Institute | Jotup

ECB appoints Banafsheh Geretzki as Director Internal Audit

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

- PRESS RELEASE

Key Points:

- PRESS RELEASE
ECB appoints Banafsheh Geretzki as Director Internal Audit
23 January 2024
- Banafsheh Geretzki will take up her new role on 1 February 2024
- Director Internal Audit leads ECB audit and investigation activities, including whistleblowing procedures
The Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) has appointed Banafsheh Geretzki as Director Internal Audit.
In her new role, Ms Geretzki will lead the ECB’s internal audit and investigation activities, including whistleblowing procedures and administrative inquiries.
The Directorate Internal Audit evaluates and seeks to continuously make more effective and efficient the risk management, control and governance processes at the ECB.
: +49 171 769 5305
Notes
The list of ECB managers can be found on the ECB website.

Congress is failing to deliver on its promise of billions more in research spending, threatening America's long-term economic competitiveness

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

The federal government spends tens of billions of dollars every year to support fundamental scientific research that is mostly conducted at universities.

Key Points:

The federal government spends tens of billions of dollars every year to support fundamental scientific research that is mostly conducted at universities.
For instance, the basic discoveries that made the COVID-19 vaccine possible stretch back to the early 1960s.
If lawmakers miss a second Feb. 2 deadline, then automatic budget cuts will hit future research hard.
Our data shows how endangering basic research harms communities across the U.S. and can limit innovative companies’ access to the skilled employees they need to succeed.

A promised investment

Congress had just passed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act.
The “science” part of the law promised one of the biggest federal investments in the National Science Foundation – America’s premier basic science research agency – in its 74-year history.
The CHIPS act authorized US$81 billion for the agency, promised to double its budget by 2027 and directed it to “address societal, national, and geostrategic challenges for the benefit of all Americans” by investing in research.

Research’s critical impact

Lagging research investment will hurt U.S. leadership in critical technologies like artificial intelligence, advanced communications, clean energy and biotechnology.
Less support means less new research work gets done, fewer new researchers are trained and important new discoveries are made elsewhere.
They employ your neighbors and friends and contribute to the economic health of your hometown and the nation.

When Congress’ problems endanger basic research, they also damage businesses like these and people you might not usually associate with academic science and engineering. Construction and manufacturing companies earn more than $2 billion each year from federally funded research done by our consortium’s members.

Jobs and innovation

Highly trained people are essential to corporate innovation and to U.S. leadership in key fields, like AI, where companies depend on hiring to secure research expertise.
Our data shows that they go on to many types of jobs, but are particularly important for leading tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Intel.
They also hurt private-sector innovation because even the most successful companies need to hire people with expert research skills.

High stakes

Temporary cuts to research funding hurt too because they reduce high-tech entrepreneurship and decrease publication of new findings.
This would make one of the fears that led lawmakers to pass the CHIPS and Science Act into a reality.
Whether the current budget deal succeeds or fails, basic research is on the table and the stakes are high.

Jason Owen-Smith's research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Wellcome Leap. He is executive director of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS).

How Israel failed to learn from the Northern Ireland peace process

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

The Good Friday agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland a quarter of a century ago, provided a clear guide.

Key Points:

The Good Friday agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland a quarter of a century ago, provided a clear guide.
They have to do what the negotiating teams, of which I was a part, did in Northern Ireland.
The problem is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his ally, the United States of America, who have failed to apply the lessons of Northern Ireland to Middle East peacemaking.

How ‘peace polls’ work

The objective was to determine the precise points of common ground, where they existed, or effective compromise where it was needed for peacemaking.
So I always made a point of hand delivering the reports to Mitchell and the parties the day before they were published.
Through public opinion polls the people gained a seat at the negotiating table, and through a referendum the deal was made.

When it all went wrong

I had been in touch with Mitchell and met him in his office at the State Department.
At that time I had also been running peace polls in Sri Lanka with support from the Norwegians.
So I did not get the funding and Mitchell eventually resigned his post without achieving peace in May 2011.
But I had made all necessary preparations and contacts with all the parties to the conflict to make it work.
My pollster Mina Zemach was a good friend of Peres and had been his pollster when he led the Labour party.
Like Sinn Féin they had a legitimate grievance and said they would be happy to cooperate with the peace polls.

Misplaced optimism

In my optimism at the time, I thought perhaps that Clinton – if she became president – would send her husband to the Middle East as her special envoy.
Bill Clinton had got very close to making an agreement some years earlier with the “Clinton parameters”, but he ran out of time.
And then Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump – and so we are where we are.
It is just as likely that my optimism was misplaced and that Clinton and possibly Joe Biden – who has always been a very strong supporter of Israel – did not want to oppose Netanyahu for domestic political reasons.

Colin John Irwin receives funding from: Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in South East Europe, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, OneVoice, Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (now FCDO), Economic and Social Research Council (UK ESRC), United Nations, InterPeace, Health and Welfare Canada, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), British Academy, Norwegian Peoples Aid, The Day After, No Peace Without Justice, US Department of State, Local Administrations Council Unit (Syria), Asia Foundation, Department for International Development (UK DFID), OpenAI, Atlantic Philanthropies, Universities: Dalhousie, Manitoba, Syracuse, Pennsylvania, Queens Belfast, Liverpool. Also member of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) which promotes freedom to publish public opinion polls and sets international professional standards.

Trolling and doxxing: Graduate students sharing their research online speak out about hate

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential for mobilizing their research, gaining credibility and finding opportunities as they prepare to compete in an over-saturated job market.

Key Points:

Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential for mobilizing their research, gaining credibility and finding opportunities as they prepare to compete in an over-saturated job market.
Our research has examined the experiences of graduate students who have encountered online hate while conducting their research or disseminating it online, and a wider landscape of university protocol and policies.

New policies needed to support researchers

Research by communications scholars George Veletsianos and Jaigris Hodson, who are part of the Public Scholarship and Online Abuse research group, finds that scholars online may be targeted for a range of reasons, but “women in particular are harassed partly because they happen to be women who dare to be public online.” Online hatred disproportionately affects women, Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans and other marginalized scholars.
New frameworks and policies are required that protect and care for increasingly diverse academic communities to foster equity and diversity.

Impacts and inadequate support

Online harassment restricts which research projects are able to proceed and who is able to pursue them.
It affects not only researchers’ well-being and career prospects, but by extention, their fields of study and members of the public served by it.

Lack of clear and accessible structures, procedures

Ketchum addresses challenges related to public scholarship in her book Engage in Public Scholarship!
Without clear structures and procedures for reporting harassment and supporting community members at an institutional level, harassment is treated by universities as isolated incidents without grasping the scale of the issue.

‘Bearing Witness’

We have facilitated a number of workshops and events that foreground experiences of online harassment among graduate students.
This work has been done with support from the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies, under the direction of Natalie Coulter.

Researcher experiences of harassment

Participants also said research methods seminars, research ethics board certification courses and conversations with supervisory committees had not addressed the possibility of encountering online harassment.
The online harassment students encountered also derailed or significantly curtailed their research projects.

Resources to help protect from harassment

There are many online resources graduate students can consult to protect themselves from online harassment.
Resources from PEN America and gaming communities provide cybersecurity tips to prevent doxxing, assess threats and report harassment to platforms and law enforcement.

Important work begins with witness

This important work must begin with institutions bearing witness to graduate students’ experiences.
University staff and faculty must listen to individual voices so that the issue of online harassment can be understood in its full scale and complexity.

Alex Borkowski receives funding from SSHRC. Natalie Coulter receives funding from SSHRC, as well as from internal grants at York University. Marion Tempest Grant 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.

#UsToo: How antisemitism and Islamophobia make reporting sexual misconduct and abuse of power harder for Jewish and Muslim women

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Ever since, #MeToo has been shorthand for people’s experiences with sexual harassment and assault, from film sets and office buildings to college campuses and religious communities.

Key Points:

Ever since, #MeToo has been shorthand for people’s experiences with sexual harassment and assault, from film sets and office buildings to college campuses and religious communities.
Many articles about #MeToo and religion focus on large churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention – spaces that are mostly white and Christian.
These women face added challenges when they break the silence around sexual misconduct and abuse of power, as I document in my book “#UsToo.” Many Jewish and Muslim women of color navigate three kinds of oppression simultaneously: sexism, racism and antisemitism or Islamophobia.

’Dirty laundry’

This problem is not exclusive to Jewish or Muslim communities but rather a general problem for all subcultures.
Publicly airing communal “dirty laundry” is seen as precarious, both for the individual and for the ethnoreligious group.
Jewish and Muslim women in the United States are diverse, from different levels of religious observance to ethnic identity.

Risks of silence and interdependence

The insularity, sense of connection and interdependence within some minority communities can be conducive to abuses of power.
Word spread quickly in the Jewish community, and other women came out of the woodwork about his behavior.
Sacred Spaces, incorporated in 2016, is another organization that brings Jewish values to its work addressing and preventing abuse.

Walking a tightrope

Nevertheless, some Muslim women affected by sexual misconduct have been working for years to bring it out of the communal closet and into the public eye.
Many of the women I interviewed live on a tightrope: calling out the patriarchy and sexual misconduct they experienced, while defending their community against anti-Muslim stereotypes.
HEART, a sexual health and reproductive justice organization founded in 2009, offers education and resources to discuss sexual relationships and violence.
Despite this progress, many Jewish and Muslim women are still apprehensive about reporting coreligionists, as are women in larger Christian communities.

The long road to a new malaria vaccine, told by the scientists behind the breakthrough – podcast

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out why it’s been so hard to find a malaria vaccine – and hear from the scientists behind the new breakthrough.

Key Points:

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out why it’s been so hard to find a malaria vaccine – and hear from the scientists behind the new breakthrough.
In 2021, 619,000 people died from malaria, the majority of them children.
The search for a vaccine has been underway for decades, but it’s particularly difficult due to the complexity of the malaria parasite.
“It begins with a mosquito bite,” says Faith Osier, co-director of the Institute of Infection at Imperial College London.

Aziz Pahad: the unassuming South African diplomat who skilfully mediated crises in Africa, and beyond

Retrieved on:

Friday, September 29, 2023

Together with a small group of foreign policy analysts, I worked with Aziz over the span of 30 years, shaping the post-apartheid South African government’s approach to international relations and its foreign policy.

Key Points:

Together with a small group of foreign policy analysts, I worked with Aziz over the span of 30 years, shaping the post-apartheid South African government’s approach to international relations and its foreign policy.
We spent countless hours debating foreign affairs and the numerous crises and challenges government had to face as a relative “newcomer” in continental African and global affairs.
Sadly, towards the end of his career as a diplomat he witnessed the slow decline of South Africa’s stature and influence in global affairs.

The Mandela and Mbeki years

Under presidents Nelson Mandela (1994-1999) and Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), South African diplomats who’d sharpened their skills during many years of exile became sought-after as facilitators and mediators.
Under their guidance Africa converted the Organisation of African Unity into the African Union, and reset relations with the international community via the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.
Neither could it withstand the grand corruption which reached its apogee in South Africa under former president Jacob Zuma (May 2009 - February 2018).

Preparatory years

The congress became involved in the broader anti-apartheid struggle in later years.
In 1963, Aziz completed a degree in sociology and Afrikaans at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
It eventually shaped government’s more formal foreign policy of 2011, entitled Building a Better World: The Diplomacy of Ubuntu.
It lives on as the Institute of Global Dialogue, based at the University of South Africa.

Role in government

From there, he was appointed by President Mandela as deputy minister of foreign affairs.
This enabled him to play an unassuming but key mediating and facilitation role dealing with major crises on the continent and beyond.
Aziz resigned from government and parliament in 2008, shortly after Mbeki was removed as president of the ANC in 2007.

The ‘diplomat-scholar’

He played a prominent role, with his brother Essop, in a small but influential think-tank, the Concerned Africans Forum.
In 2015 he headed the short-lived South African Council on International Relations.
The council was established by the government as a body of experts and a sounding board for senior decision-makers.

The enduring appeal of a century-old German film about queer love

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

When the silent German movie Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) premiered on May 28, 1919, in Berlin, it was an instant audience success.

Key Points:

When the silent German movie Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) premiered on May 28, 1919, in Berlin, it was an instant audience success.
Through its public enlightenment campaign, the film made a case to abolish Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which criminalized male homosexuality.

Box office hit

The film’s box office success pleased its Austrian director, Richard Oswald.
Anders als die Andern’s gripping story about the innocent romance between two men succumbing to anti-queer hostility served Oswald’s business model.

Queer rights and film censorship

The institution, which was the first of its kind, became the headquarters for major scholarship on and advocacy for homosexual and trans rights.
The latter concerns about the film indeed fed into a longstanding anti-queer trope about the threat of queer people seducing the youth into homosexuality.

Conservative pushback

Public debates about Anders als die Andern coincided with ongoing conservative pushback against Hirschfeld’s broader work, his background as homosexual Jew, and debates about film censorship in the aftermath of World War I.
Read more:
The early 20th-century German trans-rights activist who transformed the world's view of gender and sexuality
For a brief period after the war, censorship had been abolished.

Mourning with fictional characters

However, most important for the audience appeal was the gripping melodramatic story.
A loving relationship between two men succumbs to the effects of a blackmail campaign involving Paragraph 175.
Based on my analyses of historical material about the reception of the film, I make a case that the film facilitates for viewers a type of mourning for the protagonist’s fate.

105th Anniversary

The legal code would take different forms throughout the 20th century, but would not disappear from Germany’s basic law until the 1990s.
For its 105th anniversary in 2024, viewers will be able to watch a new restoration available on DVD through the film museum in Munich, Germany.

London is a major reason for the UK's inequality problem. Unfortunately, City leaders don't want to talk about it

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

In 2022, the richest fifth of the UK population had an income more than 12 times that of the poorest fifth.

Key Points:

In 2022, the richest fifth of the UK population had an income more than 12 times that of the poorest fifth.
Many of these firms are located in the City, which the Corporation states “drives the UK economy, generating over £85bn in economic output annually”.
An alternative perspective is that these contributions should be balanced against what the City takes out of the wider UK economy.
In 2022, the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that the biggest boom in City bonuses since the 2008 financial crisis would further increase this inequality gap.

The City’s diversity smokescreen

This is a complex picture, but few disagree that developing a more equitable UK economy and society requires significant structural change.
Politically, this has been recognised from most sides amid often heated debates about the new levelling-up bill.
Read more:
Class and the City of London: my decade of research shows why elitism is endemic and top firms don't really care

Changing the national conversation

I believe they are well placed to help change the national conversation, by asking more of their leaders on this front.
Within many corporate organisations, the issue of inequality is positioned as part of corporate sustainability agendas, or the currently more fashionable “environmental, social and governance”.
The momentum to help drive these and many other changes requires a majority of the population on board.
We need its leaders to play a central role in our national debate about how to address this problem.

How educational research could play a greater role in K-12 school improvement

Retrieved on:

Friday, August 25, 2023

Between 2019 and 2022, the Institute of Educational Sciences, the research and evaluation arm of the U.S. Education Department, distributed US$473 million in 255 grants to improve educational outcomes.

Key Points:

Between 2019 and 2022, the Institute of Educational Sciences, the research and evaluation arm of the U.S. Education Department, distributed US$473 million in 255 grants to improve educational outcomes.
In 2021, colleges and universities spent approximately $1.6 billion on educational research.
The Educational Research Information Center, a federally run repository, houses 1.6 million educational research sources in over 1,000 scholarly journals.
Each year, for instance, more than 15,000 educators and researchers gather to present or discuss educational research findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Growing gaps

During the same period, NAEP outcomes show stagnated growth in reading achievement among fourth graders.
By eighth grade, there is a greater gap in reading achievement between the highest- and lowest-achieving students.
Some education experts have even suggested that the chances for progress get dimmer for students as they get older.
Here are four things I believe can be done in order to make sure that educational research is actually being applied.

1. Build better relationships with school leaders

2. Make policy and practice part of the research process

By implementing new policies and practices based on research findings, researchers can work with school leaders to do further research to see if the new policies and practices actually work.
Through the fund, $679 million was distributed through 67 grants – and 12 of those 67 funded projects improved student outcomes.

3. Rethink how research impact is measured

4. Rethink and redefine how research is distributed

Research findings written in everyday language could be distributed at conferences frequented by public school teachers and in the periodicals that they read.
If research findings are to make a difference, I believe there has to be a stronger focus on using research to bring about real-world change in public schools.