November 25, 2022 - Al-Shabaab: sensational media reports about Kenyan terror attacks keep kids out of school
Al-Shabaab: sensational media reports about Kenyan terror attacks keep kids out of school
Sensational reporting on terror attacks in Kenya is keeping children out of school, with dire consequences for their education and their futures. That is the conclusion we came to in a recent paper that examines how local media reporting on terrorist attacks affected primary school enrolment in Kenya between 2001 and 2014. Continued here |
Community wildlife conservation isn't always a win-win solution: the case of Kenya's Samburu
Community-based wildlife conservation is often promoted as a win-win solution. The idea behind this approach is that the people who live close to wildlife can be involved in protecting it and have an interest in doing so. This results in wildlife being protected (a win for global biodiversity) and local people benefiting from conservation through tourism revenues, jobs, or new infrastructure like schools, clinics and water supplies. Continued here |
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Ukraine war: how the economy has kept running at a time of bitter conflict
November 24 marks nine months since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Despite the expectation of the Kremlin – and many international analysts – Ukraine did not fall within days. It repelled Russia’s advance on the capital Kyiv, turned the tide on the battlefields and has now retaken half of territory captured in Russia’s initial push. Ukraine’s military now has initiative and momentum on the battlefield. But the human cost of this resistance has been enormous. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have lost their lives. The recent UN Human Rights report confirmed the death of 6,595 civilians and warned that there are many more likely to come. One-third of the 44 million population has been displaced: 6.5 million within Ukraine and almost 8 million as refugees in other European countries. Continued here |
Working prisoners are entitled to employment and safety standards just like anybody else
The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) recently ended its longstanding relationship with the meatpacking company, Wallace Beef. This means that federal prisoners incarcerated in the Joyceville Institution near Kingston will no longer provide slaughterhouse labour for the private firm. Continued here |
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What if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct? Why our world might look very different
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesising. The plants died, then the animals that fed on them. The food chain collapsed. Over 90% of all species vanished. When the dust settled, all dinosaurs except a handful of birds had gone extinct. But this catastrophic event made human evolution possible. The surviving mammals flourished, including little proto-primates that would evolve into us. Continued here |
'Situationships': Why Gen Z are embracing the grey area
Long gone are the days when seeing a film or sharing a milkshake was all it took to solidify a couple as definitively together. Instead, modern dating has evolved into a delicate – at times complicated – series of ‘baby steps’ for young people. Research has shown that Gen Z’s attitudes towards dating and sex have evolved from the generations before them; they take an especially pragmatic approach to love and sex, and subsequently aren’t prioritising establishing committed romantic relationships the same way their older peers once did. Continued here |
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How a Canadian program that helps educators 'thrive' not just 'survive' could help address Australia's childcare staff shortage
On Wednesday, federal parliament passed Labor’s bill to reduce childcare fees for many Australian families. More affordable childcare for families is great, but it will not solve all the issues in the sector. Schools are not the only ones with a teacher crisis. Early childhood services are also hit with chronic staff shortages. Continued here |
Treating mental illness with electricity marries old ideas with modern tech and understanding of the brain – podcast
Assistant Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation Mental illnesses such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and addiction are notoriously hard to treat and often don’t respond to drugs. But a new wave of treatments that stimulate the brain with electricity are showing promise on patients and in clinical trials. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to three experts and one patient about the history of treating mental illness, how new technology and deeper understanding of the brain are leading to better treatments and where the neuroscience of mental illness is headed next. Continued here |
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Surrealism: How our strangest dreams come to life in design
Melting clocks drape over trees; men in bowler hats float through the sky; a disembodied eye blinks back from a plate of soup… Disturbing, displaced, dreamlike – the visual language of Surrealism is now so normal that "to be surreal" can be shorthand for anything strange, unreal, or hinting at the deeper, darker recesses of the human mind. Surrealism began as a literary movement in Paris, 1924, when writer André Breton created its first manifesto – he described it as "pure psychic automatism" – and it was shaped by Symbolist poetry and Dadaism, whose "anti-artworks" defied reason. It was soon embraced by fine artists including Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and René Magritte, who were reacting to the horrors of World War One, and the devastation of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Continued here |
Zimbabwe's stunning 80km safari train
We rattled out of Dete Station towards the north-eastern boundary of Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park, an eager dozen – nine tourists, two engineers and one safari guide – en route from Victoria Falls to the Ngamo Plains, an elephant-laden grassland where dwindling acacia forests meet the arid sprawl of the Kalahari sands. I squinted into the midday sun and sipped a gin and tonic, balancing on one foot and leaning out of the side of our purpose-built, private railcar, hoping for a better view of a vibrant bird perched atop a wire. A fellow passenger had his camera zoomed in all the way. We caught glimpses of electric blue, a longish beak, a large head, but the light made certain identification difficult. Continued here |
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Why 'quiet quitting' is nothing new
On a recent Monday morning, Gemma, 25, finally decided she needed to overhaul her working life. “I opened my inbox to a load of negative emails from the company’s founder,” explains the London-based PR worker. “I was then expected to deliver big results on a tight deadline. I’d just had enough.” However, Gemma, whose full name is being withheld over career concerns, didn’t resign. Instead, she chose to remain in her current role; she performs her tasks, but has stopped going the extra mile. “I think it’s quite clear my spark has gone, and I just get by doing the minimum,” she says. “I used to be online hours before I started work; now, I don’t log on until after 0900. I used to work so late that I didn’t have time for myself; now, I close all work apps at 1800 on the dot.” Continued here |
Ukraine war: EU parliament names Russia a 'state sponsor of terrorism' – but it won't stop the missiles
The EU parliament has declared Russia to be a state sponsor of terrorism. The largely symbolic resolution, which passed by a 494-58 vote on November 23, has no particular real-world consequences, but reflects MEPs’ condemnation of Russia’s “deliberate physical destruction of civilian infrastructure and mass murder of Ukrainian civilians with the aim of eliminating the Ukrainian people”. The parliament urged the European Union’s 27 member states to adopt the designation “with all the negative consequences this implies”. Continued here |
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Simon Nkoli's fight for queer rights in South Africa is finally being celebrated – 24 years after he died
Born in 1957, Simon Tseko Nkoli had just turned 41 when he died, in 1998, of an AIDS-related illness. In his short life, the South African activist fought against different forms of oppression. He fought for those downtrodden because of their “race”. He stood up for those ostracised because of their HIV status. His greatest fight, though, was for those persecuted because of their sexual orientation. Nkoli was born and raised in Soweto, the largest black township in a South Africa ruled by a white minority who enforced apartheid, a system of racial segregation. His activism began in 1980 when he joined the Congress of South African Students, a youth organisation fighting apartheid. Continued here |
Black Friday: so many online returns end up in landfill – here's what needs to happen to change that
Two of the busiest online shopping days of the year are upon us. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and recession, retailers will be desperately hoping that shoppers take advantage of discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to bump up annual sales figures. While this would boost a sector that has yet to fully recover from the COVID pandemic, there’s a major downside. The more that shoppers buy online, the bigger the problem with returned goods. Continued here |
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The best fiction of 2022: death and life in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger
In his book On Late Style, published posthumously in 2006, the Palestinian American critic Edward Said identifies a striking characteristic of some writers as they near the end of their lives. Rather than going gently into that good night, to borrow poet Dylan Thomas’s phrase, they exhibit instead “a renewed, almost youthful energy”. In Said’s account, the work of these aged writers communicates not “harmony and resolution”, but, rather, a sense of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction”. Continued here |
Cheaper, tougher, less toxic: new alloys show promise in developing artificial limbs
University of the Witwatersrand provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA. But there’s a major problem: titanium is not cheap. Precise data is hard to come by, but a conservative average cost of titanium-based prostheses is between US$3,000 and US$10,000. That’s expensive for most people, and prohibitively so for the majority of people in middle- and low-income countries like those in Africa. Continued here |
Journalists reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic relied on research that had yet to be peer reviewed
Read more: Preprints: how draft academic papers have become essential in the fight against COVID While this new normal offers important benefits for journalists and their audiences, it also comes with risks and challenges that deserve our attention. Continued here |
My RATs are negative but I still think I might have COVID. Should I get a PCR test?
You’ve been exposed to COVID and are starting to get symptoms. But after a couple of days of testing with rapid antigen tests (RATs), your tests remain negative. Mass PCR testing has been scaled back, so in what situations can you get a PCR? And why might it be useful? Continued here |
Why music can give you chills or goosebumps
Frisson is the French word meaning "shiver", but in this case, we're not shivering because we're cold, we're shivering because we're stimulated by music. When we hear a certain piece of music or view a particular work of art, there may be an intense psychological and physiological reaction. "You have this sudden rush of dopamine," explains psychologist Dr Rebecca Johnson-Osei. "It's a similar pathway that gets activated with sex and other things that are rewarding to our brains." Continued here |
High food prices could have negative long-term health effects on Canadians
Recent high food price inflation has plagued many Canadian families, especially those on tight budgets. Statistics Canada reported in October that in-store food prices increased at a faster rate than the all-items Consumer Price Index for the 11th month in a row. A recent study from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute found nearly 60 per cent of Canadians are struggling to provide food for their families. When they can afford to buy food, many cannot afford to buy enough, or buy the food they want. Continued here |
The jobs employers just can't fill
Throughout the past few years, workers have been resigning from jobs in record numbers. Some have been switching careers, some have been job-hopping for faster advancement and some have left the workforce altogether. In the US, for instance, the August 2022 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the labour force participation rate at 1.0 percentage point below its February 2020 level. In other words, people have been quitting and, in some sectors and jobs, they haven’t been coming back. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, given the poor conditions in many workplaces throughout the pandemic. The dearth of workers is most evident in hospitality and service-work industries, where positions for dishwashers, truck drivers, retail workers, food servers, airport agents, home health aides and similar roles have been open for literal years. Continued here
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