From the LOGIS news alert subscriptions (ending 11/12 ):

Business & management:
•Flexible working will come into force in NZ from the 1st of July 2008, but in the UK, government ministers are being told that flexible work should be extended to all employees, not just those who need to provide care for others. There is concern that not having the right to flexibility will create divisions in the workplace between those with the right, and those without.
•Businesses in NZ believe that there are more economic opportunities available as a result of climate change, rather than less.
•The 4th Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference will be held in Auckland in August 2008. The Government will be sponsoring the conference.
•As a result of research on employment relationship problems, the Government is intending on a series of improvements, including the development of a Code of Employment Practice and the review some provisions in the Employment Relations Act.
•The New Zealand Pacific Business Council will be hosting the Pacific Trade Expo in Waitakere City in March 2008.

Education
•3 new schools in the Auckland region will be designed with both education and the environment in mind. 2 of the schools will be in Flat Bush in Manukau City (their designs aim to achieve sustainability in energy and water consumption), and one will be in the Stonefields development in Mt Wellington (where the emphasis is on pedestrians, walking and public transport, and the school is only 10 minutes walk from the furthest house – thus cutting down on vehicle emissions).
•Business NZ believes that more work needs to be done on improving the literacy and numeracy skills of NZers, before we can become a knowledge economy.
•NZEI is concerned that University of Auckland restrictions on undergraduate enrolments could contribute to the “tight” supply of teaching staff available.

Environment & sustainability:
•International visitors to NZ are mostly happy that the country lives up to its green image, but are becoming increasingly demanding in their view of what’s green and what’s not – for example, 79% of them said that recycling facilities should be available at tourism activities.
•Beacon Pathway is a NZ research consortium of companies and organisations (including Waitakere City Council) looking for ways to make NZ homes more sustainable. They have recently released a report “National value case for sustainable housing innovations”, which contains recommendations to Government. The report indicates that NZ homes are on average 6°C colder than the WHO recommended winter minimum, 45% of homes are mouldy, and while people on low incomes suffer from living in the poorest housing, affluent households use more water and more energy to heat inefficiently designed homes.

Health & wellbeing:
•There is concern in the UK about the high rate of skin cancer. About 65,000 cases of skin cancer are reported in the UK each year (population 60.6 million – about 0.1%), whereas NZ had about 2000 cases of skin cancer registered in 2004 (population 4.2 million – about 0.047%). In the UK, there are coin-operated and/or unstaffed tanning salons commonly available to the public.
•Brain fitness is not just something for old people, and a new industry is growing up around the concept. “Sharp brains” is a website that can provide you with information, mental exercises and tests to help you understand the wide range of influences on our brain fitness – stress, physical exercise, education and nutrition, and how all of these can improve your memory, cognition, mental acuity, etc. If you’re sceptical about the value to you, start by reading how 10 brain fitness myths are debunked.
•The Lowdown is a NZ government-sponsored website aimed at helping to reduce our youth suicide rates and provide support for youth with depression. Although suicide rates are improving, young people still have higher rates of depression than the general population.
•26% of all child homicide victims in NZ are under the age of 1, and 60% of the victims are under the age of 5. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner has published a book “Lives cut short: child death by maltreatment” as part of an effort to understand this difficult topic.
•The Wellnomics paper that surveyed 95 organisations globally on how their workers use computers and raised concerns that computers may be more ergonomically harmful than we realise (“Byting us where it hurts” NZ Herald), is available in full.
•New research from the University of Otago indicates that over 90% of people in their 20s who have drinking problems, don’t seek help.
•Also from the Otago Wellington campus, a study shows that during the debates in 2000-2005 over smoking in bars and clubs, some MPs used tobacco industry versions of research on second-hand smoking, and a number did not believe that it is harmful.

Law & Government:
•In the UK, there are a range of home ownership schemes promoted by government, designed to enable people on low incomes to eventually pay off a mortgage and own their own homes. The new HomeBuy scheme has a “staircase” aspect to it, which allows people to gradually buy back the equity stake in their property originally provided from the government and from the associated private lender.
•”Walkable urbanism” is the term for urban or suburban areas that provide living, working and entertainment within an area that can be reached easily by pedestrians. Recent research in the US by one of the trend experts, Christopher B. Leinberger, has shown that people in Generation X are pushing the market demand for more US city areas that can provide this lifestyle – influenced he believes, by TV series like “Cheers”, “Seinfeld”, “Friends”, and “Sex in the City”, where city living is seen as hip.

People, culture & diversity:
•On International Volunteers Day last week (5thDec), the Youth Affairs Minister, Nanaia Mahuta, talked about the important role the young play in volunteering, and pointed out that 270 million hours are contributed annually by volunteers.
•More from the Unisys Security Index – “Kiwis are very uncomfortable providing personal information on online social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Bebo, prompting calls for people to take more personal action to protect their private information.”

Science, technology & transport:
•In recent research in Europe, it’s been shown that almost one fifth of the households use mobiles as their only form of telephone. And it’s the newer countries in the EU, that tend to have the highest numbers of “mobile-only” homes.
•And a recent telecoms survey here suggests that more NZers will give up their traditional home phone line, and move to alternatives such as mobile of Voice over IP, while the telecoms market is predicted to slow down.
•A new report in the UK on the carbon footprint of the IT industry, shows that computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry. The warning comes from “An Inefficient Truth”, a report from Global Action Plan.
•”Blueprints for sustainable infrastructure” is a conference to be hosted by the NZ Society for Sustainability Engineering and Science at the University of Auckland in December next year as part of a joint venture between Cambridge University and the NZ Society.