A handshake in orbit 50 years ago transformed the space race
Some 225km above France, American astronauts opened a spacecraft hatch and found themselves face to face with cosmonauts from the Soviet Union.
'Glad to see you,' Colonel Alexei Leonov spoke in accented English
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Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Otago Daily Times
Boost in job satisfaction, health: four-day work week benefits
Working less could give us more, a new study suggests. Four-day work weeks without a reduction in income are found to boost workers' job satisfaction and physical and mental health, driven by enhanced work performance, lower levels of fatigue and fewer sleep problems, new research suggests. The findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, highlight the potential for organisations and policymakers to improve employee well-being by re-evaluating workplace hours. Initiatives that reduce working hours — such as a six-hour workday or a 20% reduction in working time — have recently been trialled around the world. For example, the 4 Day Week Global initiative has run trials in many countries, with participation from about 375 companies, to understand how a shortened work week — without a reduction in pay — can result in a better working environment. To test the effects of the four-day work week (with no reduction in worker pay) intervention, Wen Fan, Juliet Schor and colleagues conducted six-month trials that involved 2896 employees across 141 organisations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland and the USA. Using survey data, they compared work- and health-related indicators (including burnout, job satisfaction, mental and physical health) before and after the intervention. They also compared these outcomes with those from 285 employees at 12 companies that did not trial the intervention. Fan and colleagues found that after the four-day work week intervention, there was a reduction in average working hours of about five hours per week. Employees with a reduction of eight hours or more per work week self-reported experiencing larger reductions in burnout and improvements in job satisfaction and mental health, as compared with those at companies that maintained a five-day workweek. Similar, though smaller, effects were observed among employees with between one and four hour and five and seven hour reductions in their work week. These benefits were partially explained by a reduced number of sleeping problems and levels of fatigue, and improved individual work ability. The authors suggest that shorter work weeks and reduced working hours without a reduction in salary can help to improve job satisfaction and worker health. They note that a key limitation of the study was companies self-selecting to participate, and resulted in a sample that consists predominantly of smaller companies from English-speaking countries. — Science Media Centre
Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Otago Daily Times
Solar bursts shine light on history
A reconstruction of Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland. IMAGE: RUSS HEINL / ALL CANAD PHOTO Not many people have had their name adopted into the English language. The Earl of Sandwich springs to mind, as does the Duke of Wellington. Then there is Vidkun Quisling and Amelia Bloomer. Now we have a new word, a Miyake event. Fusa Miyake works at the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory, Nagoya University and she has given her name to a remarkable phenomenon known as a Miyake Spike. These are brief episodes when a solar particle event generates a sharp rise in atmospheric radiocarbon and they were first identified by Fusa. Every year Japanese cedar trees add a growth ring, the shape of which is unique and determined by that year's climate. If you take a modern tree, and match it successively with earlier trees that have survived, you can obtain an annual chronology. Now, by radiocarbon dating such tree rings, you can get a precise date for a Miyake Spike. One took place in AD 793 and another in AD 993. Greenland has been in the news recently. It was certainly colonised by the Vikings en route to the New World, and on Newfoundland, they settled, briefly, at the site of Anse aux Meadows. There they build at least eight timber framed buildings, including houses, a hall and a forge. A vexing issue about this site is that radiocarbon dating has not been precise enough to pinpoint when it was occupied, other than with a very wide margin of error. This is a matter of considerable interest, after all, it was the earliest known European settlement of the Americas. Enter Margot Kuitems and a team from Groningen University. They have radiocarbon dated four pieces of wood from fir and juniper trees that had been felled by Viking metal axes at Anse aux Meadows. They then obtained multiple radiocarbon dates for individual tree rings, and found the consistent presence of the AD 993 Miyuke Spike. From this deduction, it was possible to count the tree rings to the outermost, finding that the trees had been felled in the year AD 1021. There was yet more precision. The structure of the outermost rings revealed that one tree was felled in the spring, another in the summer/autumn. Archaeologists have also been investigating this World Heritage site, finding that it was the base for Viking explorations to the south. In the words of Kuitems and her team, this dates the first known occasion by which human migrations encircled the planet.
NZ Herald
2 days ago
- NZ Herald
Erica Stanford faces greatest NCEA test
Arguably, Stanford's most important move was the simplest: her ban on smartphones in schools informed by New York University's Professor Jonathan Haidt. The damage smartphones do to developing minds is comparable to alcohol and cannabis, so that nothing else will much matter if they're not sensibly regulated. At least, they must be kept out of schools, which Stanford delivered three weeks after being sworn in. Likewise, no amount of money or other reforms would much matter if primary students remained in barn-like so-called modern learning environments (MLEs), pushed on schools by the Key Government for reasons never properly explained and retained by Jacinda Ardern's Education Minister, Chris Hipkins. Effectively compulsory until Stanford arrived, she quickly made MLEs voluntary and has now banned new ones from being built altogether. But these were quick-win prerequisites to ensure structured learning could begin again in primary classrooms. Stanford also began the much more difficult work of restoring content and rigour to the school curriculum. First were new maths and English curricula, spelling out clearly what teachers are meant to teach, and how. That departs from recent decades, when subject curricula would instead focus on 'outcomes', leaving teachers to work out what to do for their students to achieve them. Now, practical teaching resources are included in curriculum documents, with over 800,000 new maths resources already provided to primary schools. That the curriculum was not just launched but is already being implemented in 92% of primary schools suggests Stanford has a rare ability to force bureaucrats to do what she wants, rather than the reverse. It's too simplistic to call Stanford's new maths and English curricula 'back to basics', but they do focus more on teachers passing on knowledge to students than on facilitating 'learners' to discover or invent knowledge themselves. The latter can wait for primary students to start their post-graduate work in a decade or two. In the meantime, Stanford's curriculum assumes there's foundational stuff they need to learn first. Following maths and English, the next priorities are the natural sciences, the social sciences, health, and Te Reo Māori. Stanford's curriculum reforms will become harder politically as they move into more contested subjects. But the politics may be easier if her focus remains on foundational knowledge, delivered in a structured environment, in a logical sequence, rather than trying to introduce the latest and most advanced theories in primary classrooms. Kids need to learn addition before multiplication, how to read before how to interpret texts, about atoms before electrons, and that the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the British Crown and Māori chiefs before considering how well it has been honoured. As these students reach secondary school, Stanford's next big decision is how to extend her approach into the qualifications system and what to do about NCEA. Political blame for NCEA can be shared widely. Every party in Parliament has been part of a government that contributed to the fiasco, and all were warned by the country's best educators that it would dumb down secondary education and lead to a two-tier system, benefiting the rich and well connected at the expense of the middle class and poor. Everyone meant well. The NCEA's origins were David Lange and Phil Goff's Learning for Life report, which recommended establishing the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) 'to provide an across-the-board approach to the validation of qualifications in schools and in vocational and advanced academic areas'. This was a response to everyone needing some form of higher education in a more advanced economy, and a desire to break down the distinction and allow cross-crediting between vocational training and academic study. National's Lockwood Smith saw the advantages in trying to clearly define what knowledge, understanding and skills students and people in the workforce were meant to achieve, and to worry less about where they might develop them and more about whether they had. He was backed by employers who argued they needed to know exactly what potential recruits knew and could do rather than that they had scored 59, 71 or 82 in an exam. The proposed system was at the centre of Smith's Education for the 21st Century, which I ghost-wrote. But politicians should always be wary of utopianism, and the idea that NZQA or anyone else could write or validate rigorous outcomes statements for the entirety of human knowledge and capabilities, and then operate a system giving each student a detailed certificate accurately recording what they knew and could do was preposterous. To National's credit, it was never confident to finally press go on the new system. That was left to Helen Clark's Labour Government. The Key and Ardern-Hipkins Governments then set up review panels and made tweaks, but basically left the system unchanged. Meanwhile, the universities never took the system seriously while increasing numbers of schools adopted foreign systems or tried to develop their own. The upshot is NCEA delivering the opposite of that intended. If students go to a school offering Cambridge or the International Baccalaureate or take a traditional university route, their qualification is taken seriously, domestically and internationally. If they don't, they're left with the NCEA which isn't. You don't need to be a Marxist to see who that has benefited, and it is surely not those Lange, Goff or anyone intended. Now, as revealed by the Weekend Herald, even the left-wing education bureaucracy accepts NCEA has failed. Stanford faces probably the most consequential decision she'll ever make. Will she follow the Key and Ardern-Hipkins Governments and try to save NCEA with another review? Or will she accept the whole concept was utopian from the outset, and has delivered the catastrophic unintended consequences utopian visions invariably bring? For better or worse, schools, parents and students have tended to favour Cambridge, an internationally recognised qualification originally developed for Third World countries without their own systems. Singapore used it for many years after independence while getting its house in order. The least-disruptive option would be Stanford following Singapore's approach, abolishing NCEA from Year 11 next year, and engaging with Cambridge to roll out its system nationwide. That would require demanding Cambridge work with New Zealand experts to develop rigorous assessments for subjects like New Zealand history and Te Reo Maori. For a long-term, nationwide contract, it would surely be prepared to do so. Like Singapore, we would then progressively evolve Cambridge's exams into a genuinely New Zealand system. Stanford moved swiftly and boldly on smartphones, MLEs and curriculum reform. The same is needed to quickly put the multi-decade, multi-party NCEA disaster behind us.
