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GOATReads: Miscellaneous

A plague mysteriously spread from Europe into Asia 4,000 years ago. Scientists now think they may know how

For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze Age, however, the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, had not yet developed the genetic tool kit that would allow later strains to be spread by fleas. Scientists have been baffled as to how the illness could have persisted at that time. Now, an international team of researchers has recovered the first ancient Yersinia pestis genome from a nonhuman host — a Bronze Age domesticated sheep that lived around 4,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Russia. The discovery has allowed the scientists to better understand the transmission and ecology of the disease in the ancient past, leading them to believe that livestock played a role in its spread throughout Eurasia. The findings were published Monday in the journal Cell. “Yersinia pestis is a zoonotic disease (transmitted between humans and animals) that emerged during prehistory, but so far the way that we have studied it using ancient DNA has been completely from human remains, which left us with a lot of questions and few answers about how humans were getting infected,” said lead author Ian Light-Maka, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. There have been nearly 200 Y. pestis genomes recovered from ancient humans, the researchers wrote. Finding the ancient bacterium in an animal not only helps researchers understand how the bacterial lineage evolved, but it could also have implications for understanding modern diseases, Light-Maka added via email. “Evolution can sometimes be ‘lazy,’ finding the same type of solution independently for a similar problem — the genetic tools that worked for pestis to thrive for over 2000 years across over Eurasia might be reused again.” Unraveling the mystery of a Bronze Age plague The ancient bacterium that caused the Eurasia plague, known today as the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage, spread from Europe all the way to Mongolia, with evidence of the disease found across 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). Recent evidence suggests that the majority of modern human diseases emerged within the last 10,000 years and coincided with the domestication of animals such as livestock and pets, according to a release from the German research institute. Scientists suspected that animals other than rodents were a part of the enormous puzzle of the Bronze Age plague transmission, but without any bacterial genomes recovered from animal hosts, it was not clear which ones. To find the ancient plague genome, the study authors investigated Bronze Age animal remains from an archaeological site in Russia known as Arkaim. The settlement was once associated with a culture called Sintashta-Petrovka, known for its innovations in livestock. There, the researchers discovered the missing connection — the tooth of a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same plague bacteria found in humans from that area. Finding infected livestock suggests that the domesticated sheep served as a bridge between the humans and infected wild animals, said Dr. Taylor Hermes, a study coauthor and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. “We’re sort of unveiling this in real time and trying to get a sense for how Bronze Age nomadic herders out in the Eurasian Steppe were setting the stage for disease transmission that potentially led to impacts elsewhere,” Hermes said, “not only in later in time, but also in a much more distant, distant landscape.” During this time within the Eurasian Steppe, as many as 20% of the bodies in some cemeteries are those of people who were infected with, and most likely died from, the plague, making it an extremely pervasive disease, Hermes said. While livestock are seemingly a part of what made the disease so widespread, they are only one piece of the puzzle. The identification of the bacterial lineage in an animal opens new avenues for researching this disease’s evolution as well as the later lineage that caused the Black Death in Europe and the plague that’s still around today, he added. “It’s not surprising, but it is VERY cool to see (the DNA) isolated from an ancient animal. It’s extremely difficult to find it in humans and even more so in animal remains, so this is really interesting and significant,” Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in an email. Poinar was not involved with the study. It is likely that humans and animals were passing the strains back and forth, but it isn’t clear how they did so — or how sheep were infected in the first place. It is possible sheep picked up the bacteria through a food or water source and then transmitted the disease to humans via the animal’s contaminated meat, he added. “I think it shows how extremely successful (if you want to label it that way) this particular pathogen has been,” Poinar added. He, as well as the study’s authors, said they hope that further research uncovers other animals infected with the ancient strain to further the understanding of the disease’s spread and evolution. Ancient plague to modern plague While the plague lineage that persisted during the Bronze Age is extinct, Yersinia pestis is still around in parts of Africa and Asia as well as the western United States, Brazil and Peru. But it’s rare to encounter the bacteria, with only 1,000 to 2,000 cases of plague annually worldwide. There is no need for alarm when it comes to dealing with livestock and pets, Hermes said. The findings are a reminder that animals carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. Be cautious when cooking meat, or to take care when bitten by an animal, he added. “The takeaway is that humans aren’t alone in disease, and this has been true for thousands of years. The ways we are drastically changing our environment and how wild and domesticated animals are connected to us have the potential to change how disease can come into our communities,” Light-Maka said. “And if you see a dead prairie dog, maybe don’t go and touch it.” Source of the article

GOATReads: Science & Technology

GPT-5: has AI just plateaued?

OpenAI claims that its new flagship model, GPT-5, marks “a significant step along the path to AGI” – that is, the artificial general intelligence that AI bosses and self-proclaimed experts often claim is around the corner. According to OpenAI’s own definition, AGI would be “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”. Setting aside whether this is something humanity should be striving for, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s arguments for GPT-5 being a “significant step” in this direction sound remarkably unspectacular. He claims GPT-5 is better at writing computer code than its predecessors. It is said to “hallucinate” a bit less, and is a bit better at following instructions – especially when they require following multiple steps and using other software. The model is also apparently safer and less “sycophantic”, because it will not deceive the user or provide potentially harmful information just to please them. Altman does say that “GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert”. Yet it still doesn’t have a clue about whether anything it says is accurate, as you can see from its attempt below to draw a map of North America. It also cannot learn from its own experience, or achieve more than 42% accuracy on a challenging benchmark like “Humanity’s Last Exam”, which contains hard questions on all kinds of scientific (and other) subject matter. This is slightly below the 44% that Grok 4, the model recently released by Elon Musk’s xAI, is said to have achieved. The main technical innovation behind GPT-5 seems to be the introduction of a “router”. This decides which model of GPT to delegate to when asked a question, essentially asking itself how much effort to invest in computing its answers (then improving over time by learning from feedback about its previous choices). The options for delegation include the previous leading models of GPT and also a new “deeper reasoning” model called GPT-5 Thinking. It’s not clear what this new model actually is. OpenAI isn’t saying it is underpinned by any new algorithms or trained on any new data (since all available data was pretty much being used already). One might therefore speculate that this model is really just another way of controlling existing models with repeated queries and pushing them to work harder until it produces better results. What LLMs are It was back in 2017 when researchers at Google found out that a new type of AI architecture was capable of capturing tremendously complex patterns within long sequences of words that underpin the structure of human language. By training these so-called large language models (LLMs) on large amounts of text, they could respond to prompts from a user by mapping a sequence of words to its most likely continuation in accordance with the patterns present in the dataset. This approach to mimicking human intelligence became better and better as LLMs were trained on larger and larger amounts of data – leading to systems like ChatGPT. Ultimately, these models just encode a humongous table of stimuli and responses. A user prompt is the stimulus, and the model might just as well look it up in a table to determine the best response. Considering how simple this idea seems, it’s astounding that LLMs have eclipsed the capabilities of many other AI systems – if not in terms of accuracy and reliability, certainly in terms of flexibility and usability. The jury may still be out on whether these systems could ever be capable of true reasoning, or understanding the world in ways similar to ours, or keeping track of their experiences to refine their behaviour correctly – all arguably necessary ingredients of AGI. In the meantime, an industry of AI software companies has sprung up that focuses on “taming” general purpose LLMs to be more reliable and predictable for specific use cases. Having studied how to write the most effective prompts, their software might prompt a model multiple times, or use numerous LLMs, adjusting the instructions until it gets the desired result. In some cases, they might “fine-tune” an LLM with small-scale add-ons to make them more effective. OpenAI’s new router is in the same vein, except it’s built into GPT-5. If this move succeeds, the engineers of companies further down the AI supply chain will be needed less and less. GPT-5 would also be cheaper to users than its LLM competitors because it would be more useful without these embellishments. At the same time, this may well be an admission that we have reached a point where LLMs cannot be improved much further to deliver on the promise of AGI. If so, it will vindicate those scientists and industry experts who have been arguing for a while that it won’t be possible to overcome the current limitations in AI without moving beyond LLM architectures. Old wine into new models? OpenAI’s new emphasis on routing also harks back to the “meta reasoning” that gained prominence in AI in the 1990s, based on the idea of “reasoning about reasoning”. Imagine, for example, you were trying to calculate an optimal travel route on a complex map. Heading off in the right direction is easy, but every time you consider another 100 alternatives for the remainder of the route, you will likely only get an improvement of 5% on your previous best option. At every point of the journey, the question is how much more thinking it’s worth doing. This kind of reasoning is important for dealing with complex tasks by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be solved with more specialised components. This was the predominant paradigm in AI until the focus shifted to general-purpose LLMs. It is possible that the release of GPT-5 marks a shift in the evolution of AI which, even if it is not a return to this approach, might usher in the end of creating ever more complicated models whose thought processes are impossible for anyone to understand. Whether that could put us on a path toward AGI is hard to say. But it might create an opportunity to move towards creating AIs we can control using rigorous engineering methods. And it might help us remember that the original vision of AI was not only to replicate human intelligence, but also to better understand it. Source of the article

GOATReads: History

Millions of Maya Still Call Mesoamerica Home. This Groundbreaking Initiative Ushers the Rich Tapestry of Mayan Languages Into the Digital Age

The Mayan Languages Preservation and Digitization Project promotes tools designed by and for Indigenous communities, like online glossaries and special phone keyboards Earlier this year, audiences at UNESCO’s Language Technologies for All conference witnessed a landmark event. For the first time in the international organization’s 79-year history, a native speaker of the Mayan language Kaqchikel delivered a keynote conference speech entirely in his ancestral tongue. When Maya educator Kawoq Baldomero Cuma Chávez stood on the podium at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and started speaking in Kaqchikel, the audience—used to English and French as the conference’s lingua francas—paused in surprise. Cuma Chávez seized the opportunity, claiming a space to empower his language and those of other minority groups that have long been excluded from the global stage. After the presentation, delegates from around the world approached Cuma Chávez to share how much he’d inspired them. “They told me, ‘This is a good beginning for us to do the same with our languages,’” he recalls. For many, the name “Maya” prompts images of ancient pyramids and lost cities, remnants of a civilization that thrived in Mesoamerica until the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. But the Maya are not people of the past. Today, more than seven million Maya live in countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, maintaining distinct cultural practices, traditions and languages that they trace back to their ancestors. Central to Maya identity are the Mayan languages, a family of around 30 distinct but related languages still spoken today, including K’iche’, Yucatec Maya, Q’eqchi’, Mam and Kaqchikel. These languages have evolved over the centuries and remain a significant part of everyday life for modern Maya. In Guatemala, a country of roughly 18 million people, more than 40 percent of residents identify as Indigenous, and more than six million speak at least one of 22 Mayan languages. Cuma Chávez has dedicated more than two decades of his life to teaching Kaqchikel and preserving the Maya worldview through storytelling and poetry. To him, the keynote speech at the UNESCO conference wasn’t just symbolic. It was proof that Mayan languages, often confined to homes and villages in what was once called Mesoamerica, have every right to be heard in international arenas. “I am proud to be Indigenous,” Cuma Chávez says. “I have my language. I have my culture.” This philosophy of Indigenous pride drives the Mayan Languages Preservation and Digitization Project (MLPP), an open-source initiative launched in 2023 to preserve about 20 Mayan languages. The team behind the project builds free, easy-to-use tools—from digital glossaries to Android keyboards—that allow Mayan speakers to more easily communicate in their languages both online and offline. Through this work, MLPP is developing a step-by-step model that other marginalized language communities can follow to preserve their own linguistic heritage. Unlike language preservation efforts led by academic institutions and governments, which often focus on compiling scholarly archives that are difficult for the broader public to access, MLPP is a grassroots initiative designed by and for Mayan speakers. The tools the group creates are practical and owned by the community. According to UNESCO, 40 percent of people around the world don’t have access to education in a language they understand. This harsh reality traps entire communities in cycles of poverty, says Ludmila Golovine, CEO and president of the global translation and interpretation service MasterWord. “A person cannot learn a new language and a new subject at the same time,” she explains. Golovine is the great-great-niece of Yuri Knorozov, the Soviet linguist credited with decoding Maya glyphs in the mid-20th century. Her commitment to making languages accessible stems in part from her upbringing in the Soviet Union, where censorship was the norm. “Through language, you can actually gain access to knowledge,” Golovine says. “I see language as a step [toward] independence and freedom. Language access … should happen on the terms of the communities.” With support from MasterWord, MLPP has built a small team of full-time staff; contractors; and 100-plus volunteers living in Guatemala and beyond, including in the United States and Japan. The project blends longstanding cultural expertise with cutting-edge technology. At its core, it aims to empower communities and assert that Mayan languages belong in classrooms, courtrooms and cyberspace. “For the future, I wish [that] Mayan languages would have the same value as all others … that they would be as accepted as French, German or Italian,” says Cuma Chávez, who serves as an adviser to MLPP. Maya identity goes far beyond geographic location and blood ties to an ancient civilization. To call oneself Maya is to be rooted in community, sharing experiences, knowledge, gastronomy and other cultural elements, says Cuma Chávez. Walter E. Little, an anthropologist at the University at Albany who has worked with Maya communities for decades and contributes informally to MLPP, says the essence of Maya identity is found not in ancient monuments or genetic lineages, but rather in everyday practice. “A really important part of being Maya is practicing a particular type of culture,” he explains. Language, stories, dress and social ties define who you are. “The shared knowledge of all those things together—that’s what makes somebody Mesoamerican,” says Little, who is also the author of Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization and Cultural Identity. Outsiders who immerse themselves in these traditions, perhaps by learning a Mayan language or eating Maya food, might be jokingly called “Maya” by their friends, Little says—not because of their ancestry, but because culture is what matters most. This understanding of Maya identity stands in stark contrast to norms in the U.S., where many Native American tribes use “blood quantum,” a controversial measure of how much “Indian blood” one has, to determine enrollment eligibility. The system is a holdover from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the federal government embraced blood quantum as a way of limiting tribal citizenship. Despite the staggering linguistic diversity among modern-day Maya, several threads tie these distinct communities together: the milpa diet of maize, beans and squash; intricate weaving techniques; and communal storytelling traditions. These cultural anchors have survived centuries of upheaval. Beginning in the early 16th century, Spanish colonizers invaded Maya lands across Mesoamerica. The Spanish sought to conquer and impose Christianity upon the Maya, whose communities endured centuries of forced labor, displacement, and attempts to erase their languages and spiritual practices. The effects of this suppression remain visible today. “In Guatemala, discrimination for speaking [Mayan languages] is deeply ingrained,” Cuma Chávez says. The Spanish word “indio,” a derogatory term historically used to label Indigenous people as uncivilized, is still wielded as an insult, reflecting the lingering legacy of a colonial mindset that devalues Indigenous identity. While Western narratives often portray the Spanish conquest as an all-consuming tide of destruction, the Maya tell a different story: one of subtle, persistent resistance. “To speak of conquest is an overstatement,” Little says. “People maintained language, food cultures, weaving ... and learned tons of new things to their advantage.” Maya culture is inherently additive. New influences—whether from Spanish colonizers or Western technology—are not seen as replacements, but as layers added to existing traditions. Christianity and Maya spirituality, for example, coexist today: “The idea that ‘if you add something, you have to give up something’ is not really part of [Maya culture],” Little says. During the colonial period, some Maya scribes and leaders learned European writing systems, like the Latin alphabet introduced by Spanish missionaries, not as a means of assimilation, but rather to pass down stories and cultural knowledge in their native languages. Their efforts preserved enduring works of Maya literature, like the Popol Vuh and the Annals of the Cakchiquels. In other cases, Indigenous people forcibly relocated by the Spanish to centralized settlements known as reducciones, where they could be more easily controlled and converted, adopted the Mayan languages used by locals rather than switching to Spanish, Little says. These quiet acts of resistance ensured cultural survival in the face of erasure. But colonization still left scars. For generations, speaking a Mayan language has been seen as a barrier to opportunity, leading many Maya to internalize feelings of inferiority. Dulce María Horn, MLPP’s project coordinator, says the initiative seeks to reverse this mindset. “How do you start to decolonize yourself?” she asks. “It starts with saying, ‘I’m going to speak my language. I’m going to represent myself.’” MLPP began as a practical response to the language barriers Maya migrants face in legal and medical settings. In 2021, the U.S. was home to an estimated 1.8 million Guatemalan immigrants, many of them Maya. These individuals left their home country to escape discrimination and violence; they also sought economic opportunity. For individuals who don’t speak Spanish, only Mayan languages, finding interpreters to help navigate American immigration courts and hospital systems is a significant challenge. “How do you expect them to understand legal terminology in English?” Cuma Chávez asks. The absence of accurate interpretation can result in life-altering injustices, like being denied medical care due to misunderstandings about symptoms or getting in trouble for struggling to grasp complex legal matters. MLPP offers free, community-driven language tools to bridge these gaps, including training workshops where Indigenous volunteers learn to create and update digital resources themselves. In order to serve the people who need translation services and technology the most, “the community needs to always be in the driver’s seat,” says MLPP’s director, cultural anthropologist Winston Scott. Community meetings held in person in Guatemala or virtually with team members and volunteers around the world inform every decision made by MLPP, from which languages to prioritize to how glossaries should be recorded. “The project has grown into more of a ‘language access, language rights’ project,” Scott explains, “to ensure that all speakers … are able to access their language in meaningful ways.” One of MLPP’s earliest successes was the creation of six Mayan-language keyboards for Android devices. By adapting existing Spanish keyboard layouts to include essential Mayan characters, the team made it possible for users to communicate fluidly on apps like WhatsApp and Facebook without sacrificing their linguistic identity. The project’s online talking glossaries, a collection of written, visual and audio content in various Mayan languages, is regularly updated by volunteers who lend their voices and knowledge. These glossaries are at the heart of the team’s efforts. But MLPP isn’t stopping there. A partnership with a major tech company is in the works to develop text-to-speech services for K’iche’ and Q’eqchi’, allowing people who speak the languages but can’t read them to listen to written messages. In the long term, MLPP is supporting the development of the first neural machine translation model for Mayan languages. This artificial intelligence system will automatically translate text, operating similarly to Google Translate. But the model will be trained specifically on Mayan languages, avoiding issues raised by using Western source texts like the Bible, which can be filled with metaphors that don’t match everyday Mayan speech or the Maya’s values and worldview, says Scott. For MLPP, the preservation of Mayan languages isn’t just about archiving words. It’s about ensuring that young Indigenous people see their language as a living, evolving part of their future. This philosophy is embedded in the project’s partnership with the Bilingual Technology Center, a school located in Tucurú, a small town in Guatemala’s central highlands, where students learn Q’eqchi’, Spanish and English simultaneously. Pupils use MLPP keyboards to write poems, short stories and fables in their native Mayan tongue. Some of the students told Horn that this was their “first opportunity to use my language outside of my home.” According to Horn, the children added, “This is the first opportunity that I’ve ever had where somebody’s told me my language matters.” By showing students that their mother tongues can be used in digital storytelling, education and professional spaces, MLPP is dismantling the notion that Mayan languages are only for informal or domestic use. The project wants to demonstrate that speaking a Mayan language can open doors rather than close them, Horn says. Beyond the classroom, MLPP is collaborating with UNESCO to exchange resources and publish a practical guide to digitization, as well as with Cholsamaj, a Guatemala-based publishing house, to produce books in multiple Mayan languages. The goal is to provide engaging, age-appropriate reading materials that go beyond traditional dictionaries and grammar books. “If I’m a kid,” says Little, “I want to read comic books, graphic novels and cool stuff. I don’t want to read grammar.” MLPP seeks to rewrite the narrative that Mayan languages are outdated or inferior. “We believe that you can preserve the [Mayan] languages and learn Spanish as well … but we don’t think that you have to abandon the mother tongue to make that happen,” Scott says. Next, the team hopes to partner with Guatemala’s Department of Culture and Department of Education to publicize the tools developed by MLPP, Golovine says. MLPP envisions a future where Mayan languages have equal footing with other languages. “We want to see a Guatemala where everybody, no matter what their preferred language is, [can] feel proud of who they are,” Scott says. “We want to see … everybody have the opportunity to have an education in their language and to be able to choose their own path forward.” Source of the article

GOATReads: Science & Technology

Inside an urban heat island, one street can be much hotter than its neighbor – new tech makes it easier to target cooling projects

It’s summer, and it’s been hot, even in northern cities such as Boston. But not everyone is hit with the heat in the same way, even within the same neighborhood. Take two streets in Boston at 4:30 p.m. on a recent day, as an example. Standing in the sun on Lewis Place, the temperature was 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34.6 degrees Celsius). On Dudley Common, it was 103 F (39.2 C). Both streets were hot, but the temperature on one was much more dangerous for people’s health and well-being. The kicker is that those two streets are only a few blocks apart. The difference epitomizes the urban heat island effect, created as pavement and buildings absorb and trap heat, making some parts of the city hotter. A closer look at the two streets shows some key differences: Dudley Common is public open space sandwiched between two thoroughfares that create a wide expanse of pavement lined with storefronts. There aren’t many trees to be found. Lewis Place is a residential cul-de-sac with two-story homes accompanied by lots of trees. This comparison of two places within a few minutes’ walk of each other puts the urban heat island effect under a microscope. It also shows the limits of today’s strategies for managing and responding to heat and its effects on public health, which are generally attuned to neighborhood or citywide conditions. Even within the same neighborhood, some places are much hotter than others owing to their design and infrastructure. You could think of these as urban heat islets in the broader landscape of a community. Sensing urban heat islets Emerging technologies are making it easier to find urban heat islets, opening the door to new strategies for improving health in our communities. While the idea of reducing heat across an entire city or neighborhood is daunting, targeting specific blocks that need assistance the most can be faster and a much more efficient use of resources. Doing that starts with making urban heat islets visible. In Boston, I’m part of a team that has installed more than three dozen sensors across the Roxbury neighborhood to measure temperature every minute for a better picture of the community’s heat risks, and we’re in the process of installing 25 more. The Common SENSES project is a collaboration of community-based organizations, including the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and Project Right Inc.; university researchers like me who are affiliated with Northeastern University’s Boston Area Research Initiative; and Boston city officials. It was created to pursue data-driven, community-led solutions for improving the local environment. Data from those sensors generate a real-time map of the conditions in the neighborhood, from urban heat islets like Dudley Common to cooler urban oases, such as Lewis Place. These technologies are becoming increasingly affordable and are being deployed in communities around the world to pinpoint heat risks, including Miami, Baltimore, Singapore and Barcelona. There are also alternatives when long-term installations prove too expensive, such as the U.S.’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration volunteer science campaign, which has used mobile sensors to generate one-time heat maps for more than 50 cities. Making cooler communities, block by block Although detailed knowledge of urban heat islets is becoming more available, we have barely scratched the surface of how they can be used to enhance people’s health and well-being. The sources of urban heat islets are rooted in development – more buildings, more pavement and fewer trees result in hotter spaces. Many projects using community-based sensors aspire to use the data to counteract these effects by identifying places where it would be most helpful to plant trees for shade or install cool roofs or cool pavement that reflect the heat. However, these current efforts do not fully capitalize on the precision of sensors. For example, Los Angeles’ massive investment in cool pavement has focused on the city broadly rather than overheated neighborhoods. New York City’s tree planting efforts in some areas failed to anticipate where trees could be successfully planted. Most other efforts compare neighborhood to neighborhood, as if every street within a neighborhood experiences the same temperature. London, for example, uses satellite data to locate heat islands, but the resolution isn’t precise enough to see differences block by block. In contrast, data pinpointing the highest-risk areas enables urban planners to strategically place small pocket parks, cool roofs and street trees to help cool the hottest spaces. Cities could incentivize or require developers to incorporate greenery into their plans to mitigate existing urban heat islets or prevent new ones. These targeted interventions are cost-effective and have the greatest potential to help the most people. But this could go further by using the data to create more sophisticated alert systems. For example, the National Weather Service’s Boston office released a heat advisory for July 25, the day I measured the heat in Dudley Common and Lewis Place, but the advisory showed nearly the entirety of the state of Massachusetts at the same warning level. What if warnings were more locally precise? On certain days, some streets cross a crucial threshold – say, 90 F (32.2 C) – whereas others do not. Sensor data capturing these hyperlocal variations could be communicated directly to residents or through local organizations. Advisories could share maps of the hottest streets or suggest cool paths through neighborhoods. There is increasing evidence of urban heat islets in many urban communities and even suburban ones. With data showing these hyperlocal risks, policymakers and project coordinators can collaborate with communities to help address areas that many community members know from experience tend to be much hotter than surrounding areas in summer. As one of my colleagues, Nicole Flynt of Project Right Inc., likes to say, “Data + Stories = Truth.” If communities act upon both the temperature data and the stories their residents share, they can help their residents keep cool — because it’s hot out there. Source of the article

GOATReads: Arts and Culture

How Virtual Reality Is Restoring Liberia’s Culture

Traveling Treasures is a new project led by a team of anthropologists that puts Liberians directly in touch with their dispersed cultural heritage through immersive technologies designed to bridge continents and histories. WHEN STUDENTS DONNED virtual reality headsets for the first time last year at William V.S. Tubman High School in Monrovia, Liberia, it wasn’t to play the latest viral video game. Instead, they spent time engaging Liberian cultural objects housed in collections over 4,500 miles away in the United States. None of the students expressed any interest in visiting the nearby National Museum of Liberia—where hundreds of similar objects await their attention—yet they crowded around iPads to play with a 3D model of a 1952 presidential inauguration souvenir and formed a line that extended outside of the classroom to use their virtual hands to intimately explore Indigenous earthenware pots. For perhaps the first time in their lives, these young Liberians were motivated to engage their country’s material heritage that had long been inaccessible to them. Their teachers enthusiastically requested more of this exciting and immersive educational content. The demonstration workshop was part of a pilot study for the Traveling Treasures project, a transnational collaboration between the National Museum of Liberia (NMOL) and the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology Project (BAHA). As BAHA researchers, our work focuses on Liberia’s culture and heritage, leveraging 3D and immersive technologies to enable Liberians to intimately experience and interpret Liberian cultural objects that have been dispersed around the world. We launched Traveling Treasures in 2024 to increase community access and representation within Liberian collections in the U.S. This effort builds upon a deep history of transatlantic connections that facilitated the 19th-century founding of Liberia, which became Africa’s first republic, and decades of back-to-Africa migrations by Black communities from the United States and the Caribbean. The histories of Liberia’s Black American settlers, and the complex transatlantic identities formed by their descendants, presents an opportunity to explore the dynamic nature of the Black Atlantic world in the past and present. DISPLACED CULTURAL HERITAGE In the early 1820s, the West African colony of Liberia was established for Black Americans by the American Colonization Society, a U.S.-government supported organization founded to repatriate freeborn and formerly enslaved Black families and individuals. Following 25 years of colonial dependence, Black American settlers declared their sovereignty and founded the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Over the following decades, thousands of Black American migrants and their descendants settled, developed, and ruled Liberia as a means of freeing themselves from racial persecution in the U.S. and reconnecting with the imagined landscapes of their African ancestors. In 1980, 133 years of Americo-Liberian governance ended when Master Sgt. Samuel Kanyon Doe successfully led a violent military coup. Doe’s rule was marked by authoritarianism and civil unrest. Between 1989 and 2003, as various leaders vied for power, a series of catastrophic civil wars resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and countless more were displaced. During this period, the National Museum of Liberia, the foremost institution for the preservation and presentation of the nation’s material culture, was vandalized and looted. Parts of the NMOL collections were lost, stolen, or destroyed due to violent confrontations that progressed from the hinterland to the capital city of Monrovia. Since most items were removed from the National Museum without records of their origins, it became difficult to trace the objects’ paths from Monrovia to public and private collections in Europe and North America. Today only a single catalog card from the pre-war period remains at the NMOL, according to museum director Albert Markeh, who shared this information with the BAHA team during a 2023 meeting in Monrovia. While the museum’s historic building on Broad Street has been restored since the war, its vast collection was never fully recovered. Our research revealed that a large quantity of Liberia’s material culture is housed within museum and university collections in the U.S. The transfer of Liberian objects to the U.S. has a long, often poorly documented history. William “Bill” Siegmann, an American art collector and curator, directed Liberia’s National Museum from 1984 to 1987, before returning to the U.S. amid rising violence in Monrovia. He later joined the Brooklyn Museum and amassed over 1,600 West African artworks. In addition, his collection now graces the halls and storerooms of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Indiana University, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. At the Penn Museum in Pennsylvania, nearly 40 percent of 457 Liberian objects came from a single 1944 donation by H.S. Oberly, whose ties to Liberia remain unclear. Due to prolonged instability and limited research occurring within Liberia, many of these works lack detailed context about their cultural significance and how they were used. For decades, Liberian communities had very few opportunities to participate in the curation and interpretation of their dispersed heritage—until now. IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES, EMERGING STORIES The Traveling Treasures project is a material culture diplomacy initiative designed to nurture institutional relationships between U.S. museums and the National Museum of Liberia. In collaboration with NMOL staff members, the project presents high-resolution 3D models of Liberian objects in U.S. collections to Liberian curators, students, and the interested public through virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) immersive experiences. While VR and AR have rapidly advanced in many fields, their adoption in humanities research and design remains slow, despite their potential to increase meaningful access to material culture collections. 3D digitization creates high-quality digital replicas of objects, allowing users to explore, hold, and interact with them virtually on most modern devices. During one AR demonstration at the William V.S. Tubman High School, students and teachers interacted virtually with a Liberian election fan housed at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University in Illinois. Made of wood and paper, the inaugural souvenir marked the 1951 reelection of Liberia’s longest-serving president, William V.S. Tubman (1944–1971), the influential politician for whom the high school is named. The central text of the fan is bordered by miniature portraits of President Tubman and First Lady Antoinette Tubman, and Vice President William Tolbert and Second Lady Victoria Tolbert. Through infrastructure projects and policies promoting national unity, the Tubman administration worked to reduce the social divide between Liberians of settler descent and those who were Indigenous, marking what’s often called Liberia’s Golden Age. Esmeralda Kale, the curator of the Herskovits Library of African Studies, recalled an emotional moment with Tolbert’s daughter, Christine: “She almost burst into tears, and she says to us, ‘I haven’t seen this material since I was a child. I haven’t seen this fan since I was a child.’” While Christine Tolbert Norman was later able to visit the library regularly, high travel costs and visa rejections prevent most Liberians from doing the same. Traveling Treasures now provides a way for them to connect with their displaced cultural belongings in ways that were once impossible. Our use of immersive technologies is not deployed as a flashy gimmick but as a means to achieving a much broader goal—to empower users’ deep engagement of the materiality, the ways in which objects shape human ideas and behaviors, of digitized cultural objects. Reflecting on the demonstration at Tubman High, Liberian project partner LeAnn Knowlden stated: It was more than technology; it was storytelling at its finest. These students didn’t just hear about history—they experienced it. Watching their faces light up as they “touched” Liberia’s past brought the significance of our mission into sharp focus. Traveling Treasures isn’t just about artifacts; it’s about empowering Liberians to reconnect with their roots in a way that feels personal, immersive, and unforgettable. For me, this journey underscored the power of innovative education to bridge the gap between our history and our future. PSYCHIC REPAIR, EQUITABLE FUTURES In recent years, ongoing debates about the restitution, reclamation, and repatriation of African objects in European and U.S. collections have raised questions about the future of museums and their role within an equitable and collaborative global heritage industry. Approximately 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s collected material culture is housed within major world museums outside the continent. Representing the “spoils of Empire,” these collections are indicative of the extractive nature of colonialism. Demands for repatriation outweigh legal debates over ownership and stewardship, according to scholars Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in their 2018 report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. The return of these objects constitutes a form of collective psychic and spiritual repair—a catalyst for alternative imaginings of present and future possibilities in communities across Africa. Sarr and Savoy write that on a continent where 60 percent of the population is under the age of 20, young people must have access to “their own culture, creativity, and spirituality” from past eras. This is especially necessary in post-conflict Liberia, where the effects of cultural loss facilitated by the dispersal of objects have been compounded by the displacement of people and communities. Due to the civil wars, large-scale internal and external migrations have destabilized the place-based connections needed to sustain cultural memory and practice. “The war pushed people to Ghana, to Cote d’Ivoire, to Guinea, to Monrovia,” explained Liberian historian C. Patrick Burrowes in a recent interview with co-author Chrislyn Laurie Laurore. “And when the war ended, there was no effort on the part of the government to encourage people to return to their traditional homes. These places were unsafe. People were traumatized.” About a third of Liberians now live in and around Monrovia, Burrowes added. Many young Monrovians have parents who may have once spoken a local language, but their children don’t speak it because they’ve been disconnected from their local cultures and communities. In February, co-author Craig Stevens traveled to areas in Liberia where many of the U.S.-housed Liberian objects originate. Stevens and National Museum colleagues hosted VR demonstrations where community members recorded their immersive interactions with cultural objects. This content will enable staff at U.S. collecting institutions to incorporate first-person interpretations and community perspectives of these objects into their digital collections databases and upcoming Africa-related exhibitions or programming. Traveling Treasures is not a replacement for rightful calls for the return of unjustly collected objects. Instead, this work strives to radically expand accessibility and community representation in the curation of African cultural objects—particularly those tied to a long history of inequity, injustice, and colonial violence by collecting institutions in Europe and the United States. Our methodology challenges the power dynamics of standard museum practice by prioritizing local lived experiences and cultural memory over foreign academic perspectives. Agreements between the NMOL and U.S. institutions, such as one currently being formed with the Penn Museum, are a first step toward establishing formal transatlantic relationships to support more equitable exchanges of knowledge and resources. Importantly, we hope these collaborations will enhance the National Museum’s capacity to engage Liberian audiences in and beyond Monrovia. As a team of curators, anthropologists, and heritage professionals, we are motivated to empathetically curate African objects for African and Diasporic communities. Early feedback from collaborators affirms the power of this work. “VR technology is not just a new experience but a theater of our sacred past,” Liberian educator and collaborator John Lissa told us in February. “It brings our nearly forgotten cultural identity and images into the present.” These heartfelt connections drive us to continue to use objects and museums to foster lasting transnational relationships and support communities most affected by colonial harm across the African continent. Historical and cultural memory play critical roles in rebuilding Liberia. Through the 3D digitization of Liberian objects in these collections, we hope to begin the suturing of cultural wounds inflicted by the civil wars. As Liberia continues to redevelop its tourism and heritage industries, Liberians have much to gain by reclaiming their country’s displaced cultural heritage. Source of the article

GOATReads: Miscellaneous

Resist the Snark and Be Happy

Being courteous can be challenging in these fractious times, but politeness is much better for your well-being. A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness,” wrote Robert Heinlein in his 1982 futuristic novel, Friday. “A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” What, 40 years ago, were the science-fiction adventures of a technologically enhanced “artificial person” turned out also to be prophecy when we consider today’s digital networks of anonymous humans and bots, conversations between people and humanlike artificial intelligence, and a cratering of courtesy. This loss of gentle manners at almost every level is attributable, at least in part, to our adoption of these technologies. Virtually everyone agrees that people are becoming ruder, especially online. But do you see this tendency in yourself as well? Even if you’re not a sociopathic troll who feeds on incivility and conflict, you might all the same have noticed that you’re less polite than you once were, and that online environments have contributed to this. You may have observed the passing of such small niceties as addressing others by name in your messages and signing off with your own name. Quite possibly, you find yourself adopting a harsher, more sarcastic tone on social media than you ever would in real life. And why bother saying “please” and “thank you” when communicating with what is, or might be, an AI bot? This coarsening, even toward nonhuman entities, is not harmless. Indeed, it is probably hurting your well-being. When you become less polite, the alteration in your conduct can make you less happy, more depressed, and angrier about life. You may not be able to fix the broader trends in society, but you can—and should—fix this in yourself. Politeness can be defined in four ways. The first two are: etiquette, which governs basic manners and speech, and conduct, which involves actions such as holding open a door for someone to pass. The other two are a pair: positive politeness, which refers to doing courteous things for others, and negative politeness, which involves refraining from discourtesy. Social scientists define these forms of politeness not just as a set of behaviors but as part of personality. Specifically, one of the Big Five Personality Traits—agreeableness—is made up of compassion and politeness. One well-regarded study from the 1990s estimated that the heritability of agreeableness is about 41 percent genetic, allowing us to infer that you inherit some politeness from your parents partly through your genes, but more through how you were brought up. This also implies that you can become more polite with good influences and by cultivating positive habits. Some aspects of courtesy are fairly universal, such as saying please and thank you, as well as listening while others speak (positive politeness) without interrupting (negative politeness). Other courteous values vary around the world: Shaking hands is good manners in London but not in Bangkok; tipping a taxi driver is a common courtesy in New York but not in Tokyo. Some demographic variation in politeness also occurs, and gender norms can play a part too. For example, experiments show that American women generally receive more politeness than men do, and show less courteous behavior to men than vice versa. None of us wants to be treated rudely, online or in person. The finding in studies that when someone is discourteous toward you they lower your well-being is so commonsense as to make citation scarcely necessary. Even witnessing rudeness toward others can lower your happiness, as experiments have shown: When media content contains sarcasm by the author and the comment sections are uncivil, readers become unhappier—even if they agree with the snarky writer or commenters. Rudeness just brings you down. More surprising, perhaps, is the effect that your being courteous toward others has on your own mood. Researchers in 2021 showed that being polite to others raises happiness and lowers anger. This might be counterintuitive at first, because we may at times feel a powerful urge to be snippy—so doesn’t that mean that snapping at someone should make us feel better? The reverse is the case: Being impolite is more like scratching at your poison-ivy rash. Giving in to the urge makes things worse. I doubt you’ve ever felt great when you’ve known, deep down, that you’ve been a jerk, whereas you’ve almost certainly felt better when you’ve been your better angel. Being prosocial, even when you don’t feel like it or the object of your courtesy doesn’t deserve it, has been proven to raise your mood. The effect is so powerful that you benefit from being polite even when your courtesy is extended toward nonhumans. Psychologists writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology set research participants a task to perform alongside a helping robot named Tako: Those who had a stronger urge to thank Tako for its help afterward were more likely than others to behave in a prosocial way in a subsequent task. This finding suggests that even being civil to an AI bot or other nonhuman interface matters; yelling at Siri or being curt with ChatGPT will lead you to behave worse with other people, and lower your well-being. In short, be polite for your own sake. And be aware that if tech-mediated interactions are making you less polite, that can still hurt your happiness. Quitting the internet or returning to a world without AI is impractical, so the solution to this challenge of courtesy lies in how you consciously decide to behave. Here are three rules for your conduct that I can suggest. 1. Make courtesy a habit, even when other humans are not involved. My late father had impeccable manners, and I have no doubt that if he were still alive, he would start every request to AI with please and finish it with thank you. Years ago, I would have made fun of that—Dad, the bot doesn’t care!—but I’m sure he wouldn’t have paid any attention, because I now understand that his good manners were a demonstration of decent behavior to himself, about himself. And they would have protected him from some of the unhappiness we see all around. So today, I try to imitate him, online and in person, whomever or whatever I’m interacting with. 2. Renounce snark, whether you’re witnessing it or using it yourself. As noted, media sarcasm can lower your well-being as its consumer. Yet mockery of others seems an integral part of modern communication, especially among people who wish to seem sophisticated. I try not to participate in this, because even if, in the moment, it can feel satisfying or make me laugh, I know the cost to my soul. I no longer read comment sections in publications, and when an author throws out an impolite barb, I stop reading altogether. 3. Respond to rudeness not with rudeness, but with courtesy. If your happiness correspondent got into social-media spats or angry public battles, that would be a bad look and very off-brand. So I always refrain. But I try to go further than self-restraint: If I need to react to a rude in-person remark or mean online comment, I try to see it as an opportunity to improve my well-being by responding with courtesy and dignity. This gets easier with practice, and I have never once been sorry for passing on the opportunity to retaliate with a nasty zinger. I’m only sorry when I fail to make use of the opportunity to do the right thing and feel good about it. One last thought about Heinlein’s “dying culture” claim: Is it true that our culture is dying, given all the rudeness? And if so, are we too far gone to turn it around? On many days, things do look bleak, as online nastiness seems to become the dominant style. But my personal defense mechanism also aims to act as a countercultural force: I see politeness as today’s punk rock because it so transgresses the spirit of our times. And like punk rock, when you empower yourself with politeness, you feel exhilarated. It is the ultimate exercise in freedom: the freedom to be the person I want to be in the face of a cultural tyranny. Source of the article

GOATReads: Arts and Culture

Why Is No One Dressing Their Age?

Years back, age was a signal that informed how we would get dressed. With the rise of social media, fashion lovers are now embracing varying pieces no matter their age. Fashion has lost its ability to tell us anything about the person wearing it. Age, lifestyle, income, even personality, all the visual cues we used to rely on have been flattened. Just this past weekend, I saw women in their early 20s wearing sleeveless button-ups and pleated shorts with loafers, heavily leaning into the “quiet luxury” aesthetic. Women in their late 30s and early 40s were out on the same street in crop tops and ripped short shorts. In any other decade, you might assume they were having a midlife crisis. Now, it barely raises an eyebrow. TikTok aesthetics have blurred the lines of age distinctions, life milestones are being skipped over entirely, and a retail landscape that funnels everyone, regardless of age, into the same handful of stores has finished the job. The traditional fashion timeline has completely inverted.  Statistically speaking, in the U.S., TikTok Shop sales have increased by 120% in comparison to last year. Additionally, according to new research pulled by GlobalData and TikTok Shop, 83% of all shoppers say they’ve discovered a new product on the platform, while 70% say they have discovered a new brand. Brands and creators hosted over 8 million hours of live shopping sessions in the U.S. in 2024. (These figures point to how purchasing products on TikTok is now the norm.) Trends that used to belong to specific age groups are now fair game for anyone. People are shopping from brands they would have either aged out of or never reached yet. Without clear generational codes to guide us, personal style is in the middle of a full-blown identity crisis.  The shift didn’t happen overnight. Just over a decade ago, fashion magazines still ran features on “age-appropriate dressings.” J-14 or Seventeen told teens what the first day of school uniform was, while Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar guided their mothers through office-appropriate attire. Each publication spoke to its demographic with clear boundaries and expectations. Now, most of those magazines have lost their influence and are being replaced in the muddled waters of the algorithm that serves everyone.  Department stores had clear floor plans: juniors on three, contemporary on four, and the implied understanding that you graduated from one to the next. But the shift from mall shopping to online retail erased age-segmented store experiences. You used to go into a store and, based on the key demographic the boutique was marketing to, you knew if you were in the right place.  Walk into Abercrombie or Hollister and you’d immediately know from the pounding music and teenage staff whether you belonged there. Venture into Ann Taylor, and the quiet sophistication told a different story entirely. These physical spaces enforced age boundaries through environment, pricing, and social cues that made crossing generational lines feel awkward or inappropriate. The elimination of tween retail dealt the final blow to age-appropriate shopping. Stores like Justice and Delia’s once served as crucial stepping stones. Places where 10-to-14-year-olds could shop for clothes that bridge the gap before full teen-dom. These stores taught young girls how to navigate fashion retail and gave them a safe space to experiment with style. This was all before many of us graduated or moved on to what I like to refer to as “real” stores. When they shuttered, that entire developmental stage of shopping disappeared. Now tweens skip straight from kids’ clothes to shopping alongside college students and adults. This has left no intermediary step to guide the transition. It’s not just media and retail that collapsed age boundaries. Milestones that once shaped how we dressed have lost their grip, too. Going away for college, getting married, having kids, buying a house, and settling into a career no longer happen on a predictable timeline, if at all. Style used to reflect life stage. You dressed for the job you had, the family you raised, or the image of stability you wanted to project. But today, many in their thirties and forties are living like their twenty-something counterparts, without the traditional markers that once signaled a fashion shift into “adulthood.” When your life path doesn’t include a baby shower, a mortgage, or a corner office, what exactly are you supposed to dress for? Many people are opting out of children, homeownership, and other traditional milestones because they simply can’t afford them. Without hitting these life stages, fashion has lost its functional purpose.  A 35-year-old renting a studio apartment has no reason to dress differently from a 22-year-old in the same situation. The power suit meant something when it represented climbing the corporate ladder, but in a gig economy where everyone freelances from coffee shops, what’s the point? Wedding guest dresses used to be a regular wardrobe requirement, but when your friends are either perpetually single or eloping, that category becomes obsolete. So, what are we dressing for now? Aesthetics. We dress for the Instagram photo, the TikTok trend, the fantasy of who we might be rather than who we are. The “clean girl” look has nothing to do with actually being clean. It’s about looking effortlessly put-together, which is its own kind of performance. “Old money” style is popular among people who don’t have old money. The algorithm doesn’t care how old you are. It feeds everyone the same viral content, the same outfit videos, the same aesthetic breakdowns. If a 19-year-old and a 39-year-old are both watching the same “get ready with me” clip, chances are they’ll both end up in the same outfit. Style is no longer about growing into yourself; it’s about keeping up. Instead of evolving with age, people are curating looks that fit neatly into the trend of the moment. To be fair, there’s real freedom in all of this. Women aren’t being told to drop their hemlines or give up crop tops after kids. You can wear low-rise jeans at 45 or a trench coat at 15. The collapse of rigid style rules has opened space for creativity across age lines. But with that freedom comes new pressures—ones that might be even more demanding than the old rules.  When there’s no roadmap, style becomes a performance, a way to prove you’re still relevant. In a trend cycle that resets hourly, falling behind can feel like disappearing. The new fear is aging out of the algorithm. For the chronically online, that looks like getting three likes instead of hundreds. It’s not knowing the brands Gen Z swears by. It’s realizing your once-curated wardrobe now feels outdated amongst the masses because we’re all supposed to be shopping the same feed. The algorithm rewards newness, and if you miss enough trend cycles, you stop being seen. There’s something to be said for the old system, rigid as it was. Age-appropriate dressing gave people a framework—a sense of belonging to a particular stage of life with its own aesthetic language. There was dignity in that visual progression, a kind of earned sophistication that came with time. The old guidelines also offered relief from decision fatigue. When you knew what was “for you,” shopping became simpler. You had guardrails that helped you invest in pieces that would work for your lifestyle instead of chasing every trend that crossed your feed. A thirty-something professional could build a coherent wardrobe around her actual life, work meetings, school pickup, and dinner out, rather than trying to keep up with whatever a 19-year-old influencer was promoting. We don’t need to return to strict rules about what you can or can’t wear at a certain age. But we do need something to replace the roadmap we’ve lost. The answer might be less about dressing your age and more about dressing for the lives we’re living. That could mean dressing for a life built around remote work and side gigs, not conference rooms and cocktail hours. It’s about keeping the sense of intentionality that came with traditional style rules, but ditching the shame that used to come with breaking them. Maybe the goal isn’t to look timeless or trendy, but to look like yourself, wherever you happen to be right now. Clothes should evolve with you. Not because your age says so, but because your priorities and identity have changed. That isn’t about rules. It’s about knowing who you are and letting your clothes catch up. Source of the article

GOATReads: Psychology

How noise sensitivity disrupts the mind, brain and body

Though noise sensitivity is often dismissed by doctors, it can have long-term effects on our mental and physical health. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. There it was again: the incessant noise from my new upstairs neighbours, evidently still in the process of hanging up pictures or cobbling together new furniture. In my well-insulated building in central Berlin, the noise was well below decibels that would irritate anyone else. But it sent me into a rage. A tight sensation of stress rushed through my body. Even worse was the anxiety: "When will they ever be finished?" That's not the only noise that is bothering me. I notice the soft thudding across my ceilings as people get ready for bed. Somewhere in the building, I hear the high-pitched hum of a vacuum cleaner and the muffled thumping of a washing machine. The neighbour's dachshund yapping for a treat. And don't get me started on the leaf blowers and pressure washers outside. Noise – however slight – breaks my concentration and peace of mind. It is fair to say that I – along with 10% to 40% of the general population – am noise-sensitive, meaning that I feel more upset and disturbed by noise than the average person. It would be easy to dismiss noise sensitivity as a personality flaw, a symptom of generally being belligerent, whiny, and irritable. But, in recent years, scientists have learned that it has real biological roots. The brains of noise-sensitive people respond differently to sound and some may actually be born that way. What's more, it affects not only people's immediate mood but also their long-term mental and physical health. While there are few easy solutions, being aware of these effects can help noise-sensitive people take action to make their lives more tolerable.  "It's been one of those what we might call a wastepaper basket sort of issues… that just gets pushed away by health professionals," says neuroscientist Daniel Shepherd of Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Only in recent years "have people actually really started to say, right, this is at an experiential level really impacting patients", he adds. "We really need to actually start getting a handle on this." Noise sensitivity isn't a formal medical diagnosis. People can find out if they're noise sensitive by taking questionnaires like the 21-question Weinstein's noise sensitivity scale (which asks, for instance, if you're bothered by people whispering and crinkling sweet wrappers in a movie theatre, if you get mad at people making noise when you're trying to sleep or work, even if the sound of music bothers you if you're trying to concentrate.) Noise sensitivity is different from other sound-related conditions like misophonia. This is a specific decreased tolerance to certain sounds, like chewing, throat-clearing, tapping or ticking, which trigger intense feelings of disgust or rage, explains Jennifer Brout, a clinician and the founder of the US-based International Misophonia Research Network. Noise sensitivity is also different from hyperacusis, where people feel pain or extreme discomfort because they perceive sounds more loudly than they actually are. Noise sensitivity, by contrast, is a general reactiveness to all sounds, regardless of how loud they're perceived or how loud they actually are. At the very least, noise-sensitive people find sound disruptive and become annoyed, angry, or even fearful or anxious. "I remember a person describing it like having a mosquito flying around you," Shepherd says. "You just can't not attend to it." For those who are afraid of noise, the condition might make them so stressed that their bodies go into a fight-or-flight response. "Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up," says Stephen Stansfeld, a psychiatrist and professor emeritus at Queen Mary University of London. Sleep quality can also take a hit. In one 2021 study, researchers tracked the sleeping patterns of 500 adults in China and nighttime noise levels over the course of a week. They found that, while the noise itself didn't affect people's sleep quality, noise-sensitive individuals tended to find their sleep less restorative, rating their sleep as less refreshing and saying they felt moodier and had less energy during the day. Noise exposure has also been linked to a range of long-term health effects, including heart disease and diabetes – and noise-sensitive people may suffer the most from  mental health impacts, Stansfeld says. In one 2021 study, Stansfeld and his colleagues surveyed 2,398 men in the Welsh town of Caerphilly who were exposed to different levels of road traffic noise. Those who were noise-sensitive were more likely to have long-term anxiety and depression. While that may be partly because anxious people are more vigilant about their surroundings and therefore more likely to notice noise, it's also possible that being noise sensitive can worsen anxiety. And, one 2023 survey of 1,244 adults living near airports in France found that people severely annoyed by aircraft noise levels – especially some noise-sensitive individuals – were more likely to rate their general health as poor. But why do some people react more negatively to noise than others? Studies on the brains of noise-sensitive people reveal some clues. When Shepherd and his colleagues hooked people up to devices that measured the electrical activity in their brains, those without noise sensitivity only showed heightened activity when the researchers played them threatening sounds. But in noise-sensitive people, "their brains tend to go up the gears irrespective of the sound, whether it's a threatening sound or a non-threatening sound", Shepherd recalls. Both Shepherd and the neuroscientist Elvira Brattico of Denmark's Aarhus University have independently found evidence that this has to do with how the brain filters out information about unimportant sounds. Shepherd's team found evidence that in noise-sensitive people, a specific clump of cells within the medial geniculate nucleus – a relay station for sound information entering the brain – are less efficient at this filtering task compared to the brains of those without the condition. Where most people can "filter this information out and get on with life, those who have noise sensitivity don't do it as easily", he says. This kind of filtering also seems to be important during sleep. While most people show patterns of electrical activity called spindles as they fall asleep, which are thought to be important in getting used to surrounding noise, people with noise-sensitivity have less of them – helping explain why they stay so reactive to sounds that normal people aren't bothered by.  How brains end up this way, though, is a mystery. One Finnish study on twins suggests that noise sensitivity is often heritable, so some people might be predisposed to have it from birth. But it's also possible that people living in noisy environments develop sensitivity over time, Brattico says. People with anxiety, schizophrenia and autism are especially likely to develop noise sensitivity. While some people can get it after suffering traumatic brain injuries, for most it's usually something that persists over a lifetime, Stansfeld says. "It is very difficult, as compared to someone who's not noise-sensitive, to actually habituate to sound and actually desensitise to it." The ideal solution, of course, would be to tackle the sources of noise themselves. Urban planners could build quiet inner courtyards for residential buildings, use rubberised asphalt ingredients that reduce traffic noise, or erect sound-diffracting walls around highways and noisy areas like highways. Some cities in Belgium and France have already begun implementing such measures, as well as reducing vehicle speed limits, encouraging bike infrastructure and creating quiet zones in parks and along rivers. While noise is a real cause of health problems, "it's also one which is potentially avoidable", Stansfeld says. But progress is slow, leaving many noise-sensitive people to fend for themselves – for instance by avoiding noisy areas, soundproofing their living spaces or turning to earplugs, earmuffs or noise-cancelling headphones. But these methods often just dampen sounds rather than removing them altogether. "Even quiet noises might be annoying to a noise-sensitive person," Brattico says. Sometimes, treating underlying conditions like anxiety with medications may help, Stansfeld says. Cognitive behavioural therapy, a kind of talking therapy that centres on managing one's psychological reactions and behaviours, can make sense in settings where people are afraid of noise. "I treated somebody myself with cognitive behaviour therapy, and I think it could be quite helpful," Stansfeld says. Meanwhile, Brattico believes that music therapy with qualified practitioners could also be useful, which involves selecting soothing, soft music that calms people and builds positive associations with sound. For those wanting to try self-soothing, Brattico recommends music with few, soft instruments like piano or harp, such as Renaissance or Baroque chamber music. When even music is annoying, art therapy might help – "something that's relaxing and allows expressions and regulation of emotions", Brattico says.  As for myself, it was earplugs, jazz-playing noise-cancelling headphones and a towel wrapped around my head, that eventually helped somewhat. Until the world around me becomes quieter, I can at least try to find some peace in my own mind.  Source of the article

GOATReads: Miscellaneous

'England and India provide most intense, dramatic and emotional finale'

Inside the JM Finn Stand at The Oval, opposite the pavilion, is a staircase that leads up to the Test Match Special commentary box. It is used by media and spectators alike. In the hours after the sensational fifth Test between England and India ended, with the ground emptying, on that staircase was found a left shoe, then some underwear, then a right shoe. Because of their size, they presumably belonged to a man. Quite how the owners misplaced them, or when they realised their loss, is unclear. However, it raises the prospect that someone left this famous old ground both shoeless and pantless. It would have been entirely in keeping with the mayhem that had already played out on Monday morning. There had been 57 minutes of the most intense, dramatic and emotional sport you could ever wish to see. Twenty-five days of gripping Test cricket came down to a one-armed man painfully scampering 22 yards of south London turf. One wonders how the productivity of the UK was affected at the beginning of the working week, or how many offices in Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru closed early. There had been an element of farce to the previous evening. Players went to the dressing rooms because of rain and bad light when the game was on a knife-edge, then stayed there as the gloom turned to evening sunshine. Any frustration over the events of Sunday turned into anticipation of what might be possible on Monday. Thirty-five runs or four wickets. The Oval was sold out, but would anyone bother to turn up? Turn up they did, filling this historic venue with constant noise and nervous energy. There were echoes of the 2005 Ashes classic in Birmingham, when Edgbaston was full for what might have only been two deliveries of action. Just like then, there was a rich reward for turning up. India's six-run win here is the narrowest of its kind in this country since England beat Australia by two runs 20 years ago. India began the day with a huddle that seemed to have every member of the touring party included. Security, chef, bus driver. England, naturally, played football. Fittingly, it was Surrey v England. When Jamie Overton took fours off each of the first two balls of the day, England had almost a quarter of the runs they required. It was the best it got. Jamie Smith has looked increasingly frazzled in his first five-Test series as a wicketkeeper. He wafted at two deliveries, then edged the third. The dhol drum of the Bharat Army beat out the rhythm of We Will Rock You, and rocked England were. When Overton was struck on the pad, umpire Kumar Dharmasena paid his own 2005 tribute with the slow finger of Rudi Koertzen. Josh Tongue had a scattergun game with the ball and found himself as the last line of defence before the stricken Chris Woakes. On Sunday evening, Woakes somehow folded his dislocated shoulder into a set of cricket whites, which sounds excruciatingly painful in itself. When Tongue had his stumps rearranged by Prasidh Krishna, security staff rushed on to the outfield, believing the match to be over. They had not been briefed that Woakes, the nicest man in cricket, is also the bravest. Earlier this year, Woakes had a tattoo inked on his left tricep in memory of his late father Roger, who died last year. Now the same arm was strapped under his England sweater as he descended the pavilion stairs, putting his broken body on the line for the Three Lions on his chest. History will remember Woakes as a World Cup winner in both formats, an Ashes winner and one of the finest seamers in English conditions. This will trump them all. The Wizard will always be the man who tried to help England win a Test with only one functioning arm. How painful it must have been for Woakes to run four times between the wickets, his shoulder jolted by every step. Mercifully, he never faced a delivery. While Woakes played Jack Leach, Gus Atkinson could not ape Ben Stokes. Atkinson was bowled attempting to hit the six that would have levelled the scores and won the series. According to Stokes, Woakes' reaction in the dressing room was to "shrug his shoulder", which is probably the last thing he should have done. The last word went to Mohammed Siraj, who personified the unbreakable spirit and never-say-die attitude of a young India team. He carried the torch of the retired Virat Kohli, with the ability to get into a fight in a phone box. There was barely a time in this Test when Siraj was not bowling, haring in with the pavilion behind him. Thriving on responsibility, both Siraj's average and strike-rate are better when he is not playing in the shadow of Jasprit Bumrah. India's two wins in this series came in matches Bumrah did not play. A series level at 2-2 was a fair result, even if England will feel aggrieved they were denied in the drawn fourth Test at Old Trafford. If they had caught Ravindra Jadeja on nought in Manchester, or any of the six they dropped in India's second innings here, it might have been different. The sight of India great Sunil Gavaskar leading his TV production staff in song on the Oval outfield said much about which side would be happier with the result. It was highly creditable for England to get so close to chasing down 374, what would have been their second highest of all time. It was also a missed opportunity for a statement series win. Whisper it quietly, but there is a chance this was the last home Test for the England team as we know it. There is certainly a scenario where a poor Ashes leads to one of captain Stokes or coach Brendon McCullum walking away. Stokes may simply decide he has had enough of rehabbing from injuries. As cruel as it sounds, Woakes' heroics may be his last act in an England shirt. Mark Wood is 36 in January. England's next home Test is in June. There was a moment on Saturday morning of this Test, when England were fielding and contemplating a potential DRS review. In the conversation were Smith, Atkinson, Zak Crawley, Jacob Bethell, Ollie Pope and Ben Duckett. It was a window into what the senior England players will look like the next time India tour this country. If this is the end of something, England went out playing the hits. Attempting the unthinkable, stirring the emotions like few other teams can. They are exhilarating and infuriating in equal measure, never boring, and responsible for the rebirth of Test cricket in this country. Crucially, the Bazball era is still to claim a top prize. The full home series against Australia and India played under Stokes and McCullum have been drawn 2-2. England have beaten neither since 2018, when Alastair Cook was still in the team. Trips to both countries have recently ended in shellackings, regardless of who has been in charge. The next chance to change that record comes quickly, starting in Perth in November. Bazball in Australia. The drama, emotion and craziness would be nice. A win would be better. Source of the article

GOATReads: Miscellaneous

I tried to make my phone as unaddictive as possible – here’s how you can too

The number of hours the average person spends attached to a device per week has soared over the past decade. Accidental screen junkie Helen Coffey implements a range of hacks to wean herself off her smartphone. Look, I need to make it clear that I never intended to become the kind of person so attached to their phone that I’d end up walking into a tree. Or a lamp post. Or a bollard. But it’s pointless to deny the truth. Admittedly, it was dark (and I was drunk) when the tree thing happened. It’s little consolation. The fact remains that I strolled right into a whacking great trunk while glued to my screen; I’ve still got the scars to prove it. The bollard one was even more humiliating – I ended up hitting it vulva-first in broad daylight while pawing furiously at WhatsApp. As for the lamp post... well, the less said about that, the better. Accidents aside, I’ve become increasingly anxious about the steady creep of phone addiction over the past 18 months. I often find myself scrolling without remembering when or why I started, suddenly “coming to” out of a fugue-like state with a fuzzy, cotton-wool head. A cosy night in watching a film is inevitably marred by my fractured attention span – I’ll spend half of it transfixed by the smaller screen clutched in my hand instead. I’m not alone. Average mobile phone use over the past decade has leapt from one hour and 17 minutes a day to three hours and 21 minutes, according to research from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA); the daily average for looking at all types of screen (mobiles, laptops, tablets, games consoles and TV) is now almost 7.5 hours. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if we were happy about this state of affairs, but most of us categorically are not. Increased screen time has gone hand in hand with rising global depression rates over the past 20 years, while research has shown a correlation between problematic smartphone use and anxiety, depression, stress and decreased wellbeing. A survey by youth charity OnSide conducted last year found that, of the quarter of 11- to 18-year-olds who spent the majority of their free time outside school online, more than half (52 per cent) wanted to break their addiction and reduce their screen time. The majority just didn’t know how. Meanwhile, the popularity of so-called “dumb phones”, officially known as feature phones – stripped-back devices that you can use for texting and calling but not much else, like the old Nokia “brick” phones I cut my teenage teeth on back in the Noughties – has soared. According to consultancy CCS Insight, UK sales of these devices rose from 400,000 in 2023 to 450,000 last year, reports Reuters, while sales in western Europe climbed by 4 per cent the same year, totalling 215 million units. Having tried to use one myself for a week, I found that they’re simply not practical for most adults. The modern world requires smartphones at every turn, from essential authenticator apps to enable secure home working to the storing of digital train tickets and rail cards. I found myself forced to keep “cheating” by using my smartphone, which seemed to somewhat defeat the purpose. This time around, I decided to trial a whole host of hacks in a quest to slash my existing mobile usage – some employing tech, some deferring to analogue alternatives – to see whether I could develop healthier habits and free myself from spiralling addiction. Here’s what worked (and what didn’t). Measure your addiction Measurement is key to reduction. Think about it: how can you possibly cut down on your screen time if you don’t know what it was to begin with? The first and most obvious step, therefore, is to check where you’re currently at before tracking your progress. It’s easier than you might think – the location might be labelled differently depending on the model and make of smartphone, but there will be a section that allows access to some of your usage data. On my Samsung phone, for example, this information lives in “Settings” under “Digital wellbeing and parental controls”. It includes a weekly report about my average screentime and breakdowns of my most-used apps. At my first check, I averaged 2h 40m a day – less than the UK average, but far more than I’d thought possible, considering I already spend eight hours a day at a screen when working. You can also set yourself a daily target here. I put mine at 1h 30m, which turned out to be wildly optimistic – but shoot for the moon, land among the stars and all that. Impose limits In the same digital wellbeing area, you may be able to set yourself time limits for specific apps. Once the allotted time is up, you can’t use that app any more unless you manually add extra minutes. I decided to set restrictions for WhatsApp and Instagram, the two that commandeer the majority of my time. Of course, the trouble is that it’s incredibly easy to add more time – a matter of a few taps – something I repeatedly ended up doing for WhatsApp because otherwise you can’t receive new messages. (The notion of simply not receiving them until the next day proved too stressful for someone used to being permanently contactable.) But I do find the timer element somewhat helpful in that it puts the kibosh on my incessant Insta scrolling – and even when I do add time on WhatsApp, I’m aware it’s technically “borrowed”. I try to be more efficient with my correspondence, getting in and out like a ninja. Keep notifications at bay I’ve had my phone permanently set to silent mode – it doesn’t even vibrate – for the past five years to ensure I’m not constantly distracted by the “ding!” of endless messages and notifications. The only tangible downside is when you misplace your device and realise it can’t be located by simply calling it. I also started flipping my phone face-down, obscuring the screen, when out for dinner with friends – a symbol that I was present and spending intentional time with them, with no wish to put the whims of the digital world ahead of the real one. (A better practice might have been to put it away altogether – but baby steps.) This week, I tried implementing the screen-down technique elsewhere, particularly when working, to stop my eye from being drawn to the screen every time a new notification popped up. Although it works well enough when socialising, the temptation when alone is to just keep turning my phone over every five minutes with the justification that “I might have missed something”. For a true addict, this method sadly doesn’t touch the sides. Buy a (non-smart) watch This might sound laughably simple, but I’m convinced that, overall, it’s had the biggest impact. Previously, I would constantly turn to my phone to find out the time. Every time I did, I got sucked in. There would be a new email to read, a new DM to respond to, a new voicenote to listen to. Next thing you know, 20 minutes had been lost – and I still didn’t know what flipping time it was. This problematic smartphone habit was all but eradicated overnight for the price of a pre-loved Casio (£20 on Vinted, absolute bargain). And speaking of analogue timekeeping, employing an actual alarm clock instead of relying on your phone is a cheap and easy way of ensuring that staring at social media in horror as you contemplate the twisted, broken state of the world isn’tthe very first thing you do upon waking. Make it black and white The bright and jazzy colours on your phone screen are no accident; they’re very much there by design, optimised to set your brain’s pleasure centres alight. One of the most effective remedies, therefore, is to rob your screen of its seductive technicolour and swap rainbow for greyscale. One 2023 study found that this simple technique reduced participants’ daily screen time by 20 minutes at a stroke. The process is not always particularly intuitive and will be different depending on the device’s precise make and model – google your specific phone to find out how to implement it. On my Samsung, for example, I went to Settings, Accessibility, Visibility Enhancements, Colour Correction, then selected Greyscale and toggled it to “On”. The effect is instantaneous and arresting – like stepping from Oz into Kansas – and your phone immediately feels at least half as enticing, conjuring up drizzly Sunday afternoons spent watching black and white telly at an elderly relative’s house (I may be showing my age here). As it’s slightly annoying to have to go through this multi-step journey in reverse every time you want to look at a photo, for example – and then far too tempting not to switch back to greyscale – another top tip is to create a shortcut so that you can easily switch between the two modes at the touch of a button. This might sound unnecessarily lazy, but my main finding from all of this is that we are lazy. The easier you can make it not to use your phone, the better. Leave it elsewhere Clearly, the most surefire way to use your phone less is to be without it more: you can hardly use it if it’s not there. In fact, research has shown that the proximity of a device has a huge impact, not just on our usage but on our ability to perform other tasks. One study ran experiments in which participants had to complete cognitive tests. They were split into three groups: one had to leave their phones in their bags in another room; one could hang onto them but had to keep them out of sight; and the third were told to have them visible on the desk without succumbing to using or checking them. The group whose phones were in another room outperformed everyone else, while those who could see their phones fared far worse. The study authors concluded that “the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity”. Leaving my phone in another room for a set period of time – for a couple of hours, for example, while I actually watched a film instead of falling prey to the weird, unfulfilling split-screen business – made me feel more relaxed and able to concentrate. Out of sight, out of mind, is the literal name of the game. The next step is to sometimes leave my device at home when I go out, especially if it’s a low-key excursion like nipping to the shops. But the fear that I might suddenly need my phone in an emergency – or, conversely, that someone else might have an emergency and need me – is still alarmingly deep-rooted. ‘Boringify’ your phone It may sound counterintuitive to suggest downloading more apps to help you spend less time on your phone – but this one’s a winner, I promise. There is a whole range of “minimalist launchers” whose sole purpose is to make your phone’s interface more boring. I go for a free one called Olauncher: it instantly swaps out all my jaunty app icons for a joyless list of their names. It’s incredible how much less tempting TikTok, Hinge and the like are when displayed as stark text; even the font, a charmless sans serif number, is something of a turn-off. The results After combining these techniques for a week, I find that my average screentime has dropped by 22 minutes a day to 2h 18m. More gratifyingly, on three days I manage to get it down to under 1h 50m, with my lowest recorded daily use at 1h 40m – 10 minutes off my target. The previous week, my heaviest use day saw me spend a truly horrifying five hours attached to my device; this week, my max has been 3h 15m, mostly the consequence of watching Netflix while stuck at the station awaiting a chronically delayed train. Now that I’ve started, the competitive part of me feels driven to continue paring back my screen time until I hit the absolute minimum necessary to live in the modern world. In the meantime, every second of my attention I manage to claw back from my phone – and every bollard I manage to avoid walking into along the way – feels like its own small but glorious victory. Source of the article