Business & management:
• Concern is so high over a demographic crisis of a very low birth rate, that Japanese companies are being asked to allow married employees to spend more time at home, and the government is considering legislation to allow more family time.
• The UK Employment Tribunal has made a ruling that people trying to combine work with caring for disabled or elderly relatives will have the right to claim against employers who discriminate against them in refusing to offer flexible working.
• A UK commentator promotes co-owned businesses as more successful in providing public services than either pure public services or private sector providers. A publication called “Innovation Included: why co-owned businesses are good for public services” can be downloaded from the Employee Ownership Association website
• An Oxford University professor believes he has traced the world’s earliest example of a credit crunch – in Rome in 88BC.
• The Commerce Commission has today released guidelines to businesses that make environmental, or ‘green’, claims in their marketing.
Education
• The Serious Virtual Worlds report focuses on virtual worlds for educational uses, and explores the ‘serious’ – as opposed to leisure-based – uses of virtual worlds.
Environment & sustainability:
• The current financial crisis is causing some to call for a return to the days when lawns were less important than vegetable gardens.
• The NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development has released surveys of more than 3,500 New Zealanders' experiences with their homes, and their policy preferences. Included is a policy to improve the performance of NZ houses.
Health & wellbeing:
• A UK commentator says that long term social care and support needs to be reintegrated with, and owned by, the wider community.
• An investigation in the UK has discovered that some schools are illegally discriminating against HIV-positive children and teachers.
• Scientists have discovered how stress physically reshapes the brain and causes long-lasting harm to humans and animals.
Law & Government:
• Victoria University of Wellington’s eighth Post-Election Conference will be held on 12 December 2008 at the Legislative Council Chamber at Parliament. Politicians, political scientists and journalists will contribute.
• Stratford District Council’s Information Centre has launched a new touch-window information system. The interactive window display allows visitors to tap the street-side window menu to browse for information at any time whether or not the centre is open.
• A US commentator lists the “Seven silent crises” facing metropolitan areas in the US – although these could be applied to metropolitan areas around the world.
• In the Office of the Ombudsmen’s Annual Report to Parliament, concern is expressed that some parts of the public service have been deliberately delaying responses to Official Information requests.
• Britain’s binge drinking culture is to be curbed by giving local authorities the power to ban happy hours, all you can drink offers and other price promotions in troublesome pubs and bars. Some other innovative ideas to modify drinkers’ behaviour are also being trialled by police.
• Mapping tools provided by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo might lead some local authorities in the UK to be in breach of the Ordnance Survey’s copyright on the original maps.
• Students studying a range of different courses at UK universities are being encouraged to think about the impact of terrorism - town and country planning students are taught to think about how to mitigate the effects of bomb blasts in public spaces.
People, culture & diversity:
• Social networking sites proved their immediacy in the last week during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, with many providing information and images much more quickly than the formal news agencies.
• An American commentator has written about the way the Bush administration has “done unspeakable violence” to the English language.
• The famous open-air booksellers in Paris may be under threat from online book dealers and tourism.
• A UK researcher’s study of the interaction between time poverty and income poverty shows that freeing lone parents from income poverty only comes at the price of deepening their existing time poverty, which is unlikely to improve their children's well-being, and that men are less likely to experience both time and income poverty than women.
• Developmental psychologists have provided evidence that children are naturally tuned to believe in gods of one sort or another.
Science, technology & transport:
• Brain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy.
• Traffic calming features used nowadays to reduce speed even include the unconventional, e.g. “psychological traffic calming” or if you are in India, sacred cows (mentioned in a recent book: Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) / Tom Vanderbilt.)
• The new .tel domain is intended to act as a universal contact point rather than as a hook on which to hang websites, and will work either via the web or mobile phones.
• Researchers say that the impact of emissions from today’s road traffic on the global temperature in 2100 will be six times greater than that from today’s air traffic.
• In the food vs fuel debate, new research shows that perennial grasses may be a better crop to use for producing ethanol than corn.
Thursday, 4 December 2008
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