Mapping social values in Moreton Bay | 

Vicki Martin

Reef Authority: Deep Dive

 May 14, 2023 

 NORTH QUEENSLAND

The Moreton Bay Marine Park, off the coast of Brisbane, is under increasing human-induced pressures that are threatening sustainability and conservation in the Bay. Through a series of workshops, Marine Park stakeholders identified the need to learn more about how the public value different areas in the Park. 

With an initial focus on recreational boaters (a key user group in the Bay), we developed a contemporary public participation in geographic information systems (PPGIS) process to collect data about the places boaters enjoy in the Bay, and why they value these locations. 

Spatially-integrated social science has progressed considerably over the last three decades; however, debates continue about the methods and measures used. In this talk, we will discuss the methods used to develop and test the survey instrument, its usability, cognition, and suitability for planning decisions. We will share initial findings, reflect on lessons learned, and provide suggestions for future research in this field.

Dr Vicki Martin is an environmental, social scientist at The University of Queensland who has worked in interdisciplinary research teams in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.A., and Chile to engage people in environmental solutions. Her recent work has focused on human values of nature and how information about values can be used to inform marine spatial planning. 

She is particularly interested in embracing innovations in digital technologies to create contemporary, inclusive, translational, and more reliable public participation processes that unify efforts  to sustain ocean health.

Betelgeuse Is Being Weird Again. What Gives?

Story by Michelle Starr • ScienceAlert

May 22,2023

betelgeuse closeup

Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness.

The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness.

It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156 percent in April.

Currently, Betelgeuse is the 7th brightest star in the sky – up from its normal position as the 10th brightest, triggering speculation that Betelgeuse is about to blow in a spectacular supernova.

Sadly, it probably isn't. Although Betelgeuse is on the brink of death in cosmic timescales, on human timescales, its supernova could be 100,000 years away.

According to scientists, its current behavior is more likely a bit of ongoing wobbliness following the 2019 dimming, and the star will return to normal within a decade.

Betelgeuse, located around 700 light-years from Earth, is one of the most interesting stars in the sky. It hangs above us, glowing like a bloodshot eye, a star in the red giant stage that marks the end of its life.

But Betelgeuse is an uncommon type of star, even for a red giant. Once upon a time, it was an absolute monster: a blue-white O-type star, the most massive stellar weight class.

Stars of this mass range burn through their hydrogen stores more rapidly than lighter-weight stars; Betelgeuse is only about 8 to 8.5 million years old. Compare that to a star like the Sun, which at 4.6 billion years old, is only about halfway through its hydrogen-burning lifetim

Betelgeuse changed its spectral type since it has almost run through its hydrogen reserves. It's now fusing helium into carbon and oxygen and has puffed out to a gargantuan size: about 764 times the size of the Sun and about 16.5 to 19 times its mass.

Eventually, it will run out of fuel to burn, go supernova, throw off its outer material, and its core will collapse into a neutron star.

The Great Dimming event saw the star decrease in brightness by a considerable amount, almost 25 percent. Astronomers scurried to figure out the cause; it turned out that cooling on Betelgeuse's surface caused a massive cloud of dust to condense on the star.

This cloud was subsequently ejected, partially obscuring Betelgeuse, causing it to appear to dim. Fairly normal behavior for a red giant star, scientists say; we just don't usually get such a front-row seat.

Before the Great Dimming, Betelgeuse also had brightness fluctuations on regular cycles. The longest of these cycles is around 5.9 years; another is 400 days. But it seems the Great Dimming has caused some changes in these fluctuations.

A new paper, led by astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, uploaded to preprint server arXiv, found that the 400-day cycle seems to have halved.

This pulsation cycle is driven by expansion and contraction inside the star. According to simulations MacLeod and his colleagues conducted, a convective plume inside Betelgeuse could have welled up, becoming the material that breaks away from the star.

During the process, this upwelling disrupted the phase of the 400-day cycle, producing instead a roughly 200-day cycle that the star is currently exhibiting.

So, Betelgeuse is still reeling from the Great Dimming, meaning it's not unlikely that its current brightening is also related to ongoing issues.

As astrophysicist and Betelgeuse expert Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics – a co-author on MacLean's team – told Scientific American, "Just imagine if you take a hunk of the material out. Then everything else is going to swish in, and it's going to slosh around … I think what's happening is that the top layers are having a problem coming back to normal."

However, the team predicts that eventually, normalcy will set back in for Betelgeuse, and it will continue to live out its twilight millennia relatively peacefully for some time to come.

IN MEMORY OF HARRY BELAFONTE (RIP)

Support for extremism among military veterans is similar to U.S. public

Rate is lower that what researchers had expected

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RAND CORPORATION

Support among military veterans for extremist groups and extremist ideals appears similar to or less than levels seen among the U.S. public in general, despite fears that it could be higher, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Surveying a nationally representative group of military veterans, researchers found that support for extremist groups such the Proud Boys and Antifa was generally lower than rates derived from previous representative surveys of the general U.S. population.

Assessing support among veterans for extremist beliefs, researchers found results that were more mixed. Support for QAnon was lower than the public at large, while support for political violence and the Great Replacement theory appeared similar to that of the general population.

The survey found that veterans of the Marine Corps expressed the highest support for extremist groups and beliefs among the different branches of military.

“We found no evidence to support the notion that the veteran community, as a whole, exhibits higher rates of support for violent extremist groups or extremist beliefs than the American public,” said Todd C. Helmus, the study’s lead author and a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “However, our findings do suggest work still may be needed to make sure veterans are not susceptible to being recruited by those with extremist ideologies.”

Concern that the veteran community is at increased risk of radicalization to violent extremism has increased since reports that a significant proportion of the people who attacked the U.S. Capital on Jan. 6, 2021, were currently or had been affiliated with the U.S. military.

Several factors are assumed to underpin radicalization of veterans and why some extremist groups have sought to target both active-duty and military veterans. Veterans are considered significant additions to violent extremist groups, given their past weapon training and their logistic and leadership skills. They also lend a sense of legitimacy to militant groups that can further aid recruitment.

In addition, the veteran population is more male and more White than the overall U.S. population, demographic factors that are associated with right-wing (and to some degree left-wing) extremism in the United States, according to researchers.

To better understand the issue, RAND researchers conducted the first nationally representative survey of veterans’ views about extremism and extremist groups.

Researchers surveyed a group of veterans from the NORC AmeriSpeak panel, analyzing responses from 989 people who reported that they previously served on active duty, but were not currently doing so.

Participants were asked about extremist groups such as Antifa, the Proud Boys and white supremacist groups, as well as their attitudes toward QAnon ideology, support for political violence and the xenophobic Great Replacement theory.

Considerably fewer veterans expressed support for Antifa than the overall U.S. population (5.5% versus 10%), and veterans expressed much lower support for White supremacists than the U.S. population overall (0.7% versus 7%). Vet­erans also expressed relatively less support for the Proud Boys (4.2% versus 9%) and the QAnon conspiracy theory (13.5% versus 17%). About 5% of the participants expressed support for Black nationalist groups.

Despite these encouraging findings, support for the neces­sity of political violence (17.7 versus 19%) and support for the Great Replacement theory (28.8% versus 34%) were similar to support in the U.S. popula­tion. Only a minority of the veterans who expressed support for extremist groups also endorsed the need for political violence.

Researchers found that Marine Corps veterans reported the highest levels of support for Antifa, the Proud Boys and Black nationalists, as well as the highest levels of support for political violence and the Great Replacement theory. Both Air Force and Marine Corps veterans reported stronger support for QAnon.

“Given the anecdotal information about extremist group recruitment preferences and their active targeting of veterans, we would have assumed that these reported prevalence rates would be higher,” Helmus said.

Researchers say it could be that veterans who support such groups may be more inclined to actually join them or participate in their activities than nonveteran counterparts. Hence, even a smaller prevalence rate of extremist attitudes among veterans could still represent an outsized security threat to the United States.

“It seems clear that veter­ans bring a unique and danger­ous set of capabilities to extremist groups,” said Ryan Andrew Brown, co-author of the study and a RAND senior behavioral scientist. “So even a smaller prevalence rate of extremist attitudes among veterans could still represent an outsized security threat to the United States.”

Researchers suggest that the U.S. military and veteran service organizations should continue to explore what drives some active-duty person­nel and veterans to endorse extremist beliefs and join extremist causes. Such efforts should include both additional survey work and interview-based studies that would help researchers understand the factors that drive radicalization.

Support for the study was provided by Daniel J. Epstein through the Epstein Family Founda­tion, which established the RAND Epstein Family Veterans Policy Research Institute in 2021, and the Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library.

The report, “Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs: Results From a Nationally Representative Survey of the U.S. Veteran Community,” is available at www.rand.org. Rajeev Ramchand also co-authored the report.

The RAND Justice Policy Program conducts research across the criminal and civil justice system on issues such as public safety, effective policing, drug policy and enforcement, corrections policy, court reform, and insurance regulation.

---

DOI

10.7249/RRA1071-2 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs: Results From a Nationally Representative Survey of the U.S. Veteran Community

Americans Refuse to Quit Eating Meat

Story by Jess Thomson • NEWSWEEK

May 23,2023

Despite the great strides made by the vegetarian and vegan movements over the past few decades, most Americans aren't going to give up their meat-based diets anytime soon.

An exclusive poll of 1,500 eligible U.S. voters conducted for Newsweek by Redfield and Wilton Strategies on May 17 found that a majority of Americans regularly eat meat and believe that it's a healthy choice. They also said the meat industry is not that bad for the climate.

The polling also found that 81 percent of people eat meat at least once a week, and 10 percent said that they ate it only once or twice a month. Only 4 and 3 percent of the respondents said that they rarely or never ate meat, respectively.

Other questions revealed that 35 percent of people strongly agreed with the statement that it's healthy to eat meat, with 41 percent selecting "agree" and 17 percent selecting "neither agree nor disagree." Only 4 percent said that they disagreed, and a further 1 percent said that they strongly disagreed.

But eating meat, particularly red meat and processed meat, is less than healthy for our bodies. There is a link between increased consumption of red and processed meats and a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and premature death, according to the Harvard Health Publishing website.

The polling also showed that while 34 percent of people believe that eating less red meat would help lower global carbon emissions, 40 percent said that they did not believe this. Twenty-six percent said they weren't sure.

The meat industry, especially the cattle industry, produces a huge amount of greenhouse gases. A paper published in the online journal Nature Food found that raising cows, pigs and other animals for food is responsible for 57 percent of all food production carbon emissions, twice as high as those created by all plant-based food production. Beef alone accounts for a quarter of food production emissions.

The problem is the sheer amount of land needed to grow food for the animals, as well as the felling of trees to clear space for grazing and otherwise raising the animals. More land is used worldwide to feed livestock than to grow crops to feed people, according to the Nature Food paper. Additionally, all the transportation involved in the production process produces carbon dioxide, and the livestock themselves produce methane in their burps, a greenhouse gas with 28 times the warming power of CO2 on a 100-year scale.


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The Guardian reported in 2021 that 5.5 pounds of greenhouse gases are emitted for every 2.2 pounds of wheat produced, compared with a staggering 154 pounds of greenhouse gases per 2.2 pounds of beef.

The polling did show that younger people are more likely to agree that meat is bad for the environment. Thirty percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, 50 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds and 47 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds said so. For 55- to 64-year-olds, only 16 percent of people said the same.

One alternative to satisfy Americans' hunger for meat—outside of a vegan or vegetarian diet—is laboratory-grown meat. This is real meat tissue from animals that is grown in a lab rather than taken from the body of an animal. This would help minimize the carbon emissions produced in the meat supply chain, depending on how much the growth process generates.



Stock image of meat in a petri dish. 

Lab-grown meat was backed by President Joe Biden in an executive order last September. He said that the U.S. government is dedicated to investing in biotechnology that will advance the nation's food security, including via "cultivating alternative food sources" and "looking to improve food security and drive agricultural innovation through new technologies...[including] foods made with cultured animal cells."

However, this alternative doesn't seem to have inspired much enthusiasm among Americans.

Twenty-seven percent of those in the polling sample said they would feel safe eating lab-grown meat, with 25 percent saying they would eat it. However, 55 percent said they would not feel safe eating lab-grown meat, and 57 percent would not eat it.

Additionally, while 30 percent of people said that they believed lab-grown meat provides a realistic alternative to meat produced from animals, 51 percent said they did not. Nineteen percent said they didn't know.

The polling shows that while a large number of Americans recognize the meat industry's effects on both human health and the climate, fewer of them are willing to change their habits or diets as a result.

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Marianne Williamson: ‘You don’t even know what misogyny is until you’ve been a woman running for president’
Story by Edward Helmore • Yesterday 

Photograph: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images© Provided by The Guardian

Apenthouse-gym in north-west Washington DC served as a campaign stage for the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson last week. Athleisure-clad political consultants came and went, as if typecast from a political TV drama. The Washington monument poked between buildings in the distance.

Williamson is far from an average political candidate, even in the modern era of American politics where it often feels much of what was once unthinkable has become a scary new normal. She is not a politician, but instead an author and wellness guru, whose quixotic first tilt at the White House four years ago was far from successful but saw her grace the Democratic debates and score a viral hit with her message to Donald Trump that she would “harness love” to defeat him.

This time around, Williamson is running a tougher, more grounded campaign – treading the turf as a political outsider appalled at how America’s political elites have ignored the needs of its ordinary people.

The chances that Williamson will become Democratic nominee for president next year are very slim. But there’s no doubt that her message has the power to resonate, particularly among the young and with women, and with those who feel America’s current travails cut deep and are being ignored.

“I’ve had a 40-year-career working with people whose lives are in trouble. When I started that was the exception, not the rule. The work I did then was an adequate response to the suffering I saw in front of me, but now there seems to be a ubiquitous wave of people’s lives falling apart.”

An obelisk is much more than a phallus

Williamson is also increasingly clear on some of the traditional barriers she faces. Williamson, 70, is just the second woman – the first being Republican Nikki Haley – to have thrown her name into the 2024 presidential nomination contest ring. Both have received a seemingly reflexive push-back from their respective parties and some quarters of the media.

Sexist? Quite possibly.

“An obelisk is much more than a phallus,” Williamson said at her event, observing the monument beyond. And then more directly: “You don’t even know what misogyny is until you’ve been a woman running for president.”

But Williamson was less interested in symbols of power than her political agenda. She’s never held public office, though she ran unsuccessfully for California’s 33rd congressional district in 2014, and for the Democratic party nomination in 2019, endorsing Bernie Sanders after dropping out the following year.

Among her platform positions is an increase in the minimum wage, reparations for racial injustice, a more muscular response to climate change, comprehensive educational reforms and the creation of a US Department of Peace. She talks of “soulless hyper-capitalism” which she sees as the fundamental affliction of an America run by a government “of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations”.

Now she’s doggedly upgrading her old messaging about personal growth and universal love, attempting to dig a channel from new age enlightenment to political power, and to turn around what she sees as an economic, environmental and social crisis engulfing America.



Williamson speaks on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, on 30 July 2019. 

Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters© Provided by The Guardian

“I’m socio-economically well-travelled,” she said. “And my experience has had to do with the endurance and transformation of chaos. I’m interested in the principles of truth, and the realization that America is out of control. America is in chaos.”

The liberal, Jewish ex-lounge singer from Texas arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s and began to gather the stars – Madonna, Michael, Liz and Warren – and Hollywood power brokers of the era around self-healing psychotherapy and applied her energy to the Aids crisis.


She set up in New York, giving a talk once a month on a Course of Miracles. Her career took off via Oprah Winfrey, and she became known as the TV star’s “spiritual adviser”. A book publishing empire followed. Almost all her titles applied “love” to whatever the title subject at hand.

After her first run for the party nomination in 2020 she moved to Washington, which she describes as a walled city, not a bubble. She’d recently gotten out to visit East Palestine, Ohio, after the toxic train derailment turned the sleepy burgh into a byword for chemical disaster at the hands of a big corporation.

“The economically oppressed in this country are being oppressed by the same forces, whether on the left or the right. The real divide is not left and right, that’s a veil of illusion, it’s between those who are suffering and those who don’t seem to have a clue. It’s about millions of people living with chronic economic insecurity,” she said.

There’s little sign that those actually arranging Democrat political power have much time for Williamson, and they have fenced her out. But she is not put off, touring the country and doing campaign stops.

“Why would I capitulate? I’m a 70-year-old woman. I’m not part of that system. I’m not coming from that place of do what they tell you and you might get on that committee or get to run in 2028,” she said.

There’s such a fear of Donald Trump, they assume the best way to go is with Joe Biden. I disagree

“There’s such a fear of Donald Trump, they assume the best way to go is with Joe Biden. I disagree. You have to be in complete denial to think that status quo, transactional politics are going to be enough to defeat the energy that he [Trump] represents.

“People are blinded by their fear of him,” Williamson continued. “They think if they attack him enough people will change their minds. But this a man who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and supporters wouldn’t care, and I think that’s probably true.

“You’ll beat him by offering the American people a better deal, and agenda for genuine economic reform, an economic U-turn.”

Integral to that, she said, would be a 21st-century economic bill of rights – universal healthcare, free tuition, free childcare, paid family leave, guaranteed housing, a livable wage and sick pay.

Last week, Williamson also announced plans for a Department of Children and Youth, arguing that children, because they have no economic agency and no vote, are “systematically neglected”.

“Public policy in America sets children up to fail. Our children are the biggest collateral damage from hyper-capitalism. So I would place a tremendous focus on children, and create a massive transformation of resources. I want every school to be a center of learning, culture and arts.”

Students go to school in fear of gun violence, a situation she says that will exacerbate mental health issues in the future. The current debate, she says, doesn’t begin to address the issue. “It’s a sophomoric question, is it cultural or is it guns? It’s both. It’s gun safety laws and the glamorization of violence that people make money off.

“Our food policies are violent, our climate policies are violent, our justice policies are violent, our economic policies are violent. The violence perpetrated against women on TV blows my mind – and the emotional violence on social media. We’ve sexualized violence, and we will have a violent society until we chose to become non-violent.”

But her message of love and equity could be marred by other reports of the author behind the scenes. Shortly after she announced her run, Politico ran an article claiming she had episodes of “foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage” during her 2020 White House run. Williamson later called the accusations a “hit piece”.

“I raised my voice in the office. They said I threw a phone but I’ve never thrown a phone at anyone. If people feel I’ve been disrespectful to them, of course, I’m very sorry,” she says.

Some also detect a political hand. Williamson has claimed the Democratic National Committee is “rigging” the party’s primaries in favor of Biden by ruling out a debate – “candidate suppression if a form of voter suppression,” she says – and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, responded to questions about Williamson’s candidacy with jokes about auras and crystal balls.

“Of course they call me an unserious candidate because they don’t want to be called to the carpet for being so unserious about the things that matter most,” she hit back.

“Of course they would see me and those like me as dangerous, because from the perch they’re on I am dangerous.”

Politicians love to talk, but none possibly as much as Oprah-trained spiritual gurus turned politicians. And Williamson is now on a tear. Over the past month, 38 videos have gleaned 4m views and more than 600,000 “likes” on Gen-Z popular TikTok.

But this may be where Williamson likes to be – firing salvoes, getting her voice out there, offering the damned salvation, slipping on occasion into what sounds like life-coaching.

And after the traumatic four-year experiment of allowing a political outsider from the far right to enter the walled city of US politics without knowledge of or care to learn how the levers of political power operate, resistance to another outsider on a political quest is unquestionably elevated.

“I can see that it would be an extremely difficult job, and I can’t imagine that it would be fun every day,” Williamson says of the prospect of the presidency.

“I would simply try to be as good a person as I can be. I’m not claiming to be what I’m not. I’m running for president, not sainthood. I am a decent woman who has, I feel, some insights about this country and some insights about what is happening that could be of value.”

Two small businesses added to Sandia National Laboratories’ Mentor-Protégé program

Working to grow with Sandia’s guidance and knowledge

Business Announcement

DOE/SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES

 

IMAGE: AN ELECTRONICS TECHNICIAN AT COMPUNETICS TESTS A HIGH-SPEED CABLE USED IN AN AEROSPACE APPLICATION. (PHOTO COURTESY OF COMPUNETICS) view more 

CREDIT: COMPUNETICS

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories grew its Mentor-Protégé program from three companies to five with the addition of Dynamic Structures and Materials, LLC of Franklin, Tennessee, and Compunetics Inc., of Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The program not only helps small businesses develop and grow, but also helps foster long-term relationships that help Sandia achieve its mission.

As one of 17 DOE national laboratories, Sandia’s mission includes: anticipating and resolving emerging national security challenges and innovating and discovering new technologies.

“I am being asked by my customers to do things faster, better and cheaper,” said Norm Padilla, senior manager of interconnects at Sandia. “We already work with a lot of vendors, protégés are different, we are partners. We are going to be working with them for years, figuring out how to meet that goal.”

As part of the program, DSM and Compunetics get on-site visits from Sandia’s experts, gap analysis, workshops, outreach events and other one-on-one guidance. Another benefit is their ability to secure noncompetitive subcontracts from Sandia and DOE Federal agencies up to $7 million.

The DSM team welcomes the Mentor-Protégé team from Sandia National Laboratories during a site visit in March.

CREDIT

Robert Thompson/Sandia National Labs

Dynamic Structures and Materials, LLC

DSM, which builds precision motion systems for extreme or unique environments, has worked with Sandia before. They’ve also worked with the aerospace industry, military, and the US ITER Project, an international collaboration of scientists and engineers to build a reactor-scale burning plasma device that can demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power. “With magnetic fields and radiation in the reactor, the environment is not suitable for normal process valves, so we are making a custom valve that can survive and operate in that environment,” said DSM Director of Mechanical Engineering, Patrick McGirt.  The company is currently working to develop nonmagnetic robotic components for heart surgeries that can perform tiny motions using very little weight and power.

While it might seem like DSM is already a success story, with only 15 employees, it’s still a very small company. Leadership sees the Mentor-Protégé program as a potential boost. “We are excited to work with Sandia because it provides a level of manufacturing that will improve our company; we will be able to get to the next level,” said DSM Chief Financial Officer Jim Bickmore.

Compunetics Inc.

Compunetics is a leading manufacturer of rigid and flexible printed circuit boards and assemblies. They have been used in applications like nuclear control systems, guided missiles and secure communication systems. Compunetics also produces electronics for transportation and medical equipment.

Started in 1968, Compunetics was the vision of Dr. Giorgio Coraluppi, or Dr. C., the same man who developed teleconferencing technology, still widely used today. As an employee-controlled company, Compunetics continues to carry on Dr. C’s vision of innovative cutting-edge technology.

Compunetics sees the Mentor-Protégé program as a potential boost. “We are one of those hidden niches that people don’t know about; being a small company, we don’t have huge resources like Sandia,” said John Gralewski, director of sales. “Our goal is to continue to challenge ourselves and leverage the vast knowledge at Sandia.”

Sandia is currently working with Compunetics to build a flexible cable within 12 months that can fit in a small, contorted space while meeting specific standards. That’s no small feat. “A system won’t work without cables, plain and simple. They are important and need to be done correctly,” Padilla said. “What we do at Sandia is vital. Working with protégés helps them understand why it’s so important.”

The Compunetics team includes Sam Bain, left, Joe Nativio, Mike Pilyih, Joe Kasunich, Chicco Vigano, Erika Choltko, James Tripp. Compunetics is participating in Sandia National Laboratories’ Mentor-Protégé program.

CREDIT

compunetics

The Sandians behind the success

The Mentor-Protégé program has become a big success in its short existence. Started in 2019 with three mentors, it has grown to 127, with the credit going to the many Sandians who dedicate their time to it. That includes program lead Royina Lopez, leadership, mentors and support personnel.

“The mentors are key; they are the ones establishing personal connections with these small businesses. They are the ones who explain what we do and how we do it, in turn making sure these businesses are successful,” said Maria Galaviz, senior manager of product delivery value streams. Galaviz engages protégés and mentors on the production side of the house. She says this program is helping Sandia address the supply chain challenges affecting the country. “We need to have suppliers that can meet our schedule, quality and reliability requirements. It’s a perfect example of a partnership in design, supply chain and production. It’s a win-win-win situation,” added Galaviz.

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

PROFIT SHARING IS NOT EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP
Frank Stronach: Profit sharing would be a boon to the working class and spur economic activity

Opinion by Frank Stronach • 1h ago

Frank Stronach: Profit sharing would be a boon to the working class and spur economic activity© Provided by National Post

Do employees have the right to share in the profits they help produce? I believe they do, and I further believe that the government should require all large companies in Canada with more than 300 employees to share their profits with their workers.

Profit sharing is one of seven core principles I outlined in a recent column that spelled out how we could invigorate our economy and improve the living standards of all Canadians. It is a winning formula for economic prosperity.

When a company is small, its owner is much closer to its employees. The owner has to treat the employees well and pay them fairly or they’ll end up leaving. That’s what I did when I started Magna International. I always showed my workers how much money we had in the bank, and I created an informal sort of profit-sharing system.

Basically, I instituted a bonus system to help retain and motivate my employees. If we had a big order and got it done ahead of schedule, everyone pocketed some extra cash. But it was all very informal and ad hoc.

As my company got larger and I was more removed from the day-to-day operations and our growing workforce, I realized that I needed something more formal. That’s when we made profit sharing a core principle of our “corporate constitution.”

We made every employee a partner in profitability and required Magna to share 10 per cent of its annual profits with employees. After we formalized the right to profit sharing within the company’s constitution, I was amazed at the huge gains we made in both productivity and profits.

The reason why is simple: our employees were on the front lines of the factory floor and knew our products and production processes better than anyone else; they knew how to create greater efficiencies and how to work smarter.

Because they knew they would get a slice of the profits we generated, they put their hearts and souls into making quality products at competitive prices. In fact, it became our mantra at Magna: make a better product for a better price.

With profit sharing in place, profits soared. In hindsight, if I could do it all over again, I would have shared 20 per cent of our profits with employees instead of 10, though it was still a sizable chunk.

When a business is small, profit sharing should be left up to the discretion of the owner, who has to worry about reinvesting profits in product development and other issues related to getting the business up and running.

But when companies are making billions of dollars a year, they should have to share some of those profits with their employees. A company can’t make a profit without the hard work and ingenuity of its workers.

The truth of the matter is that although every businessperson wants fewer regulations, restrictions and government oversight, companies also have to realize that government has a higher duty to ensure the overall well-being of society.

Government also has the right to address the growing income inequality in our society. It can do so by imposing higher taxes and redistributing the income from those taxes in the form of social assistance payments and benefits. But in that case, no one wins in the long run because of the stifling effect that increased taxation has on productivity and economic growth.

Another — and I would argue, far better — way government can address income disparity is by requiring large companies to share profits. Under this scenario, everyone wins.

Sharing profits with workers would benefit companies, employees and governments. Companies would see an increase in productivity and profits. Employees would get more income. And governments would gain enhanced tax revenue due to the growth spurred by higher consumer spending.

But if we fail to allow workers to participate in wealth creation, and if the gap between the wealthy and the workers grows wider and wider, society will inevitably drift toward socialism, with growing cries to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Essentially, profit sharing is a philosophy that recognizes that a successful business is driven by three forces — managers, workers and investors — and that all three have a moral right to share in the success of the business.

If a national citizens’ movement adopted profit sharing as a key principle in the effort to restore Canada’s economic health, it would be a policy that millions of Canadians would likely support.

National Post
fstronachpost@gmail.com

Frank Stronach is the founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest global companies, and an inductee in the Automotive Hall of Fame.

Frank Stronach: Fixing capitalism by mandating profit sharing

SHARHOLDING WITHOUT OWNERSHIP 

IS CAPITALIST REFORMISM

https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership

What Is Employee Ownership? | NCEO 

Employee ownership is a term for any arrangement in which a company's employees own shares in their company or the right to the value of shares in their ...

https://www.esoppartners.com/blog/what-does-employee-owned-mean

What Does Employee-Owned Mean for a Company & Workers?

May 24, 2022 ... A worker co-op is a democratic business model that gives equal ownership rights to employees. Employees purchase either shares of stock or a ...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/esop.asp

Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP): What It Is, How It Wor...

Mar 15, 2023 ... An employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) enables employees to gain an ownership interest in their employer in the form of shares of company ...

https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

America's Largest Majority Employee-Owned Companies - NC... 

An annotated list of the 100 largest U.S. companies 50% or more employee-owned through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) or other means, ranked by the ...

https://hbr.org/1987/09/how-well-is-employee-ownership-working

How Well Is Employee Ownership Working? 

The typical ESOP owns a 10% to 40% interest in the company, with 10% to 15% of the plans owning a majority. At least one-third of all plans will eventually ...

https://hbr.org/2021/05/the-big-benefits-of-employee-ownership

The Big Benefits of Employee Ownership - Harvard Business Re... 

May 13, 2021 ... According to recent research by the National Center for Employee Ownership, employee-owners have higher wages and net worths, receive better ...

https://project-equity.org/learn-about-employee-ownership-options

Three employee ownership options: Find the right fit for you... 

A worker-owned cooperative is a company that is owned and controlled by the people who work there. The Board of Directors is made up of a majority of employee- ...

https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/finance/what-is-an-employee-owned-company

What Is an Employee-Owned Company?

Oct 19, 2022 ... Employee ownership refers to an arrangement where no one person has a majority of shares or control over an organization. Models can be as ...

https://www.employeeownershipfoundation.org/frontpage

Employee Ownership Foundation: Frontpage

When employee owned businesses prosper, everyone shares in the rewards. Businesses grow and gain competitive advantage, employees become stakeholders and grow ...

https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/pdf/employee-ownership-businesses-nys.pdf

Employee Ownership of Businesses in New York State

Oct 2, 2022 ... This report focuses on three prominent EO models in the United States: Employee Stock Ownership Plans, Worker Cooperatives, and Employee.

EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP IS STILL CAPITALIST REFORMISM
ONLY WORKERS SELF MANAGEMENT
IS SOCIALISM; ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

Global temperature rise could see billions live in places where human life doesn’t flourish, study says

Story by Tara Subramaniam • CNN

May 23.2023

If the current pace of global warming goes unchecked, it will push billions of people outside the “climate niche,” the temperatures where humans can flourish, and expose them to dangerously hot conditions, according to a new study published Monday.

The study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, evaluated the impact on humans if the world continues on its projected trajectory and warms 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial temperatures.

Factoring in both the expected global warming and population growth, the study found that by 2030 around two billion people will be outside the climate niche, facing average temperatures of 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher, with around 3.7 billion living outside the niche by 2090.

Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s two lead authors, said that one third of the global population could find themselves living in climate conditions that don’t support “human flourishing.”

“That’s a profound reshaping of the habitability of the surface of the planet and it could lead potentially to large scale reorganization of where people live,” Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, said in a video shared by the institute.

According to the report, the niche consists of places where the annual average temperature spans from 13 degrees Celsius (55 degrees Fahrenheit) to around 27 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Celsius). Outside this window, conditions tend to be too hot, too cold or too dry.

The study determined that while less than 1% of the global population is currently exposed to dangerous heat, with average temperatures of 29 degrees Celsius or higher, climate change has already put more than 600 million people outside the niche.

“Most of these people lived near the cooler 13 degree Celsius peak of the niche and are now in the ‘middle ground’ between the two peaks. While not dangerously hot, these conditions tend to be much drier and have not historically supported dense human populations,” said study co-author Chi Xu, a professor at Nanjing University.

If the Earth warms 2.7 degrees Celsius, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan would be the top five countries with the most population exposed to dangerous heat levels, the study found.

The entire population of some countries, such as Burkina Faso and Mali, as well as small islands already at risk from rising sea levels, would face unprecedented high temperatures.

In the worst case scenarios, if the Earth warms up by 3.6 or even 4.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, half of the world’s population would be outside the climate niche, constituting what the report calls “an existential risk.”


The last eight years have been the warmest on record. 

- Samsul Said/Bloomberg/Getty Images

According to the report, living outside the niche could lead to increased mortality rates, as exposure to temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius could be lethal, especially if humidity is so high the body can no longer cool itself to a temperature that can maintain normal functions.

Extreme heat is also predicted to decrease crop yields, and increase conflict and the spread of disease.

Scientists have long warned that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius would result in catastrophic and potentially irreversible changes. As the areas within the climate niche shrink as global temperatures rise, a larger swath of the population will also be more frequently exposed to extreme weather events including droughts, storms, wildfires and heatwaves.

Experts say there is still time to slow the pace of global warming by moving away from burning oil, coal and gas and toward clean energy, but the window is closing.

Every fraction of a degree will make a difference, Lenton said. “For every 0.1 degrees Celsius of warming above present levels, about 140 million more people will be exposed to dangerous heat.”

Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization announced that within the next five years, there is a 66% chance that the planet’s temperature will be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels for at least one year.

“We’ve left it so late to tackle climate change properly that we’re now at a point that to achieve the rate of change we need, means something like a five times speeding up of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or the decarbonization of the global economy,” Lenton said.

 CNN.com