Over the past few decades, the terms for referring to active members of causes or organizations have changed. The “volunteer” – which rather referred to charitable action, or solidarity, customary in part of the associative sector, has increasingly replaced in current discourse the “activist” of rather union or political connotation. And, even more recently, no doubt by […] … learn more→

Whenever a school shooting takes place, school officials often arrange for grief counseling services to be made available for whoever needs them. But what exactly do those services entail? To answer that question, The Conversation reached out to Philip J. Lazarus, a school psychology professor at Florida International University who counseled students and educators affected […] … learn more→

College seniors deal with more challenges today than in the past. Between finishing up your courses and searching for positions, it’s easy to lose sight of your end goal of getting a great job once you graduate. There are several things you can do to prepare yourself for the search as you finish up your […] … learn more→

If you step into a newly built school these days, chances are you will see classrooms that look very different to the classrooms most of us spent our school years in as children. On a recent visit to a new primary school in Melbourne, Grattan Institute’s education team entered a large room that contained two […] … learn more→

Google’s parent company Alphabet has lost a hefty US$100 billion (£83 billion) or nearly a tenth of its market value after its new AI chatbot, Bard, botched an answer to a query on an ad promoting its launch. It claimed that the James Webb space telescope took the first pictures of planets outside the Earth’s solar system […] … learn more→

Librarians are the curators of creativity. They collect success stories and share it with the world. Traditionally, the success was from published authors, which libraries shared with the local community. More recently, the model has been flipped: libraries have started to collect from the local community to share with everyone. In academic libraries, this is […] … learn more→

The surgeon general is the “nation’s doctor” in the United States. They are tasked with giving Americans the “best scientific information” about their health. Late last month, the current US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warned 13 is too young to join social media. He said it poses a risk to young people’s “self-worth and their relationships”, adding: […] … learn more→

Today, if you want to find a good moving company, you might ask your favourite search engine – Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for some advice. After wading past half a page of adverts, you get a load of links to articles on moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally […] … learn more→

Collaborative consumption tends to upset the established patterns of buy-sell models, gradually erasing the boundaries between producers and consumers. More concretely, if its contours are difficult to define, a consensus is emerging to define collaborative consumption as a system of redistribution between individuals based on the exchange, barter, donation or even the purchase and sale of second-hand products. […] … learn more→

Listening to people talk about views that clash with your own can be galling. Families all over the world avoid controversial topics. In the UK, for example, mention Brexit and watch everyone in the room tense up. But if you only speak to people who think the same way you do, you live in an echo chamber. Being […] … learn more→