich’s 95th birthday, the Polytechnic University reissued this book in a new edition.
On March 17, 2020, in memory of Academician Zhores Alferov and on the 90th anniversary of his birth, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the Main Building of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.
The memory of the outstanding scientist is also perpetuated by the creation of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences on his initiative. This happened in 2023 largely due to the authority and influence of Zhores Ivanovich Alferov. On March 18, the St. Petersburg branch of the RAS will host a ceremonial open meeting dedicated to the 95th anniversary of Academician Zhores Alferov.
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QS 2025 ranking: Sciences Po in the worldwide top 5 for the subject ‘Politics’
According to the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025, Sciences Po ranks 4ᵉ worldwide in the “Politics” (formerly known as “Politics & International Studies”) category out of more than 1,700 international universities. For the past seven years, Sciences Po has been among the top 5 universities in this discipline internationally. The university remains 1rst in France and 1rst in the European Union (UE).
Sciences Po shines in other fields too
The quality of Sciences Po’s research and teaching has also enabled the institution to make a name for itself in other rankings by subject:
Tomorrow, Saturday, 15 March 2025, at 12.15, at the Theological University of Northern Italy – Turin Campus, Via X Settembre 83, Turin, and in live connection with the Holy See Press Office, a press conference will be held to present the initiatives associated with the liturgical feast of the Shroud during the Jubilee year.
The speakers will be:
– Archbishop Roberto Repole of Turin, bishop of Susa, pontifical Custodian of the Shroud;
– Marco Bonatti, head of communication of the diocesan Commission for the Shroud.
The experts of the diocesan Commission, in particular Professors Bruno Barberis and Gian Maria Zaccone, will be present and available to answer any questions.
The press conference will be livestreamed in the original language on the Vatican News YouTube channel, at https://www.youtube.com/c/VaticanNews.
The future of European Union defence unsurprisingly topped the March 2025 plenary session agenda. Members held a debate on Europe’s security architecture and the EU’s unwavering support for Ukraine, in the presence of the Presidents of the European Council, and European Commission. Debates also took place on the conclusions of the 6 March special European Council meeting and preparation of the regular meeting on 20 21 March 2025. Members marked International Women’s Day with addresses from guests representing European women fighting for freedom and peace: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, leader of Belarus’ democratic forces; Palina Sharenda-Panasiuk, a former political prisoner in Belarus; Leniie Umerova, a Crimean Tatar activist; and Tata Kepler, Ukrainian medical volunteer and activist. Members also discussed Council and Commission statements on the Roadmap for Women’s Rights. Debates followed Council and Commission statements on the deteriorating situation in Gaza and secessionist threats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the clean industrial deal, and action plans for the automotive industry and affordable energy. Debates looked at the Commission’s vision for agriculture and food, and the first ‘omnibus’ simplification proposals, as well as on supporting EU regions vulnerable to the effects of climate change; the social and employment aspects of restructuring processes; EU Consumers Day, and the European Schools Alliance.
Tokyo (Agenzia Fides) – How can the treasure of a testimony of faith that took place centuries ago, of which only a few traces remain in historical documents, be passed on to new generations? Manga comics were used for this purpose, since the story to be told to today’s boys and girls took place in Japan.Read by an ever-growing audience all over the world, manga comics have long fascinated young and old alike. In addition to the adventures of unusual superheroes, the comics, drawn in their distinctive format, now also tell the stories of real men and women who, even in times of persecution, held fast to their faith in Christ: the Japanese “hidden Christians.” A phenomenon that began in the 17th century, when Christianity was banned and all missionaries were expelled.Without priests and without churches, Japanese Catholics organized themselves: the village chief led the community, established religious solemnities according to the liturgical calendar, and safeguarded the holy books. The catechist taught the children; those who knew the baptismal formulas administered the First Sacrament; a messenger visited families to announce Sundays, Christian feasts, and days of fasting and abstinence.The drawings are by manga artist Kan Takahama, who will present her project in Italy from March 17 to 20 as part of a series of conferences organized by the Japanese Embassy to the Holy See and the Archdiocese of Lucca. The conferences are taking place in Rome and Lucca as part of meetings organized to mark the 440th anniversary of the “Tensho Embassy.” It was in March 1585 that a delegation from Japan first arrived in Rome to be officially received by the Pope. The name of the Embassy refers to the date of its creation according to the Japanese calendar of the time, i.e., the tenth year of the Tensho era.The idea of sending a group of young Japanese representatives to Europe originated with Alessandro Valignano, an Italian Jesuit who had been engaged in missionary work in the Far East since 1573. He personally selected two boys from three of the largest Christian daimyō families in Japan at the time. The daimyō were powerful Japanese magnates and feudal lords who ruled most of Japan from the 10th century until the beginning of the Meiji period in the mid-19th century thanks to their vast hereditary landholdings.They were joined by two other young noblemen and a small group of companions, including the Jesuit priest Diogo de Mesquita, who served as guide and interpreter. With this journey, which lasted a total of eight years (1582 to 1590), Valignano wanted to raise awareness of Japan among the European church at the time and counter certain stereotypes about the Japanese country.And the story of the cartoonist is also connected to this history. Takahama is from Amakusa, the place where the Society of Jesus founded a college for the training of Japanese priests in 1591, and where the young men represented at the Tensho embassy continued their studies upon their return to Japan, thanks in part to Gutenberg’s printing press, which was introduced with the return of the embassy representatives from Europe. Thanks to them, the first books with Christian themes were printed in Japan.The Amakusa region, along with Nagasaki, became a place where Christians found refuge from persecution for 250 years. Despite the absence of priests, they continued to profess their faith in Christ. Today, these places are recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. Takahama accidentally discovered old documents about the persecution of Christians in her home’s archives. She has researched how to read these documents and attempted to decipher them. She is also carefully collecting oral traditions not included in the documents, thus continuing her research into the history of the local “hidden Christians.”This was the basis for the work “Shishi to Botan” (“Lion and Peonies”). The story was inspired by another true story, the revolt of oppressed Christian peasants in 1638. The revolt was led by the Christian samurai Amakusa Shiro and bloodily suppressed. But how can historical research be translated into manga comics? This question will be addressed in the lectures given by manga artist Takahama on March 17 and 18 in Rome (at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Salesian University) and on March 20 in the rooms of the Archbishop’s Residence in Lucca. (F.B.) (Agenzia Fides, 14/3/2025)
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A five-story replica of a stamp of Superman in 1998 in Cleveland, home of the superhero’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File
Nearly a hundred years ago, a hastily crafted spaceship crash-landed in Smallville, Kansas. Inside was an infant – the sole survivor of a planet destroyed by old age. Discovering he possessed superhuman strength and abilities, the boy committed to channeling his power to benefit humankind and champion the oppressed.
This is the story of Superman: one of the most recognizable characters in history, who first reached audiences in the pages of Action Comics in 1938 – what many fans consider the most important single comic in history.
As a historian of American immigration and ethnicity – and a lifelong comics fan – I read this well-known bit of fiction as an allegory about immigration and the American dream. It is, at its core, the ultimate story of an immigrant in the early 20th century, when many people saw the United States as a land with open gates, providing such orphans of the world an opportunity to reach their fullest potential.
Taken in and raised by a rural family under the name Clark Kent, the baby was imbued with the best qualities of America. But, like all immigrant stories, Kent’s is a two-parter. There is also the emigrant story: the story of how Kal-El – Superman’s name at birth – was driven from his home on Planet Krypton to embrace a new land.
That origin story reflects the heritage of Superman’s creators: two of the many Jewish American writers and artists who ushered in the Golden Age of comic books.
The American comics industry was largely started by the children of Jewish immigrants. Like most publishing in the early 20th century, it was centered in New York City, home to the country’s largest Jewish population. Though they were still a very small minority, immigration had swelled the United States’ Jewish population more than a thousandfold: from roughly 3,000 in 1820 to roughly 3,500,000 in 1920.
Comic books had not yet been devised, but strip comics in newspapers were a regular feature. They began in the late 19th century with popular stories featuring recurring characters, such as Richard F. Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” and “the Little Bears” by Jimmy Swinnerton.
A few Jewish creators were able to break into the industry, such as Harry Hershfield and his comic “Abie the Agent.” Hershfield’s success was exceptional in three ways: He broke into mainstream newspaper comics, his titular character was also Jewish, and he never adopted an anglicized pen name – as many other Jewish creators felt they must.
Shoppers and vendors outside of haberdasheries on Hester Street in a Jewish neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side around 1900. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Generally, however, Jews were barred from the more prestigious jobs in newspaper cartooning. A more accessible alternative was the cheaper, second-tier business of reprinting previously published works.
In 1933, second-generation Jewish New Yorker Max Gaines – born Maxwell Ginzburg – began a new publication, “Funnies on Parade.” “Funnies” pulled together preexisting comic strips, reproducing them in saddle-stitched pamphlets that became the standard for the American comics industry. He went on to found All-American Comics and Educational Comics.
Another publisher, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founded National Allied Publications in 1934 and published the first comic book to feature entirely new material, rather than reprints of newspaper strips. He joined forces with two Jewish immigrants, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Leibowitz. At National, they created and distributed Detective and Action Comics – the precursors to DC, which would become one of the two largest comics distributors in history.
It was at Action Comics that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two second-generation immigrants from a Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland, found a home for Superman. It would also be where two Jewish kids from the Bronx, Bob Kane and Bill Finger – born Robert Kahn and Milton Finger – found a home for their character, Batman, in 1939.
The success of these characters inspired another prominent second-generation Jewish New Yorker, pulp magazine publisher Moses “Martin” Goodman, to enter comics production with his line, “Timely Comics.” The 1939 debut featured what would become two of the early industry’s most well-known superheroes: the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. These characters would be mainstays of Goodman’s company, even when it became better known as Marvel Comics.
Thus were born the “big two,” Marvel and DC, from humble Jewish origins.
…and Jewish stories
The creation and popularization of superhero comics isn’t Jewish just because of its history. The content was, too, reflecting the values and priorities of Jewish America at the time: a community influenced by its origins and traditions, as well as the American mainstream.
Some of the most foundational early comics echo Jewish history and texts, such as Superman’s story, which parallels the Jewish hero Moses. The biblical prophet was born in Egypt, where the Israelites were enslaved, and soon after Pharaoh ordered the murder of all their newborn sons. Similarly, Superman’s people, the Kryptonians, faced an existential threat: the destruction of their planet.
Moses’ life is saved when his mother floats him down the Nile in a hastily constructed and tarred basket. Kal-El, too, is sent away to safety in a hastily constructed craft. Both boys are raised by strangers in a strange land and destined to become heroes to their people.
Comics also reflected the feelings and fears of Jews in a moment in time. For example, in the wake of Kristallnacht – the 1938 night of widespread organized attacks on German Jews and their property, which many historians see as a turning point toward the Holocaust – Finger and Kane debuted Batman’s Gotham City. The city is a dark contrast to Superman’s shining metropolis, a place where villains lurked around every corner and reflected the darkest sides of modern humanity.
Some comic artists and writers used their platform to make political statements. Jack Kirby – born Kurtzberg – and Hymie “Joe” Simon, creators of Captain America, explained that they “knew what was going on over in Europe. World events gave us the perfect comic-book villain, Adolf Hitler, with his ranting, goose-stepping and ridiculous moustache. So we decided to create the perfect hero who would be his foil.” The comic debut of Captain America in 1941 featured a brightly colored cover with the brand-new hero punching Adolf Hitler in the face.
In later generations, characters penned by Jewish authors continued to grapple with issues of outsider status, hiding aspects of their identity, and maintaining their determination to better the world in spite of rejection from it. Think of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and X-Men. All of these were created by Stan Lee – another Jewish creator, born Stanley Martin Lieber – who was hired into Timely Comics at just 17 years old.
With so many of the most popular comics written by New York Jews, and centered in the city, much of New York’s Yiddish-tinged, recognizably Jewish language made its way onto the pages. Lee’s Spider-Man, for example, frequently exclaims “oy!” or calls bad guys “putz” or “shmuck.”
In later years, Jewish authors such as Chris Claremont and Brian Michael Bendis introduced or took over mainstream characters who were overtly Jewish – reflecting an emerging comfort with a more public Jewish ethnic identity in America. In X-Men, for example, Kitty Pryde recounts her encounters with contemporary antisemitism. Magneto, who is at times friend but often foe of the X-Men, developed a backstory as a Holocaust survivor.
History is never solely about retelling; it’s about gaining a better understanding of complex narratives. Trends in comics history, particularly in the superhero genre, offer insight into the ways that Jewish American anxieties, ambitions, patriotism and sense of place in the U.S. continually changed over the 20th century. To me, this understanding makes the retelling of these classic stories even more meaningful and entertaining.
Miriam Eve Mora 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.
Saudi Arabia is 2,000 miles from Ukraine and even more politically distant, so at first glance it might seem like it has nothing to do with the ongoing war there. But the Gulf state has emerged as a key intermediary in the most serious ceasefire negotiations since Russia invaded its neighbor three years ago.
The resulting agreement, which is now being mulled in Moscow, is all the more notable given that it followed a diplomatic breakdown just weeks before at the Oval Office between Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Whether the proposed interim 30-day ceasefire materializes is still uncertain. On March 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he agreed with the proposal in principle, but he added that a lot of the details needed to be sorted out.
Should a deal be reached, there is every reason to believe it will be inked in Saudi Arabia, which has hosted not only the latest U.S.-Ukrainian talks but earlier rounds of high-level Russian-U.S. meetings.
But why is a Gulf nation playing mediator in a conflict in Eastern Europe? As an expert on Saudi politics, I believe the answer to that lies in the kingdom’s diplomatic ambitions and its desire to present a more positive image to the world. And in the background is the goal of better positioning the nation in the event of diplomatic maneuvers in its own region, notably in regards to any talks between U.S. and Iran.
The diplomatic convertion of MBS
Saudi Arabia’s growing diplomatic role has been a feature of the kingdom’s foreign policy since 2022.
Crown Prince Mohammed, who that year succeeded his father as prime minister, views Saudi Arabia as the convening power in the Arab and Islamic world.
Accordingly, officials in the kingdom have been directed to lead regional diplomacy over a number of pressing issues, including the conflicts in Gazaand Sudan.
At the same time, Saudis have started the process of reconciliation with Iran, which has long been perceived as the chief regional rival to Saudi influence.
This approach brought little in the way of stability. Rather, it left the country ensnared in an unwinnable war in Yemen, a fruitless row with Qatar, and diplomatic isolation by Western officials.
Saudi officials, in common with their counterparts in the other Gulf states, have long sought to avoid taking sides in the emerging era of great power competition and strategic rivalry. As such, the kingdom has maintained working relations with both Russia and pro-Western Ukraine since the outbreak of war in Europe.
In 2022, for example, Saudi Arabia and Russia – both leaders of OPEC+ – coordinated oil production cuts to cushion Moscow from the effects of global sanctions the West imposed after it invaded Ukraine. Yet just months later, Saudi Arabia invited Zelenskyy to address an Arab League summit in the Saudi city of Jeddah.
It was a prelude to a 2023 international summit, also in Jeddah, which brought together representatives from 40 countries to discuss the ongoing war.
Despite failing to produce a breakthrough, the meeting illustrated the convening reach of the crown prince and his intention to act as a diplomatic go-between in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Saudi Arabia and neighboring United Arab Emirates later facilitated occasional prisoner exchanges between the two countries – rare diplomatic successes in three years of conflict.
Staging ground for diplomacy
Direct engagement in high-stakes international diplomacy over the largest war in Europe since 1945 is undoubtedly a step up in Saudi ambitions. But the country’s efforts aren’t purely altruistic. Riyadh believes there’s mileage to be gained in such diplomatic endeavors.
The advent of a Trump presidency has fit Saudi desires. Trump has made his desire to be seen as a dealmaker and peacemaker clear, but he needs a neutral venue in which the hard work of diplomacy can flourish.
Just weeks into the new U.S. administration, the Saudi capital hosted the first meeting between a U.S. secretary of state and Russian foreign minister since Russia invaded in 2022.
It yielded an agreement to “re-establish the bilateral relationship” and establish a consultation mechanism to “address irritants” in ties.
The two rounds of dialogue in Riyadh – first with Russia, then Ukraine – have positioned the Saudi leadership firmly in the diplomatic process. It has also gone some way to rehabilitate Mohammed bin Salman’s image.
The sight of the crown prince warmly greeting Zelenskyy contrasted sharply with the images from a fractious White House meeting that went around the world, presenting the crown prince as a statesmanlike figure.
Turning to Tehran
Such positive optics would have seemed inconceivable as recently as 2019, when the crown prince was shunned and then presidential candidate Joe Biden labeled the country a “pariah” state.
Changing this negative global perception of Saudi Arabia is crucial if the kingdom is to attract the tens of millions of visitors that are pivotal to the success of the “giga-projects” – sports, culture and tourism events that the Saudis hope will drive its economy and allow the kingdom to be less economically dependent on fossil fuel exports.
Whereas easing tensions with Iran and supporting Yemen’s fragile truce are about derisking the kingdom’s vulnerability to regional volatility, facilitating diplomacy over Ukraine is a relatively cost-free way to reinforce the changing narratives about Saudi Arabia.
After all, any breakdown in the Russia-U.S.-Ukraine negotiations is unlikely to be blamed on the Saudis.
Indeed, Saudi officials may view their engagement with U.S. officials over Ukraine as the prelude to further diplomatic cooperation. And this will be especially true if Crown Prince Mohammed is able to establish himself as an indispensable partner in the eyes of Trump.
Saudi officials were excluded from the last major talks between Iran and the U.S., which also involved several other major world powers and led to the 2016 Iran nuclear deal. Trump withdrew from the deal shortly after assuming office for the first time in 2017, and U.S.-Iranian relations have been moribund since then.
The U.S. administration has already mooted the idea of a resumption of negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear capabilities.
Placing Saudi Arabia in the middle of any attempts to secure a new nuclear agreement that would replace or supersede that earlier deal would be a high-risk move, given the intensity of feeling on both the U.S. and Iranian sides and the uneasy coexistence between Tehran and Riyadh.
But doing so would give the kingdom what it most desires: a seat at the table.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen 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.
Heston Blumenthal, the celebrity chef known for his experimental cuisine, recently shared his experience of being sectioned under the UK’s Mental Health Act, saying it was “the best thing” that could have happened to him. His openness about living with bipolar disorder highlights the little-discussed fact that people with this condition face one of the highest suicide risks of any mental illness.
Bipolar disorder is a severe mental illness characterised by episodes of mania (high energy, impulsivity) and depression (hopelessness, fatigue). Suicidal thoughts and behaviour are a core feature of the disorder, with fluctuating risk that can persist over long periods.
Although bipolar disorder affects around 2% of the population, studies suggest that up to 50% of people with the condition attempt suicide at least once, and 15-20% die by suicide – a rate much higher than in the general population. Unlike global suicide rates, suicide deaths in bipolar disorder have not declined.
Understanding why suicide is so common in people with this disorder is difficult. But one major factor is mood instability. Rapid shifts between emotional highs and lows, as well as mixed states where symptoms of mania (impulsivity) and depression (despair) occur together, can be particularly dangerous.
Social and economic factors also play a role. Research we conducted at Swansea University shows that the population suffering from bipolar disorder has become poorer over the last two decades. Financial strain, social isolation and poorer access to healthcare all lead to worse outcomes. Beyond suicide, people with the condition die up to 20 years earlier than the general population, often from preventable health problems such as heart disease.
While bipolar disorder cannot be cured, it can be managed. The most commonly used drug, lithium, has been found to reduce suicide risk significantly in some patients. However, people with the condition struggle to take it regularly.
The drug’s side-effects can affect the kidneys, thyroid, metabolism, cognition and cardiovascular health. Managing these side-effects requires regular blood tests and continuous monitoring, making long-term treatment difficult.
Many people stop taking their medication during manic phases, believing they are cured.
Other treatments, such as antipsychotics, mood stabilisers and electroconvulsive therapy (where electric currents are passed through the brain while the patient is under anaesthesia), can also be effective in some types and phases of bipolar – for example, in states of mixed mania and depression where there is a high risk of suicide – but they come with their own harms and limitations.
Even when people seek help, healthcare systems often fail to intervene effectively. Suicide risk is highest in the days following discharge from a psychiatric hospital. Many people who later die by suicide have recently visited emergency rooms after hurting themselves, but the help they received was either delayed or not enough to prevent further harm.
Existing tools to identify and measure suicide risk, such as checklists, questionnaires and structured interviews, are ineffective. Many people with bipolar disorder who die by suicide are assessed as “low risk” shortly beforehand, exposing a crucial gap between doctor and patient perceptions. This is in great part because these tools rely too heavily on past factors such as suicide attempts (which may not be disclosed), rather than dynamic, real-time distress or mood instability.
Despite the significant effect that bipolar disorder has on individuals, families and society, the development of new drugs has been frustratingly slow. Lithium, first used in the 1940s, remains the go-to treatment, while most other drugs were originally designed to treat schizophrenia. No truly new treatments have emerged in decades.
Not a single disorder
One difficulty is that bipolar is not a single disorder but a spectrum of conditions, rendering the one-size-fits-all approach inadequate — lithium is effective in only about one in three patients.
Drug development for bipolar disorder is particularly challenging. The complexity of bipolar disorder calls for equally complex trials that need to consider patient variability, ethical concerns and strict safety requirements. New treatments also face strict approval hurdles because lithium – despite its limitations – is highly effective for some patients. This results in slow treatment development, leaving patients with limited options.
Research is also slowed by concerns about whether it’s ethical to involve patients in trials. But it’s important to include people with the disorder who have experienced suicidal thoughts and behaviour, to better understand their mindset and decision-making.
However, new approaches offer hope. Several research projects, such as Datamind, are developing artificial intelligence platforms to help find new drugs quicker and to personalise treatments based on patients’ genetic and clinical profiles. AI could lead to faster, more effective therapies tailored to individual needs.
Blumenthal’s story highlights that being sectioned, while traumatic, can save lives and keep people safe. Yet the stigma around psychiatric hospitalisation prevents many from seeking care. There is a widespread belief that hospitalisation should be avoided at all costs – but for some, it can be the difference between life and death.
However, hospitalisation alone is not enough. The mental health system must do better to ensure that people with bipolar disorder receive long-term care, particularly during high-risk periods like hospital discharge. To prevent suicide, we need to rethink how risk is assessed, improve follow-up care, and reduce barriers to treatment.
While the statistics on bipolar are alarming, the message should be one of hope. The condition is treatable and suicide is preventable, but only if we commit to improving access to care, reducing stigma and advancing research.
Marcos del Pozo Banos research is funded by UKRI – Medical Research Council through the DATAMIND Hub (MRC reference: MR/W014386/1), and the Wolfson Centre for Young People’s Mental Health (established with support from the Wolfson Foundation).
Ann John receives funding from Health and Care Research Wales, NIHR, Wolfson Foundation and MRC (DATAMIND).
Tania Gergel works for Bipolar UK as the Director of Research. She receives research funding from National Institute of Health Research, the Medical Research Council and King’s College London. She is also on the Board of the National Centre for Mental Health in Wales, and is an Honorary Visiting Professor at Cardiff University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.
Getting a headache and feeling sick are common side-effects for many medicines. Indulging in risky sexual behaviour or pathological gambling – not so common.
But a BBC investigation has highlighted that some drug treatments for restless leg syndrome and Parkinson’s disease can lead to such risky behaviour.
Over 150,000 people in the UK live with Parkinson’s – a degenerative condition that affects the brain. The main part of their brain that is damaged is the area that produces dopamine, a chemical messenger that regulates movement. Less dopamine in the brain can lead to symptoms such as tremors, muscle stiffness, slow movements and problems with balance.
Another movement disorder is restless legs syndrome (RLS), which affects between 5% and 10% of people in the UK, US and Europe. Twice as many women as men have RLS among those aged over 35.
People with RLS feel they need to uncontrollably move their legs, and may experience a crawling, creeping or tingling sensation in them. Usually, the symptoms are worse at night when dopamine levels tend to be lower. Although the exact cause of RLS is unknown, it has been linked to genes, underlying health conditions, and an imbalance of dopamine.
One of the main treatments for movement disorders is a group of drugs called dopamine-receptor agonists, which include cabergoline, ropinirole, bromocriptine and pramipexole. Dopamine-receptor agonists increase the levels of dopamine in the brain and help regulate movement.
Dopamine is known as the “happy” hormone because it is part of the brain’s reward system. When people do something fun or pleasurable, dopamine is released in their brain. But using dopamine-receptor agonist drugs can elevate these feelings, leading to impulsive behaviour.
While common side-effects include headaches, feeling sick and sleepiness, these drugs are also linked with the more unusual side-effect of impulse-control disorders. These include risky sexual behaviour (hypersexuality), pathological gambling, compulsive shopping, and binge eating. Hypersexuality encompasses behaviour such as a stronger-than-usual urge to have sexual activity, or being unable to resist performing a sexual act that may be harmful.
Previous reported cases include a 53-year-old woman taking ropinirole and exhibiting impulsive behaviour such as accessing internet pornography, using sex chat rooms, meeting strangers for sexual intercourse, and compulsive shopping. Another case highlighted a 32-year-old man who, after taking ropinirole, started binge eating and gambling compulsively, such that he lost his life savings.
When the drug was first being prescribed in the early 2000s, it was thought that impulse-control disorders were a rare side-effect associated with these drugs. But in 2007, a UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) public assessment report advised that “healthcare professionals should warn patients that compulsive behaviour with dopamine agonists may be dose-related”.
Between 6% and 17% of people with RLS who take dopamine agonists develop some form of impulse-control disorder, while up to 20% of people living with Parkinson’s may experience impulse control disorders.
But the true figures may be even higher, as many some patients may not associate changes in behaviour with their medication, or may be too embarrassed to report it. Case reports show that in most instances, impulsive behaviour stops when the drug is stopped.
Lawsuits
There have been several individual and class-action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies including GlaxoSmithKline, which produces ReQuip® (ropinirole), and Pfizer, which makes Cabaser® (cabergoline). Patients taking action against these companies claimed they were unaware of these impulsive behaviour side-effects.
For example, in 2012, a French court ordered GlaxoSmithKline to pay £160,000 in damages to Didier Jambart, after he experienced “devastating-side effects” when taking the firm’s Parkinson’s drug Requip. And in 2014, an Australian federal court approved a settlement against Pfizer for a class-action lawsuit regarding its Parkinson’s drug, Cabaser. 150 patients claimed they did not have warning of potential side-effects – including increased gambling, sex addiction and other high-risk activities – of taking Cabaser.
It is now clearer in the patient information leaflets given with all prescribed medication for movement disorders that impulsive behaviour can occur in some patients.
In 2023, the MHRA advised there had been increased reports of pathological gambling with a drug called aripiprazole. This antipsychotic drug, used in the treatment of schizophrenia and mania, partly acts as a dopamine-receptor agonist.
Any drug that increases dopamine levels could theoretically be linked to impulse control disorders, and it is important to keep monitoring patients and their behaviour in such cases.
Not everyone will experience side-effects. Before you begin any course of treatment, your doctor or pharmacist should explain the potential side-effects – but it is also important to read the information leaflet with any medicine. And if you experience any impulsive behaviours with these medicines, speak to your doctor or pharmacist immediately.
Dipa Kamdar 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel O’Brien, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
Opus, the film debut of former GQ editor-turned-director Mark Anthony Green has been described as a horror-musical. And while this new hybrid-genre film clearly has something to say, what that is remains frustratingly unclear.
Produced by independent film company A24, often a hallmark of quality, the film follows Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), a young writer striving to make her mark in entertainment journalism. While it gestures toward themes of celebrity culture and the toxicity of extreme fandom, the film ultimately feels tangled in a jumble of unfocused ideas and derivative references to other – arguably stronger – works.
Despite talent and determination, Ariel struggles with her boss Stan (Murray Bartlett) who redeploys her ideas to other senior colleagues and is often too self-absorbed to nurture her career development.
The very watchable Edebiri eases into centre stage after catapulting to global fame in the TV show The Bear (2022-present), for which she has received a Golden Globe and an Emmy.
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In contrast to the achievements of The Bear’s Sydney, her character Ariel’s success as a writer seems out of reach in Opus. In an early scene, she articulates her frustrations to a friend who responds by pointing to Ariel’s ordinariness and comfortable upbringing. Apparently, her lack of disadvantage is precisely what’s holding her back, leaving her “too middle” to be noticed, promoted or considered.
Here we have the first clue that Ariel will be destined to experience trauma which will come by way of the “final girl” horror trope (a reference to the last woman standing) by the end of the film.
To Ariel’s surprise, she is selected to accompany Stan to a remote desert compound with other journalists to cover the story of reclusive pop legend Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich, returning to the big screen for the first time in five years).
Coincidentally, Moretti is about to make a return to public life after a 30-year hiatus and reset his reputation with a new album. Malkovich seems to relish the role, cranking up his flamboyant eccentricity in what feels like a mash-up of Ziggy Stardust and Frank-N-Furter.
Moretti’s ostentatiousness in contrast to Ariel’s subdued “middle-ness”, seems to be one of several binaries that the film explores, with an epilogue that discusses the left and right sides of the brain, and the division between destruction and creativity.
The theme of creativeness is a driving force in the film, with Moretti’s and Ariel’s respective musical and literary artistry used as fuel in the narrative, from a director with a similar writing background to Ariel.
Unfortunately, the film often feels more derivative than creative because of the numerous sources it takes as its inspiration. Moretti’s compound turns out, of course, to be a cult where Ariel, Stan and other invited guests will find something even more sinister than Malkovich’s rhythmic hip thrusts.
The rules of the compound mean that all guests must hand over their phones and electronic devices, so that in typical horror fashion, the characters are completely cut off from the outside world.
The knowing nod to this horror cliché is perhaps done for comedic value, but becomes another of the film’s weak spots, in the sense that it never really commits to any one thing. It’s not quite a comedy, a horror or a musical but something that is more fragmentary, borrowing elements of each.
It’s as if the director has assembled his favourite genres, but only in notes that have not yet been successfully put together. For example, there is an explicit recreation of a very distinct scene from Takashi Miike’s harrowing Audition (1999), while other parts are heavily influenced by Ari Aster’s disturbing Midsommar, (2019) a folk horror film also made by A24.
There are also nods to Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022) in which an eccentric celebrity chef creates a meal for a group of sycophant critics with lethal consequences. As a dark comedy-horror, The Menu succeeds in satirising the absurdity of reality cooking shows, where competitiveness and TV chefs are caricatured.
However, Green’s attempt at satire in Opus doesn’t really work. That’s not to imply that the film hasn’t got something to say – Green appears to be interested in the relationship between celebrity culture and fandom. However, that idea doesn’t feel fully fleshed out, particularly when other films like Brandon Cronenberg’s dangerously underrated Antiviral (2012) was addressing this idea with visceral originality more than a decade ago.
Moretti’s songs have a deliberately dated sound which seems to be inspired by Michael Jackson, particularly around the time of his 2001 Invincible tour and album, which both failed to return the singer to his “king of pop” status.
Again, films such as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) tackle the idea of the ageing celebrity with more clarity and originality, even while clearly being inspired by other movies.
Consequently, Opus has quite a 1990s feel to it, perhaps aided by the casting of Malkovich and Juliette Lewis, both huge stars during that decade. The film also gets a bit meta, nodding to Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) through a similar use of star cameos and a puppet show – both interesting elements, but again which feel disjointed in Opus.
I think Green has stronger films in him to come but, although his work raises interesting points, there are too many ideas here for a convincing film to properly materialise. I was unclear on a number of things including Moretti’s motives and his contempt for critics, including the positive ones.
Opus perhaps bites off more than it can chew, leaving me feeling that Green’s directorial opus is still to come.
Daniel O’Brien 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sameen Mohsin Ali, Lecturer in International Development, University of Birmingham
Pakistan’s army has freed hundreds of hostages from a passenger train that was seized by armed militants in the south-western province of Balochistan on Tuesday, March 11. A number of those on board were military officials and police personnel travelling from Balochistan’s capital, Quetta, to Peshawar further north.
The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) quickly claimed responsibility for the hijacking. In a written statement sent to the Guardian, the group said its actions were “a direct response to Pakistan’s decades-long colonial occupation of Balochistan and the relentless war crimes committed against the Baloch people”.
Ever since 1948, when Balochistan became a province of Pakistan months after partition from India, this territory has been marginalised by the Pakistani state. The authorities have struggled to accommodate the diverse ethnic and linguistic groups within Balochistan, leading to several rounds of insurgency.
During the recent hijack, the BLA demanded that Pakistan’s military release Baloch activists, missing people and political prisoners, and threatened to kill many of the hostages if the authorities did not comply. The subsequent military operation, which lasted two days, resulted in the deaths of all 33 militants, as well as 21 hostages and four army personnel.
The brazen nature and scale of the attack has raised difficult questions for the Pakistani state about how it addresses escalating discontent and militancy in Balochistan.
Unlike more moderate Baloch nationalist groups, which are committed to remaining part of the Pakistani state despite longstanding grievances with it, the BLA aims to achieve an independent Balochistan.
Some of the grievances expressed by the Baloch include a lack of representation both in the federal government and the armed forces. Baloch nationalists also allege the Pakistani state has exploited the province’s coal, gold, copper and gas resources while providing very little for the Baloch people in return.
Revenues from the Saindak gold and copper mine, for example, are largely shared between the Chinese company that operates it and the Pakistani government. The Balochistan provincial government only receives around 5% of the mine’s revenue.
Chaghi, the mineral-rich district of Balochistan that hosts the Saindak mine, remains one of the most underdeveloped areas of the country. Local people employed at the mine claim they are only offered menial jobs and work in unsafe conditions.
Balochistan’s persistent underdevelopment means a poor quality of life for its citizens. It consistently ranks as the Pakistani province with the lowest human development index (HDI) rating, scoring 0.421 in 2017. This index is a summary rating between 0 (low) and 1 (high) based on measures of health, education and standard of living. Punjab has the highest HDI rating at 0.732.
The separatist movement in Balochistan intensified after Nawab Akbar Bugti, a prominent Baloch nationalist leader, was killed in a military operation in 2006. The BLA was soon banned by the Pakistani government, and the military’s operations intensified in the province.
Baloch human rights defenders and activists have persistently accused Pakistan’s security forces of harassment and relying on excessive force. Protesters believe there have been thousands of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, which the Pakistani authorities have denied.
The issue has been raised by human rights organisations both in Pakistan and abroad. Families of missing people have filed cases against the government with the Pakistan Supreme Court, and disappearances have been investigated through special commissions of inquiry.
Supreme Court rulings have held the state responsible for enforced disappearances. While some missing people have been traced as a result of these rulings and inquiries, the International Commission of Jurists notes that “there has been no apparent effort made to fix responsibility for this heinous crime”.
Attacking foreign investments
The BLA’s tactics have typically involved carrying out attacks against state installations. However, in recent years, attacks against Chinese citizens and infrastructure have become the group’s focus.
Balochistan has a strategically important coastline, providing access to the Indian Ocean. China has invested heavily in the region as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, including in a deep-sea port at Gwadar. But these investments have failed to benefit local people, fuelling accusations by many in the province that the Pakistani state is systematically neglecting their needs.
The BLA’s suicide squad was responsible for an attack that injured three Chinese engineers working in the Balochistan city of Dalbandin in 2018. Later that year, BLA militants attacked the Chinese consulate in Karachi – though Chinese nationals remained safe in that attack.
The group seems to have no difficulty attracting young and well-educated Baloch people, who see the state’s actions and Chinese presence in Balochistan as exploitative. In 2022, a female graduate student carried out a suicide attack on behalf of the BLA that killed three Chinese teachers at the University of Karachi.
The BLA’s activities have expanded substantially in recent years. It has conducted more than 150 attacks in the past year alone, including on Quetta railway station and on a convoy carrying Chinese workers near Karachi airport.
However, experts have noted that the train hijacking was unprecedented in scale. It represents a significant escalation by the BLA in terms of the planning, resources and intelligence required to execute such an operation.
The Pakistani government and military appear to have mishandled Balochistan’s security situation. But they have also failed to address the growing resentment and alienation that is driving people to groups like the BLA.
According to Farzana Sheikh, an associate fellow at Chatham House, Pakistan’s military continues to favour “a heavy-handed security response to deal with what is widely judged to be a political crisis”.
Accusations of state exploitation and neglect will not go away until the Pakistani state radically alters its stance on Balochistan, starting by ensuring accountability for perpetrators of human rights violations. Only then can trust be rebuilt with the people of this province who, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, live in “a climate of fear”.
Sameen Mohsin Ali 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University
The recently appointed White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has begun her tenure combatively, aggressively defending the Trump administration’s policies and, at times, mimicking Donald Trump’s methods of dealing with the mainstream news media.
Faced recently with a legitimate question by an Associated Press (AP) reporter who challenged Trump’s introduction of tariffs against several countries, she accused the reporter of doubting her knowledge of economics. She then dismissed him, saying: “I now regret giving a question to the Associated Press.”
AP is one of the key media organisations reporting on the White House. The largest news agency in the US, its stories are carried by news groups around the world. But recently, AP was ejected from the “press pool” that covers White House business
It was excluded in mid-February for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America”, after Trump changed its name by executive order. This was followed by an announcement that the White House would take greater control of the press pool and choose which outlets would be given most access to the president. This is likely to be based on favourable coverage rather than quality of reporting.
To appreciate how significant this is, it is important to first state the fundamental purpose of journalism in a democratic society, which is to hold the powerful to account. This is known as its “watchdog” function.
The work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in exposing the Watergate scandal during the 1970s is often held up as the gold standard of watchdog journalism. It ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president and the imprisonment of his lawyer, John Dean.
“Pooling” describes the process by which a prominent organisation or individual attempts to oversee journalistic scrutiny by managing access. King Charles, for example, also operates a press pool.
It works in two stages. First, news organisations or individual journalists apply to be members of the pool. Then, a handful of journalists from the pool are selected each day or week for access. These journalists – through their pool contract – are required to share the information they gather with the other journalists in the pool, which often leads to a genericisation of the content.
Thus, while political organisations or elite individuals might claim the pooling system is used as a benign and fair tool to manage consistent press interest, in reality it is a weapon of communications control.
The White House’s press pool was first established under President Dwight Eisenhower as a reflection of the growing number of journalists based in Washington. But in the modern era, the use of pooling was most controversial during and after the first Gulf War of the early 1990s.
Rather than roaming the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait, most western reporters spent the conflict at the media centre in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, some 250 miles from the Kuwait border. Here they were fed the information that the US military wanted the public to know. A small number of pooled journalists were then occasionally accompanied by US troops to the battlefield in what was a clear case of censorship by access and perspective limitation.
This military-media power dynamic – and the subsequent mismatch between the actuality of the war and the reporting of it – led the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to declare in a 1991 essay, published by Liberation and The Guardian, that “The Gulf war did not take place”.
General “Stormin” Norman Schwarzkopf’s famous “luckiest man in Iraq” briefing is indicative of the close relationship that developed between military and media professionals during the conflict. Schwarzkopf showed journalists footage taken through the crosshairs of a US bomber of an Iraqi private car driving over a bridge moments before a US airstrike destroys it. You can hear the journalists laughing with Schwarzkopf as they watch this lucky escape.
Legacy of Vietnam
Despite widespread understanding that scrutiny is an important part of public officialdom, the legacy of the Vietnam War – a conflict the US was perceived both at home and around the world to have lost – led to a significant amount of distrust of journalists. US media analyst Daniel Hallin referred to Vietnam as the “uncensored war”. By this he meant that journalists enjoyed an unprecedented amount of freedom – exacerbated by the relatively new medium of television, which brought stark images of war directly into people’s living rooms.
By February 1968, the US military’s daily briefings from the Rex Hotel in Saigon had become known as the “five o’clock follies”, on account of the gulf between official claims of the war’s “progress” and what was being reported by journalists who had ventured into the field. The military consistently presented a positive narrative – in stark contrast to the esteemed CBS reporter Walter Cronkite’s analysis that: “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
Vietnam could have been an opportunity for governments to think about their obligation to truth and the requirement to be more ethical in their approach. Instead, the feeling in Washington was that unfavourable press coverage had lost the war, and that journalists needed to be curtailed.
Controlling the message
The recent decision by the Trump administration to take over selection of pool journalists from the notionally independent White House Correspondents’ Association is unsurprising. The approach is consistent with the first Trump presidency’s refusal to answer questions from journalists who tried to carry out the press’s watchdog function.
It also fits with Trump’s electioneering approach during 2024 when he shunned traditional news outlets, focusing instead on social media and appearing on the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz, for example.
To this end, the White House’s decision amounts to a power grab against the institution of modern journalism – even if much of the US media has been in thrall to the powerful ever since Vietnam.
Colin Alexander 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.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his cabinet have been sworn in, ending Justin Trudeau’s time in office and paving the way for a spring election. Canadians are soon heading to the polls as they watch American democracy crumble.
United States President Donald Trump recently argued “he who saves his country does not violate any Law” as he ignores Congress and the courts, governs by executive order and threatens international laws and treaties.
Republican leaders moved dramatically to the right, and the primary system allowed the choice of an extremist. Republican voters then aligned their opinions with his. Trump’s disdain for democratic fundamentals spread quickly. Partisans defending their team slid away from democratic values.
Canada’s more centrist ideological spectrum is not foolproof against this type of extremism. Public opinion can be moved when our leaders take us there.
Decline can start slowly and then accelerate. America’s democratic backsliding in the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency follows the erosion of democratic norms over decades. Republican attacks on institutions, the opposition, the media and higher education corrosively undermined public faith in the truth, including election results.
Trust in government is holding steady in Canada, however. That provides an important guardrail for Canadian democracy.
The dangers of courting the far right
There are also lessons for our political parties. To maximize their seats, Republicans accepted extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but soon needed those types of politicians for key votes.
The so-called Freedom Caucus, made up of MAGA adherents, forced the choice of a new, more extreme, leader of the House of Representatives. This provides a clear lesson that history has shown many times: it is dangerous for the party on the political right to accommodate the far right, which can quickly take control.
Once established within the ruling party, extremists can hold their party hostage.
Austria recently avoided the inclusion of the far right in its new coalition, and now Germany is working to do the same. As Canada’s Conservatives look for every vote, courting far-right voters and candidates risks destabilizing the system.
They clearly did not imagine party loyalty negating the safeguards that protect democracy from an authoritarian-minded president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate and impeach, limits the executive’s power to spend and make appointments, gives the judiciary power to hold an executive accountable and contains the 25th amendment allowing cabinet to remove a president.
But when one party controls the legislative and executive branches during a time of hyper-partisanship, these mechanisms may not constrain an authoritarian. Today, Republican loyalty has eroded these checks and balances and American courts are struggling to step up to their heightened role.
Although counter-intuitive, parliamentary systems like Canada’s are usually less susceptible to authoritarianism than presidential ones because the cabinet or the House of Commons can turn against a lawless leader.
Still, if popular, authoritarian leaders can still retain their party’s support — and then things can slide quickly. The rightward pull of extremists seen in the U.S. House would be more dangerous here since the Canadian House of Commons includes our executive.
Guarding against xenophobia
Lastly, Canada should be wary of xenophobic rhetoric.
“America First” is not simply shopping advice. It began as an isolationist slogan during the First World War but was soon adopted by pro-fascists, American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. These entities questioned who is really American and wanted not only isolationism, but racist policies, immigration restrictions and eugenics.
Trump did not revive the phrase accidentally. It’s a call to America’s fringes. Alienating domestic groups is a sure sign of democratic decline.
“Canada First” mimics that century-long dark theme in America. In combination with contempt for the opposition, it questions the right of other parties to legitimately hold power if used as a message by one party.
Also, asserting that “Canada is broken” — as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre often does — mimics Trump’s talk of American carnage, language and imagery he uses to justify extraordinary presidential authority.
Such language erodes citizens’ trust in democratic institutions and primes voters to support undemocratic practices in the name of patriotism. Canadian parties and politicians should exit that road.
Ultimately, institutions alone do not protect a country from the rise of authoritarianism. Democracy can be fragile. As a federal election approaches in Canada, it’s important to know the warning signs of extremism and anti-democratic practices that are creeping into our politics.
Matthew Lebo 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Arthur Daemmrich, Professor of Practice in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
MLB’s automated ball-strike technology could be used in big league games as soon as 2026.Rich Schultz/Getty Images
Baseball fans tuning into spring training games may have noticed another new wrinkle in a sport that’s experienced a host of changes in recent years.
Batters, pitchers and catchers can challenge a home plate umpire’s ball or strike call. Powered by Hawk-Eye ball-tracking technology, the automated ball-strike system replays the pitch trajectory to determine whether the umpire’s call was correct.
To minimize disruptions, Major League Baseball permits each team a maximum of two failed challenges per game but allows unlimited challenges as long as they’re successful. For now, the technology will be limited to the spring exhibition games. But it could be implemented in the regular season as soon as 2026.
Count future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer among the skeptics.
“We’re humans,” the Toronto Blue Jays hurler said after a spring training game in which he challenged two calls and lost both to the robo umps. “Can we just be judged by humans?”
Technological advances that lead to fairer, more accurate calls are often seen as triumphs. But as co-editors of the recently published volume “Inventing for Sports,” which includes case studies of over 20 sports inventions, we find that new technology doesn’t mean perfect precision – nor does it necessarily lead to better competition from the fan perspective.
Cue the cameras
While playing in a cricket match in the 1990s, British computer scientist Paul Hawkins fumed over a bad call. He decided to make sure the same mistake wouldn’t happen again.
Drawing on his doctoral training in artificial intelligence, he designed an array of high-speed cameras to capture a ball’s flight path and velocity, and a software algorithm that used the data to predict the ball’s likely future path.
He founded Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd. in 2001, and his first clients were cricket broadcasters who used the technology’s trajectory graphics to enhance their telecasts.
By 2006, professional tennis leagues began deploying Hawk-Eye to help officials adjudicate line calls. Cricket leagues followed in 2009, incorporating it to help umpires make what are known as “leg before wicket” calls, among others. And professional soccer leagues started using the technology in 2012 to determine whether balls cross the goal line.
A technician uses the Hawk-Eye system as part of a broadcast trial for the technology during the 2005 Masters Tennis tournament in London. Julian Finney/Getty Images
Reaction to Hawk-Eye has been mixed. In tennis, players, fans and broadcasters have generally embraced the technology. During a challenge, spectators often clap rhythmically in anticipation as the Hawk-Eye official cues up the replayed trajectory.
“As a player, and now as a TV commentator,” tennis legend Pam Shriver said in 2006, “I dreamed of the day when technology would take the accuracy of line calling to the next level. That day has now arrived.”
But Hawk-Eye isn’t perfect. In 2020 and 2022, the firm publicly apologized to fans of professional soccer clubs after its goal-line technology made errant calls after players congregated in the goal box and obstructed key camera sight lines.
Perfection isn’t possible
Critics have also raised more fundamental concerns.
In their 2016 book “Bad Call,” researchers Harry Collins, Robert Evans and Christopher Higgins reminded readers that Hawk-Eye is not a replay of the ball’s actual position; rather, it produces a prediction of a trajectory, based on the ball’s prior velocity, rotation and position.
The authors lament that Hawk-Eye and what they term “decision aids” have undermined the authority of referees and umpires, which they consider bad for the games.
Ultimately, there are no purely objective standards for fairness and accuracy in technological officiating. They are always negotiated. Even the most precise officiating innovations require human consensus to define and validate their role. Technologies like photo-finish cameras, instant replay and ball-tracking systems have improved the precision of officiating, but their deployment is shaped – and often limited – by human judgment and institutional decisions.
For example, today’s best race timing systems are accurate to 0.0001 seconds, yet Olympic sports such as swimming, track and field, and alpine skiing report results in increments of only 0.01 seconds. This can lead to situations – such as Dominique Gisin and Tina Maze’s gold medal tie in the women’s downhill ski race at the 2014 Sochi Olympics – in which the timing officials admitted that their equipment could have revealed the actual winner. But they were forced to report a dead heat under the rules established by the ski federation.
With slow-motion instant replays, determining a catch or a player’s intention for a personal foul can actually be distorted by low-speed replay, since humans aren’t adept at adjusting to shifting replay speeds.
One of the big issues with baseball’s automated ball-strike system has to do with the strike zone itself.
MLB’s rule book defines the strike zone as the depth and width of home plate and the vertical distance between the midpoint of a player’s torso to the point just below his knees. The interpretation of the strike zone is notoriously subjective and varies with each umpire. For example, human umpires often call a strike if the ball crosses the plate in the rear corner. However the automated ball-strike system uses an imaginary plane that bisects the middle – not the front or the rear – of home plate.
There are more complications. Since every player has a unique height, each has a unique strike zone. At the outset of spring training, each player’s height was measured – standing up without cleats – and then confirmed through a biomechanical analysis.
Eddie Gaedel, the shortest player in major league baseball history, had a much smaller strike zone than his peers. He drew a walk in his only at-bat. Bettmann/Getty Images
But what if a player changes their batting stance and decides to crouch? What if they change their cleats and raise their strike zone by an extra quarter-inch?
Of course, as has been the case in tennis, soccer and other sports, Hawk-Eye can help rectify genuinely bad calls. By allowing teams to correct the most disputed calls without eliminating the human element of umpiring, MLB hopes to strike a balance between tradition and change.
Fans have the final say
Finding a balance between machine precision and the human element of baseball is crucial.
Players’ and managers’ efforts to work the umpires to contract or expand the strike zone have long been a part of the game. And fans eagerly cheer or jeer players and managers who argue with the umpires. When ejections take place, more yelling and taunting ensues.
Though often unacknowledged in negotiations between leagues and athletes, fan enthusiasm is a key component of whether to adopt new technology.
For example, innovative “full-body” swimsuits contributed to a wave of record-breaking finishes in the sport between 2000 and 2009. But uneven access to the newest gear raised the specter of what some called “technological doping.” World Aquatics worried that as records fell simply due to equipment innovations, spectators would stop watching and broadcast and sponsorship revenue would dry up. The swimming federation ended up banning full-body swimsuits.
When managers argue balls and strikes, it can make for great TV.
Of course, algorithmic officiating differs from technologies that enhance performance and speed. But it runs a similar risk of turning off fans. So MLB, like other sports leagues, is being thrust into the role of managing technological change.
Assessing technologies for their immediate and long-term impact is difficult enough for large government agencies. Sports leagues lack those resources, yet are nonetheless being forced to carefully consider how they introduce and regulate various innovations.
MLB, to its credit, is proceeding incrementally. While the logical conclusion to the current automated ball-strike experiment would be fully electronic officiating, we think fans and players will resist going that far.
The league’s challenge system is a test. But the real umpires will ultimately be the fans.
Arthur Daemmrich receives funding from the National Science Foundation and The Lemelson Foundation.
For the research underlying this article, Eric S. Hintz and the Smithsonian Institution received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Lemelson Foundation, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Nike, Inc., the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the Shō Foundation, ConocoPhillips, and the Hopper-Dean Family Fund.
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the National Science Foundation or any other funder.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Michael Moats, Professor of Metallurgical Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Semiconductors power nearly every aspect of modern life – cars, smartphones, medical devices and even national defense systems. These tiny but essential components make the information age possible, whether they’re supporting lifesaving hospital equipment or facilitating the latest advances in artificial intelligence.
It’s easy to take them for granted, until something goes wrong. That’s exactly what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic exposed major weaknesses in the global semiconductor supply chain. Suddenly, to name just one consequence, new vehicles couldn’t be finished because chips produced abroad weren’t being delivered. The semiconductor supply crunch disrupted entire industries and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
The crisis underscored a hard reality: The U.S. depends heavily on foreign countries – including China, a geopolitical rival – to manufacture semiconductors. This isn’t just an economic concern; it’s widely recognized as a national security risk.
That’s why the U.S. government has taken steps to invest in semiconductor production through initiatives such as the CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to revitalize American manufacturing and was passed with bipartisan support in 2022. While President Donald Trump has criticized the CHIPS and Science Act recently, both he and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have touted their efforts to expand domestic chip manufacturing in recent years.
Yet, even with bipartisan support for new chip plants, a major challenge remains: Who will operate them?
Minding the workforce gap
The push to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. faces a significant hurdle: a shortage of skilled workers. The semiconductor industry is expected to need 300,000 engineers by 2030 as new plants are built. Without a well-trained workforce, these efforts will fall short, and the U.S. will remain dependent on foreign suppliers.
This isn’t just a problem for the tech sector – it affects every industry that relies on semiconductors, from auto manufacturing to defense contractors. Virtually every military communication, monitoring and advanced weapon system relies on microchips. It’s not sustainable or safe for the U.S. to rely on foreign nations – especially adversaries – for the technology that powers its military.
For the U.S. to secure supply chains and maintain technological leadership, I believe it would be wise to invest in education and workforce development alongside manufacturing expansion.
Building the next generation of semiconductor engineers
Filling this labor gap will require a nationwide effort to train engineers and technicians in semiconductor research, design and fabrication. Engineering programs across the country are taking up this challenge by introducing specialized curricula that combine hands-on training with industry-focused coursework.
Clean rooms, a vital part of semiconductor factories, are also where the next generation of tech innovators conduct research. Here, a Ph.D. candidate is seen in an air shower room before entering a clean room at Tokyo University on May 1, 2024. Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images
Future semiconductor workers will need expertise in chip design and microelectronics, materials science and process engineering, and advanced manufacturing and clean room operations. To meet this demand, it will be important for universities and colleges to work alongside industry leaders to ensure students graduate with the skills employers need. Offering hands-on experience in semiconductor fabrication, clean-room-based labs and advanced process design will be essential for preparing a workforce that’s ready to contribute from Day 1.
Rebuilding domestic semiconductor manufacturing isn’t just about national security – it’s an economic opportunity that could benefit millions of Americans. By expanding training programs and workforce pipelines, the U.S. can create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs, strengthening the economy and reducing reliance on foreign supply chains.
And the race to secure semiconductor supply chains isn’t just about stability – it’s about innovation. The U.S. has long been a global leader in semiconductor research and development, but recent supply chain disruptions have shown the risks of allowing manufacturing to move overseas.
If the U.S. wants to remain at the forefront of technological advancement in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and next-generation communication systems, it seems clear to me it will need new workers – not just new factories – to gain control of its semiconductor production.
Michael Moats 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.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence has sent shock waves across industries, from the technical to the creative. AI systems that can generate viable computer code, write news stories and spin up professional-looking graphics have inspired countless headlines asking whether they will take away jobs in technology, journalism and design, among many other fields.
And these new ways of doing work and making things raise another question: In the era of AI, what does it mean to be an inventor?
Among technologists who build digital tools or programs, it is increasingly common to use AI as part of design and development processes. But as deep learning models flex their technical muscles more and more, even highly skilled researchers who are using AI in their work have begun to express concerns about becoming obsolete.
There is much debate about whether AI can augment human creativity, but emerging data suggests that the technology can boost research and development where creativity typically plays an important role. A recent study by MIT economics doctoral student Aidan Toner-Rodgers found that scientists using AI tools increased their patent filings by 39% and created 17% more prototypes than when they worked without such tools.
While this study indicates that AI seemed to help humans be more productive, it also showed there was a downside: 82% of the surveyed researchers felt less satisfied with their jobs since implementing AI in their workflows. “I couldn’t help feeling that much of my education is now worthless,” one researcher said.
This emerging dynamic leads to a related question: If a scientist uses AI in order to build something new, does the output still qualify as an invention? As a legal scholar who studies technology and intellectual property law, I see the growing power of AI shifting the legal landscape.
Natural persons
In 2020, the United States Patent and Trademark Office refused to list the AI system DABUS, which purportedly designed a food container and a flashing emergency beacon, as an inventor on patent applications. Subsequent court rulings clarified that under current U.S. law, only humans can be listed as inventors, but they left open the question of whether inventions developed by scientists with the help of AI qualify for patent protection.
The concept of inventorship and legal protections for inventions have deep roots in the U.S. The Constitution explicitly protects the “exclusive rights” of authors and inventors “to their respective writings and discoveries,” reflecting the framers’ strong conviction that the state should protect and encourage original ideas.
U.S. law today defines an inventor as a natural person who has conceived of a complete and operative invention that can be used without extensive research or experimentation. An inventor must do more than follow routine instructions – they must make an intellectual contribution in producing something novel.
That contribution can be a key idea that sparks the invention or a crucial insight that turns the concept into a working product. If a person’s input is routine or just explains what’s already known, they are not an inventor.
Role of AI
To what extent can or should AI become part of the invention process? The release of AI applications such as ChatGPT in 2022 introduced the public to large language models and sparked renewed debate about whether and how AI should be used in the inventive process. That same year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard a case that tested whether AI could be named as an inventor on a patent application.
The court concluded that under U.S. law, inventors must be human beings. The ruling reaffirmed the idea that Congress intended to encourage human beings, not machines, to invent. This idea remains foundational to current patent policy.
In light of the court’s decision, in 2024 the United States Patent and Trademark Office updated its guidance to clarify the role of AI in the inventive process. The guidance reaffirms that an inventor must be human. However, the Patent and Trademark Office explained that the policy did not preclude inventors from using AI tools to assist in the research and development of inventions. This approach acknowledges how the rapid development of AI technologies has allowed researchers to make exciting breakthroughs.
Policymakers seem to understand that if the U.S. is to continue to lead the world in innovation, the mythology of a sole inventor toiling away in a garage and relying on pure intellect must evolve to account for the value of AI tools that research has proven make humans more productive.
Nevertheless, since only human beings can be named as inventors on a patent, current policy does not quite answer the question of who or what should get credit for doing the work. Despite a growing trend where researchers are expected to disclose whether they’ve used AI tools, for example in academic papers, the U.S. patent system makes no such demand.
Regardless of AI’s role in the research and development process, a U.S. patent will list only the names of human inventors so long as those humans made a significant contribution to the invention. As a result, current policy is not concerned with how to recognize the contributions of AI. AI is considered a tool like a microscope or a Bunsen burner.
Personal ingenuity in the age of AI
Given this shifting legal landscape, I see that U.S. innovation policy is at a crossroads. The Patent and Trademark Office’s guidance reaffirming human inventorship and simultaneously embracing AI as an innovation tool is only a year old. It is unclear how the Trump administration’s forthcoming action plan to “enhance America’s global AI dominance” will affect this guidance.
Some observers expect the rate of scientific discovery to increase dramatically with the assistance of AI tools. But if the majority of those same productive researchers enjoy their jobs less, is the act of inventing being encouraged as the framers envisioned?
Current U.S. policy attempts to strike a balance and recognize the concept of personal ingenuity, stemming from the principle that for an invention to be patented in the U.S., a human must have led the way. Yet the guidance also implicitly acknowledges that AI can lend a helping hand in modern research and development. Whether and how policymakers maintain this balance – and how leaders in industry and science respond – will help shape the next chapter of American innovation.
W. Keith Robinson 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.
I studied giftedness, creativity and talent as part of my Ph.D. program focusing on students who are “twice exceptional” – that is, they have both learning challenges such autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as well as advanced skills. A better understanding of why parents choose homeschooling can help identify ways to improve the public education system. I believe focusing on twice-exceptional students can offer insights beyond this subset of the homeschooled population.
What we know about homeschooling
The truth is researchers don’t know much about homeschooling and homeschoolers.
One problem is regulations involving homeschooling differ dramatically among states, so it is often hard to determine who is being instructed at home. And many families are unwilling to talk about their experiences homeschooling and their reasons for doing so.
But here’s what we do know.
The share of children being homeschooled has surged since 2020, rising from 3.7% in the 2018-2019 school year to 5.2% in 2022-2023 – the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics. Over 3 million students were homeschooled in 2021-22, according to the National Home Education Research Institute.
And the population of homeschoolers is becoming increasingly diverse, with about half of families reporting as nonwhite in a 2023 Washington Post-Schar School poll. In addition, homeschooling families are just as likely to be Democrat as Republican, according to that same Post-Schar survey, a sharp shift from previous surveys that suggested Republicans were much more likely to homeschool.
As for why parents homeschool, 28% of those surveyed in 2023 by the Institute of Education Sciences said the school environment was their biggest reason, followed by 17% that cited concerns about academic instruction. Another 17% said providing their kids with moral or religious instruction was most important.
But not far behind at 12% was a group of parents who prioritized homeschooling for a different reason: They have a child with physical or mental health problems or other special needs.
This group would include parents of twice-exceptional children, who may be especially interested in pursuing homeschooling as an alternative method of education for three reasons in particular.
Some families have devoted significant resources, such as by creating home libraries, to homeschool their children. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
1. The ‘masking’ problem
These parents may notice that their child’s needs are being overlooked in the public education system and may view homeschooling as a way to provide better individualized instruction.
Students who are twice exceptional often experience what researchers call the “masking” phenomenon. This can occur when a child’s disabilities hide their giftedness. When this occurs, teachers tend to provide academic support but hesitate to give these children the challenging material they may require.
Masking can also occur in reverse, when a student’s gifts tend to hide disabilities. In these cases, teachers provide challenging material, but they do not provide the needed accommodations that allow the gifted child to access the materials. Either way, masking can be a problem for students and parents who must advocate for teachers to address their unique range of academic needs.
While either type of masking is challenging for the student, it may be particularly frustrating for parents of twice-exceptional students to watch classroom teachers focus only on their child’s weaknesses rather than helping them develop their advanced abilities.
2. Individualized instruction
By the time a child enters school, parents have spent years observing their child’s development, comparing their progress with that of others their age. They’re also likely to be aware of their child’s unique interests.
While this may not be true for all parents, those who choose to homeschool may do so because they feel they have more of an ability and interest in catering to their child’s unique needs than a classroom teacher who is tasked with teaching many students simultaneously. Parents of students who demonstrate exceptional ability have expressed concerns about their child’s future educational opportunities in a public school setting.
Additionally, parents may become exhausted by their efforts to advocate for their child’s unique needs in the school system. Parents of students who demonstrate advanced abilities often pull their children out of public school after repeated efforts to improve communication between home and school.
3. Behavioral and emotional needs
Gifted students who have emotional or behavioral disabilities may find it difficult to demonstrate their abilities in the classroom.
All too often, teachers may be more focused on disciplining these students rather than addressing their academic needs. For example, a child who is bored with the class material may be loud and attempt to distract others as well.
Rather than recognizing this as signaling a need for more advanced material, the teacher might send the child to a separate area in the classroom or in the school to refocus or as punishment. Parents may feel better equipped than teachers to address both their child’s challenging behaviors and their gifted abilities, given the knowledge they have about their child’s history, interests, strengths and areas needing improvement.
Supporting students’ needs
Gaining a better understanding of the motivations driving parents to take their children out of the public school system is an important step toward improving schools so that fewer will feel the need to take this path.
Additionally, strengthening educators’ and policymakers’ understanding about twice-exceptional homeschooled students may help communities provide more support to their families – who then may not feel homeschooling is the only or best option. My research shows that many schools can do a better job providing these types of students and their parents with the support they need to thrive.
Rachael Cody 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.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow Democrats criticize President Donald Trump’s plan to shutter the Education Department on March 6, 2025.AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The details remain unclear, but reports suggest that staffs at six of the 12 regional OCR offices were laid off. Because of the office’s role in enforcing civil rights laws in schools and universities, the cuts will affect students across the country.
As education policy scholars who study how laws and policies shape educational inequities, we believe the Office for Civil Rights has played an important role in facilitating equitable education for all students.
The latest cuts further compound funding and staffing shortages that have plagued the office. The full effects of these changes on the most vulnerable public school students will likely be felt for many years.
Few staff members
The Education Department, already the smallest Cabinet-level agency before the recent layoffs, distributed roughly US$242 billion to students, K-12 schools and universities in the 2024 fiscal year.
About $160 billion of that money went to student aid for higher education. The department’s discretionary budget was just under $80 billion, a sliver compared with other agencies.
Within the Education Department, the Office for Civil Rights had a $140 million budget for fiscal year 2024, less than 0.2% of discretionary funding, which requires annual congressional approval.
The office’s appropriated budget in fiscal year 2017 was one-third of the budget of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – a federal agency responsible for civil rights protection in the workplace – despite the high number of discrimination complaints that OCR handles.
Support for OCR
Despite this underfunding, the office has traditionally received bipartisan support.
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for example, requested a funding decrease for the office during the first Trump administration. Congress, however, overrode her budget request and increased appropriations.
Likewise, regardless of changing administrations, the office’s budget has remained fairly unchanged since 2001.
It garners attention for investigating and resolving discrimination-related complaints in K-12 and higher education. And while administrations have different priorities in how to investigate these complaints, they have remained an important resource for students for decades.
But a key function that often goes unnoticed is its collection and release of data through the Civil Rights Data Collection.
The CRDC is a national database that collects information on various indicators of student access and barriers to educational opportunity. Historically, only 5% of the OCR’s budget appropriations has been allocated for the CRDC.
That’s because the CRDC often relies on data infrastructure that is shared with the institute.
The history of the CRDC
The CRDC originated in the late 1960s as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The data questionnaire, which poses questions about civil rights concerns, is usually administered to U.S. public school districts every two years.
Although there have been some changes to questions over the years, others have been consistent for 50 years to allow for examining changes over time. Some examples are counts of students disciplined by schools’ use of corporal punishment or out-of-school suspension.
The U.S. Department of Education building is seen in Washington on Dec. 3, 2024. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
During the Obama administration, the Office for Civil Rights prioritized making the CRDC more accessible to the public. The administration created a website that allows the public to view information for particular schools or districts, or to download data to analyze.
Why the CRDC matters
Our research focuses on how the CRDC has been used and how it could be improved. In an ongoing research project, we identified 221 peer-reviewed publications that have analyzed the CRDC.
Articles focusing on school discipline – out-of-school suspensions, for example – are the most common. But there are many other topics that would be difficult to study without the CRDC.
That’s especially true when making comparisons between districts and states, such as whether students have access to advanced coursework or participation in gifted and talented programs.
The data has also inspired policy changes.
The Obama administration, informed by the data on the use of seclusion and restraint to discipline students, issued a policy guidance document in 2016 regarding its overuse for students with disabilities.
Additionally, the data helps examine the effects of judicial decisions and laws – desegregation laws in the South, for example – that have improved educational opportunities for many vulnerable students.
Amid the Education Department’s continued cancellation of contracts of federally funded equity assistance centers, we believe research partnerships with policymakers and practitioners drawing on CRDC data will be more important than ever.
Erica Frankenberg and Maithreyi Gopalan received funding from the Student Experience Research Network.
Maithreyi Gopalan has received research grants and fellowships from various foundations such as the Student Experience Research Network (New Venture Fund), Federation of American Scientists, and others.
Knowing which vaccines older adults should get and hearing a clear recommendation from their health care provider about why a particular vaccine is important strongly motivated them to get vaccinated. That’s a key finding in a recent study I co-authored in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
Adults over 65 have a higher risk of severe infections, but they receive routine vaccinations at lower rates than do other groups. My colleagues and I collaborated with six primary care clinics across the U.S. to test two approaches for increasing vaccination rates for older adults.
In all, 249 patients who were visiting their primary care providers participated in the study. Of these, 116 patients received a two-page vaccine discussion guide to read in the waiting room before their visit. Another 133 patients received invitations to attend a one-hour education session after their visit.
The guide, which we created for the study, was designed to help people start a conversation about vaccines with their providers. It included checkboxes for marking what made it hard for them to get vaccinated and which vaccines they want to know more about, as well as space to write down any questions they have. The guide also featured a chart listing recommended vaccines for older adults, with boxes where people could check off ones they had already received.
In the sessions, providers shared in-depth information about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases and facilitated a discussion to address vaccine hesitancy.
In a follow-up survey two months later, patients reported that the most significant barriers they faced were knowing when they should receive a particular vaccine, having concerns about side effects and securing transportation to a vaccination appointment.
The percentage of patients who said they wanted to get a vaccine increased from 68% to 79% after using the vaccine guide. Following each intervention, 80% of patients reported they discussed vaccines more in that visit than they had in prior visits.
Of the 14 health care providers who completed the follow-up survey, 57% reported increased vaccination rates following each approach. Half of the providers felt that the use of the vaccine guide was an effective strategy in guiding conversations with their patients.
A pamphlet at the doctor’s office can empower older patients to ask about vaccines.
My research shows that strategies that equip older adults with personalized information about vaccines empower them to start the conversation about vaccines with their clinicians and enable them to be active participants in their health care.
What’s next
In the future, we will explore whether engaging patients on this topic earlier is even more helpful than doing so in the waiting room before their visit.
My research team plans to conduct a pilot study that tests this approach. We hope to learn whether reaching out to these patients before their clinic visits and helping them think through their vaccination status, which vaccines their provider recommends and what barriers they face in getting vaccinated will improve vaccination rates for this population.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Laurie Archbald-Pannone has received funding from Virginia Department of Health and PRIME education. This activity is supported by an independent educational grant from GSK.
