Monthly Archives: January 2021

Mandatory vaccinations for students would be a mistake

Mandatory vaccinations for students would be a mistake

Formal approval of Covid-19 vaccines means that colleges and universities around the world will soon face a fraught choice, if not a Faustian bargain: whether to mandate vaccinations for campus communities. In an era when even the smallest colleges possess a student health infrastructure capable of delivering mass inoculations, the temptation to vaccinate by fiat […] … learn more→

Teaching about pandemics and inequality while living through those realities

Teaching about pandemics and inequality while living through those realities

Jodi Benenson and Tara Kolar Bryan are professors in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska Omaha. In the fall of 2020 they coordinated a team-taught graduate-level course called Pandemics, Protest and Policy that centered around public policy and management issues happening in real time. Here, they answer five questions about what they learned. 1. […] … learn more→

Teen suicide prevention during COVID-19: How parents and kids can have honest and safe conversations

Teen suicide prevention during COVID-19: How parents and kids can have honest and safe conversations

“School or no school, it won’t matter.” “Young people’s issues are minor compared to those of adults.” As researchers concerned with suicide prevention in youth, we sometimes hear people express sentiments like these about young people in the pandemic. But socialization is an important part of growing up. As much as COVID-19 has affected adults, […] … learn more→

Poorer students are less likely to take part in sport at university

Poorer students are less likely to take part in sport at university

Sport has benefits for education as well as for health and wellbeing. Being active can help with concentration, and improve grades. Sport also gives students skills that are valuable in the world of work, such as confidence, team working, leadership and communication skills. These can have a positive impact on future job opportunities. Despite this, involvement in […] … learn more→

Poet Amanda Gorman’s take on love as legacy points to youth’s power to shape future generations

Poet Amanda Gorman’s take on love as legacy points to youth’s power to shape future generations

National youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s recitation of “The Hill We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in the United States captured the attention of a nation and people globally. Gorman highlighted the power of poets in our current sociopolitical context to speak unique and timely truths, while tapping into larger literary traditions. Some commentators were […] … learn more→

It’s not just about the rise in anti-Semitism: why we need real stories for better Holocaust education in Australia

It’s not just about the rise in anti-Semitism: why we need real stories for better Holocaust education in Australia

On January 27 communities worldwide commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz — the largest complex of concentration camps and extermination centres during the Holocaust. This is the first year the International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be marked nationally in Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will address the event, which demonstrates the importance the government ascribes […] … learn more→

On Earth, the mass of the artificial now equals the mass of the living

On Earth, the mass of the artificial now equals the mass of the living

Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) published, on December 9, 2020, a scientific study in the journal Nature entitled “The global mass produced by man exceeds all living biomass”. From the summary, a sentence clearly situates the subject: “We find that the Earth is exactly at a point of intersection. By 2020, anthropogenic mass, which recently doubled […] … learn more→

How superfast charging batteries can help sell the transition to electric vehicles

How superfast charging batteries can help sell the transition to electric vehicles

  Israeli company StoreDot recently announced it can now mass produce electric vehicle batteries that can be fully charged in just five minutes. “The bottleneck to extra-fast charging is no longer the battery,” claimed the firm’s chief executive. But is this fast-charging battery really a gamechanger? And if so: exactly how? Electric vehicle charging speeds […] … learn more→