Science

Mindfulness, the meditation practice that brings one’s attention to present experiences, is gaining traction in the business world.

Researchers have long known that being mindful causes physical and mental benefits such as better brain health, decision-making and stress resilience. Major companies such as Google, Aetna and Intel offer mindfulness training programs as a way to boost employee well-being and productivity.

Building on this trend, financial products and services are starting to use the term “financial mindfulness” as a way to appeal to consumers. For instance, Fidelity talks about the importance of mindfulness in saving and investing, while PNC and Vanguard focus on regulating your emotions during financial planning.

Retailers offer financial mindfulness journals that claim to help people distinguish needs from wants and set financial goals. Books such as “Mindful Money” and “The Mindful Millionaire” explore how to achieve peace and prosperity through money management. Fintech has hopped on the financial mindfulness bandwagon, with apps such as Financial Mindfulness, Allo: Mindful Money Tracker and Aura, a mindful money management platform designed to “help you put your money to work and anxiety to rest.”

But not everyone agrees on what “financial mindfulness” means—and does it even matter?

The short answer is yes.

What financial mindfulness is

Together, our team has 32 years of experience investigating the psychology of consumer finance. Georgetown professor Simon Blanchard and I, along with Cornell Ph.D. student Lena Kim, conducted the first large-scale academic study on financial mindfulness.

We began by conducting a dozen hourlong interviews to ask: “What does financial mindfulness mean to you?” The people we interviewed were from various life stages, from their late teens to early 60s, and they could speak to different kinds of financial stressors: everything from how to best manage college debt, to how to navigate the financial and emotional stress of a divorce, to how to stay on track with retirement saving.

Our interviews revealed two main abilities that consumers associate with being financially mindful: high levels of financial awareness, or knowing what you have and what you owe; and high levels of financial acceptance.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean being complacent. Instead, it’s about being able to face unpleasant financial decisions without letting your emotions take over.

We used these two components to create an eight-item scale to measure how financially mindful someone is.

Why financial mindfulness matters

We then wanted to examine whether financial mindfulness actually results in better financial decisions.

Past research has shown that practicing general mindfulness makes people less likely to fall prey to the sunk cost bias: the tendency to continue working on something just because you’ve already invested large amounts of money, effort or time.

As an example, people are told that an investment strategy they developed over several months is not working, and there is no way to recover their lost time or money. Those who show the bias decide to continue with their current investment strategy even though they know it’s not working.

Importantly, when we measured how generally mindful someone is, as well as how mindful they are about finances in particular, we found that their level of financial mindfulness is a better predictor of the decision to change their investment strategy. Put differently, people with a good awareness of their finances, and who are willing to accept their financial situation, are better able to resist the sunk cost bias, since they are better able to manage emotions surrounding their money.

In addition to collecting our own data, we also partnered with two fintech apps that allowed us to administer our financial mindfulness scale to their customers.

With Aura Finance, a wealth-management app that targets young, high-earning women, we examined each user’s percentage allocation of stocks versus bonds, a common measure of investment risk tolerance. There is no optimal split level between stocks and bonds, but younger people are typically advised to take on more financial risk. Although we did not include the Aura data in our published paper, when we matched users’ scale scores to their portfolios, we found that financially mindful users were willing to take on more risk in their portfolios.

With Debbie, an app that helps customers track progress toward repaying debt and provides rewards when they achieve goals, we found that those who are more financially mindful have higher credit scores. Every 1-point increase in financial mindfulness was associated with a 14.8-point increase in credit score.

Increasing financial mindfulness

In the current economic climate, financial stress is a major concern for many Americans, leading to anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. Here are some practical steps to bring mindfulness to your finances:

1. Build financial awareness: Track and monitor your spending habits using available software, tools and apps, such as those offered through your bank. This will help you understand your relationship with money and build financial awareness. You can’t have financial mindfulness without knowing what’s going on with your own money.
2. Develop financial acceptance: You also need to accept your financial situation, even if your finances are not where you want them to be. Take advantage of services such as money coaches or online communities for money matters. Talking about money helps.
3. Learn about your money personality—your core beliefs about whether money can solve problems and what financial goals are most important to you. This will help you to develop better coping mechanisms.

Incorporating mindfulness into financial practices and habits can help people navigate their financial journeys. Based on our research, we believe that financial service providers should continue to offer not only awareness-related services but also acceptance tools—helping their customers lead financially happier lives.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Quick question: what do these titles have in common? A Dark Continent Seeking Light; Sure, Ebola is Bad. Africa has Worse, or; Magic and Cannibalism in the African Jungle. You guessed it—they’re all about Africa. But the most correct answer is they’re all headlines that have appeared in the prestigious New York Times newspaper.

They’re just some examples of the ways that many traditional news outlets in the west have historically reported about Africa. Today news reporting that reinforces negative perceptions, stereotyping and racial misrepresentation is declining. But the harms inflicted on the continent and its communities remain unresolved.

US media scholar Meredith Clark predicted that 2021 would be the “year journalism starts paying reparations”. She coined the term “reparative journalism” to mean a new approach for the US news media “to redeem itself … through radically inclusive editorial choices”.

As if to answer this call, many news organizations have published prominent apologies. These acknowledge their racialized framing of the news or links to slavery.

Other forms of redress have also gained recognition. The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine, for example, is a platform for marginalized communities to revisit the history of slavery and racism. In the UK, The Guardian created a similar project, Cotton Capital, as part of a broader restorative justice program.

Scholars have argued that this employs a strategy of “journalistic retelling” of the news.

There are some positive developments regarding how Africa is being reported internationally. But an ongoing cultural change is needed, mainly in the ways news is produced. This calls for rethinking journalism training and shifting to more community-oriented approaches of reporting.

And, in this rethink, should African media should not also be taking stock of their own damaging historical role in supporting colonial interests and global north perspectives?

As media scholars we focus on how journalism on the continent works. We have studied how African journalists report on African news in relation to global news media. In a forthcoming scholarly book, Wahutu considers what forces have shaped African journalism and why African narratives have been marginalized by African journalists.

It’s critical for minority world countries to reckon with a dark history of colonization, slavery, genocide or racial discrimination. But there is also the question of how—or even if—this is something that news organizations and professionals in Africa themselves need to reckon with.

Africa’s own reckoning?

The press has a long history in Africa. The first newspaper appeared in the late 1700s in Egypt, followed by South Africa in 1800 and Sierra Leone in 1801.

Indigenous newspapers, such as The Lagos Weekly Record (Nigeria), L’Action Tunisienne (Tunisia), Imvo Zabantsundu (South Africa) and Njata ya Kirinyaga (Kenya), were not shy to call out the ills of the colonial government or African elites.

This would change after independence due to political repression by new African governments—as well as ongoing western approaches to journalism education and training that had become the norm. The state was mostly treated with kid gloves or as a source of information. Audiences were mostly treated as “the man in the biscuit factory“: uninterested in politics and concerned about sports.

Research shows that when covering international events unfolding on the continent, African newspapers have been more likely to get their stories from organizations and actors from the western world than from other African countries.

This is typically presented as a necessary function of a lack of resources. For example, it may be cheaper for Kenya to get news stories from a global news agency than from Ugandan newspapers (some of which are owned by rival Kenyan media organizations). And, as a journalist once quipped, “We have this mentality that foreign media is the best … until they bash us.”

So, if correspondents of The New York Times admit that their organization misrepresents Africa, why would The New York Times stories appear in newspapers in Kenya? Especially when talking about events in Kenya? Whatever the reasons—and there are many—it’s time for African news organizations to also consider reparative journalism. To think about whether or how African journalism has perpetuated these very misrepresentations through outsourcing labor or through what is understood as “good journalism“.

Many news organizations in Africa have yet to adequately examine how they have internalized white normative approaches to journalism.

National Geographic has apologized for framing Aboriginal Australians as “savages”. Perhaps we should ask some Kenyan newspapers to apologize for seeking to expand the colonial military’s presence and therefore violence against Kenyans.

The future

A new period of cultural reckoning in the US and UK has paved the way for a global conversation about reparative journalism. Among the proposals are for news organizations to find new ways of doing news reporting. These include more sustained coverage of misrepresented communities, more just future dealings with minority communities, and journalism that is expanded to include sidelined voices in news reporting, such as artists and activists.

African journalism within the continent needs to reawaken its historically outspoken role instead of continuing to mimic damaging practices from the west. There is a need to retell the continent’s realities in a manner that avoids divisions embraced by early political elites.

Our research proposes that African news organizations must think of themselves as chroniclers of contemporary histories and builders of archives for future generations.

The news media are key in not only constructing reality but also archiving it. This informs how audiences think about their everyday life. This in turn influences how they imagine their tomorrow and remember their yesterday. It has a lasting effect on how future generations think about places like Africa.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Iyashikei is a Japanese genre that, according to Japanese studies scholar Paul Roquet, tells stories that are designed to comfort and heal weary readers by creating an aesthetic of calm. In order to achieve this, as Roquet articulates, these stories are presented as tales with little or no plot conflict.

That simple idea is, however, somewhat antithetical to longstanding western storytelling traditions, where conflict has been considered key to plot development.

Screenwriting guru Robert McKee simply states that “nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.”

Yet, instead of conflict, iyashikei typically provides, as educator Patricia Thang notes, “a feeling of warmth and comfort, like curling up in a big blanket with a cup of tea and fuzzy socks.”

Iyashikei comes from “iyashi,” which can be translated as “healing,” “soothing” or even “therapy,” and “kei,” which means “type,” notes Roquet. He links the emergence of iyashikei to Japan’s economic downturn in the 1990s, where iyashi cultural outputs began operating across a wide array of media (including anime and manga, but also literature, commercials and cinema).

Examples of Iyashikei manga

Iyashikei has found a noteworthy home in the medium of manga—Japanese comics of international renown, which in 2023 had an estimated US$14 billion market value. Many iyashikei manga have been made into related anime.

Popular stories that fall into this healing type include Yuru Camp (also known as Laid-Back Camp), A Man and His Cat, Flying Witch, Girls Last Tour, Aria and How to Keep a Mummy.

Each of these stories offer readers the fuzzy socks experience described by Thang.

Consider, for example, A Man and His Cat, which tells the simple tale of a lonely older man who adopts an ugly and unwanted cat. The manga is completely devoid of a clearly defined conflict, and so the reader is simply left to vicariously experience the affection that grows between the two titular characters and the life that they build together in the wake of their respective experiences of loneliness and isolation.

The series creator, Umi Sakurai, notes in an interview: “A Man and His Cat is a picture made of small, happy moments, little exchanges of thoughtfulness that can be found anywhere in our daily lives.”

Chapters focus on things such as the man (Kanda) choosing the right toys for his cat (Fukumaru) or on Fukumaru discovering the joy of listening to Kanda play the piano, with accompanying visuals rendered in a pleasing aesthetic. Other visuals simply emphasize expression through close-ups that project things like happiness or simply calm.

Early Iyashikei in North American market

One of the great early successes for iyashikei in the North American market is Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket, which began in 1998 and sold over 30 million copies globally before fostering multiple adaptations in a variety of media.

Fruits Basket tells the story of Tohru Honda, an orphaned young woman. The story narrates her experiences with the Sohma family, and occurrences that isolate the Sohmas from society, including intergenerational trauma and family members’ competition with each other.

As rhetoric instructor and writer Erika Arivett notes, “the characters, like the readers, are encouraged to struggle, grieve and heal in their experiences of trauma.” The end result is a manga that can be deeply relatable and soothing to anyone who has experienced things like isolation, loss, violence or depression.

Multiple scholars and commentators have identified the popularization of a healing type genre as a development that makes sense within the context of Japanese culture navigating varied crises and stressors related to social and technological modernization.

The suggested correlation is that times of great cultural stress call for cultural healing through the media that we consume.

Culture, stories and wellness

Underlying the concept of iyashikei stories are more fundamental questions about the capacity for culture and stories to provide healing.

These questions are entwined in concepts explored by the academic fields of Graphic Medicine, the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of health care, or narrative-based medicine—work by health-care practitioners that acknowledges stories have powerful impacts on patient care and the fulfillment of practitioners.

Based on the popularity of iyashikei stories and the widespread interest in connections between narrative and healing, it would seem multiple disciplines and communities are wondering if maybe we have enough conflict in our world these days.

With the iyashikei genre, readers in want of healing more than adventure gain an enriched palate of experiences.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

According to a study by the Department of Psychology at the UCO in which 245 women participated, 98% of women suffer street harassment and 80% of them experience it on a monthly basis. The research is published in the journal Sex Roles.

Street harassment is one of the forms of Violence Against Women recognized by the UN since 2013. This type of violence involves a series of behaviors directed at women, by one or more unknown men, without communicative intent. These are behaviors featuring a sexual dimension and that seek to degrade women. Despite the adjective “street,” they actually transcend streets, per se, extending to other locations like parks, shopping malls, cinemas and university halls, for example.

Given the scarcity of studies on the subject in Spain, and with the aim of ascertaining the prevalence and frequency of these behaviors, and their impact on the psychological well-being of women, researchers in the Department of Psychology Ana M. Contreras Merino, Naima Z. Farhane Medina and Rosario Castillo Mayén took an “X-ray” of the problem in the country, unifying different types of street harassment in public and semi-public places.

The study, which involved 245 women between the ages of 18 and 61, found high rates of street harassment in the country. “98% of the women surveyed had experienced some type of street harassment in their lives, 80% had experienced it on a monthly basis, and 25.7%, on a daily basis,” explained researcher Naima Farhane.

Regarding the impact that these behaviors can have on women’s lives, researcher Ana Contreras pointed to how “higher levels of anxiety and fear of rape are observed when these experiences of harassment are more frequent. Self-esteem also drops as a result of these experiences.”

“The study specifically asked about anxiety, placing women in situations of harassment to indicate the discomfort they felt in relation to that experience,” explained researcher Rosario Castillo.

Changes in women’s lives and routines to avoid harassment are also indicated in the study, as participants reported that they restricted their own mobility and avoided certain places when they were alone.

In this way, “street harassment emerges as a control mechanism that aggravates women’s subordination. The fact that women use these avoidance strategies restricts public spaces to those who can use them with a certain level of security,” added Farhane.

Thus, the limitations on women’s freedom of movement due to street harassment reflected in the study highlight the importance of this problem, despite the legislative support in the country. As the researchers point out, there is a clash between what happens on the street and regulatory advances, creating a kind of “equality bubble.”

Finally, another issue revealed by the study is that sexism leads to fewer reports of harassment experiences. It shows that, as Contreras explained, “harboring a sexist ideology can prevent one from detecting or remembering these experiences of harassment, which are normalized and understood as part of the normal relationship between women and men.” In contrast, feminist women identified these types of behaviors more readily.

The researchers point to education and the fight against sexism as possible ways to deal with these situations that, as they demonstrate, have a high impact on women’s lives and well-being. In their line of research, they will continue to delve into the subject to identify possible differences based on age, the nature of them, and to explore how women cope with street harassment.

With the presidential election just five weeks away, the only thing predictable about the campaign season is the daily churn of United States electorate polls.

Polls have garnered derision over the last few election cycles, but survey methodologists—including Kristen Olson, director of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Bureau of Sociological Research—are always working to improve the science.

Polling methodology is always changing, Olson, an expert in survey methodology, said. Most notably, pollsters have changed the ways polls are conducted over the last two decades. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, in 2000, polling was done almost exclusively by phone.

Today, pollsters rely on text, online and phone surveys, and probability panels that follow a group of voters through a set amount of time during an election campaign. More firms are also gathering the numbers, with the number of active polling firms more than doubled since the turn of the century.

Olson served on committees for the American Association for Public Opinion Research charged with reviewing polling methods and outcomes following presidential elections, which led to changes in how pollsters statistically weight their data and the transparency of firms’ methods.

She served on the Public Opinion Research committee following the presidential elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016. The 2016 election stunned poll watchers, but Olson said when the committee dug into the data, the reasons for the outsized differences between the polls and the ultimate result became clearer.

“The real problems were in the state-level polls, where the estimates of anticipated vote choice were far off in important states,” Olson said.

“One of the reasons for that was that state-level pollsters were not weighting for education, especially an overrepresentation of college graduates in their samples. One big recommendation in our report was to weight for education in addition to age, race and sex.”

Olson said that the other issue was the way polling aggregators were modeling probabilities for election outcomes.

“There was a very large presence in the media and political discourse about these polling aggregators,” she said. “We came down hard on them in our report because they were using inputs in their models with unknown errors, and they weren’t really being transparent.”

The American Association committees in 2016 and 2020 also examined how transparent pollsters were about their methodologies.

“The best polls are transparent about their methods,” Olson said.

Poll watchers should keep in mind that any single poll is a snapshot in time, not necessarily predictive of an electoral outcome.

“It’s really just showing what the electorate is thinking at a particular point in time,” she said. “And there is a lot of evidence of late deciders—or those who are making their decision at the ballot box—and polls can’t capture those in-the-moment decisions.

“The undecideds are pretty sizable, and there have been post-election surveys done that ask when a person made up their mind about who they were going to vote for, and large numbers of people reported very late decisions.”

Additionally, despite efforts to incorporate different collection methods and statistical adjustments, polling is more difficult now than ever.

“Response rates are really low right now,” Olson said.

“Response rates have been declining for 40 years—it’s not a new thing—and they’re generally declining in most countries. There’s no singular explanation for it. There have been changes in norms of communication, changes in willingness to participate, changes in how we think about privacy, and more demands on our time.”

So why should any attention be paid to polls?

“The world changes fast, especially in the world of politics,” Olson said. “What people are thinking today might not be what they think tomorrow. When I look at a poll, I know that’s what they were thinking yesterday, and having some sense of what people thought yesterday is informative, but it’s certainly not the final answer.”

And from a researcher’s perspective, election polling can provide useful benchmarks for the field.

“As a survey methodologist, election polling is the most visible thing we do, even more so than the census, more than the unemployment rate,” Olson said. “And they are one of the few places where a true value is known, and we can evaluate how well our methods worked, and if what we’re doing is getting us closer to the truth.

“Pollsters are often at the forefront of innovation in methods, and it’s important to keep evaluating and studying those methods.”

In September, the Purdue University/CME Group Ag Economy Barometer recorded its lowest readings since March 2016. Declining income expectations pushed farmer sentiment down as the barometer fell 12 points to 88, and the Index of Future Expectations dropped 14 points to 94. The Index of Current Conditions also fell 7 points to 76, which nearly matched levels seen in April 2020, during the height of COVID-19 concerns for farmers. This month’s survey was conducted from Sept. 9–13, 2024.

September’s survey revealed that farmers are increasingly worried about commodity prices, input costs, agricultural trade prospects and the potential impact of the upcoming election on their farm operations. When asked to identify their top concerns for the coming year, low commodity prices and high input costs were nearly tied, with 34% of farmers citing input prices and 33% pointing to lower output prices as their primary concerns. Interest rates trailed behind as a top concern for 17% of respondents.

Producers’ apprehensions about commodity prices matched up with their lack of confidence in the future of U.S. agricultural exports; only 26% of respondents expect exports to rise over the next five years, the most pessimistic response to this question since it was first introduced in 2019. Additionally, 78% of producers expressed concern that government policy changes following the fall 2024 elections could impact their farms.

“The continued drop in the barometer reflects deepening concerns among farmers regarding expectations for farm income in 2024 and 2025,” said James Mintert, the barometer’s principal investigator and director of Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture.

“It’s notable that producer sentiment dropped back to levels last seen in 2016 when the U.S. farm economy was in the early stages of an economic downturn. In addition to commodity prices and input costs weighing heavily on their operations, producers are also facing considerable uncertainty about what lies ahead for their farms with the possible government policy changes following the upcoming 2024 elections.”

The Farm Financial Performance Index fell for the third consecutive month, dropping to 68 in September from 72 in August. Farmers’ financial expectations have declined markedly compared to a year ago, as the index was at 86 in September 2023—an 18-point difference. While the Farm Capital Investment Index increased by 4 points from August to a reading of 35, it sits just above its all-time low, indicating that many producers believe it is not an opportune time for making large investments.

The Short-Term Farmland Value Expectations Index dropped by 10 points to 95. This is the first time since 2020 that the index fell below 100, indicating that more farmers are expecting a decline in farmland values over the next year than those who anticipate an increase. This month’s shift from a positive to a weaker outlook is attributable to a significant decrease in the percentage of producers forecasting rising values and a rise in those who expect values to remain steady.

The September survey marks the fourth consecutive year that the barometer has included questions regarding cover crop usage among corn and soybean producers. Consistent with prior years’ surveys, more than half of the respondents indicated that they currently plant cover crops on part of their farms, while an additional 1 in 5 farmers reported planting cover crops sometime in the past.

Interestingly, farmers who currently use cover crops say they are devoting a larger proportion of their farm’s acreage to cover crops than in the past. In 2021, 41% of cover crop users noted planting them on more than 25% of their farm’s acreage. This figure rose to 50% in 2023, and in this year’s survey, 68% of cover crop users indicated planting cover crops on more than one-fourth of their farms.

The European Union’s chief on Tuesday warned that the continent was “losing ground” in the global technology race and must boost research spending to “turn the tide”.

“We must put research and innovation at the heart of Europe’s economy,” EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen told a ceremony celebrating the 70th anniversary of Europe’s CERN physics laboratory.

She hailed the world’s largest particle physics lab for helping put the continent “back on the map” for scientific development, after the post-World War II brain-drain.

“Just like 70 years ago, we live in times of rising geopolitical competition,” she told the ceremony, attended by dignitaries, including Princess Astrid of Belgium and the presidents of Italy, Serbia and Slovakia.

“We are in the midst of a global race for the technologies that will shape the world of tomorrow, from clean tech to quantum, from AI to fusion,” Von der Leyen said, lamenting that “while Europe is home to more researchers than both the US and China, we are losing ground in many fields”.

One of those is patent applications, where the European share has been cut in the last two decades from 30 percent to 15 percent”.

Increase research spending

“It is time to turn the tide,” she said, adding that she wanted “to increase research spending in our next budget”.

The CERN lab on the edge of Geneva straddles the border between France and Switzerland. It seeks to unravel what the universe is made of and how it works, aiming to advance the boundaries of human knowledge.

It employs 2,500 people and welcomes some 17,000 visiting scholars every year.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—a 27-kilometer proton-smashing ring running about 100 metres below ground—has already begun chipping away at the unknown.

Among other things, it was used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson—dubbed the God particle—which broadened the understanding of how particles acquire mass.

CERN has its sights set on building a huge new particle accelerator that would eclipse the LHC.

A feasibility study is underway for the 91-kilometer Future Circular Collider (FCC), with CERN earlier this year estimating it would cost around $17 billion.

‘Hope’

CERN director general Fabiola Gianotti on Tuesday insisted that it could become “the most extraordinary instrument ever built by humanity to study the fundamental laws of the universe and address many of the outstanding questions”.

She appealed to CERN’s member states—22 European countries plus Israel—to “ensure that CERN has a brilliant future”.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic vowed that his country would double its financial contributions to CERN.

Von der Leyen suggested that if developed, the FCC “could preserve Europe’s scientific edge”.

She said that European countries had to stand together in the face of competition from China, which is evaluating building its own 100-kilometer accelerator “to challenge CERN’s global leadership”.

Gianotti said it was important for CERN to build its accelerator before China does.

“It will be very difficult to have two such facilities in the world,” she told AFP.

© 2024 AFP

A new study led by an Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) expert has revealed alarming shortcomings in the UK’s efforts to prosecute wildlife criminals.

The report System set to fail—prosecuting wildlife crime, reveals that despite widespread public demand for strict penalties, many perpetrators escape justice due to systemic failures. The study was conducted by Angus Nurse, Professor of Law and Environmental Justice at ARU and Nadine Harding from the University of Gloucestershire.

Commissioned by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), the report offers a comprehensive analysis of the obstacles faced by those on the front line of wildlife law enforcement. Professor Nurse, an expert in environmental justice, led a team of criminologists in compiling first-hand accounts from police officers, legal professionals, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Their findings describe a legal system struggling to handle the growing threat of wildlife crime.

The report highlighted the significant challenges facing enforcement agencies, including a lack of resources, inadequate training, and inconsistent evidence-gathering procedures.

The report’s release coincides with a YouGov poll that shows overwhelming public support for harsher penalties against wildlife criminals, with 97% of respondents saying that those who torture wild animals should face punishment, and 92% supporting the establishment of a formal reporting system for wildlife crimes.

Despite this, the System set to fail report reveals that many cases go unpunished, with criminals finding ways to exploit weaknesses in the system.

One of the most pressing issues identified by Professor Nurse and his team is the lack of capacity which leads to problems in collecting evidence and consistency in preparing cases for prosecution.

The team also identified the “non-notifiable” status of wildlife crimes. This classification means that such incidents do not have to be reported to the Home Office, thereby excluding them from national crime statistics. As a result, these crimes are often obscured within broader categories like violence and anti-social behavior, making it difficult to assess the true scale of the problem.

Professor Nurse said, “Research consistently shows wildlife crime doesn’t get the priority or the resources it deserves. Instead, we have a system reliant on the diligence and dedication of individual enforcement staff. We need better systems in place to provide the necessary support to investigate and prosecute these crimes.”

“The current system fails to provide the necessary support to protect wildlife and bring wildlife criminals to justice. The need for reform has never been more urgent.”

IFAW’s recommendations include making wildlife crime a “notifiable” offense, implementing mandatory legal training on wildlife crime, and establishing clear sentencing and prosecution guidelines. Additionally, the report calls for enhanced multi-agency collaboration and a renewed commitment to funding the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU).

A new project is assessing the influence of ancient rock art on the modern art of Indigenous peoples in Central Asia and Canada, revealing its importance to reclaiming cultural identities.

Rock art holds an important place in the cultures of many Indigenous peoples to this day, indicating their shared communal identities and ancient ties to the land on which they live. However, the influence of rock art on current artistic movements is still rarely recognized and poorly understood.

“The contemporary re-use of rock art is a growing phenomenon,” says author of the research, Professor Andrzej Rozwadowski from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. “However, to date, very little attention has been paid to how rock art inspires contemporary Indigenous artists, especially in such little known areas as Siberia or Central Asia.”

To remedy this, Professor Rozwadowski is leading the project “Rock Art as a Source of Contemporary Cultural Identity,” focusing on the Indigenous artists of Central Asia (covering Siberia & Kazakhstan) and Canada. Professor Rozwadowski interviews and documents the art of Indigenous artists in these regions, exploring how their work was inspired by rock art.

His findings are published in the journal Antiquity. In Siberia and Kazakhstan, Indigenous cultural expression was often suppressed by the Soviet Union. Taking inspiration from rock art now provides Indigenous peoples in post-Soviet regions with a link to their ancestors that was erased during Soviet times, making it a key aspect of reclaiming lost cultural identities.

In Canada, a similar process occurred as a result of European colonization. In the face of First Nations traditions being forgotten by younger generations, the application of ancient rock art to contemporary artistic expression is essential for the preservation of heritage. Many Indigenous Canadian artists also consciously link rock art traditions to modern colonial injustice, for example, the residential schools system, acting as decolonizing symbols intended to heal some wounds in Indigenous history.

Furthermore, the ways rock art motifs are incorporated into contemporary art share similarities over these thousands of miles. “It turned out that both Asian and Canadian artists see a lot of similarities in the art they create,” states Professor Rozwadowski.

“The most memorable thing for me was what Canadian artist from the Cree Nation Jane Ash Poitras said when I met her in Edmonton. When I showed her the work of the Khakass artist Alexander Domozhakov, from southern Siberia, she said, ‘Isn’t it Norval Morrisseau?'” (Norval Morrisseau is Canada’s most prominent Indigenous artist.)

This research shows that the application of rock art motifs to contemporary art is a very deliberate act on part of Indigenous artists, emphasizing the resilience and cultural continuity of various historically oppressed peoples. “Rock art is a source of both aesthetic and identity inspiration for contemporary artists,” concludes Professor Rozwadowski.

“It demonstrates how rock art is important to many Indigenous artists as a source for rediscovering their cultural identities, especially now in post-colonial times.”

Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the right to freedom of expression remains less important to Germans who lived in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) than to their West German counterparts. These are the findings of a study by economists from the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg and the University of Groningen.

The longer people lived in the GDR, the greater the difference is, the analysis showed. In contrast, there are no obvious east-west differences among people born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The study was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

The authors, Dr. Olga Popova (IOS) and Prof. Dr. Milena Nikolova (University of Groningen), approached the division and later reunification of Germany as a natural experiment to investigate the long-term effects of socialism on individual freedom of speech values.

They analyzed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) from longitudinal surveys, involving the same people in 1996, 2006, and 2016, as well as data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) covering 1991 to 2018.

Respondents were asked to indicate, for example, how important they consider the protection of freedom of expression to be as a political goal in comparison to maintaining public order, campaigning against price increases, and giving citizens more influence over the government.

The researchers compared the responses of people who had lived in the GDR before 1989 with those of people who had lived in the Federal Republic of Germany before 1989. According to the results, citizens of the former GDR consistently gave relatively low priority to freedom of expression.

In 1996, as the economists’ analysis showed, 6.3% of former GDR citizens considered the protection of freedom of expression to be the most important political goal, compared to 21% of their counterparts in the West, a difference of 14.7 percentage points. In 2006, the difference was 13.2 percentage points while in 2016, it was 15.4 percentage points.

Freedom of expression was also mentioned less frequently by citizens of the former GDR when it came to the second most important political goals. The analysis of the other data sets presented a similar picture consistently from summer 1991 to the end of the surveys.

Nikolova explains, “While there is evidence of some convergence in attitudes over time, the rate is very slow. That’s why we can assume that the differences still exist today—and will continue to exist for a long time to come.”

The discrepancy in attitudes is more pronounced the older the former GDR citizens are and the longer they therefore lived in the socialist system.

Popova said, “We cannot explain these differences with absolute certainty; they are probably a consequence of the regime’s omnipresent efforts to control information and suppress dissenting opinions through indoctrination and political repression. This can create deep-seated mistrust—and thus a general caution against free expression of opinion.

“It is remarkable that living in a democracy for more than three decades now has hardly had any contrary influence. On the other hand, those born in East Germany after 1989 do not score lower in terms of freedom of opinion than those from West Germany.”

Nikolova and Popova argue that the study contributes to a better understanding of how political regimes influence individual values and how long these effects can last. It also shows how fragile fundamental rights such as freedom of expression can be, even in established democracies.

The SOEP, based at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), is the largest and longest-running multidisciplinary long-term study in Germany. In the ALLBUS study series, conducted by the GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim, random samples of the German population were surveyed on attitudes and behavior.