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Category: The Conversation

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Neurodiverse kids at camp: How programs can become places where all children belong

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nicole Neil, Associate professor, Faculty of Education, Western University

    For many families, summer camp is a rite of passage representing friendship, fun and freedom. But for families of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities, it can be a season of rejection, stress and exclusion.

    While other children pack their bags for campfires and canoeing, many children with disabilities are told there’s no space for them, not because they don’t belong, but because the camp isn’t prepared. This is a reality faced by families of children with disabilities.

    That’s why colleagues and I created the Inclusive Camp Hub (inclusivecamp.ca), a free, research-informed platform to help camps become places where every child can participate.

    Why we needed to act

    In Canada, about one in 11 children are diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disability, such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and intellectual disabilities. And yet, despite legal protections like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, many camps report difficulties in creating inclusive environments.

    Our research into inclusion in community settings, such as camps and museums, revealed consistent barriers: staff lacked training, resources were scarce and families were left with few options. As a result, children with neurodevelopmental disabilities were excluded from the same joyful, formative experiences their peers enjoyed.

    These barriers have real consequences. Families often struggle to find respite during the summer, and children miss out on opportunities for social development, peer interaction and community belonging.

    Building the Hub

    Well-trained and supportive staff play a crucial role in fostering inclusion in camps. Interviews with families revealed the importance of staff who are kind, responsive and equipped to support a wide range of needs. It was clear that staff training needed to be a central focus of our work.

    We designed The Inclusive Camp Hub to feature practical tools grounded in research from inclusive education to focus on staff training modules, tip sheets and real-world strategies that are easy to implement.

    In studying and following a module about Universal Design for Learning, for example, camp directors or staff can consider strategies for providing multiple means of representation, engagement and expression — while ensuring physical spaces and materials are universally accessible.

    Less awareness of cognitive accessibility

    While many community settings have made strides in improving physical accessibility, adding ramps, accessible washrooms and mobility-friendly spaces, there has been far less attention paid to cognitive accessibility.

    This includes designing environments that support different ways to participate, such as by making routines predictable and by making activities flexible enough to accommodate different ways of learning.

    In developing the Inclusive Camp Hub, we drew on evidence-based practices identified in our research.

    These include staff training, peer-mediated interventions and behavioural supports such as reinforcement systems and prompting. Reinforcement systems are structured ways to encourage behaviour by offering rewards or positive outcomes when those behaviours happen. Prompting means giving a child cues, like pictures, words or gestures, to help them complete a task such as using a visual schedule to show what comes next.

    We also found that families with children with neurodevelopmental disabilities valued hands-on, multi-sensory learning experiences, clear signage, quiet spaces and staff who are kind and responsive. By incorporating these strategies into our training site, we aimed to make inclusion achievable and sustainable for camps of all types.

    A model camp

    To test and refine our approach to inclusion, we launched a model inclusive camp, called the S3 camp, at Western University.

    We welcomed children ages nine to 14 — with and without neurodevelopmental disabilities — and focused on STEM activities, disability awareness and, most importantly, a sense of belonging.

    The camp was staffed by students in a school psychology program, as well as education and STEM-field students who received specialized training and used inclusive design tools from the Hub. They learned how to create accessible activities, use behavioural supports, support communication differences and foster inclusive group dynamics.

    The results were promising. We saw campers who had difficulty at other camps fully engaged in activities. Staff reported feeling more confident and capable in supporting children with disabilities, and parents said their children came home happy, proud and excited to return the next year.

    Why camp inclusion matters

    At first glance, summer camps might seem like a luxury — a fun experience rather than a critical developmental one. But camps offer more than just fun: they are powerful spaces for growth, learning and connection.

    Research shows that children in inclusive settings experience improved social skills, stronger peer relationships and increased self-esteem. They learn through play, build friendships and develop a sense of belonging, all which are foundational for healthy development.

    These benefits extend to all campers. Neurotypical children gain empathy, communication skills and a broader understanding of diversity

    Looking forward

    Inclusive Camp Hub is now expanding its reach, with plans to partner with more camps and extend its impact while continuing to refine our tools based on feedback from families, staff and community organizations.

    Camp leaders can take the first step by exploring the free tools and training available through the Hub. Families and advocates can continue to ask questions, share their experiences and push for environments where all children are welcomed and supported.

    As a researcher, I’ve spent years studying inclusion. But nothing compares to seeing it in action, watching a child find joy, friendship and confidence at camp. Every child deserves a summer of belonging.

    Nicole Neil’s work is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

    – ref. Neurodiverse kids at camp: How programs can become places where all children belong – https://theconversation.com/neurodiverse-kids-at-camp-how-programs-can-become-places-where-all-children-belong-258793

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Canada Day: Resurrecting John A. Macdonald statues ignores critical lessons about Canada’s history

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Eric Strikwerda, Associate Professor, History, Athabasca University

    “We’re freeing John A.,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently announced, unveiling plans to return a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald to its place of prominence overlooking the south lawn of the Ontario legislature at Queen’s Park.

    The statue’s return comes five years after activists, disgusted by the first Canadian prime minister’s racist policies, sprayed pink paint over the statue’s base.

    Ford’s announcement was welcome news to the mostly conservative historians, editorialists and assorted pundits who have decried Macdonald’s “cancellation.”

    Their objections have been part of passionate debates about whether racist and harmful figures from the past should be celebrated through statues, school and state institution names and public infrastructure projects.

    For these conservatives, the issue is simple. Dismantling statues is dismantling Canada’s history.



    Read more:
    Canada needs to reckon with the relics of its colonial past, including racist statues

    On the other side of the debate are those who argue that Macdonald’s active and integral role in creating the aggressively assimilationist Gradual Civilization Act, the infamous Indian Residential Schools system, the Reserve and Pass Systems and the Indian Act were all meant to make Indigenous Peoples disappear.

    Macdonald was no man to celebrate, they contend, and his statue is nothing more than a symbol of racism and Canada’s dark colonial past.



    Read more:
    ‘Clearing the plains’ continues with the acquittal of Gerald Stanley

    Flurries of commemoration

    Both sides to the debate, of course, are correct in their assessments of Canada’s first prime minister. Like all historical figures from the past, Macdonald was a complex human being operating at a particular historical moment. And his actions had important historical implications for the way Canada developed.

    Was Macdonald, as proponents of his statue suggest, a visionary nation-builder? Maybe. But he was also a racist colonizer who used his position and his power to advance clearly racist goals in the most awful ways.

    And yet, the debate misses a deeper and much more interesting set of questions about how we understand Canadian history, how we describe Canada’s past and ultimately how Canadians tell stories about themselves to each other.

    It’s important to recognize from where and in what historical contexts Canada’s statues, commemorations and public infrastructure names come. Statues of figures like Macdonald, as well as the naming of public buildings, bridges and roads in his honour, appeared principally at two separate times.

    The first came in the late 19th century, mostly commemorating Macdonald’s death in 1891. But statues were being erected during this period amid rising nationalism. They signalled a celebration of Canada’s membership in the British Empire, then at the zenith of its power and influence.

    The second flurry of Macdonald commemoration was in the mid-1960s, another moment of heightened nationalism and Canadian pride. It coincided with Canada’s centenary in 1967, the Montréal Expo that same year, a new Canadian flag and a newfound confidence in the world through its active participation in international peacekeeping efforts.

    Canada was also at that time grappling with a deeply dissatisfied Québec and its place in Confederation, a state of affairs that eventually resulted in a divisive sovereignty referendum in 1980 that threatened the very fabric of Canada.

    Respecting the dissent

    But just as Canadians need to understand the historical contexts in which citizens of the past have celebrated people like Macdonald, so too do they need to grasp the historical contexts in which Canadians past and present have questioned his legacy.

    In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States sparked critical re-evaluations of statues of Civil War-era figures from the American South and the continued use in some southern states of the highly offensive Confederate flag, along with many other symbols of racism, division and hatred.

    The release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report a decade ago similarly forced Canadians to confront some the darkest chapters of the country’s past.

    The point often missed here is that historical markers — like the TRC Commission and the Black Lives Matter movement — themselves become artefacts of the ongoing project involving how people tell stories about themselves to themselves, what those stories say about them in the present and how they want to define themselves in the future.

    A more fulsome engagement with history demands Canadians refrain from conflating the story of John A. Macdonald, the statue, with the story of John A. Macdonald, the man, any more than we’d conflate a drawing of an apple with the one on our counter.

    A true examination of Macdonald

    It’s not a question of who Macdonald was or wasn’t. Instead, it’s about the historical context in which the commemorations of him were installed. But it’s also part of the continuing story of how we see ourselves today.

    Claims that dismantling public statues and renaming roads and schools somehow erases Canadian history are ridiculous and profoundly misunderstand how history works.

    As Canada Day approaches, it’s important to remember that Macdonald’s story and legacy live on exactly where they should — in the pages of history books, museums and classrooms, where his life and times can be examined, interpreted and debated with the kind of depth and nuance that Canadian history deserves.

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

    – ref. Canada Day: Resurrecting John A. Macdonald statues ignores critical lessons about Canada’s history – https://theconversation.com/canada-day-resurrecting-john-a-macdonald-statues-ignores-critical-lessons-about-canadas-history-259351

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Canada Day: Resurrecting John A. Macdonald statues ignores critical lessons about Canada’s history

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Eric Strikwerda, Associate Professor, History, Athabasca University

    “We’re freeing John A.,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently announced, unveiling plans to return a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald to its place of prominence overlooking the south lawn of the Ontario legislature at Queen’s Park.

    The statue’s return comes five years after activists, disgusted by the first Canadian prime minister’s racist policies, sprayed pink paint over the statue’s base.

    Ford’s announcement was welcome news to the mostly conservative historians, editorialists and assorted pundits who have decried Macdonald’s “cancellation.”

    Their objections have been part of passionate debates about whether racist and harmful figures from the past should be celebrated through statues, school and state institution names and public infrastructure projects.

    For these conservatives, the issue is simple. Dismantling statues is dismantling Canada’s history.



    Read more:
    Canada needs to reckon with the relics of its colonial past, including racist statues

    On the other side of the debate are those who argue that Macdonald’s active and integral role in creating the aggressively assimilationist Gradual Civilization Act, the infamous Indian Residential Schools system, the Reserve and Pass Systems and the Indian Act were all meant to make Indigenous Peoples disappear.

    Macdonald was no man to celebrate, they contend, and his statue is nothing more than a symbol of racism and Canada’s dark colonial past.



    Read more:
    ‘Clearing the plains’ continues with the acquittal of Gerald Stanley

    Flurries of commemoration

    Both sides to the debate, of course, are correct in their assessments of Canada’s first prime minister. Like all historical figures from the past, Macdonald was a complex human being operating at a particular historical moment. And his actions had important historical implications for the way Canada developed.

    Was Macdonald, as proponents of his statue suggest, a visionary nation-builder? Maybe. But he was also a racist colonizer who used his position and his power to advance clearly racist goals in the most awful ways.

    And yet, the debate misses a deeper and much more interesting set of questions about how we understand Canadian history, how we describe Canada’s past and ultimately how Canadians tell stories about themselves to each other.

    It’s important to recognize from where and in what historical contexts Canada’s statues, commemorations and public infrastructure names come. Statues of figures like Macdonald, as well as the naming of public buildings, bridges and roads in his honour, appeared principally at two separate times.

    The first came in the late 19th century, mostly commemorating Macdonald’s death in 1891. But statues were being erected during this period amid rising nationalism. They signalled a celebration of Canada’s membership in the British Empire, then at the zenith of its power and influence.

    The second flurry of Macdonald commemoration was in the mid-1960s, another moment of heightened nationalism and Canadian pride. It coincided with Canada’s centenary in 1967, the Montréal Expo that same year, a new Canadian flag and a newfound confidence in the world through its active participation in international peacekeeping efforts.

    Canada was also at that time grappling with a deeply dissatisfied Québec and its place in Confederation, a state of affairs that eventually resulted in a divisive sovereignty referendum in 1980 that threatened the very fabric of Canada.

    Respecting the dissent

    But just as Canadians need to understand the historical contexts in which citizens of the past have celebrated people like Macdonald, so too do they need to grasp the historical contexts in which Canadians past and present have questioned his legacy.

    In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States sparked critical re-evaluations of statues of Civil War-era figures from the American South and the continued use in some southern states of the highly offensive Confederate flag, along with many other symbols of racism, division and hatred.

    The release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report a decade ago similarly forced Canadians to confront some the darkest chapters of the country’s past.

    The point often missed here is that historical markers — like the TRC Commission and the Black Lives Matter movement — themselves become artefacts of the ongoing project involving how people tell stories about themselves to themselves, what those stories say about them in the present and how they want to define themselves in the future.

    A more fulsome engagement with history demands Canadians refrain from conflating the story of John A. Macdonald, the statue, with the story of John A. Macdonald, the man, any more than we’d conflate a drawing of an apple with the one on our counter.

    A true examination of Macdonald

    It’s not a question of who Macdonald was or wasn’t. Instead, it’s about the historical context in which the commemorations of him were installed. But it’s also part of the continuing story of how we see ourselves today.

    Claims that dismantling public statues and renaming roads and schools somehow erases Canadian history are ridiculous and profoundly misunderstand how history works.

    As Canada Day approaches, it’s important to remember that Macdonald’s story and legacy live on exactly where they should — in the pages of history books, museums and classrooms, where his life and times can be examined, interpreted and debated with the kind of depth and nuance that Canadian history deserves.

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

    – ref. Canada Day: Resurrecting John A. Macdonald statues ignores critical lessons about Canada’s history – https://theconversation.com/canada-day-resurrecting-john-a-macdonald-statues-ignores-critical-lessons-about-canadas-history-259351

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Atul K. Shah, Professor, Accounting and Finance, City St George’s, University of London

    Krailath/Shutterstock

    Financial products are becoming increasingly sophisticated – as are the frauds associated with things like crypto, hacking and digital robbery. Many people are already overwhelmed by financial matters, and being unable to manage money can lead to mental health problems.

    But money is primarily a social and cultural construct. Humans created it to serve their everyday needs for food, clothing and shelter. You could argue, however, that this servant of society has now become the master. Money permeates every aspect of life, including health, wellbeing and love – even relationships can become transactional.

    Humans have done immense damage to the planet. We urgently need to re-examine our financial motives and institutions so that we nurture the Earth, rather than extract, plunder and destroy it.

    Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the discipline of finance has grown in influence and reach. In fact, most other disciplines in business, such as marketing, organisational behaviour and management, have become subservient to finance. The priority has been to maximise profits to satisfy the demand for constant growth in revenues and shareholder wealth. This is known as financialisation.

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

    This, along with rising inequality, makes it a good moment to examine the knowledge system (epistemology) and beliefs (ontology) of finance. What are its core ethics, when did they go wrong, and how can they be reformed to help shape a sustainable society in future?

    Given the vast cultural and religious diversity on Earth, as well as the global challenges of inequality and sustainability, I have examined a variety of experiences, beliefs and perspectives on money in my new book, Organic Finance.

    This has resulted in a framework akin to organic farming, where the health of the soil, air and water is respected. Tradition, morality, culture and belief play a highly influential role in cultivating sustainable societies. Making money is placed into a wholesome cultural and planetary context. I have looked at attitudes towards money across culture and uncovered forgotten wisdom.

    Many religions have strong views on money, debt and their role in building peace and cohesion. Most have rejected the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and warned about the limits of greed and materialism. But these principles are the antithesis of how modern abstract economics and finance are modelled and taught all over the world. This has endorsed environmental degradation through resource depletion and extraction.

    Countless cultures and traditions have emphasised the importance of kinship, charity, volunteering and service towards building communities and social relationships. Trust and mutuality have been central to many cultures and beliefs, yet severely undermined and ignored by the teachings of modern finance.

    In contrast, for many indigenous traditions, money has historically played only a small role in livelihoods. For example, the Jains have a record dating back several hundred years of philanthropy for people, animals and the environment.

    The first chapter of my book is titled “Evil Finance”, and outlines how some people have become defined by competition, exploitation and expropriation. Multinational corporations have amassed significant global power, and are very hard to govern and regulate. This is often accepted as a scientific reality, when in fact such behaviour is unsustainable.

    Nature and spirituality are important when it comes to framing a conscious and responsible future for finance. A ground-up view of finance that includes kindness towards living beings, including rural communities and animals, would help to keep the focus on soil health, water purity and unpolluted air. And it would ensure that humans are humble and nurturing.

    Trust before profits

    Across the world, there are millions of small businesses that simply want to provide a valuable service and feed their families. They have no aspirations of exponential growth and want to keep expansion within manageable proportions. And because they want to pass the business to future generations, sustainability is deeply woven into their business culture. Trust and relationships are valued more than profits or wealth.

    In the book, I also examine how profits and wealth maximisation have serious consequences, with side-effects including pollution and insecure jobs. Sadly, I’ve seen from decades of research and teaching experience that words like morality, trust, relationships and community have been disappearing from corporate finance and banking textbooks, encouraging selfishness and a calculating mindset.

    Unless we go back to the basics of the cultural and ethical nature and limits of money, reforms in finance such as ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment criteria or net zero goals are going to be sticking plasters on fundamentally short-termist, greedy and selfish market institutions.

    For people who work in finance, it’s about understanding the limits of materialism. Finance can once again become a servant of society and nature, helping to boost values of family and community. We can start by placing ethics and culture at the centre of accounting, economics and finance training.

    When we allow self-reflection and diverse cultures and traditions into the finance curriculum, we enable rich dialogues, strong moral frameworks and an ability to put money in its place. Such a rewriting of finance would be respectful of diverse cultures and traditions, allowing them to learn from one another, and work together to build an equal society and healthy planet.

    This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

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

    – ref. I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable – https://theconversation.com/ive-studied-faiths-and-cultures-around-the-world-heres-how-finance-can-be-made-more-inclusive-and-sustainable-258254

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Atul K. Shah, Professor, Accounting and Finance, City St George’s, University of London

    Krailath/Shutterstock

    Financial products are becoming increasingly sophisticated – as are the frauds associated with things like crypto, hacking and digital robbery. Many people are already overwhelmed by financial matters, and being unable to manage money can lead to mental health problems.

    But money is primarily a social and cultural construct. Humans created it to serve their everyday needs for food, clothing and shelter. You could argue, however, that this servant of society has now become the master. Money permeates every aspect of life, including health, wellbeing and love – even relationships can become transactional.

    Humans have done immense damage to the planet. We urgently need to re-examine our financial motives and institutions so that we nurture the Earth, rather than extract, plunder and destroy it.

    Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the discipline of finance has grown in influence and reach. In fact, most other disciplines in business, such as marketing, organisational behaviour and management, have become subservient to finance. The priority has been to maximise profits to satisfy the demand for constant growth in revenues and shareholder wealth. This is known as financialisation.

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

    This, along with rising inequality, makes it a good moment to examine the knowledge system (epistemology) and beliefs (ontology) of finance. What are its core ethics, when did they go wrong, and how can they be reformed to help shape a sustainable society in future?

    Given the vast cultural and religious diversity on Earth, as well as the global challenges of inequality and sustainability, I have examined a variety of experiences, beliefs and perspectives on money in my new book, Organic Finance.

    This has resulted in a framework akin to organic farming, where the health of the soil, air and water is respected. Tradition, morality, culture and belief play a highly influential role in cultivating sustainable societies. Making money is placed into a wholesome cultural and planetary context. I have looked at attitudes towards money across culture and uncovered forgotten wisdom.

    Many religions have strong views on money, debt and their role in building peace and cohesion. Most have rejected the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and warned about the limits of greed and materialism. But these principles are the antithesis of how modern abstract economics and finance are modelled and taught all over the world. This has endorsed environmental degradation through resource depletion and extraction.

    Countless cultures and traditions have emphasised the importance of kinship, charity, volunteering and service towards building communities and social relationships. Trust and mutuality have been central to many cultures and beliefs, yet severely undermined and ignored by the teachings of modern finance.

    In contrast, for many indigenous traditions, money has historically played only a small role in livelihoods. For example, the Jains have a record dating back several hundred years of philanthropy for people, animals and the environment.

    The first chapter of my book is titled “Evil Finance”, and outlines how some people have become defined by competition, exploitation and expropriation. Multinational corporations have amassed significant global power, and are very hard to govern and regulate. This is often accepted as a scientific reality, when in fact such behaviour is unsustainable.

    Nature and spirituality are important when it comes to framing a conscious and responsible future for finance. A ground-up view of finance that includes kindness towards living beings, including rural communities and animals, would help to keep the focus on soil health, water purity and unpolluted air. And it would ensure that humans are humble and nurturing.

    Trust before profits

    Across the world, there are millions of small businesses that simply want to provide a valuable service and feed their families. They have no aspirations of exponential growth and want to keep expansion within manageable proportions. And because they want to pass the business to future generations, sustainability is deeply woven into their business culture. Trust and relationships are valued more than profits or wealth.

    In the book, I also examine how profits and wealth maximisation have serious consequences, with side-effects including pollution and insecure jobs. Sadly, I’ve seen from decades of research and teaching experience that words like morality, trust, relationships and community have been disappearing from corporate finance and banking textbooks, encouraging selfishness and a calculating mindset.

    Unless we go back to the basics of the cultural and ethical nature and limits of money, reforms in finance such as ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment criteria or net zero goals are going to be sticking plasters on fundamentally short-termist, greedy and selfish market institutions.

    For people who work in finance, it’s about understanding the limits of materialism. Finance can once again become a servant of society and nature, helping to boost values of family and community. We can start by placing ethics and culture at the centre of accounting, economics and finance training.

    When we allow self-reflection and diverse cultures and traditions into the finance curriculum, we enable rich dialogues, strong moral frameworks and an ability to put money in its place. Such a rewriting of finance would be respectful of diverse cultures and traditions, allowing them to learn from one another, and work together to build an equal society and healthy planet.

    This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

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

    – ref. I’ve studied faiths and cultures around the world. Here’s how finance can be made more inclusive and sustainable – https://theconversation.com/ive-studied-faiths-and-cultures-around-the-world-heres-how-finance-can-be-made-more-inclusive-and-sustainable-258254

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: How to protect your favourite urban trees from increasing danger

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Grace, PhD Candidate, Climate Change and Literature, Nottingham Trent University

    Whether your favourite tree is in a private garden, on wasteland, in a school playground or on the street, your emotional response may be admiration, relaxation, rejuvenation or awareness of the seasons passing. But so many special trees are experiencing a combination of threats.

    According to a new report from environmental charity the Tree Council and government-funded agency Forest Research, introduced pests and diseases, pollution, extreme weather and infrastructure development are all on the increase, which could be a disaster for the UK’s trees. These affect trees’ condition, resilience and capacity to mitigate the climate and nature crises.

    Not only do trees play ecological roles in nature, such as shelter for wildlife and protection from floods, many people have long-standing connections to trees. A report from the Tree Council highlights the role of trees as an important part of the “fabric of human cultures and societies”.

    This demonstrates a move away from appreciating only the ecological benefits provided by urban trees and towards the social and cultural importance they hold for local populations.

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

    The ecological and biodiversity values of trees are well-documented. Trees offer homes and food for birds, insects and wildlife. They prevent rainwater reaching the ground by as much as 45%. When combined with grass, surface water flooding is reduced by 99% compared with tarmac. Urban trees reduce air pollution, quieten noise and keep cities shaded and cool.

    Thousands of people cast votes for their favourite trees in the UK and Europe. In a recent study, over half of 1,800 adults surveyed said they had a favourite tree and 74% felt that urban development is the greatest threat to our trees.

    That’s not the only threat, though. Single species planting of street trees, for example, leaves the trees vulnerable to diseases (such as Dutch elm or ash dieback). Rising temperatures and water scarcity leaves trees competing for resources.

    But what does that mean for our urban trees? Approximately 30% of tree cover in England exists outside forest and woodland. Such trees form an essential habitat in urban areas where 83% of the UK’s population live, yet more than ever before our urban trees are facing threats from a deadly combination of environmental change and human development. In Wales, for example, 7,000 mature trees in towns and cities were lost between 2006 and 2013.

    To try to address this growing crisis, woodland charity Forest Research have released a new, national free to use “trees outside woodland” map. This refers to any trees found in settings such as parks, open countryside and farmland, gardens and estates, or beside roads and paths.

    These can be on a street corner, beside a railway track or in a market square and includes very old trees like those listed on the ancient tree inventory plus otherwise unremarkable trees growing in unusual settings, such as the vandalised 200-year-old Sycamore Gap tree.

    Why we love trees

    England is dawdling behind many other countries when it comes to protecting important trees. Forest Research found that trees outside woodland share many of the social and cultural values associated with trees in woodlands, however people make specific relationships with these urban trees and they are more likely to be considered unique and irreplaceable.

    Trees in urban areas have huge social benefits too.
    Karo Martu/Shutterstock

    They can be recognised for their grace and beauty or for their associations with customs, beliefs and rituals. They can be a place to rest and play and symbols of community belonging. They can give a sense of continuity, connecting people’s lifespans with reflections about the natural world and everything beyond.

    Many countries give clear titles to their important trees. In Poland, they are called natural monuments, in Germany they are living monuments. Spain, Belgium, Greece, Mexico and Finland use the term “monumental trees”. In New Zealand, special urban trees are referred to as national living landmarks. Currently England falls behind in designating trees for protection based on their historical or aesthetic importance.

    Trees for everyone

    A common feature across many countries is the opportunity for anyone, including members of the public, to recommend a tree for protection. Tree equity is the idea that everyone should have access to the benefits of trees. It includes prioritising and deploying resources in the areas where people have least access to them.

    Tree inequity exists in most UK towns and cities. On average, the most economically and socially deprived and most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods have half the tree canopy cover compared to the least deprived and least diverse.

    Canopy cover ranges from 1–2% in parts of north-east England to 36% in Hampstead, north London. Even within London there are wide variations.

    So ensure your favourite tree can be appreciated and celebrated by your community as a living monument, make sure it is on the Trees Outside Woodland map. And check if it needs a drink.

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

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

    Lucy Grace receives funding from AHRC for her PhD through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

    – ref. How to protect your favourite urban trees from increasing danger – https://theconversation.com/how-to-protect-your-favourite-urban-trees-from-increasing-danger-258227

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: How to protect your favourite urban trees from increasing danger

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Grace, PhD Candidate, Climate Change and Literature, Nottingham Trent University

    Whether your favourite tree is in a private garden, on wasteland, in a school playground or on the street, your emotional response may be admiration, relaxation, rejuvenation or awareness of the seasons passing. But so many special trees are experiencing a combination of threats.

    According to a new report from environmental charity the Tree Council and government-funded agency Forest Research, introduced pests and diseases, pollution, extreme weather and infrastructure development are all on the increase, which could be a disaster for the UK’s trees. These affect trees’ condition, resilience and capacity to mitigate the climate and nature crises.

    Not only do trees play ecological roles in nature, such as shelter for wildlife and protection from floods, many people have long-standing connections to trees. A report from the Tree Council highlights the role of trees as an important part of the “fabric of human cultures and societies”.

    This demonstrates a move away from appreciating only the ecological benefits provided by urban trees and towards the social and cultural importance they hold for local populations.

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

    The ecological and biodiversity values of trees are well-documented. Trees offer homes and food for birds, insects and wildlife. They prevent rainwater reaching the ground by as much as 45%. When combined with grass, surface water flooding is reduced by 99% compared with tarmac. Urban trees reduce air pollution, quieten noise and keep cities shaded and cool.

    Thousands of people cast votes for their favourite trees in the UK and Europe. In a recent study, over half of 1,800 adults surveyed said they had a favourite tree and 74% felt that urban development is the greatest threat to our trees.

    That’s not the only threat, though. Single species planting of street trees, for example, leaves the trees vulnerable to diseases (such as Dutch elm or ash dieback). Rising temperatures and water scarcity leaves trees competing for resources.

    But what does that mean for our urban trees? Approximately 30% of tree cover in England exists outside forest and woodland. Such trees form an essential habitat in urban areas where 83% of the UK’s population live, yet more than ever before our urban trees are facing threats from a deadly combination of environmental change and human development. In Wales, for example, 7,000 mature trees in towns and cities were lost between 2006 and 2013.

    To try to address this growing crisis, woodland charity Forest Research have released a new, national free to use “trees outside woodland” map. This refers to any trees found in settings such as parks, open countryside and farmland, gardens and estates, or beside roads and paths.

    These can be on a street corner, beside a railway track or in a market square and includes very old trees like those listed on the ancient tree inventory plus otherwise unremarkable trees growing in unusual settings, such as the vandalised 200-year-old Sycamore Gap tree.

    Why we love trees

    England is dawdling behind many other countries when it comes to protecting important trees. Forest Research found that trees outside woodland share many of the social and cultural values associated with trees in woodlands, however people make specific relationships with these urban trees and they are more likely to be considered unique and irreplaceable.

    Trees in urban areas have huge social benefits too.
    Karo Martu/Shutterstock

    They can be recognised for their grace and beauty or for their associations with customs, beliefs and rituals. They can be a place to rest and play and symbols of community belonging. They can give a sense of continuity, connecting people’s lifespans with reflections about the natural world and everything beyond.

    Many countries give clear titles to their important trees. In Poland, they are called natural monuments, in Germany they are living monuments. Spain, Belgium, Greece, Mexico and Finland use the term “monumental trees”. In New Zealand, special urban trees are referred to as national living landmarks. Currently England falls behind in designating trees for protection based on their historical or aesthetic importance.

    Trees for everyone

    A common feature across many countries is the opportunity for anyone, including members of the public, to recommend a tree for protection. Tree equity is the idea that everyone should have access to the benefits of trees. It includes prioritising and deploying resources in the areas where people have least access to them.

    Tree inequity exists in most UK towns and cities. On average, the most economically and socially deprived and most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods have half the tree canopy cover compared to the least deprived and least diverse.

    Canopy cover ranges from 1–2% in parts of north-east England to 36% in Hampstead, north London. Even within London there are wide variations.

    So ensure your favourite tree can be appreciated and celebrated by your community as a living monument, make sure it is on the Trees Outside Woodland map. And check if it needs a drink.

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

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

    Lucy Grace receives funding from AHRC for her PhD through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

    – ref. How to protect your favourite urban trees from increasing danger – https://theconversation.com/how-to-protect-your-favourite-urban-trees-from-increasing-danger-258227

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: The spectacular frenzy of 28 Years Later offers a new breed of pandemic storytelling

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucyl Harrison, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities, University of Hull

    Twenty-three years on from director Danny Boyle’s unforgettable film 28 Days Later, and five years on from COVID, horror is having a spectacular renaissance. With 28 Years Later, the franchise has returned to cinema as a mouthpiece for the unique pressures Britain is facing post-pandemic and post-Brexit.

    In 2020, speculative architect and director Liam Young said: “I’m sure the scripts for a new genre of virus fictions or ‘Vi-Fi’ are already in the works and perhaps that is the real opportunity of this present moment, to imagine the potential fictions and futures, and to prototype the new worlds that we all want to be a part of when the viral cloud lifts.” Well, here that vision is.

    In this film, Europe has contained the “rage virus” to Britain. There are French boats on quarantine patrols, Swedish soldiers mocking remaining mainlanders and St George’s flags burning.

    Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

    28 Years Later is set on Holy Island, off the coast of the UK. There, an isolated community is protected by tides which conceal and reveal a causeway through which islanders can leave to get to the mainland to forage.

    One of the film’s most adrenaline-spiking scenes comes in the form of a terrifying chase back to the island. A young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) is hurrying back after performing his rite of passage ceremony in which he is instructed to kill infected people on the mainland. It’s sound-tracked to the transcendental tones of Wagner’s Das Rheingold prelude.

    Twenty-eight years on from the events of the first film, the infected have evolved. Boyle has re-imagined them in even more monstrous forms. Gore-lovers will enjoy the menacing new brand of infected – seven-foot “alphas” – who rip heads from the living and dangle their severed spines.

    An ode to COVID

    Talking about how the pandemic inspired 28 Years Later, Boyle told Sky News:

    Suddenly everybody’s capital city, everywhere around the world was the same. And what was incredible about it was obviously just this idea which had previously only really belonged to films, like our film, where culture is suddenly just stopped dead.

    Danny Boyle speaks about 28 Years Later.

    The film’s stars, Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor Johnson, meanwhile have both said that they drew from their real-life experiences of pandemic isolation for their roles as Spike’s Geordie parents. As Taylor explained:

    My son was 13, the same age as Alfie was when we were making this movie. I know what it was like to protect your family but also to not understand what was happening around us. And I thought it was interesting whilst reading this that an audience is going to understand that journey […] I drew upon a lot of those scenarios.

    The film ushers in a new age of “Vi-Fi” without succumbing to pulpy pandemic storytelling. Boyle gives us an antidote to cultural amnesia around the pandemic through Dr Kelson, the mad doctor played by Ralph Fiennes.

    Dr Kelson pushes against cultural erasure through his construction of a temple of bones: totems of tibias and a spire of skulls that honour the virus victims.

    The trailer for 28 Years Later.

    He touchingly explains that we are to remember death and remember love: “Every skull is a set of thoughts, these sockets saw, and these jaws swallowed.” Fiennes is adept at rendering this “crazy” loner character who has a knack for turning up at the right time; the effortlessness of his humanity is a pleasure to watch.

    Boyle explained: “The COVID memorial wall opposite parliament is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen … it sort of inspired Ralph Fiennes’ character and what he’s building as a gesture towards remembering everyone as a way of actually looking forwards, not a way of looking back.”

    After the creative inertia brought on by the COVID lockdowns, I’ve detected tectonic shifts in pandemic storytelling in my interviews with COVID authors.

    Stories like 28 Years Later that “quietly” insert the pandemic and push COVID into the background are considered the easiest to digest. These stories are part of a new, radical literary avant-garde that has emerged in contemporary literature to chronicle the COVID era.

    Pandemic fiction has become an oft-maligned genre; conversations on my podcast, Pandemic Pages, with emergency planner Professor Lucy Easthope and horror author Kylie Lee Baker confirm that literary festivals and agents have expressed reluctance to read or publish COVID fiction. Professor Easthope explained that many people just don’t feel ready to read about the pandemic.

    For Baker, it’s that many people simply find the associations too traumatic. However, judging from the reactions of cinema-goers when I saw 28 Years Later, there is an audience hungry for another serving of Boyle’s insatiable trilogy.

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

    – ref. The spectacular frenzy of 28 Years Later offers a new breed of pandemic storytelling – https://theconversation.com/the-spectacular-frenzy-of-28-years-later-offers-a-new-breed-of-pandemic-storytelling-259579

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: The spectacular frenzy of 28 Years Later offers a new breed of pandemic storytelling

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucyl Harrison, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities, University of Hull

    Twenty-three years on from director Danny Boyle’s unforgettable film 28 Days Later, and five years on from COVID, horror is having a spectacular renaissance. With 28 Years Later, the franchise has returned to cinema as a mouthpiece for the unique pressures Britain is facing post-pandemic and post-Brexit.

    In 2020, speculative architect and director Liam Young said: “I’m sure the scripts for a new genre of virus fictions or ‘Vi-Fi’ are already in the works and perhaps that is the real opportunity of this present moment, to imagine the potential fictions and futures, and to prototype the new worlds that we all want to be a part of when the viral cloud lifts.” Well, here that vision is.

    In this film, Europe has contained the “rage virus” to Britain. There are French boats on quarantine patrols, Swedish soldiers mocking remaining mainlanders and St George’s flags burning.

    Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

    28 Years Later is set on Holy Island, off the coast of the UK. There, an isolated community is protected by tides which conceal and reveal a causeway through which islanders can leave to get to the mainland to forage.

    One of the film’s most adrenaline-spiking scenes comes in the form of a terrifying chase back to the island. A young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) is hurrying back after performing his rite of passage ceremony in which he is instructed to kill infected people on the mainland. It’s sound-tracked to the transcendental tones of Wagner’s Das Rheingold prelude.

    Twenty-eight years on from the events of the first film, the infected have evolved. Boyle has re-imagined them in even more monstrous forms. Gore-lovers will enjoy the menacing new brand of infected – seven-foot “alphas” – who rip heads from the living and dangle their severed spines.

    An ode to COVID

    Talking about how the pandemic inspired 28 Years Later, Boyle told Sky News:

    Suddenly everybody’s capital city, everywhere around the world was the same. And what was incredible about it was obviously just this idea which had previously only really belonged to films, like our film, where culture is suddenly just stopped dead.

    Danny Boyle speaks about 28 Years Later.

    The film’s stars, Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor Johnson, meanwhile have both said that they drew from their real-life experiences of pandemic isolation for their roles as Spike’s Geordie parents. As Taylor explained:

    My son was 13, the same age as Alfie was when we were making this movie. I know what it was like to protect your family but also to not understand what was happening around us. And I thought it was interesting whilst reading this that an audience is going to understand that journey […] I drew upon a lot of those scenarios.

    The film ushers in a new age of “Vi-Fi” without succumbing to pulpy pandemic storytelling. Boyle gives us an antidote to cultural amnesia around the pandemic through Dr Kelson, the mad doctor played by Ralph Fiennes.

    Dr Kelson pushes against cultural erasure through his construction of a temple of bones: totems of tibias and a spire of skulls that honour the virus victims.

    The trailer for 28 Years Later.

    He touchingly explains that we are to remember death and remember love: “Every skull is a set of thoughts, these sockets saw, and these jaws swallowed.” Fiennes is adept at rendering this “crazy” loner character who has a knack for turning up at the right time; the effortlessness of his humanity is a pleasure to watch.

    Boyle explained: “The COVID memorial wall opposite parliament is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen … it sort of inspired Ralph Fiennes’ character and what he’s building as a gesture towards remembering everyone as a way of actually looking forwards, not a way of looking back.”

    After the creative inertia brought on by the COVID lockdowns, I’ve detected tectonic shifts in pandemic storytelling in my interviews with COVID authors.

    Stories like 28 Years Later that “quietly” insert the pandemic and push COVID into the background are considered the easiest to digest. These stories are part of a new, radical literary avant-garde that has emerged in contemporary literature to chronicle the COVID era.

    Pandemic fiction has become an oft-maligned genre; conversations on my podcast, Pandemic Pages, with emergency planner Professor Lucy Easthope and horror author Kylie Lee Baker confirm that literary festivals and agents have expressed reluctance to read or publish COVID fiction. Professor Easthope explained that many people just don’t feel ready to read about the pandemic.

    For Baker, it’s that many people simply find the associations too traumatic. However, judging from the reactions of cinema-goers when I saw 28 Years Later, there is an audience hungry for another serving of Boyle’s insatiable trilogy.

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

    – ref. The spectacular frenzy of 28 Years Later offers a new breed of pandemic storytelling – https://theconversation.com/the-spectacular-frenzy-of-28-years-later-offers-a-new-breed-of-pandemic-storytelling-259579

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Why it can be harder to sleep during the summer – and what you can do about it

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Timothy Hearn, Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Anglia Ruskin University

    The amount of daylight we get in the summer can seriously mess with our body clock. Lysenko Andrii/ Shutterstock

    As the days stretch long and the sun lingers late into the evening, most of us welcome summer with open arms. Yet for a surprising number of people, this season brings an unwelcome guest: insomnia.

    For these people, summer is a time of tossing and turning, early waking – or simply not feeling sleepy when they should. Far from just being a nuisance, this seasonal insomnia may chip away at mood, concentration and metabolic health.

    But why does insomnia spike in summer — and more importantly, what can be done about it? The answer lies in the light.

    Every tissue in the body owns a molecular “clock”. However, these clocks take their cue from a central timekeeper – the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus. This cluster of about 20,000 neurons synchronises the myriad cellular clocks to a near 24-hour cycle.

    It uses the external light detected by the eyes as a cue, driving the release of two different hormones: melatonin, which makes us sleepy and a pre-dawn surge cortisol to help us wake.

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

    In winter, this light cue is short and sharp. But in June and July, daylight can stretch on for 16 or 17 hours in the mid‑latitudes. That extra dose matters because evening light is the most potent signal for pushing the central timekeeper later. In summer melatonin shifts by roughly 30 minutes to an hour later, while dawn light floods bedrooms early and kills the hormone off sooner.

    This can have a big effect on the amount of sleep we get. One study monitored the sleep of 188 participants in the lab on three nights at different times of the year. The researchers found that total sleep was about an hour shorter in summer than winter.

    Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — the sleep stage most strongly linked to emotional regulation and the consolidation of emotionally charged memories — accounted for roughly half the sleep loss in summer.

    The same team later tracked 377 patients over two consecutive years and showed that sleep length and REM sleep began a five‑month decline soon after the last freezing night of spring. Sleep length shrank by an average of 62 minutes, while REM decreased by about 24 minutes. Slow-wave sleep – the phase most critical for tissue repair, immune regulation and the consolidation of factual memories – reached its annual low around the autumn equinox.

    Both studies took place in a city bathed in artificial light – suggesting that even in modern environments our sleep remains seasonally affected.

    Big population surveys echo these findings. Among more than 30,000 middle‑aged Canadians, volunteers interviewed in midsummer said they slept eight minutes less than those interviewed in midwinter. The summer interviewees also reported greater insomnia symptoms in the fortnight after the autumn clock change – suggesting the abrupt time shift exacerbates underlying seasonal misalignment.

    One study also compared the effect of summer sleep in people living at very different latitudes – such as near the equator, where there’s little change in day length in the summer, and near the Arctic circle, where the differences are extreme. The study found that for people living in Tromsø, Norway, their self-reported insomnia and daytime fatigue rose markedly in summer. But for people living in Accra, Ghana (near the equator), these measures barely budged.

    This show just how strongly daylight – and the amount of daylight hours we experience – can affect our sleep quality. But it isn’t the only culprit of poor summertime sleep.

    The warm temperatures can also interrupt our sleep.
    antoniodiaz/ Shutterstock

    Temperature is another factor that can spoil sleep during the summer months.

    Just before we fall asleep, our core body temperature begins a steep descent of roughly 1°C to help us fall asleep. It reaches its lowest point during the first half of the night.

    On muggy summer nights this can make falling asleep difficult. Laboratory experiments show that even a rise from 26°C to about 32°C increases wakefulness and reduces both slow-wave and REM sleep.

    Different people are also more vulnerable to summer insomnia than others. This has to do with your unique “chronotype” – your natural preference to rise early or sleep late.

    Evening chronotypes – “night owls” – already lean towards later bedtimes. They may stay up even later when it stays bright past ten o’clock. Morning chronotypes, on the other hand, may find themselves waking up even earlier than they normally do because of when the sun rises in the summer.

    Mood can amplify the effect. Research found people who suffered with mental health issues were more likely to experience difficulty sleeping in summer.

    Chronic anxiety, alcohol use and certain prescription drugs — notably beta blockers, which suppress melatonin — can all make sleep more elusive in summer.

    Reclaiming summer sleep

    Happily, there are many ways of fixing the issue.

    • Get some morning sunshine. Try to step outside within an hour of waking up – even if it’s just for 15 minutes. This tells the clock that the day has begun and nudges it to finish earlier that evening.

    • Create an artificial dusk. Around two hours before bed, close the curtains, turn off the lights and reduce the intensity of your phone screen’s blue light to help your melatonin rise on time.

    • Don’t let the dawn light in. Being exposed to the dawn light too early will wake you up. Blackout curtains or a contoured eye-mask can ensure you don’t wake before you’re rested.

    • Keep things cool. Fans, breathable cotton or linen sheets or a lukewarm shower before bed all help the body to achieve that crucial one-degree drop in core temperature needed to get a good night’s sleep.

    The deeper lesson here from chronobiology is that humans remain, biologically speaking, seasonal animals. While our industrialised lives flatten the calendar, our cells still measure day length and temperature just as plants and migratory birds do.

    By adapting and aligning our habits with those light signals, we might just be able to recapture some sleep – even during the warmer months.

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

    – ref. Why it can be harder to sleep during the summer – and what you can do about it – https://theconversation.com/why-it-can-be-harder-to-sleep-during-the-summer-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-259292

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Why it can be harder to sleep during the summer – and what you can do about it

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Timothy Hearn, Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Anglia Ruskin University

    The amount of daylight we get in the summer can seriously mess with our body clock. Lysenko Andrii/ Shutterstock

    As the days stretch long and the sun lingers late into the evening, most of us welcome summer with open arms. Yet for a surprising number of people, this season brings an unwelcome guest: insomnia.

    For these people, summer is a time of tossing and turning, early waking – or simply not feeling sleepy when they should. Far from just being a nuisance, this seasonal insomnia may chip away at mood, concentration and metabolic health.

    But why does insomnia spike in summer — and more importantly, what can be done about it? The answer lies in the light.

    Every tissue in the body owns a molecular “clock”. However, these clocks take their cue from a central timekeeper – the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus. This cluster of about 20,000 neurons synchronises the myriad cellular clocks to a near 24-hour cycle.

    It uses the external light detected by the eyes as a cue, driving the release of two different hormones: melatonin, which makes us sleepy and a pre-dawn surge cortisol to help us wake.

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

    In winter, this light cue is short and sharp. But in June and July, daylight can stretch on for 16 or 17 hours in the mid‑latitudes. That extra dose matters because evening light is the most potent signal for pushing the central timekeeper later. In summer melatonin shifts by roughly 30 minutes to an hour later, while dawn light floods bedrooms early and kills the hormone off sooner.

    This can have a big effect on the amount of sleep we get. One study monitored the sleep of 188 participants in the lab on three nights at different times of the year. The researchers found that total sleep was about an hour shorter in summer than winter.

    Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — the sleep stage most strongly linked to emotional regulation and the consolidation of emotionally charged memories — accounted for roughly half the sleep loss in summer.

    The same team later tracked 377 patients over two consecutive years and showed that sleep length and REM sleep began a five‑month decline soon after the last freezing night of spring. Sleep length shrank by an average of 62 minutes, while REM decreased by about 24 minutes. Slow-wave sleep – the phase most critical for tissue repair, immune regulation and the consolidation of factual memories – reached its annual low around the autumn equinox.

    Both studies took place in a city bathed in artificial light – suggesting that even in modern environments our sleep remains seasonally affected.

    Big population surveys echo these findings. Among more than 30,000 middle‑aged Canadians, volunteers interviewed in midsummer said they slept eight minutes less than those interviewed in midwinter. The summer interviewees also reported greater insomnia symptoms in the fortnight after the autumn clock change – suggesting the abrupt time shift exacerbates underlying seasonal misalignment.

    One study also compared the effect of summer sleep in people living at very different latitudes – such as near the equator, where there’s little change in day length in the summer, and near the Arctic circle, where the differences are extreme. The study found that for people living in Tromsø, Norway, their self-reported insomnia and daytime fatigue rose markedly in summer. But for people living in Accra, Ghana (near the equator), these measures barely budged.

    This show just how strongly daylight – and the amount of daylight hours we experience – can affect our sleep quality. But it isn’t the only culprit of poor summertime sleep.

    The warm temperatures can also interrupt our sleep.
    antoniodiaz/ Shutterstock

    Temperature is another factor that can spoil sleep during the summer months.

    Just before we fall asleep, our core body temperature begins a steep descent of roughly 1°C to help us fall asleep. It reaches its lowest point during the first half of the night.

    On muggy summer nights this can make falling asleep difficult. Laboratory experiments show that even a rise from 26°C to about 32°C increases wakefulness and reduces both slow-wave and REM sleep.

    Different people are also more vulnerable to summer insomnia than others. This has to do with your unique “chronotype” – your natural preference to rise early or sleep late.

    Evening chronotypes – “night owls” – already lean towards later bedtimes. They may stay up even later when it stays bright past ten o’clock. Morning chronotypes, on the other hand, may find themselves waking up even earlier than they normally do because of when the sun rises in the summer.

    Mood can amplify the effect. Research found people who suffered with mental health issues were more likely to experience difficulty sleeping in summer.

    Chronic anxiety, alcohol use and certain prescription drugs — notably beta blockers, which suppress melatonin — can all make sleep more elusive in summer.

    Reclaiming summer sleep

    Happily, there are many ways of fixing the issue.

    • Get some morning sunshine. Try to step outside within an hour of waking up – even if it’s just for 15 minutes. This tells the clock that the day has begun and nudges it to finish earlier that evening.

    • Create an artificial dusk. Around two hours before bed, close the curtains, turn off the lights and reduce the intensity of your phone screen’s blue light to help your melatonin rise on time.

    • Don’t let the dawn light in. Being exposed to the dawn light too early will wake you up. Blackout curtains or a contoured eye-mask can ensure you don’t wake before you’re rested.

    • Keep things cool. Fans, breathable cotton or linen sheets or a lukewarm shower before bed all help the body to achieve that crucial one-degree drop in core temperature needed to get a good night’s sleep.

    The deeper lesson here from chronobiology is that humans remain, biologically speaking, seasonal animals. While our industrialised lives flatten the calendar, our cells still measure day length and temperature just as plants and migratory birds do.

    By adapting and aligning our habits with those light signals, we might just be able to recapture some sleep – even during the warmer months.

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

    – ref. Why it can be harder to sleep during the summer – and what you can do about it – https://theconversation.com/why-it-can-be-harder-to-sleep-during-the-summer-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-259292

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Assisted dying: what happens now the House of Lords has the bill?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel Gover, Senior Lecturer in British Politics, Queen Mary University of London

    The House of Lords will now scrutinise the bill. Flickr/House of Lords , CC BY-NC-ND

    MPs have voted to introduce assisted dying, almost seven months after this bill was first debated in the House of Commons. The proposal – a backbench private member’s bill promoted by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater – would allow terminally ill people in England and Wales to receive assistance to end their lives.

    That the bill has completed its House of Commons passage is an important milestone. Its success is perhaps also surprising given that private members’ bills face a precarious route through that chamber. Even a small number of determined opponents is often enough to derail them.

    Want more politics coverage from academic experts? Every week, we bring you informed analysis of developments in government and fact check the claims being made.

    Sign up for our weekly politics newsletter, delivered every Friday.

    But that has not materialised in this case. MPs on all sides of the debate deserve credit for enabling the bill to be decided on its merits rather than by procedural subterfuge and political game-playing.

    Even so, the bill’s passage into law is not yet assured. It must now go through an equivalent series of legislative stages in the House of Lords. If the Lords makes any changes, these must in turn be agreed to by MPs – potentially setting off a process of compromise known as “ping-pong” – before the bill can enter the statute book.

    This has led to speculation around whether the Lords could block the legislation.

    Unlikely to block the bill outright

    Stereotypes of the Lords as a holdout of social conservatism are now largely out of date. Indeed it is the Lords that has, to a large extent, kept the issue of assisted dying on the political agenda. Prior to Leadbeater’s bill, peers proposed a series of private members’ bills on this topic – including in 2014, 2020, 2021 and 2024. None, however, made it through the chamber.

    Despite this recent history, it is difficult to predict exactly how the Lords will respond to this assisted dying bill. As an unelected and largely appointed chamber, the Lords contains many members with expertise directly relevant to the bill, including medical, legal and disability rights. For many peers, the Lords’ central constitutional purpose is to subject proposals to in-depth scrutiny – and they will surely want to do so here.

    In principle, it would be possible for the Lords to reject the assisted dying bill outright. The often-cited Salisbury convention, which states that peers should not block any proposal in the governing party’s election manifesto, would clearly not apply to this backbench measure.

    Yet such an outcome would appear unlikely. In practice, it is exceptionally rare for any bill to be rejected outright by peers. This is in large part because the chamber recognises that it should be for the elected House of Commons to set the direction of policy, with the Lords playing a supporting scrutiny role.

    Whatever the chamber’s balance of opinion on assisted dying – and some peers may well be individually willing to vote it down – the chamber as a whole seems likely to conclude that they would be playing with constitutional fire to reject such a high-profile bill that has been passed on a free vote by MPs.

    In-depth scrutiny

    What is more difficult to call is whether the bill could run out of time before it has completed its passage. The last time an assisted dying bill made significant progress in the Lords, a decade ago, it became mired in hundreds of amendments and never made it out of committee stage.

    Given the gravity of this bill, and the degree of Lords expertise, there is likely to be significant demand to conduct in-depth scrutiny and to make amendments to the legislative text. Unlike in the House of Commons – where only a small number of amendments are selected by the speaker for a decision – in the Lords, every proposed amendment can be moved and spoken to. All of this will require parliamentary time.

    It is also theoretically possible that a small number of opponents could deliberately propose large numbers of amendments purely to gum up proceedings. Most of the time, peers act with restraint – and they would probably do so here too, given the high risk of generating backlash against the chamber. But the combination of strong feelings with a “free-vote” conscience issue makes this harder to definitively rule out.

    Adding to the unpredictability is that the timetables available remain uncertain. If the Lords makes any changes to the bill these would need to return to MPs for approval before the bill can pass into law. As things stand, the last available Commons sitting Friday – by default there are only 13 each session, when private members’ bills are considered – is July 11. There is now next to no chance of this deadline being met.

    A tight timetable

    It is possible in principle for the Lords to expedite scrutiny of the bill. But House of Lords procedures recommend observing minimum periods between bill stages. This ensures there is time, for example, to consider the issues raised at one stage before deciding whether to pursue them further at the next.

    Departing from these conventions would be politically unthinkable on a bill criticised by many – largely unfairly – for inadequate parliamentary scrutiny.

    Yet it is straightforward for ministers to grant additional time in the Commons. Indeed, it would arguably break with recent practice for time to not be provided. In both cases since 2010 where a regular private member’s bill required additional Commons time for Lords amendments – in 2019 and 2023 – this was provided by the then Conservative governments.

    This means that the second key deadline is the end of the current parliamentary session, at which point most outstanding legislation automatically falls. Sessions typically last around one year, and some had expected this one to end sometime in the autumn.

    But the length of sessions is elastic – within the control of ministers – and it is not unusual for those immediately after a general election to last significantly longer.

    Nor does the Lords operate the same system of private members’ bill Fridays as the Commons, though it would be unusual to schedule substantive debates on them earlier in the week. Either way, there would surely be pressure for sufficient parliamentary time to be found.

    Ultimately, one of the stories of this bill’s passage to date has been that the constraints of an often-inadequate parliamentary process have not been allowed to prevent MPs from expressing their will. Many in the Lords will recognise the risks of any situation in which they are now seen to stand in its way.

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

    – ref. Assisted dying: what happens now the House of Lords has the bill? – https://theconversation.com/assisted-dying-what-happens-now-the-house-of-lords-has-the-bill-259572

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Who is Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sahar Maranlou, Lecturer in Law and Socio-legal Studies, Royal Holloway University of London

    Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1939, as the second son of a local religious leader, Javad Khamenei, and he grew up in relative poverty.

    He learned to read the Qur’an in early childhood before attending a theological seminary school in Mashhad. At 18, he travelled to Najaf in central Iraq to study Shia jurisprudence, but was later asked by his father to return. He was a student of Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

    There is not much known about Khamenei’s family life, except that he is married and has six children. Khamenei’s interest in poetry is a well-known part of his public persona. He often cites poems in his speeches and hosts poetry gatherings where pro-government poets gather to read their poems to receive his comments. Khamenei’s interest in literature is quite rare among religious clerics. The same goes for his interest in gardening.

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    In the 1960s and 1970s Khamenei was involved in protests against the US-backed monarchy (the shah), and was an ardent supporter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then living in exile, and against the “westernisation” of Iran. This led to his arrest by the shah’s secret police and intelligence operation, the Organisation of National Security and Information (Savak), which suppressed opposition to the shah.

    Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the monarch who ruled Iran until 1979, was backed by western powers including the US and the UK. After a decade of economic growth in Iran, mainly based on oil revenues, did not lead to an improvement in the standard of living for ordinary Iranians, a combination of students, intellectuals and clerics created combined support for a revolution.

    After the shah was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, Iran became an Islamic republic. Khamenei was appointed as a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Council, which was put in place to manage the revolution, and served as deputy defence minister and led Friday prayers in Tehran, which was considered highly prestigious.

    The new republic adopted an anti-western “imperialist” foreign policy. This is known as “global arrogance” (Estekbar Jahani) in Iranian post-revolutionary discourse.

    In 1982, he was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, winning 95% of the vote, after the previous president, Mohammad Ali Rajai, was killed in a bomb attack in Tehran. Khamenei had been the target of an assassination attempt two months earlier, leaving him with serious injuries and paralysis in his right arm.

    Iran’s supreme leaders reacts to air strikes by Israel and US rhetoric.

    Iran’s war with neighbouring Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, lasted from 1980 to 1988 and is known in Iran as the “sacred defence”. The war began after an invasion by Iraqi troops on Iranian territory and resulted in around one million deaths across both countries.

    This was another significant period in Khamenei’s career. He was active in managing Iran’s defence as the chairman of the supreme council of war support during this period. The council was formed to make sure the country was as prepared as possible during the war and to take measures to mobilise forces and to meet the needs of the war at the battlefront.



    Read more:
    Why Israel’s air strikes signal a shifting relationship with the US and a weakening Iran

    He also commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite part of the Iranian armed forces, from 1981. At the end of the war, Khamenei claimed Iran had won a “luminous victory”.

    He praised Khomeini for his tactics in the war and said that the supreme leader had realised from the very beginning that it was not an ordinary conflict between two neighbours. “He recognised the enemy and realised that the main enemy is not present in the war, and he recognised that Saddam is just a tool.”

    He went on to suggest that this was a war about US regional power and that Saddam Hussein would continue to receive US support.

    Rising to supreme leadership

    Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989 after the death of Khomeini. He was designated as the new leader by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of Islamic clerics. He ruled in the same style, and with the same type of foreign policy, as his predecessor; looking for allies to offset US power in the region.

    The duties designated for the rahbar (supreme leader) are listed in Article 101 of the constitution and range from determining the political direction of the government (in consultation with an advisory committee) to commanding the armed forces to declaring war, peace, and the mobilisation of armed forces to pardoning or commuting sentences upon recommendation of the head of the judiciary.

    Khomeini’s conception of Islamic government was centred on the doctrine of the guardianship of “the jurist”, known as velayat-e faqih, and this continued at the heart of the government that followed under Khamenei. This gives the supreme leader extensive powers, including control over the military, judiciary and media.

    This doctrine plays a vital role in legitimising theocratic power in Iran, linking religious authority with the state. Discussion about velayat-e faqih continues within Iranian society as part of an ongoing dialogue between traditional religious authority and civil society.



    Read more:
    Trump’s unpredictable approach to Iran could seriously backfire

    The question of who might come to power after Khamenei was raised during the grassroots uprising and pro-democracy protests around Iran in 2022 and 2023. It was expected that any transition would take a considerable amount of time, especially if the aim was for a more democratic form of government.

    The current war might suggest a different outcome. Even though the Israeli attacks on Iran have again sparked discussion of a possible change of leader, the public is focused now on their own safety, and defending Iran, not on political change.

    Any external war or threats coming from outside Iran has historically united Iranians against aggressors. This means that the path to democratic change is not likely to be created, or helped, by Israeli air strikes or US threats.

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

    – ref. Who is Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? – https://theconversation.com/who-is-irans-leader-ayatollah-ali-khamenei-259424

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Hidden gems of LGBTQ+ cinema: celebrating the wonderful slippery queerness of Penda’s Fen

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Benedict Morrison, Senior lecturer in Film, Television, Literature, and Queer Studies, University of Exeter

    I was not around in 1974 to witness the first television outing of Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen. Broadcast only seven years after sex between men was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, this enigmatic film was beamed into the nation’s living rooms with an audacity that remains giddying today.

    Some commentators have suggested that the film “seems a world away” from the gritty social commentary of Clarke’s Scum (1977) and The Firm (1989). But Penda’s Fen recognises that unruly desire – manifested within the film in Blakean visions of angels, demons and the pagan King Penda – is political.

    Stephen, a classical music-loving, left-wing-despising rector’s son, lives among the green and pleasant Malvern Hills, where he plays at being an impeccably uniformed cadet and struggles to suppress his delirious sexual desire for other boys.

    This article is part of a series highlighting brilliant films that should be more widely known and firmly part of the canon of queer cinema .

    In his visions, the path of least resistance – that of being the young man everyone wants him to be – is championed by the sinister figures of the Mother and Father of England (modelled on conservative activist Mary Whitehouse and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge). This path would offer him “the right to inherit power”.

    But playing the role of the straight, conventional boy weighs heavily on Stephen, and he slips further from the narratives he longs to believe in. Haunted by a series of real and imagined encounters with angels, demons and England’s pagan past, Stephen begins to questions all he knows about himself – his religion, politics and sexuality.

    When I finally saw Penda’s Fen after its re-release by the BFI in 2016, it was uncannily familiar. Like Stephen, I grew up as the gay son of a rector in the rural West Midlands, torn between the lures and impossibilities of sexual convention.

    The political rhetoric of the LGBT+ community in the 1990s created social impact by speaking in very clear terms about non-straight identities. This rhetoric, for the sake of clarity, often offered narrow definitions of the characteristics and attributes that made someone definitively LGBT+.

    But it did lead to progress, featuring in campaigns for the repeal of section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which banned any affirmative presentation of homosexuality by local authorities, including schools. It also was used in campaigns that led to the lowering of the age of consent for gay sex to 16, in line with heterosexual sex.

    However, this narrow view left me with an uncomfortable sense that my inconsistencies and contradictions meant that I was never quite, never just, gay. Despite being a valuable term as I came out and claimed a social identity and a community, it failed to capture the complexities of my experience in a single word.

    These inconsistencies and complexities shine in queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s not-quite-definition of “queer”: “The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”



    Read more:
    Hidden gems of LGBTQ+ cinema: Saving Face is a complicated romcom that tenderly depicts the experiences of queer Asians

    Sedgwick suggests that queerness is a kind of structural messiness; far from being a neat summing-up of someone’s identity, it is where the desires and behaviours which make up a person’s sexuality don’t quite add up, and so escape full understanding.

    Loving your own strangeness

    For me, the greatest queer films are not those which seek to confirm the myth of stable identity but, instead, open these meshes of possibility. I know of no film which does this better than Penda’s Fen.

    When the film begins, Stephen stamps out all his flickering desires. He clings to clear-cut notions of gender, sex and nation, the three pillars that will secure his power as a man in society.

    By the end, he has encountered the ghost of the composer Elgar, fantasised about schoolmates in homoerotic rugby scrums, and discovered that he is adopted and less English than he imagined. In this “Gnostic anarcho-punk anti-pastoral visionary work of English art”, as the writer Gary Budden calls it, all Stephen’s certainties shatter.

    As he ultimately stands in the hills’ high places, tempted by the Mother and Father of England to repress confusion and embrace their idea of normality in a folk-horror echo of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, his rejection becomes a radiant queer manifesto:

    “I am … nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness … I am mud and flame!”

    Mud and flame is what I was as a teenager living in the shadow of those same hills: the earthy and the fiery, the tangible and the transcendent, the banal and the radical, the secure and the lost. This was – although I didn’t realise it at the time – queerness, a word theorist Lee Edelman writes “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one”.

    No film that I know captures this sense of slipping, sliding, desiring self so well as Penda’s Fen. Everyone who has ever felt the constituent parts of their own sexuality refusing to align should watch the film and fall in love with their own strangeness.

    Penda’s Fen, like queerness, resists specific interpretation. It is telling that the visionary commissioning editor David Rose, who oversaw the BBC Birmingham drama department and greenlit Penda’s Fen, confessed that he “didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be”. This attitude is unimaginable in commissioners today.

    Clarke’s film is a blend of folk horror motifs, the politics of society and character-driven drama that cracks open meaning just as the church floor fractures when Stephen plays the organ discordantly.

    Viewers new to the film should experience its extraordinary final sequence without spoilers, but I will say that the closing images of Stephen – that
    “strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant” protagonist – offer me the thrill of queerness’s unsettled, unsettle-able politics.

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

    – ref. Hidden gems of LGBTQ+ cinema: celebrating the wonderful slippery queerness of Penda’s Fen – https://theconversation.com/hidden-gems-of-lgbtq-cinema-celebrating-the-wonderful-slippery-queerness-of-pendas-fen-257299

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Elio: Disney’s enjoyable new animation may be an original story – but it’s also a forgettable one

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura O’Flanagan, PhD Candidate, School of English, Dublin City University

    In a summer cinema release schedule filled with sequels, remakes and franchise instalments, Disney’s latest animation Elio is a rare original story.

    Recently, much has been written and hands been wrung about the lack of original films in Hollywood. Indeed, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced in 2024 that the studio’s output would primarily be sequels, saying: “There’s a lot of value in the sequels obviously because they’re known and it takes less in terms of marketing”. At least he’s honest.

    Elio is an unknown entity for the studio and indeed for 2025’s cinema goers. Fittingly, the film tackles the most unknown entities of all: outer space and life beyond Earth. What does this new story have to offer today’s cinema audiences who are accustomed to characters they already know and onscreen worlds that they have already visited?

    Elio tells the story of Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab), a lonely newly orphaned boy who is fascinated with space and aliens. He lives in California with his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldana), a major in the US Air Force.

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    When aliens make contact one night, Elio secretly answers their call and is brought to the “Communiverse” in outer space, a brightly coloured world that is populated with aliens. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s leader, Elio is tasked with solving an intergalactic crisis in this new alien world – a world in which he increasingly feels he belongs. Elio needs to decide whether to leave Earth forever, or if there is no place like home.

    Characteristic of Disney (Pixar), the film’s visuals are audaciously stunning. Space is depicted as a twinkling magical canvas upon which Elio can dream, and sweeping, majestic images of Earth beg to be seen on a large cinema screen. The Communiverse is depicted beautifully in iridescent colours. But, against this spectacular setting, the characters ring a little hollow.

    Elio is given little emotional depth, and in the Communiverse there are simply too many aliens for an audience to connect with. Elio’s new friend Glorgon is the exception here, and his open-hearted comedic wonder will certainly appeal to younger viewers. Aunt Olga is disappointingly underdeveloped and her status as a military major is presented as at odds with her new role as Elio’s caregiver.

    The film forgoes much of Olga’s story in favour of a zany subplot between Glorgon and his alien father who need to reconnect. This feels like a missed opportunity and a superficial effort to depict a female character of high military rank that falls short of giving her any real agency or power in the film.

    Strikingly, the filmmakers use audio clips of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos to amplify the film’s message about life and connection. These are accompanied with spectacular visuals of space and constellations. But these audio clips have a solemnity that seems out of place alongside an alien blob called Glorgon who has daddy issues.

    This oddness of tone is woven throughout the film, laced with peril that feels unthreatening, comedic moments which stop before the belly laugh, and sentimental scenes that cut before the tears flow. Characters and plotlines are plentiful but consequently, the film spreads itself too thin, leaving the entire story feeling underdeveloped and somewhat shallow.

    There is a lot of everything in this film, and certainly something for everyone. And maybe that’s the point. In the past two decades, we’ve moved from a shared cultural canon to a stratified ecosystem of personalised content streams.

    In this entertainment landscape, a film like Elio could appeal to everyone a little bit, rather than become anyone’s firm favourite. Everyone in the family will enjoy a part of this film, albeit different parts. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where Elio’s clone is living on Earth.

    This may well be Disney’s strategy: to release an original story with broad appeal in order to mitigate the risks associated with untested stories and characters. This may prove financially viable initially, but will it create films with enduring legacies that generate franchises and spawn sequels?

    I fear Elio will not. The film provides little more than a passable afternoon at the cinema. It is pleasant, forgettable and safe – unlikely to live in the memory to “infinity and beyond”, like previous Disney releases.

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

    – ref. Elio: Disney’s enjoyable new animation may be an original story – but it’s also a forgettable one – https://theconversation.com/elio-disneys-enjoyable-new-animation-may-be-an-original-story-but-its-also-a-forgettable-one-259213

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Trump’s first term lies at the heart of escalation between Iran and Israel

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christian Emery, Associate Professor in International Politics, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL

    The US president, Donald Trump, is weighing up whether to join Israel in attacking Iran. The fact he is even contemplating such a move is, in my opinion, a direct consequence of his 2018 decision to tear up the agreement negotiated during Barack Obama’s presidency that limited Iran’s nuclear capabilities in return for sanctions relief.

    Trump not only squandered the opportunity to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions severely. He also shut the door on showing Iran that diplomacy and economic development could offer a more promising path than proxy warfare.

    The Obama administration’s core strategic rationale behind the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA), was that amid several devastating regional wars and an American public weary of costly military interventions, a war with Iran would be disastrous. This was especially true given the growing US desire to pivot toward containing China.

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    Obama challenged opponents of the deal to propose a credible alternative. And Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed US Congress to make the case against the JCPOA. He argued that it would not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

    But Obama ultimately succeeded in persuading the American public that the only real alternative to a negotiated agreement with Iran was yet another war in the Middle East.

    Trump believed that exiting the JCPOA and crushing the Iranian economy would either force the regime to accept major restrictions on its nuclear programme and moderate its regional behaviour, or cause the entire theocratic system to collapse.

    What followed instead was a sharp escalation of tensions in the Persian Gulf. Iran exercised greater reliance on its regional proxy network, with attacks on US personnel increasing. It simultaneously increased its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

    When Trump took office in 2017, the JCPOA had already eliminated 98% of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile. It also capped enrichment at 3.7%, well below the level required for a nuclear bomb.

    The situation has changed since Trump’s withdrawal. Israel’s central justification for launching its attack against Iran on June 15 was the International Atomic Energy Agency’s determination that Iran had now amassed over 408kg of uranium enriched up to 60%. Netanyahu claimed that Iran could be “within a few months” of producing a nuclear weapon.

    However, even with these serious violations, US intelligence has consistently stated that Iran is not actively pursuing such a weapon. It recently assessed that, even if Iran decided to do so, it was up to three years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon that it could deliver to a target of its choosing.

    Netanyahu may have wanted to attack Iran anyway. He has repeatedly claimed over the past 15 years that immediate military action was needed to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

    But it would have been harder to justify an attack on Iran if it possessed no highly enriched uranium and was verifiably complying with the JCPOA. Iran had stuck to the JCPOA for four years, including one year after the US withdrew, and there is no evidence to suggest it wouldn’t have kept to a deal that Iran clearly saw as being in its interests.

    Maximum pressure campaign

    Iran’s developing nuclear programme may be the immediate pretext for the current escalation. But Iran’s proxy warfare strategy, using regional militant groups to fight Israel and serve as pressure points it can activate when threatened, forms the other essential backdrop.

    This strategy pre-dates the Trump administration. But Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign clearly escalated tensions in the Middle East, making direct confrontation between Israel and Iran more likely.

    When Trump enacted sanctions aiming to eliminate Iran’s oil and gas exports, Tehran retaliated by using its strategic position in the Strait of Hormuz to harass Gulf shipping. In September 2019, an Iranian drone attack on a Saudi oil processing facility temporarily took out 50% of Saudi oil production.

    Iran would normally have zero interest in disrupting Gulf shipping. This is because its own gas and oil must travel through the Strait of Hormuz. But its strategy was to deter Trump’s economic warfare by showing that it would not be the only one to suffer.

    Tehran unsurprisingly viewed Trump’s policy as an attempt to deliver regime change and responded by doubling down on its “forward defence” strategy. Iran increased its military, financial and political backing of proxy groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. And it also continued development of its ballistic missile programme.

    Before 2018, the US estimated that Iran was sending about US$200 million (£148 million) annually to the Lebanese armed group, Hezbollah. By 2020, it was sending US$700 million.

    Trump’s repudiation of the JCPOA also critically damaged more moderate voices in Iran. In 2017, the success of the JCPOA helped propel reformist president Hassan Rouhani to a second term in office. However, in 2021, the regime prevented key moderate figures from standing.

    Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner who had lost against Rouhani in 2017 and was already under US sanctions, was elected as Iran’s president. Raisi and his faction demanded tougher terms for any future nuclear deal – more sanctions relief upfront and binding guarantees against another US withdrawal.

    This frustrated attempts to revive the agreement under Joe Biden’s presidency, as only Congress could offer such guarantees. This was an improbable prospect amid escalating tensions with a more hostile, nuclear-advanced Iran that was increasingly aligning with Russia.

    None of this absolves Iran of its own intransigence, support for terrorism or brutalisation of its own citizens. Nor does it free the Islamic Republic of criticism over its decision to abandon the nuclear limits agreed under the JCPOA – even if it was the US that first broke the deal.

    Ultimately, though, the conditions that led to this war would almost certainly not have arisen without Trump’s mishandling of Iran policy in his first administration. It was a precursor to the abysmal leadership he’s demonstrating in this war.

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

    – ref. Trump’s first term lies at the heart of escalation between Iran and Israel – https://theconversation.com/trumps-first-term-lies-at-the-heart-of-escalation-between-iran-and-israel-259199

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: How mice ‘listen’ with their whiskers

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tommi Anttonen, Postdoctoral research associate, University of Oxford

    Bilanol/Shutterstock

    Oh no! You dropped your keys on the ground, and it is too dark to see them. You might have to feel the ground with your hands, but a mouse could use its whiskers to find the keys.

    Mouse whiskers, also known as the vibrissa system, are long facial hairs which are sensitive to touch and allow mice to feel around their environment. As a whisker touches something, the sensory neurons at the hair follicle activate. These neurons send electrical signals to the animal’s central nervous system, which interprets them into information about the features of the environment.

    But a recent study by neuroscience PhD candidate Ben Efron and his colleagues suggested that mice may use their whiskers to explore their surroundings in ways other than the sense of touch.

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

    The sensory system of mice is especially useful for nocturnal animals like mice that navigate in lightless burrows and in the dark corners of our houses. Mice can use specialised muscles to move their whiskers in patterns. They can also do this by turning their head. This behaviour is called whisking. Rodents use various whisking patterns depending on whether it is running, turning or examining an object. The faster the mouse runs, the faster the whisker movements are.

    The researchers behind the new study noticed that mouse whiskers make subtle sounds when they touch surfaces. They measured the electrical activity of neurons in the auditory cortex (a brain area that processes sound) of whisking mice and discovered that these sounds induce brain activity.

    This happened even when the nerve connection that conveys touch sensation from the whiskers to the brain was cut, suggesting that mice can detect these sounds as a separate sensory input with their auditory system. The researchers also trained mice to recognise specific surfaces solely based on the sounds that their whiskers produced.

    Scientists generally have believed that whiskers only help mice explore their surrounding via touch. But these results indicate whiskers provide sound information to mice too. Whether other animals with whiskers can do this too remains to be studied.

    Integrating information from several senses in this way may help animals make a more accurate interpretation of the world around them. Like mice with their whiskers, you can acquire multisensory information about the location of your lost keys with your hands. You might not identify them based on how they feel when you tap them but the familiar sound of the keys jingling would tell you that you have found them.

    Every animal perceives the world differently through the unique combination of the senses that they have. There is a secret world of sounds and vibrations around us that we cannot experience.

    The way mice in the recent study identified objects based on sounds resembles, in part, echolocation that some bats and aquatic mammals like dolphins use for navigation. Echolocating bats produce ultrasounds – meaning that they are too high in frequency for humans to hear them – which reflect from surrounding surfaces. Bats can navigate their way in total darkness and detect prey such as moths by listening to these echoes.

    Moths in turn have evolved acoustic defenses against echolocating bats which include the ability to detect ultrasounds, acoustic camouflage (wing scales that reduce ultrasonic echoes), decoy structures (elongated wingtips that misguide the bats to attack away from the body of the moth) and emitting ultrasounds that compromise bat echolocation.

    Lunar moth tails make an acoustic signal that seems to make bats zero in on the tail rather than more vital body parts.
    Jay Ondreicka/Shutterstock

    Elephants make vocalisations known as rumbles that are infrasonic, meaning that they are too low in frequency for humans to hear them. Elephants, however, seem to use rumbles for long distance communication. Rumbles travel through air as sound signals and through the ground as seismic signals which can travel up to 6km.

    It’s not completely clear how elephants detect seismic signals. Detection may happen through vibration-sensitive organs in their feet and/or through bone conduction hearing. During bone conduction hearing, vibrations do not enter the inner ear as airborne sounds but as vibrations of bones and tissues. You can experience this by placing a vibrating tuning fork on the bony part of your head behind your ear or on your tooth. Suddenly, you can hear the tuning fork vibrating loudly.

    Why should we be interested in this secret world that cannot be detected by human senses? First, human-generated environmental change, which includes noise pollution, poses significant threats to many species and ecosystems.

    For example, maritime noise interferes with sound communication of whales and dolphins while human-made noise on land disturbs nesting birds. To protect animals from these harmful effects, we need to understand how their sensory systems are affected.

    Secondly, bio-inspired innovations are waiting to be discovered. So keep in mind next time when parking a car with ultrasound-based parking sensors that echolocating bats have had access to this navigation technique for more than tens of millions of years.

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

    – ref. How mice ‘listen’ with their whiskers – https://theconversation.com/how-mice-listen-with-their-whiskers-257650

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: What is an ‘alpha’ male?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jwana Aziz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham

    AS Inc/Shutterstock

    The recent success of the Netflix show Adolescence has drawn attention to misogynistic rhetoric and how it spreads online. Safeline, an organisation supporting survivors of sexual abuse, has warned that terms like “high-value” and “low-value men” (also described as “alpha” and “beta” men) are being used to radicalise boys, drawing them into embracing such rhetoric.

    Last year, Elon Musk shared a post that argued only “high T alpha males” – men with high testosterone levels – can think freely and are most qualified to lead and govern. Relevant here is the reach of influencers like Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who, with his brother, is now facing 21 charges in the UK including rape and human trafficking, all of which they deny.

    What do these terms mean, and how harmful are they?

    The terms alpha and beta male are pseudoscientific terms used to push a concept of masculinity as necessarily hierarchical and aggressive. The theory frames the ideal of a man as someone who is financially successful, assertive, strong, logical and a “natural” leader.


    Boys and girls are together facing an uncertain world. But research shows they are diverging when it comes to attitudes about masculinity, feminism and gender equality.

    Social media, politics, and identity all play a role. But what’s really going on with boys and girls? Join The Conversation UK and Cumberland Lodge’s Youth and Democracy project at Newcastle University for a discussion of these issues with young people and academic experts. Tickets available here.

    Acquiring high-value status is not viewed merely as key to success in life, but also for attracting what are seen as high-value – namely virtuous and physically attractive – women, as well.

    Common and serious use of terms like alpha or high-value male were once largely confined to niche internet subcultures like the manosphere and incel (involuntary celibate) forums. But they have broken into the mainstream through influencers like Tate, whose followers describe him as “Top G”.

    Changing norms?

    There are also signs that the ideas around what it means to be “high value” are changing from the traditional, hegemonic view of masculinity. An interesting case study is Ashton Hall, whose morning routine video recently garnered millions of views on TikTok, and was widely discussed online.

    The male self-improvement influencer’s meticulously structured day comprises a series of self-optimisation tasks, starting with push-ups at 4am, journalling by 4.40am, and dunking his face in ice water before hitting the gym at 6.20am. After another ice-water face plunge and some hours of work, the video ends with a woman presenting him with his evening meal.

    It is interesting to see Hall take practices traditionally seen as feminine, like journalling and skincare, and embrace them as part of an otherwise very traditionally masculine morning routine.

    Another hypermasculine influencer, Hamza, also blends his tough man demeanour with practices like meditation, nutrition and wellness. He frames these habits as “warrior training”. Such practices, then, are not viewed as feminine or emasculating.

    Face masks and self-care have been rebranded by some as part of a masculine routine.
    G-Stock Studio/Shutterstock

    Masculinity today is influenced by neoliberal ideals, where a man’s value is measured by his productivity and success. Practices like self-care are branded as discipline and performance-enhancing tools, used to construct the most optimised, competitive version of the male self.

    Ashton Hall may not describe himself as an “alpha male”, but in many respects he embodies the idealised neoliberal archetype of masculinity: physical strength, wealth and material possessions.

    While Tate’s displays of wealth and women are clear performances of masculine dominance, Hall’s more restrained approach fits within the same hierarchy. In both, “value” is defined by discipline, social ascendancy and power, especially over women. In Hall’s video, it is a woman’s hands that can be seen preparing and serving his food, reinforcing traditional gender roles.

    Why is it harmful?

    It’s important to note that not all hypermasculine influencers are necessarily bad role models for young men and boys.

    But, as we have explored in a recent report, self-improvement content can be a key gateway into the misogynistic digital space of the manosphere.

    In our analysis of online discussions, we found that many of those drawn to hypermasculine influencers reported struggling with various offline vulnerabilities. These included experiencing big life changes, anxiety, depression, bullying and social isolation, and also being neurodiverse. Young followers described motivational content as having “saved” them. Others came across this content through otherwise innocuous searches about getting better abs or finding a girlfriend.

    One 15-year-old in our research, for example, recalled being severely bullied at school. He said that after adopting a strict routine inspired by Tate (waking at 6 am, pursuing fitness, cutting out social media), “Now people respect me.”

    Initially, what young men find may boost their confidence. But in encountering the promotion of unrealistic standards for self-improvement and a “hustle culture” mentality, they may be indoctrinated into an online world of rigidity and misogyny.

    Assigning worth to men based on social and economic status has personal and societal consequences. It presents failure to meet these standards as a path to loneliness and suffering, and frames following self-improvement influencers as the only solution.

    The appeal of self-improvement lies in its promise of transformation – from a state of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment to one of abundance, empowerment and power. Even followers of Tate’s who say they don’t agree with his views of women are drawn to his financial and business success.

    While presented as aspirational, being “high-value” is typically reserved to those with privileges of time and wealth, making it inherently exclusive and inaccessible to most. More importantly, it encourages a worldview where people are judged not for who they are, but for rather how much they produce and what they can offer.

    Such rhetoric reduces human relationships to metrics-based transactions based on a hierarchical order where only those who have accumulated the most power, wealth, and success rise to the top. Andrew Tate’s “Top G” persona rests on this understanding of human relations, resulting in a hyper-competitive transactional model of masculinity.

    More concerning is the ease through which this discourse lends itself to misogynistic narratives. In one video, Tate describes how a “body count [the number of sexual partners] is the easiest way to judge the value of a woman”.

    This metric, which men are exempted from, becomes the standard that men can use to asses and demean women. It reveals the true intentions behind concepts such as “high value” – a way to rank men and justify the control and devaluation of women, further reinforcing systems of power and male dominance.

    Jwana Aziz receives funding by University of Birmingham QR Policy Support Funding and a donation from the Barker Family Trust.

    Anna Lavis has previously received funding for research into online harms from Wellcome, Samaritans and the ESRC, and the work on which this article draws was funded by University of Birmingham QR Policy Support Funding and a donation from the Barker Family Trust.

    Anna sits on Meta’s Eating Disorders and Body Image Global Experts Advisory Board, but receives no payment for this work.

    – ref. What is an ‘alpha’ male? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-an-alpha-male-254503

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: The light triad: psychology’s answer to our darkest fears about people

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christian van Nieuwerburgh, Professor of Coaching and Positive Psychology, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences

    Are you losing faith in humanity because of everything that is going on right now? If so, that is no surprise. Our habit of “doomscrolling” convinces us that people are inherently self-centred and uncaring.

    According to the American Psychological Association, many of us are suffering from “headline stress disorder”. We all know from experience that exposure to negative news shapes a darker view of humanity.

    Psychologists have been interested in the darker side of human personality for decades. The so-called dark triad of Machiavellianism, narcissism and sociopathy have attracted intense scrutiny. People high in these darker traits tend to be manipulative, self-centred and lacking in empathy.

    Between our doomscrolling habit and our natural negativity bias, we start to doubt the goodness of human beings.

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

    In response to this, American psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and his colleagues have highlighted positive aspects of humanity with their research into the “light triad”.

    The light triad emphasises the positive aspects of human nature – Kantianism (treating people as inherently valuable rather than as means to an end), humanism and faith in humanity. Those who score high on the light triad see the inherent value in others, believe in human goodness and treat people with dignity and respect.

    In his blog for Scientific American, Kaufman argues that these positive aspects of personality are “just as worthy of research attention and cultivation in a society that sometimes forgets that not only is there goodness in the world, but there is also goodness in each of us”.

    (Anyone curious about where they fall on the light triad scale can find out for free online by completing a questionnaire.)

    By taking a balanced view of personality, we remind ourselves of the breadth of possibility within each of us. Human beings are capable of performing wonderful, heartwarming acts of kindness, just as they are capable of acts of selfishness and cruelty.

    We all have traits from both the dark and light triads. When we’re at our best, we’re sociable, positive, supportive and forgiving. Human nature isn’t black and white. Embracing this complexity can help us to be more compassionate to ourselves and others.

    With all the challenges we face today, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and lose sight of our shared humanity. But it is especially now that we should avoid that. Let’s remember the potential for kindness, altruism and compassion that exists within all of us. Here are five simple ways to boost our hopefulness.

    Engage in small acts of kindness

    Try simple everyday gestures such as letting someone go ahead of you in line, allowing a car to merge in traffic or simply offering a warm smile. These small acts of kindness can brighten someone’s day, boost your mood and encourage others who witness them.

    Show compassion

    Compassion is crucial. Start by being gentle with yourself. Practise self-compassion by going easy on yourself during tough moments. Extend that same compassion to others. Remember that everyone is always in the middle of something. A bit of patience, a few kind words or a genuine acknowledgement can make a big difference.

    Spread positivity

    Instead of sharing negative news in your WhatsApp groups, make a conscious effort to highlight positive and uplifting stories from within your network or community. Share articles or videos that inspire hope and celebrate human kindness. By spreading positivity, you can play your part in counterbalancing our negativity bias and create a more hopeful narrative about the world we live in.

    Listen intentionally

    In a world full of distractions, offering someone your full, undivided attention can be a powerful act. Take the time to really listen to others, making them feel seen, valued and heard.

    By being present in your conversations and engaging in “radical listening”, you not only strengthen your connection with the other person but also create a more humanising environment.

    Robert Biswas-Diener and I have written a book called Radical Listening: The Art of True Connection. To learn more about the concept, listen to one of the many podcasts out there.

    Radical listening explained.

    Connect through community

    As human beings, we thrive through social connections. Get involved by participating in community events. Join a litter-picking group, offer to volunteer at the local school, get involved in charity fundraisers or even set up a casual coffee morning. These activities will help you feel more connected while reinforcing the idea that we all belong to something bigger and can make a difference together.

    Every positive action and enriching conversation counts. By doing these small things, you will be playing your part in reigniting hope in our shared humanity. It starts with each of us choosing to be compassionate, listening radically and seeing the good in others.

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

    – ref. The light triad: psychology’s answer to our darkest fears about people – https://theconversation.com/the-light-triad-psychologys-answer-to-our-darkest-fears-about-people-258050

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Outsourcing cost of ‘impact’ data could mean 13% more bang for every charitable buck

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By George E. Mitchell, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY

    Trying to measure a charity’s impact requires the right tools. MirageC/Moment via Getty Images

    Charitable donors often make gifts despite having little information about the organizations they support. Without relevant data, that money may not flow to the charities that evidence suggests are delivering the biggest bang for donors’ bucks.

    But getting good information about what donors call “impact” takes money, time and effort. If donors are responsible for those costs, then they may not obtain the data, and charities would be less likely to produce the data in the first place.

    I’m a public and international affairs professor who researches nonprofits and philanthropy.. I conducted a study in 2023 with Chengxin Xu and Huafang Li, two other scholars of nonprofit management, to better understand whether these costs influence how donors pick charities. Through this study, which involved nearly 2,000 U.S. adults, we were able to estimate how much impact may be lost when donors incur information costs themselves.

    Impact refers to the effects a charity achieves. Donors can try to get the most impact per dollar by supporting charities that achieve high impact at low cost.

    We asked the participants in our experiment to choose one of 10 hypothetical charities to receive support. All the charities had the same mission: “to save lives.” Everyone was paired with a fictitious partner who would also be supporting the selected charity. Before choosing, the participant had the option to obtain information about each organization’s impact per dollar.

    About half the time, the participant could pay for the information themselves out of their own hypothetical budget. In the other half, they could tell their partner to pay out of their partner’s budget. The charity would receive the combined gifts, minus any money paid for information. The total amount spent stayed the same no matter who paid or whether anyone paid.

    When someone else paid, participants were more likely to direct their gifts to more efficient charities, raising the average impact of donations by about 13%. In other words, donors gave smarter when someone else picked up the tab for the information.

    Why it matters

    Americans gave more than US$550 billion to charity in 2023.

    If shifting information costs can boost the impact of charitable giving by 13%, then applying that gain to just one-tenth of that giving could potentially unlock about $7 billion worth of additional impact. Funders who are very interested in the potential of data to increase impact, such as effective altruists, philanthropists who emphasize outcomes, and some large foundations, may be willing to bear the costs so others don’t have to. The challenge is that not all donors are equally willing to pay for information that could increase the impact of charitable giving.

    Other research findings have suggested that most Americans want to see data about the impact that charities have, but it is not obvious where the funding for this should come from. If charities cover the cost themselves, then they are essentially asking their donors to pay for it. But many donors may want all their gifts to pay for program delivery, not data production.

    What still isn’t known

    It’s unclear how well these findings would translate into real-world giving behavior. Donors’ appetite for information that comes at the expense of direct services may be limited, even if it improves the overall impact of their gifts. And using data about impact per dollar to guide giving could have downsides. For example, it might reward work that is easy to measure and discourage efforts that are just as important but are harder to assess, or just take longer for the results to be seen.

    What’s next

    Philanthropists can access more data about charities than ever before. Platforms like Candid and Charity Navigator offer the potential to harness that data to better inform donors. Organizations like GiveWell go even further, recommending specific charities based on rigorous data analysis. I’ll be studying these kinds of opportunities for boosting the impact of charitable giving, because when donors are better informed, they can accomplish more with their money.

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

    George E. Mitchell receives funding from the Baruch College Fund.

    – ref. Outsourcing cost of ‘impact’ data could mean 13% more bang for every charitable buck – https://theconversation.com/outsourcing-cost-of-impact-data-could-mean-13-more-bang-for-every-charitable-buck-255825

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Outsourcing cost of ‘impact’ data could mean 13% more bang for every charitable buck

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By George E. Mitchell, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY

    Trying to measure a charity’s impact requires the right tools. MirageC/Moment via Getty Images

    Charitable donors often make gifts despite having little information about the organizations they support. Without relevant data, that money may not flow to the charities that evidence suggests are delivering the biggest bang for donors’ bucks.

    But getting good information about what donors call “impact” takes money, time and effort. If donors are responsible for those costs, then they may not obtain the data, and charities would be less likely to produce the data in the first place.

    I’m a public and international affairs professor who researches nonprofits and philanthropy.. I conducted a study in 2023 with Chengxin Xu and Huafang Li, two other scholars of nonprofit management, to better understand whether these costs influence how donors pick charities. Through this study, which involved nearly 2,000 U.S. adults, we were able to estimate how much impact may be lost when donors incur information costs themselves.

    Impact refers to the effects a charity achieves. Donors can try to get the most impact per dollar by supporting charities that achieve high impact at low cost.

    We asked the participants in our experiment to choose one of 10 hypothetical charities to receive support. All the charities had the same mission: “to save lives.” Everyone was paired with a fictitious partner who would also be supporting the selected charity. Before choosing, the participant had the option to obtain information about each organization’s impact per dollar.

    About half the time, the participant could pay for the information themselves out of their own hypothetical budget. In the other half, they could tell their partner to pay out of their partner’s budget. The charity would receive the combined gifts, minus any money paid for information. The total amount spent stayed the same no matter who paid or whether anyone paid.

    When someone else paid, participants were more likely to direct their gifts to more efficient charities, raising the average impact of donations by about 13%. In other words, donors gave smarter when someone else picked up the tab for the information.

    Why it matters

    Americans gave more than US$550 billion to charity in 2023.

    If shifting information costs can boost the impact of charitable giving by 13%, then applying that gain to just one-tenth of that giving could potentially unlock about $7 billion worth of additional impact. Funders who are very interested in the potential of data to increase impact, such as effective altruists, philanthropists who emphasize outcomes, and some large foundations, may be willing to bear the costs so others don’t have to. The challenge is that not all donors are equally willing to pay for information that could increase the impact of charitable giving.

    Other research findings have suggested that most Americans want to see data about the impact that charities have, but it is not obvious where the funding for this should come from. If charities cover the cost themselves, then they are essentially asking their donors to pay for it. But many donors may want all their gifts to pay for program delivery, not data production.

    What still isn’t known

    It’s unclear how well these findings would translate into real-world giving behavior. Donors’ appetite for information that comes at the expense of direct services may be limited, even if it improves the overall impact of their gifts. And using data about impact per dollar to guide giving could have downsides. For example, it might reward work that is easy to measure and discourage efforts that are just as important but are harder to assess, or just take longer for the results to be seen.

    What’s next

    Philanthropists can access more data about charities than ever before. Platforms like Candid and Charity Navigator offer the potential to harness that data to better inform donors. Organizations like GiveWell go even further, recommending specific charities based on rigorous data analysis. I’ll be studying these kinds of opportunities for boosting the impact of charitable giving, because when donors are better informed, they can accomplish more with their money.

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

    George E. Mitchell receives funding from the Baruch College Fund.

    – ref. Outsourcing cost of ‘impact’ data could mean 13% more bang for every charitable buck – https://theconversation.com/outsourcing-cost-of-impact-data-could-mean-13-more-bang-for-every-charitable-buck-255825

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: What makes some people self-censor while others speak out? Podcast

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

    Jo Panuwat D/Shutterstock

    Faced with the choice in their daily lives, their work or their politics, why do some people decide to keep quiet, to censor themselves in anticipatory obedience, even if they’re not ordered to do so?

    In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we talk to self-censorship expert Daniel Bar-Tal about what drives people to censor themselves, and its consequences for society.

    It was Daniel Bar-Tal’s experiences serving in the Israeli army that prompted him to begin studying self-censorship. “ I was observing all kind of phenomenon that are going on within a country that is engaged in intractable conflict,” he told us.
    Bar-Tal, an emeritus professor in the school of education at Tel Aviv University, began to notice that self-censorship was essential in societies, like Israel, living in conflict. He explains:

     There are all kind of directives which develop censorship, in the army, in school, teachers are told what they should do and say. But self-censorship is going beyond this. So it means that nobody tells you that you must say A or B or C, but you feel an obligation by yourself to say certain things without any order from above.

    Bar-Tal assembled a team of researchers from different disciplines to examine how self-censorship plays out across different sectors of a society, from politics to academia to journalism. They found three main motivations why people self-censor: as a defence mechanism for their in-group; out of fear; and to win rewards.

    Listen to Bar-Tal talk about his research into self-censorship on the latest episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, which includes an introduction from Beth Daley, executive editor at The Conversation U.S. about self-censorship currently happening in parts of American academia.

    This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

    Newsclips in this episode from NBC10 Boston.

    Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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

    – ref. What makes some people self-censor while others speak out? Podcast – https://theconversation.com/what-makes-some-people-self-censor-while-others-speak-out-podcast-258882

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Anti-ageing drug rapamycin extends life as effectively as restricting calories – new research

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Zahida Sultanova, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia

    There’s a better way. Africa Studio/Shutterstock

    For centuries, humans have searched for ways to extend life. Alchemists never found the philosopher’s stone, but scientists have consistently shown that a longer life can be attained by eating less – at least in certain lab animals. But can we find a way to live longer while still enjoying our food?

    Compounds that mimic the biological effects of dieting could be the answer, and the two most popular diet-mimicking drugs are rapamycin and metformin. In a new study, my colleagues and I found that rapamycin prolongs life almost as consistently as eating less, whereas metformin does not.

    Eating less, or dietary restriction, has been the gold standard for achieving a longer life ever since a study nearly a century ago in which laboratory rats that ate less surprised scientists by outliving their well-fed lab mates.

    But for many people, sticking to a permanent diet is hard and far from enjoyable. Also, if taken to extremes, it can even be bad for health. That is why we wanted to know whether drugs that are dieting mimics could bring the same benefit of eating less without the unwanted side-effects.

    Rapamycin was first discovered in bacteria living in Easter Island soil in the 1970s, and medical professionals now use it to prevent organ-transplant rejection, as it is a powerful immunosuppressant. It works by blocking a molecular switch that tells cells when nutrients are abundant.

    Metformin, meanwhile, is a synthetic descendant of a compound found in French lilac (also known as goat’s rue) and is widely prescribed to control blood sugar in type 2 diabetes. Both drugs are involved in the body’s ability to sense nutrients and energy, so biologists like us hoped they might copy the mechanisms activated by eating less.

    To find out, we pooled the results of many studies to see if there were any overall patterns. We carefully examined thousands of scientific papers to finally home in on 167 studies on eight vertebrate species, from fish to monkeys, that provided sufficient details on survival and how the study was done. Then we compared three longevity strategies: eating less, taking rapamycin and taking metformin.

    We found that eating less still came out on top as the most consistent way to prolong life in all animals but rapamycin was close behind. Metformin, in contrast, showed no clear benefit. The life-extension effect of eating less was the same in both sexes, and it didn’t matter whether the diet plan involved eating smaller portions or intermittent fasting.

    That makes rapamycin one of the most exciting leads for new anti-ageing therapies. Ageing might not be considered a disease, but it is a risk factor behind many diseases from cancer to dementia. If we slow that underlying process, the benefit will be extra years of quality life and lower healthcare bills as the world’s population grows older.

    Rapamycin was first isolated from bacteria found in the soil on Easter Island.
    JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com

    Encouraging early signs, but we’re not quite there yet

    However, there are some important points to consider. First, we discovered considerable variation from experiment to experiment with some studies even showing that eating less or taking rapamycin reduced lifespan.

    Also, most of the evidence originates from mice and rats that have many of our genes but are clearly not exactly like us.

    Finally, rapamycin may have side-effects such as repressing immunity and reproduction. Researchers are now investigating milder doses of rapamycin to see if they provide the advantages without the side-effects.

    The preliminary signs are encouraging. In an ongoing human rapamycin trial, volunteers given low, intermittent doses of rapamycin have experienced positive effects on indicators of healthspan. For metformin, the human trial is still in progress and the findings are expected to be out in a few years time.

    For now, nobody should run to their doctor asking for prescriptions of rapamycin to live longer. But this drug, extracted from obscure soil bacteria, shows us that interfering with a single molecular pathway can be enough to mimic the benefits of eating less. The challenge is to use this discovery to produce therapies that make us healthier for longer without compromising our quality of life – or our taste for the occasional slice of chocolate cake.

    Dr. Zahida Sultanova works for the University of East Anglia and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She is a member of European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Society of Turkey (EkoEvo).

    – ref. Anti-ageing drug rapamycin extends life as effectively as restricting calories – new research – https://theconversation.com/anti-ageing-drug-rapamycin-extends-life-as-effectively-as-restricting-calories-new-research-259169

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Can a foreign government hack WhatsApp? A cybersecurity expert explains how that might work

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University

    On The Back Of Camera/Shutterstock

    Earlier today, Iranian officials urged the country’s citizens to remove the messaging platform WhatsApp from their smartphones. Without providing any supporting evidence, they alleged the app gathers user information to send to Israel.

    WhatsApp has rejected the allegations. In a statement to Associated Press, the Meta-owned messaging platform said it was concerned “these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them most”. It added that it does not track users’ location nor the personal messages people are sending one another.

    It is impossible to independently assess the allegations, given Iran provided no publicly accessible supporting evidence.

    But we do know that even though WhatsApp has strong privacy and security features, it isn’t impenetrable. And there is at least one country that has previously been able to penetrate it: Israel.

    3 billion users

    WhatsApp is a free messaging app owned by Meta. With around 3 billion users worldwide and growing fast, it can send text messages, calls and media over the internet.

    It uses strong end-to-end encryption meaning only the sender and recipient can read messages; not even WhatsApp can access their content. This ensures strong privacy and security.

    Advanced cyber capability

    The United States is the world leader in cyber capability. This term describes the skills, technologies and resources that enable nations to defend, attack, or exploit digital systems and networks as a powerful instrument of national power.

    But Israel also has advanced cyber capability, ranking alongside the United Kingdom, China, Russia, France and Canada.

    Israel has a documented history of conducting sophisticated cyber operations. This includes the widely cited Stuxnet attack that targeted Iran’s nuclear program more than 15 years ago. Israeli cyber units, such as Unit 8200, are renowned for their technical expertise and innovation in both offensive and defensive operations.

    Seven of the top 10 global cybersecurity firms maintain R&D centers in Israel, and Israeli startups frequently lead in developing novel offensive and defensive cyber tools.

    A historical precedent

    Israeli firms have repeatedly been linked to hacking WhatsApp accounts, most notably through the Pegasus spyware developed by Israeli-based cyber intelligence company NSO Group. In 2019, it exploited WhatsApp vulnerabilities to compromise 1,400 users, including journalists, activists and politicians.

    Last month, a US federal court ordered the NSO Group to pay WhatsApp and Meta nearly US$170 million in damages for the hack.

    Another Israeli company, Paragon Solutions, also recently targeted nearly 100 WhatsApp accounts. The company used advanced spyware to access private communications after they had been de-encrypted.

    These kinds of attacks often use “spearphishing”. This is distinct from regular phishing attacks, which generally involve an attacker sending malicious links to thousands of people.

    Instead, spearphishing involves sending targeted, deceptive messages or files to trick specific individuals into installing spyware. This grants attackers full access to their devices – including de-encrypted WhatsApp messages.

    A spearphishing email might appear to come from a trusted colleague or organisation. It might ask the recipient to urgently review a document or reset a password, leading them to a fake login page or triggering a malware download.

    Protecting yourself from ‘spearphishing’

    To avoid spearphishing, people should scrutinise unexpected emails or messages, especially those conveying a sense of urgency, and never click suspicious links or download unknown attachments.

    Hovering the mouse cursor over a link will reveal the name of the destination. Suspicious links are those with strange domain names and garbled text that has nothing to do with the purported sender. Simply hovering without clicking is not dangerous.

    Enable two-factor authentication, keep your software updated, and verify requests coming through trusted channels. Regular cybersecurity training also helps users spot and resist these targeted attacks.

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

    – ref. Can a foreign government hack WhatsApp? A cybersecurity expert explains how that might work – https://theconversation.com/can-a-foreign-government-hack-whatsapp-a-cybersecurity-expert-explains-how-that-might-work-259261

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Are Israel’s actions in Iran illegal? Could it be called self-defence? An international law expert explains

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Shannon Bosch, Associate Professor (Law), Edith Cowan University

    Israel’s major military operation against Iran has targeted its nuclear program, including its facilities and scientists, as well as its military leadership.

    In response, the United Nations Security Council has quickly convened an emergency sitting. There, the Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon defended Israel’s actions as a “preventative strike” carried out with “precision, purpose, and the most advanced intelligence”. It aimed, he said, to:

    dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, eliminate the architects of its terror and aggression and neutralise the regime’s ability to follow through on its repeated public promise to destroy the state of Israel.

    So, what does international law say about self-defence? And were Israel’s actions illegal under international law?

    When is self-defence allowed?

    Article 2.4 of the UN charter states:

    All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

    There are only two exceptions:

    1. when the UN Security Council authorises force, and
    2. when a state acts in self-defence.

    This “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence”, as article 51 of the UN charter puts it, persists until the Security Council acts to restore international peace and security.

    So what’s ‘self-defence’ actually mean?

    The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has consistently interpreted self-defence narrowly.

    In many cases, it has rejected arguments from states such as the United States, Uganda and Israel that have sought to promote a more expansive interpretation of self-defence.

    The 9/11 attacks marked a turning point. The UN Security Council affirmed in resolutions 1368 and 1373 that the right to self-defence extends to defending against attacks by non-state actors, such as terrorist groups. The US, invoking this right, launched its military action in Afghanistan.

    The classic understanding of self-defence – that it’s justified when a state responds reactively to an actual, armed attack – was regarded as being too restrictive in the age of missiles, cyberattacks and terrorism.

    This helped give rise to the idea of using force before an imminent attack, in anticipatory self-defence.

    The threshold for anticipatory self-defence is widely seen by scholars as high. It requires what’s known as “imminence”. In other words, this is the “last possible window of opportunity” to act to stop an unavoidable attack.

    As set out by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2005:

    as long as the threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate, this would meet the accepted interpretation of self defence under article 51.

    As international law expert Donald Rothwell points out, the legitimacy of anticipatory self-defence hinges on factual scrutiny and strict criteria, balancing urgency, legality and accountability.

    However, the lines quickly blurred

    In 2002, the US introduced a “pre-emptive doctrine” in its national security strategy.

    This argued new threats – such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction – justified using force to forestall attacks before they occurred.

    Critics, including Annan, warned that if the notion of preventive self-defence was widely accepted, it would undermine the prohibition on the use of force. It would basically allow states to act unilaterally on speculative intelligence.

    Annan acknowledged:

    if there are good arguments for preventive military action, with good evidence to support them, they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorise such action if it chooses to.

    If it does not so choose, there will be, by definition, time to pursue other strategies, including persuasion, negotiation, deterrence and containment – and to visit again the military option.

    This is exactly what Israel has failed to do before attacking Iran.

    Lessons from history

    Israel’s stated goal was to damage Iran’s nuclear program and prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon that could be used against it.

    This is explicitly about preventing an alleged, threatened, future attack by Iran with a nuclear weapon that, according to all publicly available information, Iran does not currently possess.

    This is not the first time Israel has advanced a broad interpretation of self-defence.

    In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was under construction on the outskirts of Baghdad. It claimed a nuclear-armed Iraq would pose an unacceptable threat. The UN Security Council condemned the attack.

    As international law stands, unless an armed attack is imminent and unavoidable, such strikes are likely to be considered unlawful uses of force.

    While there is still time and opportunity to use non-forcible means to prevent the threatened attack, there’s no necessity to act now in self defence.

    Diplomatic engagement, sanction, and international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program – such as through the International Atomic Energy Agency – remain the lawful means of addressing the emerging threat posed by Tehran.

    Preserving the rule of law

    The right to self-defence is not a blank cheque.

    Anticipatory self-defence remains legally unsettled and highly contested.

    So were Israel’s attacks on Iran a legitimate use of “self-defence”? I would argue no.

    I concur with international law expert Marko Milanovic that Israel’s claim to be acting in preventive self-defence must be rejected on the facts available to us.

    In a volatile world, preserving these legal limits is essential to avoiding unchecked aggression and preserving the rule of law.

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

    – ref. Are Israel’s actions in Iran illegal? Could it be called self-defence? An international law expert explains – https://theconversation.com/are-israels-actions-in-iran-illegal-could-it-be-called-self-defence-an-international-law-expert-explains-259259

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Jaws at 50: how a single movie changed our perception of white sharks forever

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By John Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University

    Shane Myers Photography/Shutterstock

    It’s been 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws first cast a terrifying shadow across our screens.

    At a low point during production, Spielberg worried he’d only ever be known for “a big fish story”. The film, however, did not tank.

    Jaws broke box office records and became the highest-grossing movie at the time, only surpassed by the first Star Wars released two years later in 1977.

    A combination of mass advertising, familiar “hero” tropes and old-school showmanship launched Jaws as the first modern blockbuster.

    Hollywood, and our relationship to oceans and the sharks within them, would never be the same.

    The novel Jaws was based on was a bestseller in its own right.
    Snap Shot/Shutterstock

    An unrealistic monster

    In Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel that Jaws is based on, the shark is 6 metres long. For added screen excitement, in the movie it grew to a whopping 7.6 metres.

    However, that’s unrealistically large.

    The average size of a mature great white (Carcharodon carcharias, also known as the white shark) is between 4.6 and 4.9 metres for female sharks and up to 4 metres for male sharks.

    The largest recorded living specimens peak at about 6 metres, with one monster specimen caught in Cuba in 1945 reaching 6.4 metres.

    Earth’s oceans have seen bigger predatory sharks in the past. The biggest one of all time was the megalodon (Otodus megalodon) which lived from 23 to 3 million years ago, and may have been up to 24 metres in length. However, it looked nothing like the modern white shark.

    We don’t know precisely how big the megalodon was, but certainly larger than the great white shark.
    Steveoc 86/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

    They’re not even directly related – another thing scientists learned quite recently.

    Who was the megalodon, then?

    White sharks first evolved between 6 and 4 million years ago in the shadows of the megalodon. A recent study showed the megalodon’s large serrated teeth show signs of it being a supreme opportunistic super-predator.

    That means it ate just about anything, but especially liked whales and marine mammals.



    Read more:
    Friday essay: Giant shark megalodon was the most powerful superpredator ever. Why did it go extinct?

    But white sharks are not directly related to the megalodon, whose lineage began with a shark called Cretalamna during the age of dinosaurs about 100 million years ago.

    By contrast, the white shark lineage began with an ancient mako shark, Carcharodon hastalis. It was 7 to 8 metres long and had large, similarly shaped teeth to the modern white shark but lacking serrated edges.

    A fossil intermediate species, Carcharodon hubbelli shows the transition over time from weakly serrated to strongly serrated teeth.

    White shark fossil species. Left, the serrated fossil tooth teeth of the extant white shark; right, a similarly shaped unserrated tooth of the extinct giant mako shark which gave rise to white sharks.
    John Long, CC BY

    How did Jaws affect white shark populations?

    Last year, the International Shark Attack File reported 47 unprovoked shark bites to humans worldwide, resulting in seven fatalities. This was well below the previous ten-year average of 70 bites per year; your chances of getting bitten by a shark are extremely rare.

    Following the movies that made up the Jaws franchise, there was an increase in hunting and killing sharks – with a particular focus on great white sharks that were already going into a decline due to overfishing, trophy hunting and lethal control programs.

    Between 80% and 90% of white sharks have disappeared globally since the middle of the 20th century. Recent estimates calculate there are probably less than 500 individual white sharks in Australian waters right now.

    When Jaws first aired, scientists didn’t know how long sharks took to reproduce, or how many offspring a white shark could have each year. We now know it takes about 26 years for a male and 33 years for a female to sexually mature before they can start having pups.

    Data about white shark births is sparse, but recently a 5.6-metre-long female caught on a drum line off the coast of Queensland had just four large pups inside her. This is a very small number. Some large sharks, such as the whale shark, can give birth to up to 300 young.

    Now that we know just how slow they are to breed, it’s clear it will take many decades to reestablish the “pre-Jaws” population of white sharks – important apex predators in the marine ecosystem.

    Charlie Huveneers from Flinders University about to take a tissue sample for research on white sharks. There is still a lot we don’t know about their biology.
    Andrew Fox, Adelaide, CC BY

    Will white sharks survive?

    White sharks are currently listed as vulnerable.

    This classification means if we don’t change the current living conditions for white sharks, including impacts caused by human activities such as commercial fishing, and the impacts of climate change and ocean pollution, they will continue to decline and eventually could go extinct.

    Currently, white sharks are protected in several countries and form the basis for an important tourist industry in Australia, South Africa, western United States and most recently Nova Scotia, Canada.

    These sharks are iconic apex predators that fascinate people. One of us (John) went cage diving with them recently off the Neptune Islands of South Australia and can attest to how breathtaking it is to watch them in their natural environment.

    In terms of economic impact, they are worth far more alive than dead.

    White sharks are a growing tourism draw in several countries.
    Andrew Fox, Adelaide, CC BY

    There’s still much we don’t know about white sharks

    The complete white shark genome was first published only in 2019. It has 4.63 billion base pairs, making it much larger than the human genome (3.2 billion base pairs).

    The genome revealed some surprising things, like how white sharks show strong molecular adaptations for wound-healing processes, and a suite of “genome stability” genes – those used in DNA repair or DNA damage response.

    The transcriptome (or sum total of the messenger RNA) of the white shark showed greater similarity to the human transcriptome than to that of other fishes. This hints that “unexpressed genes” in the shark could one day play a role in uncovering genetic pathways for potential cures in human diseases.

    Jaws and its sequels certainly brought white sharks to the attention (and nightmares) of humans, with devastating impacts on how we treated them as a species.

    Our relationship with white sharks reflects our relationship with nature more broadly – a feared antagonist within the current capitalist paradigm; an enemy to be tamed, contained or consumed.

    As we learn more of the peril and potential of these remarkable creatures, we can learn how to live with them, to see beyond our fears and value their role within our delicate ocean ecosystems.

    John Long receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

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

    – ref. Jaws at 50: how a single movie changed our perception of white sharks forever – https://theconversation.com/jaws-at-50-how-a-single-movie-changed-our-perception-of-white-sharks-forever-258306

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Is Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album cover satire or self-degradation? A psychology expert explores our reactions

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Katrina Muller-Townsend, Lecturer in Psychology, Edith Cowan University

    Island Records

    Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album cover has fans divided.

    Carpenter poses on all fours, her glossy blond hair grasped by a male figure cropped from the frame. Her wide-eyed expression intensifies an ambiguous performance of subservience, tapping into a visual language tied to female objectification, from classic pin-up imagery to contemporary pop culture.

    The emotionally loaded image plays on her hyper-feminine, tongue-in-cheek pop star persona, forcing us to question where irony ends and objectification begins.

    Is it satire, or self-degradation?

    Up for debate

    At first glance, the cover seems like just another stylised, provocative pop image. It delivers what we’ve come to expect: a bold, ironic twist on the exaggerated Juno-style pose she reinvents on stage.

    To some fans, it’s clever satire: a pop star reclaiming and amplifying her image to mock industry norms. Satire uses exaggeration, irony, or humour to critique power structures – and Carpenter’s pose walks that tightrope.

    To others it crosses a line, reinforcing regressive attitudes about women’s sexuality and drawing criticism from domestic violence advocates.

    The debate reflects our unresolved discomfort about gender, power and control. There is a tension between Carpenter’s ironic persona and the submissive pose, creating uncertainty for the viewer.

    We can use psychology to better understand this dichotomy.

    The schema violation

    This mismatch between expectation and perception is a schema violation.

    A schema is a mental shortcut: a template built from experience and unspoken rules that helps us make sense of the world and predict what to expect. When something breaks that pattern, it’s called a schema violation.

    Carpenter’s brand is cheeky, self-aware irony – so when she adopts a pose steeped in submission and hyper-femininity as in this album image, it feels off.

    That can trigger cognitive dissonance: the mental tension we feel when two ideas (here, empowerment and obedience) don’t align.

    To resolve the conflict, some fans reinterpret the image as feminist sarcasm. Others reject it, fearing it panders to outdated, dangerous norms.

    Both reactions reflect our emotional and ideological investments in who Carpenter is or should be.

    Exploring confirmation bias

    Part of this conflicted reaction is driven by confirmation bias: our tendency to filter information to support what we already believe.

    Fans who see Carpenter as witty and empowered interpret the image as intentionally ironic. Others – more sceptical of the industry’s history of exploiting female sexuality – view it as a throwback to damaging norms.

    Either way, our interpretations often reflect more about ourselves than about Carpenter’s intent.

    When her image contradicts both her public persona and our social values, it creates a gap between what we think is right and what we want to be right. So, we try to explain it away, by either defending the image or criticising it.

    Satire and scandal

    Carpenter’s cover follows a long tradition of female artists whose work straddles satire and scandal, complicating public reception.

    Madonna’s Like a Prayer drew outrage for mixing religion with sexual imagery. Yet it positioned her as a provocateur – a woman resisting the lack of agency that so often defines sexualised media.

    Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz era shocked fans with a bold shift from Hannah Montana innocence to hypersexualised rebellion, challenging the narrow roles women in pop culture are confined to.

    Doja Cat’s shift from glam pop princess to glitch villainess unsettled audiences. Was it satire, rebellion, or just chaos?

    These women, like Carpenter, force us to confront our own discomfort with women who won’t stay in one lane.

    Performer and provocateur

    Audience reaction is also shaped by emotional investment in Carpenter’s persona. Through carefully curated social media, interviews and lyrics, fans build intimate narratives forming parasocial relationships – one-sided emotional bonds with celebrities.

    When an image contradicts that imagined persona, it can feel jarring, even like betrayal.

    Audiences often expect idols to be empowering but not polarising, sexy but safe, to challenge norms – but only in ways that affirm our own values.

    Carpenter’s image breaks that implicit contract, which creates discomfort for some viewers.

    Carpenter’s cover raises uncomfortable but necessary questions about how much freedom female artists have to be both critical and complicit. Can they play with society and play along, to be both performer and provocateur?

    This highlights the double bind many women face in media and popular culture. Female artists are expected to both subvert and satisfy; to entertain without offending; empower without alienating. The burden to be palatable and provocative is one male artists rarely face.

    It’s what we make of it

    Is Carpenter undermining herself or subverting the system? Perhaps both. Or perhaps the image isn’t the message: our reaction is.

    The image forces us to confront not only our perception of Sabrina Carpenter but also our cultural discomfort with women who defy neat categorisation. Satire demands interpretation, especially when it comes from women addressing sex or power.

    More than provocation, Carpenter’s cover mirrors our cultural struggle to accept women who defy simple labels of satire or submission. The image can reflect broader social ideals and tensions projected onto public figures.

    What we see says more about our assumptions than her intent. Understanding those reactions doesn’t kill the fun – it deepens it.

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

    – ref. Is Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album cover satire or self-degradation? A psychology expert explores our reactions – https://theconversation.com/is-sabrina-carpenters-mans-best-friend-album-cover-satire-or-self-degradation-a-psychology-expert-explores-our-reactions-259043

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Is Mark Carney turning his back on climate action?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Deborah de Lange, Associate Professor, Global Management Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University

    The G7 summit in Alberta, hosted by Prime Minister Mark Carney, has ended with only passing mention of fighting climate change, including a statement on wildfires that is silent on the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    This is puzzling. Canadians didn’t opt for Conservative Pierre Poilievre, considered by some to be an oil and gas industry mouthpiece, in the last federal election. Instead, voters gave Carney’s Liberals a minority government.

    Carney was the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance and was behind the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance, so some Canadians might have assumed he’d prioritize climate action if he won the election. Instead, Carney has described developing fossil fuel infrastructure as “pragmatic.”

    But it’s unclear how a country grappling with abysmal air quality due to wildfires fuelled by global warming will benefit from further global fossil fuel development and its related emissions.



    Read more:
    Wildfire smoke can harm your brain, not just your lungs

    Warming rapidly

    Canada is warming faster than most of the globe. Its leaders should be laser-focused on mitigating climate change by reducing fossil fuel use to the greatest extent possible, as soon as possible.

    This decades-long understanding of how to approach climate action has been repeatedly explained by experts and is well known to governments globally. Canada’s prime minister was once one of those experts.

    Carney now has a tremendous opportunity to lead by steering Canada in a clean direction.

    Canada is at the forefront of clean technology, with numerous business opportunities emerging, particularly in areas like circular economy international trade. These opportunities not only support Canada’s commitment to meeting its Paris Agreement targets but also help expand and diversify its global trade.

    Eco-industrial parks

    Canada already has exemplar eco-industrial parks — co-operative businesses located on a common property that focus on reducing environmental impact through resource efficiency, waste reduction and sharing resources. Such industrial communities are in Halifax and in Delta, B.C. They represent significant investment opportunities.

    Vacant urban land could be revitalized and existing industrial parks could boost their economic output and circular trade by building stronger partnerships to share resources, reduce waste and cut emissions.



    Read more:
    A sustainable, circular economy could counter Trump’s tariffs while strengthening international trade

    Canada would benefit economically and environmentally by building on existing expertise and expanding successful sustainability strategies to achieve economic, environmental and social goals.

    But by continuing to invest in fossil fuels, Canada misses out on opportunities to diversify trade and boost economic competitiveness.

    The secret to China’s success

    Real diversification makes Canada less vulnerable to economic shocks, like the ones caused by the tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump.

    Fossil fuel reliance increases exposure to global economic risks, but shifting to cleaner products and services reduces climate risks and expands Canada’s global trade options. China’s economic rise is partly a result of this strategy.

    That’s seemingly why Trump is so fixated on China. China today is a serious competitor to the U.S. after making smart trade and economic decisions and forging its own path, disregarding American pressure to remain a mere follower.

    Investing in its huge Belt and Road Initiative, China also aligned itself with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It’s building diplomatic bridges with many Belt and Road countries in southeast Asia as Trump’s America alienates its partners, pulling out of the Paris Agreement and cutting foreign aid.

    As another one of the America’s mistreated partners, Canada was poised to forge its own path under Carney. Instead, Carney is supporting American oil and gas by encouraging Canadian pipeline projects.

    Clean innovation is the path forward

    Canadian oil and gas is a concentrated industry controlled by a wealthy few, primarily Americans. More pipelines would therefore mean more sales of fossil fuels to other countries, with the beneficiaries mostly American.

    Fossil fuel investments reduce Canada’s diversification because the resources used to further these projects could go elsewhere — toward clean diversification. With almost unlimited clean economy options across many sectors, clean diversification would broaden Canada’s economic and trade portfolios and reduce American control.



    Read more:
    Why Canada’s Strong Borders Act is as troublesome as Donald Trump’s travel bans

    This is International Business 101, and would make the Canadian economy more competitive through innovation, while reducing the country’s climate risk.

    California, often targeted by Trump for its policies, has been a leader in clean innovation, making its economy the envy of the world.



    Read more:
    California is planning floating wind farms offshore to boost its power supply – here’s how they work

    My recent research shows that clear, decisive choices like those made in California will be key to Canada’s future success. Canada must make choices aligned with goals — a core principle of strategic management.

    My research also suggests Canada must restructure its energy industry to focus on renewable energy innovation while reducing fossil fuel reliance. Increased renewable energy innovation, as seen in patent numbers, leads to higher GDP.

    Contrary to common beliefs, pollution taxes boost the economy in combination with clean innovation. But when the government supports both the fossil fuel industry and clean industries, it hinders Canada’s transition to a cleaner future.

    Trapped by the fossil fuel industry?

    Do Canadian taxpayers truly want to keep funding an outdated, polluting industry that benefits a wealthy few, or invest in clean industries that boost Canada’s economy, create better jobs and protect the environment? To differentiate Canada from the United States, it would make sense to choose the latter.

    Carney should consider refraining from pushing for the fast-tracking of polluting projects. If he doesn’t, Canada will become more uncompetitive and vulnerable, trapped by the fossil fuel industry.



    Read more:
    Mark Carney wants to make Canada an energy superpower — but what will be sacrificed for that goal?

    Carney’s support for pipelines may have stemmed from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s implicit support for Alberta sovereignty. She made veiled threats to Canada at a critical juncture, when Trump was making repeated assertions about annexing Canada.

    Alberta didn’t vote for Carney. But Canadians who care about mitigating climate change did.

    Banks that felt pressure to at least recognize sustainable finance during the Joe Biden administration joined Carney’s Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

    But as soon as Trump came to power a second time and walked away from the Paris Agreement, many American banks abandoned the alliance. Canadian banks followed suit, and Carney remarkably missed another moment to show Canadian leadership by stopping their exit.

    In fact, Carney seems to have abandoned his own organization to appease Trump as the president made multiple 51st state threats. The prime minister had the chance to differentiate Canada and demonstrate his own leadership. Instead, he seems to have easily turned his back on his principles under pressure from Trump.

    Deborah de Lange receives funding from SSHRC and ESRC. She is affiliated with The Liberal Party of Canada and The Writers’ Union of Canada.

    – ref. Is Mark Carney turning his back on climate action? – https://theconversation.com/is-mark-carney-turning-his-back-on-climate-action-258737

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postcript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Cameron Shackell, Sessional Academic, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology

    Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential works.

    Gilles Deleuze was one of the most original and imaginative thinkers of postwar France. A lifelong teacher, he spent most of his career at the University of Paris VIII, influencing generations of students but largely shunning the mantle of public intellectual.

    His complex, creative books mix philosophy, literature, film and politics – not to give clear answers, but to spark new ways of thinking.

    Postscript on the Societies of Control, published 35 years ago in the countercultural L’Autre Journal is Deleuze at his most accessible and prophetic.

    Written at a time when the Cold War was ending, computers were becoming more common, and the internet was beginning to connect institutions, the essay describes the emergence of a new kind of society – one not ruled by a single stern voice but by the soft hum of networks.

    How societies work

    Postscript was written as an update to the work of Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who had died in 1984. Deleuze called it a “postscript” not just because of its brevity (it’s only around 2,300 words in English translation) but to highlight he wasn’t refuting Foucault, just building on his work.

    Gilles Deleuze.
    Tintinades/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

    From the 18th to early 20th centuries, Foucault had argued, Western societies were “disciplinary societies”. Schools, factories, prisons and hospitals – institutions with walls, schedules, routines and clear expectations – moulded behaviour. People were trained, observed, tested and corrected as they passed from one institution to the next.



    Read more:
    ‘A dark masterpiece’: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at 50

    But in the late 20th century, Deleuze saw something shifting. He thought the stodgy old disciplinary institutions were “in a generalized crisis” due to technological advances and a new form of capitalism that demanded more flexibility in workers and consumers.

    New systems of management and technology were starting to reshape people without sending them through traditional institutions. Deleuze wrote presciently, for example, that “perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination”.

    In business, he saw a growing idea of “salary according to merit”, transforming work into “challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions” – something much at odds with the old model of the standard wage and the assembly line. Traditional government institutions like hospitals and the classic factory were embracing the model of the corporation, driven always by a profit motive and the need for better human tools.

    To Deleuze, all this meant people were becoming more “free-floating” – they could be still playing socially useful roles but were being gently steered into them. This greater freedom, however, required a new system to keep everyone in line. He called this “modulation” to underline its dynamic, enveloping nature.

    Like nudging, but everywhere

    Deleuze described modulation as “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other”. He meant that people were beginning to live in an environment where everything shape-shifts to encourage or discourage us in the right direction without explicitly putting up walls.

    A prime example of how modulation has since become commonplace is nudging – the use of psychological techniques, often subtle and data-driven, to shape people’s behaviour.

    Nudging didn’t really exist in 1990, but governments and tech companies use nudges all the time now. We’re nudged to eat healthier, buy, save, recycle, donate. Web sites use “dark patterns” – tricky designs that steer (or nudge) us toward certain choices. Social media feeds use algorithms to exclude us if we say the wrong thing. In fact, entire teams of behavioural scientists operate behind the scenes to manipulate many aspects of our lives.

    Nudges can be good and can save us from poor choices, but their newfound moral acceptability (sometimes called libertarian paternalism) is very much a clue that Deleuze’s control society has arrived.

    Control in your pocket

    Deleuze, who died in 1995, wrote Postscript before the advent of the smartphone, but he foresaw that an “electronic collar” would assume a central role in society. He envisaged a “computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation.”

    Smartphones more than fit the bill. In the old disciplinary ways, they track where we go, what we search for, what we buy, how many steps we take, even how well we sleep. But if we apply Deleuze’s ideas to these phones, detailed surveillance is no longer their most important function. Our phones present and curate options.

    In effect, they shape how we see the world. When you scroll through news or social media, for instance, you’re reading about a version of the world built just for you, designed to keep you looking, clicking and reacting – and keep you very finely attuned to what is acceptable or dangerous behaviour.

    In Deleuze’s terms, this is pure modulation: not a forceful “No” but a softly spoken, “How about this?” Your phone doesn’t lock you in – it draws you in. It shapes what you see, rewards your cooperation, ignores your silence, and always keeps score. And it does this 24/7. You might unlock it hundreds of times a day. And each time it’s updated to guide your next move more precisely.

    At the same time our phones quietly turn us into a set of credentials useful for regulating physical access to workplaces, bank accounts, information: In the societies of control, writes Deleuze, “what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password.”

    Data points not people?

    Deleuze warned that, in a control society: “Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses have become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” A dividual to Deleuze is a person transformed into a set of data points and metrics.

    You are your credit rating, your search history, your likes and clicks – a different dataset to every institution. Such fragments are used to make decisions about you until they effectively replace you. In fact, for Deleuze a dividual has internalised this treatment and thinks of themselves as a net worth, a mortgage size, a car value – psychological anchors for control.

    He illustrates this point with healthcare, predicting a

    new medicine ‘without doctor or patient’ that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation.

    How many health decisions are now made for us collectively before we ever see a doctor? We should be grateful for advances in public health and epidemiology, but this has certainly impacted our individuality and how we are treated.

    Hard to detect

    An unsettling part of Deleuze’s perspective is that control doesn’t usually feel like control. It’s often dressed up as convenience, efficiency or progress. You set up internet-linked video cameras because then you can work from home. You agree to long terms and conditions because your banking app won’t work otherwise.

    One problem is there are no longer clear barriers we can rail against. As Deleuze said:

    In disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in control societies one is never finished with anything.

    Control doesn’t always crush – it can enable. Digital networks bring real freedom, economic possibility, even joy. We move more easily – both mentally and geographically – than ever before. But while we move, it always inside a kind of invisible map shaped by capitalism.

    It’s no conspiracy because nobody has the whole map. So it’s difficult to work out exactly what action, if any, to take. As Deleuze concludes: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

    So what can we do?

    Postscript doesn’t offer a political program beyond the sardonic comment that:

    Many young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated’ […] It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve.

    There are ways to resist control. Some people demand more privacy or digital rights. Others opt out selectively – logging off, turning off, refusing to be nudged. Some look to art as a way of resisting its smooth grip. These acts – however small – may offer what Deleuze and his collaborator, the French psychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari, called lines of flight: creative ways to move not just against control, but beyond it.

    The real message of Postscript, however, is its invitation to consider a timeless perspective. Any society must have a way to make people useful. So, what kind of society do we want? What kinds of restrictions are we willing to live under? And, crucial to this current age, how explicit should control be?

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

    – ref. Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postcript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient – https://theconversation.com/computers-tracking-us-an-electronic-collar-gilles-deleuzes-1990-postcript-on-the-societies-of-control-was-eerily-prescient-254579

    MIL OSI Analysis –

  • MIL-OSI Analysis: How does Israel’s famous air defence work? It’s not just the ‘Iron Dome’

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By James Dwyer, Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania

    Israeli defence systems intercept Iranian missiles over the city of Haifa Ahmad Gharabli / AFP via Getty Images

    Late last week, Israel began a wave of attacks on Iran under the banner of Operation Rising Lion, with the stated goal of crippling the Islamic republic’s nuclear program and long-range strike capabilities. At the outset, Israel claimed Iran would soon be able to build nine nuclear weapons, a situation Israel regarded as completely unacceptable.

    Following Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, and targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and key members of the Iranian armed forces, Iran retaliated with a large barrage of ballistic missiles and drones against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The first wave consisted of some 200 ballistic missiles and 200 drones.

    The conflict continues to escalate, with population centres increasingly being targeted. Israel’s missile defence systems (including the vaunted Iron Dome) have so far staved off most of Iran’s attacks, but the future is uncertain.

    Ballistic missiles and how to stop them

    Iran possesses a large arsenal of ballistic missiles and long-range drones, alongside other long-range weapons such as cruise missiles. Ballistic missiles travel on a largely fixed path steered by gravity, while cruise missiles can adjust their course as they fly.

    Iran is approximately 1,000km from Israel, so the current strikes mostly involve what are classified as medium-range ballistic missiles, alongside long-range drones. It is not clear exactly what type of missile Iran has used in its latest strikes, but the country has several including the Fattah-1 and Emad.

    It is very difficult to defend against ballistic missiles. There is not much time between launch and impact, and they come down at very high speed. The longer the missile’s range, the faster and higher it flies.

    An incoming missile presents a small, fast-moving target – and defenders may have little time to react.

    Israel’s missile defence and the Iron Dome

    Israel possesses arguably one of the most effective, battle-tested air defence systems in service today. The system is often described in the media as the “Iron Dome”, but this is not quite correct.

    Israel’s defences have several layers, each designed to address threats coming from different ranges.

    Iron Dome is just one of these layers: a short range, anti-artillery defence system, designed to intercept short-range artillery shells and rockets.

    In essence, Iron Dome consists of a network of radar emitters, command and control facilities, and the interceptors (special surface-to-air missiles). The radar quickly detects incoming threats, the command and control elements decide which are most pressing, and the interceptors are sent to destroy the incoming shells or rockets.

    Ballistic defence systems

    The other layers of Israel’s defence system include David’s Sling, and the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors. These are specifically designed to engage longer-range ballistic missiles, both within the atmosphere and at very high altitudes above it (known as exoatmospheric interception).

    Spectacular footage has been captured of what are likely exoatmospheric interceptions taking place during this latest conflict, demonstrating Israel’s capacity to engage longer-range missiles.

    The US military has comparable missile defence systems. The US Army has the Patriot PAC-3 (comparable to David’s Sling) and THAAD (comparable to Arrow 2), while the US Navy has the Aegis and the SM-3 (comparable to Arrow 3) and the SM-6 (comparable again to Arrow 2).

    The US deployed Aegis-equipped warships to support Israel’s defence against missile attacks in 2024, and appears to be preparing to do the same now.

    Iran possesses some air defence systems such as the Russian S300 which has some (very limited) ballistic missile defence capabilities, but only against shorter range (and thus slower) ballistic missiles. Further, Israel has been focusing on degrading Iran’s air defences, so it is not clear how many are still operational.

    Iran has been focusing on developing technology such as maneuverable warheads, which are harder to defend against. However, it is not clear whether these are yet operational and in Iranian service.

    A THAAD interceptor launched during a US Army test in 2013.
    The U.S. Army Ralph Scott/Missile Defense Agency/U.S. Department of Defense/Wikimedia Commons

    Can missile defences last forever?

    Missile defences are finite. The defender is always limited by the number of interceptors it possesses.

    The attacker is also limited by the number of missiles it possesses. However, the defender must often assign multiple interceptors to each attacking missile, in case the first misses or otherwise fails.

    The attacker will plan for some losses to interceptors (or mechanical failures) and send what it determines to be enough missiles for at least some to penetrate the defences.

    When it comes to ballistic missiles, the advantage lies with the attacker. Ballistic missiles can carry large explosive payloads (or even nuclear warheads), so even a handful of missiles “leaking” past defensive systems can still wreak significant damage.

    What now?

    Israel’s missile defences are unlikely to stop working completely. However, as attacks deplete its stocks of interceptors, the system may become less effective.

    As the conflict continues, it may become a race to see who runs out of weapons first. Will it be Iran’s stocks of ballistic missiles and drones, or the interceptors and anti-air munitions of Israel, the US and any other supporters?

    It is impossible to say who would prevail in such a race of stockpile attrition. Some reports suggest Iran has fired approximately 1,000 ballistic missiles of an estimated 3,000. However, this still leaves it with an enormous stockpile to use, and it is unclear how fast Iran can make new missiles to replenish its resources.

    But we should hope it doesn’t come to that. Beyond the tit-for-tat exchange of missiles, the latest conflict between Israel and Iran risks escalating. If it is not resolved soon, and if the US is drawn into the conflict more directly, we may see broader conflict in the Middle East.

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

    – ref. How does Israel’s famous air defence work? It’s not just the ‘Iron Dome’ – https://theconversation.com/how-does-israels-famous-air-defence-work-its-not-just-the-iron-dome-259029

    MIL OSI Analysis –