Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kurt Michael Downes, PhD Candidate, Kinesiology, University of Windsor

When the World Athletics Indoor Championships get underway in Kujawy Pomorze, Poland, on March 20, be sure to tune in to the men’s seven-event heptathlon and the women’s five-event pentathlon.

The move indoors means there are fewer events compared to the men’s decathlon (10 events) and women’s heptathlon held at outdoor events like the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo last fall and the Olympics, but these events deserve the spotlight — and not just for the incredible athleticism.

The real lessons these events offer have less to do with medals and extend far beyond winning and losing. Instead, this sport setting provides an opportunity to reimagine how we develop athletes. What if the blueprint for building better athletes isn’t about doing multiple sports, but instead about doing multiple events?

Each year, North American sport is confronted with the same problem: Growing numbers of children are pressured by parents, coaches and leagues to commit to a single sport. Before they even reach their teens, kids are “encouraged” (and by encouraged we mean pressured) to spend more time specializing in their sport to gain a competitive edge. Yet, research suggests the opposite is true: Studies consistently link early specializaton to burnout, higher rates of overuse injuries and sport dropout.

Interestingly, this paradox suggests the very pathway thought to build champions often pushes promising athletes out of sport. An alternative may be found in track and field’s combined events. The decathlon and heptathlon require athletes to run, jump and throw across a slate of events, unlike single-sport specialists.

The advantage is that the combined events allow athletes to develop every major athletic quality: speed, power, endurance, agility and strength. When you add both linear and rotational movements, you get one of the most complete athlete-development systems in sport.

In essence, the combined events represent a more updated and advanced version of the Long-Term Athlete Development Plan, a program designed to outline appropriate stages of athletic growth, build on fundamental movement skills and develop sport-specific competency while reducing injury and burnout.

As such, we ask whether a run-jump-throw system based on the combined events model could be the answer to early specialization in youth sport.

The problem of early specialization

Early sport specialization often refers to year-round participation in a single sport, a trend now common across youth athletics. Examples include young hockey, basketball and soccer players who are pushed toward club or academy teams with daily programs to stay competitive and ensure the “right” people can see them play.

These clubs and academies come with hefty tuition, major travel expenses and logistics, and they may even require kids to leave home and find room and board.

But even outside these commitments, young athletes and their families often feel the need to hire extra personal skills trainers, find additional practice time, compete on multiple teams and more throughout the year in order to keep up with their peers and squeeze every ounce of performance out of their young bodies in and out of season. Once involved in a youth sport at a competitive level, there is no time (or money) for other sports.

At first glance, practice and competition in a single sport seems like a surefire plan for success; with a “more hours equals better” mindset, how could it not? Unfortunately, research tells a different story. Studies consistently show that early specialization is not the most effective pathway to high performance, and a singular focus on one sport instead becomes a risky gamble in long-term athlete development.

Kids who focus on one sport routinely face repetitive overuse injuries, ranging from stress fractures to tendinitis and the loss of motivation to participate in sport.

What’s most concerning is that youth sport dropout rates average roughly 35 per cent per year, and early specialization is consistently linked with even higher dropout risk driven by less play, more pressure and an unbalanced developmental path.

Enter the combined events

Since reports suggest early specialization limits an athlete’s growth, we suggest looking to one of sport’s most multifaceted disciplines as the remedy. In track and field, the decathlon and heptathlon demand a broad skill set that spans the full range of athletic abilities.

Over the course of two demanding days, combined-event athletes sprint, hurdle, jump, throw and run. Scaled-down developmental versions also exist, offering age- and skill-appropriate movements instead of early mastery of a single sport.

This diversity can also align with what sport scientists describe as windows of trainability: periods when young athletes are especially primed to develop speed, agility, co-ordination and endurance. Training across multiple disciplines ensures these important windows of development are not missed.

The difference with early specialization is undeniable. While a young soccer player may log thousands of contacts with the ball by age 12, an athlete in youth combined events is learning to hurdle, jump, throw and pace distance runs. This variety builds broad physical literacy, spreads stress across the body and reduces the overuse injuries common in single-sport pathways. It provides the range, balance and adaptability youth athletes need in order to avoid the pitfalls of early specialization.

Why it matters for kids in sport

Ultimately, the combined events are the antidote for early specialization. Training across the sprints, jumps, throws and distance events keeps kids moving in different ways and across different planes. It avoids the monotony and repetitive stress that pushes so many away from sport.

Long-term athlete development models, which are the gold standard of athlete development across sports, promote broad skill development. Here’s why there’s such a strong case for the combined events:

• Fewer injuries: Combined-event training spreads physical stress, lowering the risk of overuse injuries. Research shows that early specialization increases injury risk, while variety builds resistance..

• Stronger foundations: A mix of running, jumping and throwing helps develop comprehensive physical literacy through a wide mixture of skills, which in turn allows athletes to grow healthier and reach higher levels in sport.

• More fun, less burnout: Keeping practices fresh with new challenges increases motivation. It reduces burnout and keeps kids engaged in sport..

For parents, coaches, schools, clubs and policymakers, the combined events have a format that can be easily delivered and easily integrated into youth sport. As an example, a youth athlete playing soccer (the most highly participated sport in Canada for ages five to 17), can become more athletically proficient during the off-season.

The goal is not to replace soccer. Instead, introducing the principles of combined events can enhance performance and enjoyment. First-step acceleration helps with breakaway speed, jumping develops power for change of direction and throwing builds muscular co-ordination and trunk strength. The combined events’ weekly rotation through sprints, jumps, throws and endurance work is supported by science.

Burnout to balance

Early specialization can look like a shortcut, but it often leads to injuries, burnout and kids leaving sport. The path meant to create champions can end careers before they start.

Combined events offer a better way, blending power, endurance, technical skill and adaptability.

The science is clear: broad experiences in childhood lay the best foundation for long-term success. Most kids won’t become decathletes or heptathletes, but the message is simple: variety matters, but only when it’s balanced, intentional and developmentally appropriate. The right mix of skills develops better young athletes and keeps them engaged.

Kurt Michael Downes receives funding from the Coaching Association of Ontario (CAO). He is the President and Head Coach of the Border City Athletics Club (a not-for-profit organization) and serves on the boards of Family Fuse and Resilient Kids Canada (both not-for-profit organizations).

Kevin Milne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The case for combined events: How decathlon and heptathlon training could solve a crisis in youth sport – https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-combined-events-how-decathlon-and-heptathlon-training-could-solve-a-crisis-in-youth-sport-270263

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, Assistant Professor in Health Ethics, Simon Fraser University

In a span of two days following news that the Tumbler Ridge perpetrator’s ChatGPT account had been flagged prior to the shooting, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and British Colombia Premier David Eby.

He secured commitments on both sides: reporting threats directly to the RCMP, retroactive review of previously flagged accounts, distress-redirect protocols, access to the company’s safety office for Canadian experts and an agreement to work with B.C. on regulatory recommendations to Ottawa.

He also agreed to apologize to the community of Tumbler Ridge, where 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed eight people and wounded many others before dying of a self-inflicted wound. Months prior to the shooting, Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account had been flagged for scenarios involving gun violence. The account was banned, but not reported to law enforcement.

OpenAI’s new commitments are significant gestures. But they resolve a narrower question than the one Tumbler Ridge actually raised. As I argued earlier, the core problem was not a reporting failure. It was a governance vacuum.

What’s changed since? OpenAI has agreed to make the same type of unilateral determination it made before, but to act on it more aggressively, routing the result directly to the RCMP. That is not a fix. It is the same unaccountable architecture with a faster trigger.

The human-in-the-loop fallacy

Consider what we now know about the internal process. The shooter’s account was flagged. Human moderators reviewed the interactions. Some advocated escalating to law enforcement. Other humans, guided by the company’s own opaque thresholds, decided against it. The breakdown was not mechanical. It was institutional.

“Human in the loop” is one of the most repeated reassurances in AI safety discourse. The Tumbler Ridge case exposes its limits. Humans in the loop are only as accountable as the institutional structure around them. When that structure is a private corporation with no legally binding reporting obligations, no transparency requirements and no external oversight, the human in the loop is simply a more sympathetic face on an unaccountable system.

OpenAI has since announced that its thresholds have been updated. But updated by whom, according to what criteria, subject to what review? These remain internal decisions, invisible to the public and unreachable by Parliament.

The surveillance substitution

There is a deeper problem that receives almost no attention. The proposed settlement does not regulate AI. It regulates users.

The entire apparatus being constructed (internal threat identification, flagging, direct RCMP referral) is oriented toward monitoring what people say to AI, not toward how AI systems are designed, trained or constrained in their responses.

True AI regulation asks whether a model might facilitate or amplify harmful ideation through its interaction patterns. It asks how the system is built, what it’s tested for and what obligations attach to its deployment.

The current arrangement asks none of these questions. Instead, it builds a pipeline from private AI interactions to law enforcement, administered by a corporation, governed by proprietary policy.

I call this the surveillance substitution: a governance vacuum gets filled not with democratic regulation, but with corporate surveillance of users. It is not regulation of AI. It is regulation of the people who use AI, conducted by the AI company itself, with the police as the endpoint.

The civil liberties implications are substantial. Research on compassion-sensitive AI, including my own work on how AI systems should respond to users in vulnerable states, consistently shows that people disclose distress to chatbots precisely because the interaction feels private and non-judgmental.

If that space becomes a monitored channel where concerning disclosures trigger law enforcement referrals based on opaque corporate criteria, the most vulnerable users may stop disclosing. The chilling effect on help-seeking behaviour has not been studied, and it has not been discussed in any of the public negotiations following Tumbler Ridge.

Rational strategy, absent framework

It’s important to be precise about what OpenAI is doing. The company is not acting in bad faith. It is behaving as a rational private entity in the absence of a regulatory framework, offering the minimum viable response to political pressure while preserving as much operational autonomy as possible.

Look south and the logic becomes clearer. In the United States, the relationship between AI companies and government power is being forcibly renegotiated. The Pentagon has sought AI models with safety guardrails removed for military applications. When Anthropic resisted, OpenAI moved to fill the gap. In that context, the U.S. government commands and AI companies comply.

In Canada, the dynamic is inverted: OpenAI is not being commanded. It is volunteering concessions designed to pre-empt the kind of binding legislation that would actually constrain its operations. Support broad norms with no immediate legal force; resist specific domestic obligations that carry real consequences. This is how regulatory capture begins: not with corruption, but with convenience.

Canada has genuine leverage here: an unusual cross-party consensus that something must change, public attention that has given AI governance a human face, and a provincial government that understands the stakes.

But leverage evaporates. If the federal government accepts OpenAI’s pledges as a sufficient response, it normalizes corporate self-regulation as the baseline. Future companies will cite this arrangement as precedent. The window for legislation narrows.

What durable governance requires

The response that Tumbler Ridge demands is not more efficient surveillance of users. It is a regulatory architecture that addresses the systems themselves.

That means binding legislation with legally defined thresholds for when AI companies must refer flagged interactions to authorities: thresholds defined by Parliament, developed with mental health professionals, privacy experts and law enforcement, not inherited from a company’s terms of service.

It means an independent triage body so that flagged interactions are assessed by professionals equipped to distinguish ideation from intent, accountable to public law rather than corporate liability. And it means model-level accountability: regulatory attention that moves upstream from users to systems. How are these models designed to respond to escalating disclosures of violent ideation? What testing obligations apply? What auditing requirements exist?

These questions are absent from the current political negotiations, and their absence defines the limits of what the current pledges can achieve.

OpenAI’s commitments following Tumbler Ridge are the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. Canada holds good cards. The question is whether it plays them, or lets the other side set the rules while the table is still being built.

Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. OpenAI’s safety pledges in the wake of Tumbler Ridge aren’t AI regulation — they’re surveillance – https://theconversation.com/openais-safety-pledges-in-the-wake-of-tumbler-ridge-arent-ai-regulation-theyre-surveillance-278364

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Matthew Burkholder, PhD Candidate, Theological Studies, University of Toronto

Soldiers in the United States Armed Forces have lodged more than 100 complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) stating that their commanders are using extremist religious rhetoric to describe the U.S.-Israel war against Iran.

According to some complaints, American military commanders have told their troops the attack on Iran is a holy war, and that U.S. President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, the MRFF’s president, Mikey Weinstein, said the foundation was “inundated” with calls from soldiers indicating that commanders across the armed forces “were euphoric” because the war would serve as a way to “bring their version of weaponized Jesus back.”

The comments are among other violent religious rhetoric to come from U.S. officials. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, caused a diplomatic row when he suggested Israel had a biblical claim to take over much of the Middle East.

The language also comes as some American officials have sought to characterize the Iranian government as fanatical. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said: “Crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.”

Meanwhile, American televangelist John Hagee recently claimed that Russia, Turkey, “what’s left of Iran” and “groups of Islamics” would soon invade Israel and be destroyed by God.

American evangelicalism

During my PhD in Christian theology, I’ve asked why some American evangelical religious movements, which have gained increasing visibility and power through President Donald Trump’s MAGA politics shaped heavily by white Christian nationalism, embrace violent interpretations of what theologians refer to as “eschatology” (a theology of end times).

Read more:
When war looks like prophecy: How U.S. ‘end time’ narratives frame the war with Iran

While the term “evangelical Christian” is notoriously difficult to define, historian David Bebbington, who focused on these movements in the United Kingdom, delineated four broad charactersitics: a strong belief in the Bible, the death of Jesus for sins, a conversion experience and social activism.

My own research specialization is how modern Protestant Christians, including evangelical Christians, understand the significance of Jesus’s death, also referred to as the atonement, and its relationship to the end times.

Seeking Armageddon

Rhetoric about wars being religious, and Trump being divinely anointed and about to cause Armageddon, is deeply disturbing and has catalyzed condemnation from Christians in the U.S. and beyond advocating non-violent and diplomatic foreign policy.

Violent U.S. religious rhetoric being amplified with the U.S.-Israel war against Iran is associated with beliefs that once Israel is restored as a nation and the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, Jesus will return and judge humanity.

Read more:
As Iran war expands, some conservative Christians interpret the conflict through biblical prophecies

Christians adhering to these views read the Biblical Book of Revelation, with its vivid symbolic apocalyptic language, as making literal claims about history. They maintain their inspired and authoritative Biblical interpretation allows them to know that conflicts in the Middle East initiate God’s final act in history, with Trump seen as the dominating and aggressive man who can help usher in God’s violent judgment of his enemies.

Interpretations of Jesus’s death and violence

It’s relevant to consider how some Christian beliefs about Jesus’s death correlate with a willingness to support or justify violence.

Protestant Evangelical theologians, such as J. I. Packer and John Stott, argue that Jesus’s death primarily “paid the penalty” for human sin. They emphasize that God’s holiness requires a payment for this sin. In this framework, God orchestrates the violent death of Jesus to satisfy God’s penal justice to forgive humanity.

Non-evangelical Christians, on the other hand, like 19th-century Congregationalist Horace Bushnell and contemporary Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver, understand the death of Jesus as an example of God’s love.

In this interpretation, Jesus doesn’t endure violence to pay a debt to God. Instead, the death of Jesus is more akin to that of a martyr’s tragic death. These theologians reject violence as a condition for forgiveness.

A 2012 debate in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) about a hymn demonstrates this tension, with a proposed change of hymn lyrics from “on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied” to “the love of God was magnified.” Ultimately, the authors rejected the proposal.

But the conflict demonstrates that Christians are passionate about their different interpretations of Jesus’s death.

Divine violence in atonement

Researchers have shown that penal atonement beliefs predict a negative association with a sense of responsibility for reducing pain and suffering in the world. This is not surprising when violence is incorporated as redemptive into theological frameworks.

I make a connection in my PhD dissertation between accepting divine violence in the atonement and divine violence in eschatology. Of course, this topic is far more complex and nuanced. Nonetheless, Christians are always going through a process of interpretation and negotiation when it comes to sacred texts.

For example, is Jesus the warrior Christ of Revelation 19 riding a warhorse to go into battle against his enemies or the teacher of peace in Matthew 21 who commands his followers to love their enemies just as God perfectly does?

Biblical interpretation and political beliefs

For those who see violence as a tool for redemption, they are more apt to subvert Jesus’s nonviolent teaching with images found in the Biblical book of Revelation. For those who see violence as incompatible with Christian ethics, they will interpret this allegorically, and with humility, paying attention to signs of God not just in their own lives and “insider” group. These two approaches will also inform political beliefs as well.

Consider a recent social media post by Reformed Baptist theologian and pastor John Piper. The post simply quotes Leviticus 19:34:

“You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Piper was quickly labelled “woke” and pushing an “irresponsible” theology by Trump supporters. American theologan Russell Moore noted years ago:

“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — ‘turn the other cheek’ — to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’”

A more responsible evangelical theology

I argue Christians should not believe in a God of violent death, but life. Violent atonement and eschatology portrays a God who is not above revenge and a God who leaves most of humanity hopeless.

We are left asking a series of disturbing questions if God is indeed about to end the world with violence. Why does the tone of this theology resemble the tone of empire, which crushes enemies instead of building bridges with them? Why does Jesus, as One Person of the One God, expect his followers to love their enemies — if God the Father ultimately does not?

All Christians in the U.S. and beyond need to reject violent theology as incompatible with the love of God that was magnified on the cross.

Matthew Burkholder is a member of the Liberal Party of Canada.

– ref. Evangelical holy war: Why some Christians think Trump will end the world – https://theconversation.com/evangelical-holy-war-why-some-christians-think-trump-will-end-the-world-277617