Category: MIL-OSI

Source: – By Elizabeth Wolfson, Assistant Director of Campus Partnerships for the Office of Public Scholarship, Washington University in St. Louis

Artist, illustrator and writer Edward Gorey would have turned 100 this year, and the recently published “From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey” is a fitting celebration of his wit and talent.

The book reproduces, in stunning detail, a series of 50 elaborately illustrated envelopes Gorey created in the mid-1970s. But when I started reading “From Ted to Tom,” I felt confused – and a little let down.

The book makes no mention of Gorey’s queerness. To me, this is a missed opportunity to shed light on how being gay may have fueled some of his most personal work.

The master of macabre

Today, Edward Gorey is widely known for his sprawling, macabre-yet-humorous body of work, which spans nearly every medium.

There are dozens of his own books, notably “The Doubtful Guest” and “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” as well as cover designs for many others; sets and costumes for the 1977 Tony Award-winning revival of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”; the opening credit sequence for the PBS television series “Mystery!”; “The Fantod Pack,” a deck of Tarot-like cards; and hand-sewn, surrealist dolls.

His stories often feature adults and children alike who meet untimely ends through mostly hilarious, unlikely accidents – and, yes, the occasional straight-up murder. But they’re never gratuitous, nor do they glorify violence for violence’s sake.

As for his personal life, Gorey may have been what today we’d call asexual; Gorey himself used the term “undersexed,” but he also acknowledged, when asked directly about his sexuality, that he “supposed” he was gay.

Mark Dery’s 2018 Gorey biography, “Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey,” documents the artist’s participation in postwar gay life. The book details a handful of crushes Gorey had on various men, at least one of which – a brief affair with a man named Victor – involved some physical intimacy.

To whatever extent Gorey entertained sex or romance, it was with men. As Dery points out, however, this fact largely goes unaddressed in discussions of the artist’s work.

A chance encounter

“From Ted to Tom” reinforces this silence.

The “Tom” is Tom Fitzharris, the author of the book’s introduction and some commentary at the book’s end.

In the introduction, Fitzharris explains that before he met Gorey, he was already collecting the artist’s “small, exquisite books.”

After attending a gallery exhibit of Gorey’s work in 1974, Fitzharris mailed him one of the books from his collection to request Gorey’s signature, along with a cryptic inquiry about two of the book’s characters. Gorey obliged and returned the book with a similarly cryptic reply.

Soon after this exchange, Fitzharris spotted Gorey on the street and introduced himself. The two soon began meeting regularly “for dinner, the theater, coffee, and especially the ballet, his great passion,” one that Fitzharris shared. When Gorey left to summer on Cape Cod, he began sending Fitzharris the envelopes collected in “From Ted to Tom.”

Fitzharris shares almost no information about himself in the book, and he has never commented publicly about his own sexuality. However, even his dry, minimalist narration cannot conceal the intensity of their connection.

Describing his first visit to Gorey’s apartment, he writes: “I thought I’d be at Gorey’s for ten minutes, but I left two hours later.” Whether Fitzharris lost track of time as the two explored their “dozens of shared interests” or simply couldn’t tear himself away, when he finally made it back to work, he was surprised that he still had a job.

The envelope as canvas

Given this voracious drive to create, it is no surprise that Gorey saw an object as humble as a letter envelope as a creative opportunity. As Dery points out, Gorey was also making his illustrated envelopes as the mail art movement was becoming popular. Sparked by artist Ray Johnson in the 1960s – who, like Gorey, lived in New York City – it involved artists using the postal service to exchange works of art, using it as an alternative to the commercial galleries and museums that artists had largely depended on.

The 50 envelopes reproduced in “From Ted to Tom” was not Gorey’s first dalliance with the envelope as canvas; he’d experimented with it six years earlier, while in the midst of a collaboration with author and editor Peter Neumeyer, with whom he produced three children’s books.

In his drawings to Neumeyer, Gorey mostly seems to be having fun playing around with a new formal challenge: how to integrate drawings with the prerequisite address text in a satisfying way.

Because I study how people use images to make sense of the world, I couldn’t help but notice key differences between the Neumeyer envelopes and those that Gorey sent to Fitzharris.

The Fitzharris series is poised and polished from the jump. Gorey’s distinctive hand-lettering is crisp, precise and perfectly straight, each envelope a complete scene. Some scenes are more complex than others, but each is a complete thought.

There’s another notable difference between the Neumeyer and Fitzharris envelopes. While the former features a revolving cast of real and imaginary creatures, the latter has two co-stars: two black-and-white dogs, sides emblazoned with matching, serifed T’s.

In his introduction to the book, Fitzharris confirms that the animals represent Gorey and him. Fitzharris is also clearly more than the lucky witness to a burst of creative genius. He is its muse.

‘Pen pal’ or something more?

Whatever Gorey’s artistic ambitions for the project, it is also a visual diary of sorts: an album of their shared experiences, their common interests and hobbies, and a document of Gorey’s goings-on while they were apart.

Take, for example, an envelope that depicts the canine duo standing amid a vast assemblage of blue bottles, with Fitzharris’ address displayed as labels.

“All the blue bottles are a recollection of a window full of them in one of the antique shops I stopped in after you left that Sunday,” Gorey wrote in the accompanying letter. “The sun coming through them is not reproducible, at least by me.”

In the same letter, Gorey struggles to convey the depth of his feeling upon receiving a recent letter from Fitzharris.

“I used to maintain that if it couldn’t be put into words it didn’t exist; if anything I believe rather the opposite now. All of which is rather a strangled attempt to say that I appreciated your letter of the 23rd very much, but that I don’t know how to say so directly. Yes.”

What did Fitzharris’ letter say that moved Gorey so much? What is the meaning of his singular, elliptical “yes”? Is it simply stylistic? Or is it a response?

We’ll likely never know. But evidently whatever Fitzharris said moved him deeply.

There are other poignant scenes. In his notes to “From Ted to Tom,” Fitzharris takes credit for introducing Gorey to the French phrase “heure bleue,” which translates to “the blue hour” and refers to the time of day just after the sun sets. Gorey’s delight is reflected in a lovely scene of quiet companionship.

Tom and Ted stand at a low fence or porch railing, sharing drinks and gazing up at a darkening sky as dusk settles over thick foliage. For once leaving nothing to the imagination, he inscribes “HEURE BLEUE” next to the image in thick, bold letters – a rare act of captioning.

This unusual relative directness continues into the accompanying letter. Though he can hardly bear admitting it, Gorey describes their recent visit as “a happy day,” immediately qualifying the comment as a “revolting phrase.”

One “cannot help but think how seldom in life one knows one is having one at the time,” he continues. The phrasing is somewhat innocuous. But I wonder how much pleasure Gorey must have felt – and how strong his need to convey it must have been – to overcome the force of his “revulsion.”

This push and pull between attraction to one another and repulsion at one’s own spontaneous emotion supplies the dynamism that make the drawings in “From Ted to Tom” so compelling.

Despite this powerful current, Fitzharris, who is credited as the book’s editor, leaves the topic of Gorey’s sexuality untouched in both his introduction to the book and its end notes, where he provides a guide to some of the personal and cultural references in Gorey’s drawings and letters. The book’s back cover refers to Fitzharris as the artist’s “pen pal.”

Denied access to the underlying details driving this dynamism, the reader loses the chance to reflect on the source of this electrical current, its impact on his art, and how Gorey’s struggles with intimacy and desire, which are all too universal, were also undoubtedly shaped by the challenge of being gay in a deeply homophobic society.

Rather than limiting the understanding of his work, accounting for Gorey’s queerness invites viewers of his art and readers of his work into deeper communion with the artist – and themselves.

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

– ref. A new book of Edward Gorey’s drawings shows what’s lost when the artist’s sexuality is glossed over – https://theconversation.com/a-new-book-of-edward-goreys-drawings-shows-whats-lost-when-the-artists-sexuality-is-glossed-over-257938

Source: – By Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

“Da, duh.”

Two simple notes – E and F – have become synonymous with tension, fear and sharks, representing the primal dread of being stalked by a predator.

And they largely have “Jaws” to thank.

Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film – along with its spooky score composed by John Williams – convinced generations of swimmers to think twice before going in the water.

As a scholar of media history and popular culture, I decided to take a deeper dive into the staying power of these two notes and learned about how they’re influenced by 19th-century classical music, Mickey Mouse and Alfred Hitchcock.

The first summer blockbuster

In 1964, fisherman Frank Mundus killed a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island.

After hearing the story, freelance journalist Peter Benchley began pitching a novel based on three men’s attempt to capture a man-eating shark, basing the character of Quint off of Mundus. Doubleday commissioned Benchley to write the novel, and in 1973, Universal Studios producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film rights to the novel before it was published. The 26-year-old Spielberg was signed on to be the director.

Tapping into both mythical and real fears regarding great white sharks – including an infamous set of shark attacks along the Jersey Shore in 1916 – Benchley’s 1974 novel became a bestseller. The book was a key part of Universal’s marketing campaign, which began several months before the film’s release.

Starting in the fall of 1974, Zanuck, Brown and Benchley appeared on a number of radio and television programs to simultaneously promote the release of the paperback edition of the novel and the upcoming film. The marketing also included a national television advertising campaign that featured emerging composer Williams’ two-note theme. The plan was for a summer release, which, at the time, was reserved for films with less than stellar reviews.

Films at the time typically were released market by market, preceded by local reviews. However, Universal’s decision to release the film in hundreds of theaters across the country on June 20, 1975, led to huge up-front profits, sparking a 14-week run as the No. 1 film in the U.S.

Many consider “Jaws” the first true summer blockbuster. It catapulted Spielberg to fame and kicked off the director’s long collaboration with Williams, who would go on to earn the second-highest number of Academy Award nominations in history – 54 – behind only Walt Disney’s 59.

The film’s beating heart

Though it’s now considered one of the greatest scores in film history, when Williams proposed the two-note theme, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke.

But Williams had been inspired by 19th and 20th century composers, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and especially Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” In the “Jaws” theme, you can hear echoes of the end of Dvorak’s symphony, as well as the sounds of another character-driven musical piece, Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

“Peter and the Wolf” and the score from “Jaws” are both prime examples of leitmotifs, or a musical piece that represents a place or character.

The varying pace of the ostinato – a musical motif that repeats itself – elicits intensifying degrees of emotion and fear. This became more integral as Spielberg and the technical team struggled with the malfunctioning pneumatic sharks that they’d nicknamed “Bruce,” after Spielberg’s lawyer.

As a result, the shark does not appear until the 81-minute mark of the 124-minute film. But its presence is felt through Williams’ theme, which some music scholars have theorized evoke the shark’s heartbeat.

Sounds to manipulate emotions

Williams also has Disney to thank for revolutionizing character-driven music in film.

The two don’t just share a brimming trophy case. They also understood how music can heighten emotion and magnify action for audiences.

Although his career started in the silent film era, Disney became a titan of film, and later media, by leveraging sound to establish one of the greatest stars in media history, Mickey Mouse.

When Disney saw “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, he knew that sound would be the future of film.

On Nov. 18, 1928, “Steamboat Willie” premiered at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City as Disney’s first animated film to incorporate synchronized sound.

Unlike previous attempts to bring sound to film by having record players concurrently play or deploying live musicians to perform in the theater, Disney used technology that recorded sound directly on the film reel.

It wasn’t the first animated film with synchronized sound, but it was a technical improvement to previous attempts at it, and “Steamboat Willie” became an international hit, launching Mickey’s – and Disney’s – career.

The use of music or sound to match the rhythm of the characters on screen became known as “Mickey Mousing.”

“King Kong” in 1933 would deftly deploy Mickey Mousing in a live action film, with music mimicking the giant gorilla’s movements. For example, in one scene, Kong carries away Ann Darrow, who’s played by actress Fay Wray. Composer Max Steiner uses lighter tones to convey Kong’s curiosity as he holds Ann, followed by ominous, faster, tones as Ann escapes and Kong chases after her. In doing so, Steiner encourages viewers to both fear and connect with the beast throughout the film, helping them suspend disbelief and enter a world of fantasy.

Mickey Mousing declined in popularity after World War II. Many filmmakers saw it as juvenile and too simplistic for the evolving and advancing film industry.

When less is more

In spite of this criticism, the technique was still used to score some iconic scenes, like the playing of violins in the shower as Marion Crane is stabbed in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

Spielberg idolized Hitchcock. A young Spielberg was even kicked off the Universal lot after sneaking on to watch the production of Hitchcock’s 1966 film “Torn Curtain.”

Although Hitchcock and Spielberg never met, “Jaws” clearly exhibits the influence of Hitchcock, the “Master of Suspense.” And maybe that’s why Spielberg initially overcame his doubts about using something so simple to represent tension in the thriller.

The use of the two-note motif helped overcome the production issues Spielberg faced directing the first feature length movie to be filmed on the ocean. The malfunctioning animatronic shark forced Spielberg to leverage Williams’ minimalist theme to represent the shark’s ominous presence in spite of the limited appearances by the eponymous predatory star.

As Williams continued his legendary career, he would deploy a similar sonic motif for certain “Star Wars” characters. Each time Darth Vader appeared, the “Imperial March” was played to set the tone for the leader of the dark side.

As movie budgets creep closer to a half-billion dollars, the “Jaws” theme – and the way those two notes manipulate tension – is a reminder that in film, sometimes less can be more.

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

– ref. ‘Jaws’ and the two musical notes that changed Hollywood forever – https://theconversation.com/jaws-and-the-two-musical-notes-that-changed-hollywood-forever-255379

Source: – By Sean Lawrence, Assistant Professor of History, West Virginia University

When you think about ticks, you might picture nightmarish little parasites, stalking you on weekend hikes or afternoons in the park.

Your fear is well-founded. Tick-borne diseases are the most prevalent vector-borne diseases – those transmitted by living organisms – in the United States. Each tick feeds on multiple animals throughout its life, absorbing viruses and bacteria along the way and passing them on with its next bite. Some of those viruses and bacteria are harmful to humans, causing diseases that can be debilitating and sometimes lethal without treatment, such as Lyme, babesiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

But contained in every bite of this infuriating, insatiable pest is also a trove of social, environmental and epidemiological history.

In many cases, human actions long ago are the reason ticks carry these diseases so widely today. And that’s what makes ticks fascinating for environmental historians like me.

Changing forests fueled tick risks

During the 18th and 19th centuries, settlers cleared more than half the forested land across the northeastern U.S., cutting down forests for timber and to make way for farms, towns and mining operations. With large-scale land clearing came a sharp decline in wildlife of all kinds. Predators such as bears and wolves were driven out, as were deer.

As farming moved westward, Northeasterners began to recognize the ecological and economic value of trees, and they returned millions of acres to forest.

The woods regrew. Plant-eaters such as deer returned, but the apex predators that once kept their populations in check did not.

As a result, deer populations grew rapidly. With the deer came deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) carrying borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. When a tick feeds on an infected animal, it can take up the bacteria. The tick can pass the bacteria to its next victim. In humans, Lyme disease can cause fever and fatigue, and if left untreated it can affect the nervous system.

The eastern U.S. became a global hot spot for tick-borne Lyme disease starting around the 1970s. Lyme disease affected over 89,000 Americans in 2023, and possibly many more.

Californians move into tick territory

For centuries, changing patterns of human settlements and the politics of land use have shaped the role of ticks and tick-borne illnesses within their environments.

In short, humans have made it easier for ticks to thrive and spread disease in our midst.

In California, the Northern Inner Coast and Santa Cruz mountain ranges that converge on San Francisco from the north and south were never clear-cut, and predators such as mountain lions and coyotes still exist there. But competition for housing has pushed human settlement deeper into wildland areas to the north, south and east of the city, reshaping tick ecology there.

While western black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus) tend to swarm in large forest preserves, the Lyme-causing bacterium is actually more prevalent in small, isolated patches of greenery. In these isolated patches, rodents and other tick hosts can thrive, safe from large predators, which need more habitat to move freely. But isolation and lower diversity also means infections are spread more easily within the tick’s host populations.

People tend to build isolated houses in the hills, rather than large, connected developments. As the Silicon Valley area south of San Francisco sprawls outward, this checkerboard pattern of settlement has fragmented the natural landscape, creating a hard-to-manage public health threat.

Fewer hosts, more tightly packed, often means more infected hosts, proportionally, and thus more dangerous ticks.

Six counties across these ranges, all surrounding and including San Francisco, account for 44% of recorded tick-borne illnesses in California.

A lesson from Texas cattle ranches

Domesticated livestock have also shaped the disease threat posed by ticks.

In 1892, at a meeting of cattle ranchers at the Stock Raiser’s Convention in Austin, Texas, Dr. B.A. Rogers introduced a novel theory that ticks were behind recent devastating plagues of Texas cattle fever. The disease had arrived with cattle imported from the West Indies and Mexico in the 1600s, and it was taking huge tolls on cattle herds. But how the disease spread to new victims had been a mystery.

Editors of Daniel’s Texas Medical Journal found the idea of ticks spreading disease laughable and lampooned the hypothesis, publishing a satire of what they described as an “early copy” of a forthcoming report on the subject.

The tick’s “fluid secretion, it is believed, is the poison which causes the fever … [and the tick] having been known to chew tobacco, as all other Texans do, the secretion is most probably tobacco juice,” they wrote.

Fortunately for the ranchers, not to mention the cows, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sided with Rogers. Its cattle fever tick program, started in 1906, curbed cattle fever outbreaks by limiting where and when cattle should cross tick-dense areas.

By 1938, the government had established a quarantine zone that extended 580 miles by 10 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas Brush Country, a region favored by the cattle tick.

This innovative use of natural space as a public health tool helped to functionally eradicate cattle fever from 14 Southern states by 1943.

Ticks are products of their environment

When it comes to tick-borne diseases the world over, location matters.

Take the hunter tick (Hyalomma spp.) of the Mediterranean and Asia. As a juvenile, or nymph, these ticks feed on small forest animals such as mice, hares and voles, but as an adult they prefer domesticated livestock.

For centuries, this tick was an occasional nuisance to nomadic shepherds of the Middle East. But in the 1850s, the Ottoman Empire passed laws to force nomadic tribes to become settled farmers instead. Unclaimed lands, especially on the forested edges of the steppe, were offered to settlers, creating ideal conditions for hunter ticks.

As a result, farmers in what today is Turkey saw spikes in tick-borne diseases, including a virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, a potentially fatal condition.

It’s probably too much to ask for sympathy for any ticks you meet this summer. They are bloodsucking parasites, after all.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the tick’s malevolence isn’t its own fault. Ticks are products of their environment, and humans have played many roles in turning them into the harmful parasites that seek us out today.

This article has been updated to clarify that ticks spread alongside the deer population.

Sean Lawrence has nothing to disclose.

– ref. Ticks carry decades of history in each troublesome bite – https://theconversation.com/ticks-carry-decades-of-history-in-each-troublesome-bite-257110

Source: – By Brian Bossak, Professor of Public Health, College of Charleston

Summer is just getting started, and millions of people are under heat advisories as a major heat wave spreads across large parts of the central and eastern U.S. in June 2025.

For many people, summer is their favorite season, a time for cookouts, beach trips and other outdoor activities. However, summer also brings the risk of dangerously high temperatures and humidity.

In the U.S., hundreds of people working or playing outside – even those who seem healthy – succumb to heat-related illnesses each year. Older adults and people in areas that historically haven’t needed air conditioning tend to see the highest rates of illnesses during heat waves, as Chicago saw in 1995 when at least 700 people died in a heat wave.

Even in places where heat is recognized as a dangerous health threat, people can be caught off guard as the thermometer creeps higher, on average, each year. In some cases, dangerous heat can arise quickly. In 2021, a young family died of heat stroke on a California trail after setting out for a hike when temperatures were still in the 70s Fahrenheit (low to mid 20s Celsius).

I study health risks in a warming climate as a professor of public health, and I’ve seen heat become a growing concern. Here are some of the key warning signs to watch for when temperatures rise – and ways to keep cool when the heat and humidity get too high.

Signs of heat-related illness to watch for

Heat-related illnesses occur across a spectrum, and mild heat stress can quickly progress to life-threatening heat stroke if a person is exposed to dangerous conditions for too long.

Mild forms of heat-related illness include heat cramps and heat rash, both of which can be caused by extensive sweating during hot conditions. Cooling the body and drinking cool fluids can help.

When heat-related illnesses progress into heat exhaustion, the situation is more serious. Heat exhaustion includes symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, excessive sweating, feeling weak, thirst and getting a headache.

Heat exhaustion is a signal that the body is losing its ability to maintain a stable core temperature. Immediate action such as moving to a cool, ideally air-conditioned space, drinking liquids, loosening clothes and applying wet cloths are some of the recommended steps that can help keep heat exhaustion from progressing to the most dangerous form of heat-related illness, heat stroke.

Heat stroke is a medical emergency. At this point, the body can no longer maintain a stable core temperature. A body with heat stroke can reach 106 degrees Fahrenheit or higher rapidly, and that heat can quickly damage the brain, heart and kidneys.

Typically, someone suffering heat stroke has exhausted their reserves of sweat and salt to stay cool, so sweating eventually stops during heat stroke. Their cognitive ability fails, and they cannot remove themselves from danger. Heat stroke can cause seizures or put someone into a coma as their core temperature rises. If the condition is not treated immediately, and the core temperature continues to rise, heat stroke becomes fatal.

Because heat exhaustion can lead to heat stroke, addressing heat-related illnesses before they progress is vital.

How to tell when the heat is too high

Heat risk isn’t just about temperature – humidity also increases the risk of heat-related illnesses because it affects how well sweating will cool the human body when it gets hot.

Instead of just looking at temperature when planning outdoor activities, check the heat index, which accounts for heat illness risk associated with temperature and relative humidity.

It doesn’t take very high temperatures or very high humidity for the heat index to enter dangerous territory.

However, the heat index is still a conservative measure of the impact of heat on humans, particularly for outdoor workers and athletes at summer practices. This is because temperature measurements used in weather forecasting are taken in the shade and are not exposed to direct sunlight. If someone is outside and exposed to the direct sun, the actual heat index can be as much as 15 F higher than the heat index chart indicates.

A more sophisticated measurement of heat effects on human health is what’s known as the wet-bulb globe temperature, which takes into account other variables, such as wind speed and cloud cover. Neither takes into account a person’s physical exertion, which also raises their body temperature, whether working at a construction site or playing soccer.

Tips for staying safe in a heat wave

How can you stay cool when heat waves set in? The answer depends in part on where you are, but the main points are the same:

• Avoid strenuous outdoor activities in high temperatures if possible. If you start to feel symptoms of heat-related illnesses, drink fluids that will hydrate you. Find shade, rest, and use cool, damp cloths to lower your body temperature. If you see signs of heat stroke in someone else, call for medical help.

• Be careful with fans. Fans can be useful if the temperature isn’t too high because they wick sweat away from the body and induce evaporative cooling. But at very high temperatures, they can accelerate heat buildup in the body and lead to dangerous conditions. If indoor temperatures reaches 95 degrees or higher, using fans can actually be dangerous and raise the risk of heat-related illnesses.

• Find a cooling center, library or community center where you can get inside and rest in an air-conditioned space in the hottest hours. In places such as Phoenix, where high temperatures are a regular hazard, cooling centers are typically opened in summer. Northern cities are also opening cooling centers as heat waves occur there more frequently than they did in the past. Urban areas with a lot of pavement and buildings – known as heat islands – can have temperatures well above the city’s average.

• Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! Drink plenty of fluids, and don’t forget about the importance of electrolytes. Heat-related dehydration can occur when people sweat excessively, losing water and necessary salts from the body. Some sports drinks or rehydration fluids restore electrolytes and hydration levels.

Older adults and people with disabilities often face higher risks from heat waves, particularly if they can’t easily move to a cooler environment. Communities and neighbors can help protect vulnerable populations by providing cooling centers and bottled water and making regular wellness checks during high heat.

Summer can be a season of fun. Just remember the risks, keep an eye on your friends and neighbors when temperatures rise, and plan ahead so you can beat the heat.

This article, originally published June 19, 2025, has been updated with new heat advisories and forecasts.

Brian Bossak is not currently receiving relevant external funding for heat-related illness research. In 2017-2019, he served as a consultant on a heat-related research award from the Southeastern Coastal Center for Agricultural Health and
Safety at the University of Florida.

– ref. How to stay safe during heat waves – and heat stroke warning signs to watch for – https://theconversation.com/how-to-stay-safe-during-heat-waves-and-heat-stroke-warning-signs-to-watch-for-257708

Source: – By Sarah Bauerle Bass, Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Temple University

In Philadelphia, the leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer and unintentional drug overdose. While some of these deaths are caused by things out of our control – like genetics – many are largely preventable.

Preventable deaths are the result of a series of decisions. Whether a person decides to smoke, eat lots of fried foods or be a couch potato, their decisions – sometimes unconsciously – can affect their health.

I’m a health communication expert and public health researcher at Temple University in North Philadelphia. I began working in public health in the late 1980s at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and before that I worked in marketing and public relations. I have spent my career thinking about how health decisions are like many of the decisions consumers make each day around which products to buy.

One key difference with health decisions is the inherent risks involved. There isn’t much risk in trying a new brand of cereal, but there is risk in riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

Many people have a “that won’t happen to me” attitude when making a decision that involves risk. This element of “risk perception” has guided my interest in health decisions and how to use commercial marketing techniques – the same ones companies use to sell products – to encourage people to get vaccinated, get a colonoscopy or get treated for a medical condition.

Breaking demographics into psychographics

One strategy I use is segmentation analysis.

Segmentation analysis is the process of looking at groups of people who may look like they are all similar on the surface – such as Black women from North Philadelphia – and then breaking them into smaller groups based on differences in their attitudes, beliefs or behaviors.

Looking at these “psychographics” instead of demographics like age or sex can help public health communication researchers better understand how to communicate effectively.

For example, I led a study in 2021 that looked at how connected transgender women living in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area felt to other members of the trans community. We wanted to see if messaging about PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, the medication used to prevent HIV infection, would need to be different depending on how connected they felt.

We found that participants who were more engaged with the trans community were not only more knowledgeable about PrEP, but they were also more likely to see the benefits of using it compared with those who were less engaged.

This indicates that strategies to reach those not as connected may need to include, for example, providing more basic information about what PrEP is and how it works.

Mathematical models and 3D maps

Another powerful marketing tool that I use is a process known as perceptual mapping and vector message modeling.

Using simple survey answers, we can mathematically model how people are thinking about a health decision and present it in a three-dimensional map.

Similar to how someone might think about the relationship between where cities or countries are in relation to each other – such as where Philadelphia is in relation to New York or Chicago – we can take answers from a survey and convert them into distances. We ask people to agree or disagree to statements about the benefits or barriers to a decision and enter their responses into a computer program to create the map.

We can then do vector message modeling, which shows how to move the group toward the desired decision.

Think back to high school physics when you may have learned about the amount of force, or pushing and pulling, needed to move one object toward another. Vector message modeling helps us figure out which beliefs to push or pull against to get the group to move toward a particular decision, and it helps us create the most persuasive messages for that group.

When we use vector modeling along with segmentation analysis, we can also compare how messaging may need to be similar or different for different groups.

For example, I used segmentation analysis and then perceptual mapping and vector message modeling to understand how medical mistrust might affect the decision to get vaccinated for COVID-19 among a group of Philadelphians who had not yet been vaccinated.

Our team then looked at perceptual maps and vector message modeling by levels of mistrust. The vectors showed that those with high levels of medical mistrust would be more likely to respond to messages that addressed concerns about the pandemic being a hoax, or the worry that minorities wouldn’t get the same treatment as others.

This allowed us to think about how to build in messages around those issues in public media campaigns or other communication strategies that encourage vaccination.

Decision-making tools

I have used these methods to create and test a number of different communication strategies to influence health decisions.

For example, I’ve developed web-based tools that have been used in hospitals and clinics in Philadelphia to encourage methadone patients with hepatitis C to receive antiviral treatment for their infection, Black cancer patients to take part in a clinical trial or to get genetic testing, and patients with low literacy and higher risk of colorectal cancer to have a colonoscopy.

My colleagues and I have also developed posters, booklets and social media posts that encourage low-income and vaccine-hesitant Philadelphians in Kensington to get COVID-19 booster shots; educational slides for low-literacy Philadelphia adults on dirty bombs and how the radioactive weapons might be used in a terror attack; and a comic book for trans women to learn about the benefits of PrEP use.

Getting people to make better decisions about their health can be an uphill battle. We all have our reasons for not doing things that are good for us. For example, what did you eat for lunch today? Was it healthy? If not, why did you eat it?

My job is to figure out what makes people do what they do, and then help them make decisions that keep them healthy.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia.

Sarah Bauerle Bass has received funding from a number of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Departments of Health, and independent pharma research grants from Gilead and Merck.

– ref. I’m an expert in crafting public health messages: Here are 3 marketing strategies I use to make Philadelphia healthier – https://theconversation.com/im-an-expert-in-crafting-public-health-messages-here-are-3-marketing-strategies-i-use-to-make-philadelphia-healthier-254905

Source: – By Cynthia H. Chuang, Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences, Penn State

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated a nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion and returned the authority to regulate abortion to the states.

The Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has vastly reshaped the national abortion landscape. Three years on, many states have severely restricted access to abortion care. But the decision has also had a less well-recognized outcome: It is increasingly jeopardizing access to contraception.

We are a physician scientist and a sociologist and health services researcher studying women’s health care and policy, including access to contraception. We see a worrisome situation emerging.

Even while the growing limits on abortion in the U.S. heighten the need for effective contraception, family planning providers are less available in many states, and health insurance coverage of some of the most effective types of contraception is at risk.

A growing demand for contraception

Abortion restrictions have proliferated around the country since the Dobbs decision. As of June 2025, 12 states have near-total abortion bans and 10 states ban abortion before 23 or 24 weeks of gestation, which is when a fetus is generally deemed viable. Of the remaining states, 19 restrict abortion after viability and nine states and Washington have no gestational limits.

It’s no surprise that women living in states that ban or severely restrict abortion may be especially motivated to avoid unintended pregnancy. Even planned pregnancies have grown riskier, with health care providers fearing legal repercussions for treating pregnancy-related medical emergencies such as miscarriages. Such concerns may in part explain emerging research that suggests the use of long-acting contraception such as intrauterine devices, or IUDs, and permanent contraception – namely, sterilization – are on the rise.

A national survey conducted in 2024 asked women ages 18 to 49 if they have changed their contraception practices “as a result of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.” It found that close to 1 in 5 women began using contraception for the first time, switched to a more effective contraceptive method, received a sterilization procedure or purchased emergency contraception to keep on hand.

A study in Ohio hospitals found a nearly 16% increase in women choosing long-acting contraception methods or sterilization in the six months after the Dobbs decision, and a 33% jump in men receiving vasectomies. Another study, which looked at both female and male sterilization in academic medical centers across the country, also reported an uptick in sterilization procedures for young adults ages 18 to 30 after the Dobbs decision, through 2023.

A loss of contraception providers

Ironically, banning or severely restricting abortion statewide may also diminish capacity to provide contraception.

To date, there is no compelling evidence that OB-GYN doctors are leaving states with strict abortion laws in significant numbers. One study found that states with severe abortion restrictions saw a 4.2% decrease in such practitioners compared with states without abortion restrictions.

However, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports declining applications to residency training programs located in states that have abortion bans – not just for OB-GYN training programs, but for residency training of all specialties. This drop suggests that doctors may be overall less likely to train in states that restrict medical practice. And given that physicians often stay on to practice in the states where they do their training, it may point to a long-term decline in physicians in those states.

But the most significant drop in contraceptive services likely comes from the closure of abortion clinics in states with the most restrictive abortion policies. That’s because such clinics generally provide a wide range of reproductive services, including contraception. The 12 states with near-total abortion bans had 57 abortion clinics in 2020, all of which were closed as of March 2024. One study reported a 4.1% decline in oral contraceptives dispensed in those states.

Contraception under threat

The Dobbs decision has also encouraged ongoing efforts to incorrectly redefine some of the most effective contraceptives as medications that cause abortion. These efforts target emergency contraceptive pills, known as Plan B over-the-counter and Ella by prescription, as well as certain IUDs. Emergency contraceptive pills are up to 98% effective at preventing pregnancy after unprotected sex, and IUDs are 99% effective.

Neither method terminates a pregnancy, which by definition begins when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus. Instead, emergency contraceptive pills prevent an egg from being released from the ovaries, while IUDs, depending on the type, prevent sperm from fertilizing an egg or prevent an egg from implanting in the uterus.

Conflating contraception and abortion spreads misinformation and causes confusion. People who believe that certain types of contraception cause abortions may be dissuaded from using those methods and rely on less effective methods. What’s more, it may affect health insurance coverage.

Medicaid, which provides health insurance for low-income children and adults, has been required to cover family planning services at no cost to patients since 1972. Since 2012, the Affordable Care Act has required private health insurers to cover certain women’s health preventive services at no cost to patients, including the full-range of contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

According to our research, the insurance coverage required by the Affordable Care Act has increased use of IUDs, which can be prohibitively expensive when paid out of pocket. But if IUDs and emergency contraceptive pills were reclassified as interventions that induce abortion, they likely would not be covered by Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act, since neither type of health insurance requires coverage for abortion care. Thus, access to some of the most effective contraceptive methods could be jeopardized at a time when the right to terminate an unintended or nonviable pregnancy has been rolled back in much of the country.

Indeed, Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda that the Trump administration appears to be following, specifically calls for removing Ella from the Affordable Care Act contraception coverage mandate because it is a “potential abortifacient.” And politicians in multiple states have expressed support for the idea of restricting these contraceptive methods, as well as contraception more broadly.

On the third anniversary of the Dobbs decision, it is clear that its ripple effects include threats to contraception. Considering that contraception use is almost universal among women in their reproductive years, in our view these threats should be taken seriously.

Cynthia H. Chuang receives funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

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

– ref. 3 years after abortion rights were overturned, contraception access is at risk – https://theconversation.com/3-years-after-abortion-rights-were-overturned-contraception-access-is-at-risk-258458

Source: – By Christina Scherrer, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Kennesaw State University

Programs delivering fluoride varnish in schools significantly reduce cavities in children. That is a key finding of our recently published study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Fluoride varnish is a liquid that is applied to the teeth by a trained provider to reduce cavities. It does not require special dental devices and can be applied quickly in various settings.

Our research team found that school fluoride varnish programs, implemented primarily in communities with lower incomes and high cavity risk among children, achieve meaningful rates of student participation and reduced new cavities by 32% in permanent teeth and by 25% in primary – or “baby” – teeth.

We also found that school fluoride varnish programs reduced the progression of small cavities to more severe cavities by 10%. This positive impact held true among school children of various ages in preschool through high school, in rural or urban areas and in communities with and without fluoridated tap water. Fluoride varnish remained effective when delivered by various providers, including dentists, hygienists or trained lay workers.

This research was a large team collaboration on a systematic review, led by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from our universities. A systematic review is when researchers carefully collect and study all the best available research on a specific topic to figure out what the overall evidence shows.

Ultimately, our conclusions were based on 31 published studies that were reported in 43 peer-reviewed articles involving 60,780 students.

Why is this important?

Although preventable, dental cavities are very common, with well over half of teenagers affected.

Untreated tooth decay can diminish a child’s ability to eat, speak, learn and play, and can negatively affect school attendance and grades.

Reducing tooth decay in youths is a national health objective.

In addition, we believe that since there is a growing movement in the U.S. to remove water fluoridation, other ways of protecting teeth with fluoride, such as toothpaste and varnish, will become more important. About three-quarters of the U.S. population using public water systems has been receiving fluoridated water at levels designed to strengthen enamel and prevent cavities. They will be at higher risk for cavities if fluoride is removed from their drinking water.

Fluoride varnish is recommended by the American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and others. However, many children don’t receive recommended preventive dental services, including fluoride varnish, at dental visits, with some estimates as low as 18% for children from families in low-income households.

This makes schools an important setting for delivery of fluoride varnish to increase access. Students typically receive a dental exam, oral health education and supplies, and referrals for dental care. Depending on state regulations, the varnish can be applied by dental and medical professionals or trained lay workers.

Our work led to the recommendation of school fluoride varnish by the Community Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of nationally recognized public health experts that provides evidence-based recommendations on programs and services to protect and improve health in the United States.

What still isn’t known

Limited funds are a barrier. We believe that further understanding the ways to reduce the cost of these programs would help to expand them and reach more students.

One key opportunity is relaxing the restrictions on application by health professionals such as medical assistants and registered nurses, which is allowed in some states but not others.

Programs also sometimes struggle to get schools and families fully engaged. More research could help us determine the best ways to increase the percentage of families that return their consent forms and make school fluoride programs easier to run.

Another barrier is that many states only provide insurance reimbursement for these programs through age 6. Thus, increasing the eligibility age served by medical providers can serve more children, increase the number of these programs and protect more children’s teeth from decay – supporting oral and overall health.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Christina Scherrer receives funding related to this research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Shillpa Naavaal received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) related to this research. She is an executive board member and treasurer of the American Association of Public Health Dentistry.

– ref. More than half of US teens have had at least one cavity, but fluoride programs in schools help prevent them – new research – https://theconversation.com/more-than-half-of-us-teens-have-had-at-least-one-cavity-but-fluoride-programs-in-schools-help-prevent-them-new-research-259124

Source: – By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

When shots rang out in Minnesota, targeting state Democratic politicians, the headlines quickly followed a familiar script: a mentally unstable suspect and the well-worn label “lone gunman.”

According to media reports, the Minnesota gunman, Vance Luther Boelter, was a deeply religious anti-abortion activist and a conservative who supported President Donald Trump.

The term lone gunman, routinely deployed in the aftermath of mass shootings and political violence – that the suspect was simply acting alone, so there’s no one or nothing else to blame – may offer a comforting explanation, but it’s dangerously simplistic.

It obscures the conditions that made the violence possible in the first place. It casts the perpetrator as an isolated anomaly – mentally unwell, unpredictable, detached from broader movements or ideologies.

As a scholar of extremism, I argue that the use of this term ignores the larger symptoms of deeper societal failures such as rising political extremism, systemic hate or the normalization of violent rhetoric.

The lone gunman myth

The idea of the lone gunman has long held sway in American public discourse, with perhaps no example more iconic than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Warren Commission that was set up to investigate concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, a finding still contested by many.

But more significant than the historical debate is how the lone gunman label became entrenched in the national psyche. It presents a digestible narrative, one that absolves institutions of responsibility and short-circuits more difficult questions about what conditions produced the attacker in the first place.

More recent examples reveal how this myth continues to serve as a shield against systemic scrutiny.

After the 2012 mass shooting that killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, media coverage quickly centered on James Holmes’ mental state, with little emphasis on the culture of gun access, misogyny or disaffection with peers that shaped his actions.

Similarly, after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, early coverage emphasized his apparent isolation and mental state. However, he had openly stated his motivations in a racist manifesto and had long-standing connections to white supremacist ideology that motivated and shaped his violence.

Radicalization is rarely solitary

In most cases, so-called lone wolves are not as isolated as the term implies. Researchers have increasingly shown that radicalization is a social process.

Individuals absorb extremist views through online echo chambers, algorithmic recommendation systems, peer validation and reinforcement from political and media figures.

This is evident in cases like that of Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Bowers’ defense attorneys said in a March 2023 court filing that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though he acted alone, Bowers was deeply embedded in far-right networks on the social media platform Gab, where he echoed white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Similarly, Payton Gendron, who killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, cited previous mass shooters as inspiration and plagiarized sections of a white nationalist manifesto. His radicalization was nourished in extremist online forums on platforms such as 4chan and Discord.

Even attacks without manifestos or explicit ideological tracts often follow recognizable scripts. The El Paso shooter, who killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019, wrote that he was targeting Hispanics as part of a defense against an “invasion” of immigrants – echoing language used by some conservative analysts, pundits and political figures in mainstream U.S. media and government.

Again and again, attackers are seen to be acting in ways that align with a broader rationalization or ideology, even if they do not carry official membership in a particular group or organization.

The politics of the ‘lone gunman’

Importantly, the lone gunman narrative is applied unevenly, especially along racial lines.

White perpetrators are frequently described as mentally ill or troubled loners. Their violence is compartmentalized as the result of personal demons. In contrast, as the Sentencing Project – which is working to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system – has shown, Black, Muslim or immigrant suspects are often held up as proof of a broader threat: religious, ethnic or cultural.

This double standard not only reinforces racial stereotypes but also shapes how law enforcement and the media view violence committed by white actors – as an aberration rather than a pattern.

The media can play a crucial role in perpetuating the lone gunman myth.
Consider how swiftly the media and politicians labeled the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, perpetrated by Omar Mateen, as an act of Islamist terrorism. Even though Mateen had no meaningful connections to any terrorist groups, his Islamic religious beliefs were used to construct a narrative that he was part of a global threat.

By contrast, the FBI hesitated to call Dylann Roof’s actions “racial terrorism.” Terrorism is defined as a form of political violence, where the threat or use of physical force by individuals or groups is not only intended to influence or disrupt governmental authority but to instill fear and force political change. The FBI designated Roof’s crime as a hate crime perpetrated by a disturbed young man.

This distinction between calling Roof’s attack a hate crime rather than racially motivated terrorism sparked significant criticism from scholars, activists and commentators. Many argued that Roof’s white supremacist motives and the symbolic target, a historic Black church, made it a clear case of racial terrorism.

Moving toward a more honest understanding

This asymmetry matters.

I argue that it shapes public perception, policy responses and resource allocation. It allows white supremacist violence to flourish under the radar, often dismissed until it becomes undeniable – usually after multiple lives have been lost.

At the same time, politicians are frequently reluctant to acknowledge the ideological underpinnings of such violence, particularly when those ideologies overlap with their own rhetoric or voter base.

After the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, where the gunman explicitly cited the “Great Replacement theory” in his manifesto, several Republican politicians who had previously echoed similar anti-immigrant rhetoric condemned the violence but avoided addressing the ideology behind it. The Great Replacement theory is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that falsely claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants, especially Muslims, Latinos or Black people, through immigration, higher birth rates and federal government policy.

Despite the shooter’s clear ideological motivation, once again many officials focused on mental illness or the violence as an isolated case of extremism. The impact of the messages about immigration and demographic change in contributing to a climate of racial fear and conspiracy were left unacknowledged.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly identified white supremacist violence as one of the top domestic terrorism threats. Investigations related to domestic terrorism and violence have increased significantly over the past few years. In a 2023 interview with “PBS NewsHour,” Seamus Hughes of the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology and Education Center said that “the FBI was investigating 850 people three years ago. Now they’re investigating 2,700.”

Yet meaningful, structural reforms, whether in tech and social media regulation, gun control or public education, have remained elusive. I believe connecting the larger social, political and cultural issues that surround extreme violence is critical to building healthy communities.

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

– ref. The term ‘lone gunman’ ignores the structures that enable violence – https://theconversation.com/the-term-lone-gunman-ignores-the-structures-that-enable-violence-259107

Source: – By Aislinn Conrad, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Iowa

Artificial intelligence is rapidly being adopted to help prevent abuse and protect vulnerable people – including children in foster care, adults in nursing homes and students in schools. These tools promise to detect danger in real time and alert authorities before serious harm occurs.

Developers are using natural language processing, for example — a form of AI that interprets written or spoken language – to try to detect patterns of threats, manipulation and control in text messages. This information could help detect domestic abuse and potentially assist courts or law enforcement in early intervention. Some child welfare agencies use predictive modeling, another common AI technique, to calculate which families or individuals are most “at risk” for abuse.

When thoughtfully implemented, AI tools have the potential to enhance safety and efficiency. For instance, predictive models have assisted social workers to prioritize high-risk cases and intervene earlier.

But as a social worker with 15 years of experience researching family violence – and five years on the front lines as a foster-care case manager, child abuse investigator and early childhood coordinator – I’ve seen how well-intentioned systems often fail the very people they are meant to protect.

Now, I am helping to develop iCare, an AI-powered surveillance camera that analyzes limb movements – not faces or voices – to detect physical violence. I’m grappling with a critical question: Can AI truly help safeguard vulnerable people, or is it just automating the same systems that have long caused them harm?

New tech, old injustice

Many AI tools are trained to “learn” by analyzing historical data. But history is full of inequality, bias and flawed assumptions. So are people, who design, test and fund AI.

That means AI algorithms can wind up replicating systemic forms of discrimination, like racism or classism. A 2022 study in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, found that a predictive risk model to score families’ risk levels – scores given to hotline staff to help them screen calls – would have flagged Black children for investigation 20% more often than white children, if used without human oversight. When social workers were included in decision-making, that disparity dropped to 9%.

Language-based AI can also reinforce bias. For instance, one study showed that natural language processing systems misclassified African American Vernacular English as “aggressive” at a significantly higher rate than Standard American English — up to 62% more often, in certain contexts.

Meanwhile, a 2023 study found that AI models often struggle with context clues, meaning sarcastic or joking messages can be misclassified as serious threats or signs of distress.

These flaws can replicate larger problems in protective systems. People of color have long been over-surveilled in child welfare systems — sometimes due to cultural misunderstandings, sometimes due to prejudice. Studies have shown that Black and Indigenous families face disproportionately higher rates of reporting, investigation and family separation compared with white families, even after accounting for income and other socioeconomic factors.

Many of these disparities stem from structural racism embedded in decades of discriminatory policy decisions, as well as implicit biases and discretionary decision-making by overburdened caseworkers.

Surveillance over support

Even when AI systems do reduce harm toward vulnerable groups, they often do so at a disturbing cost.

In hospitals and elder-care facilities, for example, AI-enabled cameras have been used to detect physical aggression between staff, visitors and residents. While commercial vendors promote these tools as safety innovations, their use raises serious ethical concerns about the balance between protection and privacy.

In a 2022 pilot program in Australia, AI camera systems deployed in two care homes generated more than 12,000 false alerts over 12 months – overwhelming staff and missing at least one real incident. The program’s accuracy did “not achieve a level that would be considered acceptable to staff and management,” according to the independent report.

Children are affected, too. In U.S. schools, AI surveillance like Gaggle, GoGuardian and Securly are marketed as tools to keep students safe. Such programs can be installed on students’ devices to monitor online activity and flag anything concerning.

But they’ve also been shown to flag harmless behaviors – like writing short stories with mild violence, or researching topics related to mental health. As an Associated Press investigation revealed, these systems have also outed LGBTQ+ students to parents or school administrators by monitoring searches or conversations about gender and sexuality.

Other systems use classroom cameras and microphones to detect “aggression.” But they frequently misidentify normal behavior like laughing, coughing or roughhousing — sometimes prompting intervention or discipline.

These are not isolated technical glitches; they reflect deep flaws in how AI is trained and deployed. AI systems learn from past data that has been selected and labeled by humans — data that often reflects social inequalities and biases. As sociologist Virginia Eubanks wrote in “Automating Inequality,” AI systems risk scaling up these long-standing harms.

Care, not punishment

I believe AI can still be a force for good, but only if its developers prioritize the dignity of the people these tools are meant to protect. I’ve developed a framework of four key principles for what I call “trauma-responsive AI.”

1. Survivor control: People should have a say in how, when and if they’re monitored. Providing users with greater control over their data can enhance trust in AI systems and increase their engagement with support services, such as creating personalized plans to stay safe or access help.

2. Human oversight: Studies show that combining social workers’ expertise with AI support improves fairness and reduces child maltreatment – as in Allegheny County, where caseworkers used algorithmic risk scores as one factor, alongside their professional judgment, to decide which child abuse reports to investigate.

3. Bias auditing: Governments and developers are increasingly encouraged to test AI systems for racial and economic bias. Open-source tools like IBM’s AI Fairness 360, Google’s What-If Tool, and Fairlearn assist in detecting and reducing such biases in machine learning models.

4. Privacy by design: Technology should be built to protect people’s dignity. Open-source tools like Amnesia, Google’s differential privacy library and Microsoft’s SmartNoise help anonymize sensitive data by removing or obscuring identifiable information. Additionally, AI-powered techniques, such as facial blurring, can anonymize people’s identities in video or photo data.

Honoring these principles means building systems that respond with care, not punishment.

Some promising models are already emerging. The Coalition Against Stalkerware and its partners advocate to include survivors in all stages of tech development – from needs assessments to user testing and ethical oversight.

Legislation is important, too. On May 5, 2025, for example, Montana’s governor signed a law restricting state and local government from using AI to make automated decisions about individuals without meaningful human oversight. It requires transparency about how AI is used in government systems and prohibits discriminatory profiling.

As I tell my students, innovative interventions should disrupt cycles of harm, not perpetuate them. AI will never replace the human capacity for context and compassion. But with the right values at the center, it might help us deliver more of it.

Aislinn Conrad is developing iCare, an AI-powered, real-time violence detection system.

– ref. Protecting the vulnerable, or automating harm? AI’s double-edged role in spotting abuse – https://theconversation.com/protecting-the-vulnerable-or-automating-harm-ais-double-edged-role-in-spotting-abuse-256403

Source: – By Jonathan Krasner, Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research, Brandeis University

As commencement season comes to a close, many campuses remain riven by the Israel-Hamas war. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the undergraduate class president was banned from walking at her graduation after delivering a fiery – and unauthorized – speech accusing her school of complicity in Israel’s campaign to “wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth.” Anti-Israel protests broke out at graduation ceremonies across the United States, from Columbia to the University of California at Berkeley.

Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, many American campuses have been punctuated by vigils, demonstrations and disruptions. But the loudest voices aren’t necessarily the most representative. Activists’ pronouncements on either side fail to capture the range of student opinion about the war and its reverberations at home, including the documented rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia.

This is certainly true for Jewish students – buffeted by the war, the hostage crisis, campus protests and federal politics. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has used campus antisemitism and anti-Zionism as a pretext to assault higher education and implement hard-line immigration policies.

Indeed, one of the most striking findings of my study
on Jewish undergraduate attitudes, published in May 2025, is how many students described themselves as conflicted, uncertain, disaffected and even detached. Interviews across the country convinced my research team that any attempt to gauge Jewish student opinion with either/or categories are reductive and misleading.

Moving beyond numbers

In the wake of Oct. 7, my office hours quickly became a refuge for distraught Jewish students as they processed their thoughts. Few were content with pat answers.

I began wondering how representative they were. Tufts researchers Eitan Hersh and Dahlia Lyss found that since Oct. 7, more students were valuing and prioritizing their Jewish identities, even while an increased number were hiding their Jewishness on campus.

My Brandeis colleagues Graham Wright, Leonard Saxe and their research team, meanwhile, found that a clear majority of Jewish students said they felt a connection to Israel but were sharply divided in their views of its government. While most considered statements calling for the country’s destruction to be antisemitic, they differed about where to draw the line between reasonable and illegitimate criticisms of Israel.

These findings were instructive. But I was interested in learning more about the “how” and the “why” behind the numbers. Over the spring 2024 semester, my team and I interviewed 38 students on 24 campuses across 16 states and the District of Columbia. Participants reflected the broad religious, political, economic, geographical, sexual and racial diversity within the American Jewish population, particularly among Jews under 30. Some of the campuses were relatively placid; others were hotbeds of protest.

The ‘missing middle’

As my team analyzed transcripts, we identified six categories.

About one-third of the Jewish students we spoke with were actively engaged on either side of the conflict, whether through demonstrations or online advocacy. “Affirmed” students’ connection to Israel deepened after Oct. 7. “Aggrieved” students, on the other hand, had joined anti-war protests and voiced anger at Jewish organizations for ignoring Israel’s culpability for Palestinian suffering.

Many more of our participants, however, were ambivalent, despondent or even apathetic. As journalist Arno Rosenfeld put it in an article about my research, the majority of Jewish students inhabit a “great missing middle” in Israeli-Palestinian discourse.

Two-thirds of the students we spoke with are in this “missing middle,” divided into four categories:

• “Conflicted” students were inconclusively grappling with the moral and political complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• “Disillusioned” students struggled to reconcile their sentimental attachment to Israel with their disappointment – their sense that the country betrayed its own values in its treatment of Palestinians.
• “Retrenched” students turned inward, fearful of being identified as Jewish on campuses they perceived as hostile to Jews.
• The last category, “disengaged” students, were detached or actively steering clear of controversy.

Out of the fray

The most straightforward of these categories is the “disengaged” students. Some, like Bella, on the West Coast – all of the names in this article are pseudonyms – knew little about the conflict before the war. What they learned since convinced them it was unsolvable and that they were powerless to promote change.

The distance that some students felt from events in Israel and Gaza made it all the more baffling and odious to them when peers protested in ways that implied Jewish Americans were complicit.

“I’m not personally doing anything,” complained Salem, a first-year student in the Midwest. “I don’t have anything to do with this.”

Students whom we classified as “retrenched” reported anxiety, loss of sleep and a sense of isolation. Many of them were concerned that rejecting Zionism – that is, the movement supporting the creation and preservation of Israel as a national homeland for the Jewish people – had become a litmus test in their progressive circles. That was untenable for these students, because they viewed Zionism as a constituent part of being Jewish.

Interviewees like Jack, a junior in the Pacific Northwest, spoke of removing their Star of David necklaces and censoring elements of their biography, because they perceived a social penalty for being Jewish.

Rejecting simple narratives

By far, the largest group of Jewish students were struggling with mixed feelings about the war and its reverberations. What united these “conflicted” or “disillusioned” students was wariness of grand narratives and talking points that reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a contest between good and evil, or the powerful and the powerless. They also eschewed labels such as “Zionist” or “anti-Zionist,” saying they lacked nuance.

Consider Elana, a “conflicted” sophomore in the mid-Atlantic, who told us she was uncomfortable in most Jewish spaces on campus because they effectively demanded that she declare her Israel politics at the door. It seemed to her that activists on both sides were more comfortable retreating into echo chambers than engaging in dialogue across differences.

Then there was Shira, a “disillusioned” first year in the Midwest who viewed Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, however implausible, as the only alternative to mutual destruction. She refused to participate in anti-war demonstrations on her campus because she couldn’t abide the organizers’ confrontational tactics – but also to avoid blowback from pro-Israel family and friends.

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘groupthink’

One unambiguous finding from our study was how often our interviewees used language prevalent in progressive discourse. They spoke repeatedly about the importance of “safe spaces,” and felt that listeners’ understandings mattered more than speakers’ intentions when evaluating “hate speech” and “microaggressions.”

Leo, a “conflicted” junior in the Deep South who uses they/them pronouns, acknowledged that some protesters who chant slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada” may not recognize how many Jewish students interpret them: as antisemitic calls for Israel’s destruction. But that was no excuse, they insisted. “What I’ve noticed is that the people who are at those demonstrations have created their own definition of antisemitism,” without input from the vast majority of Jews – something progressive protesters would not have stood for if another racial, religious or ethnic minority were being discussed.

The use of provocative and arguably antisemitic language was responsible for keeping Jews like Leo and Shira, who evinced deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, from joining the protests.

Fundamentally, however, many of the Jewish students we spoke with said they’d welcome opportunities to discuss the war and the broader conflict. But the “groupthink” on campus was stifling, they complained, whether in Hillel centers that toe a reflexively pro-Israel line or student organizations that demand unquestioned buy-in to a set of progressive orthodoxies.

Joe, a “disillusioned” student in New England who just received his diploma two weeks ago, reflected, “When my friends complain that the ‘Free Palestine’ stickers on my campus are antisemitic, I think they just don’t want to be uncomfortable.” Discomfort can be productive, he added – as long as it is expressed in an environment that values intellectual risk-taking, dialogue across difference, and empathy.

Research discussed in this article was sponsored by the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University.

– ref. Conflicted, disillusioned, disengaged: The unsettled center of Jewish student opinion after Oct. 7 – https://theconversation.com/conflicted-disillusioned-disengaged-the-unsettled-center-of-jewish-student-opinion-after-oct-7-257521