I worked with “informed optimism,” which means you are basically working with many of the same institutions, systems, and tendencies that exist today, and understanding how there could be the best possible scenario. When I interviewed people for New York 2044, I asked them if they could use the lens of informed optimism to imagine their scenarios.

News from Home - Urban Omnibus

Twenty years of the development of health impact assessment in Australia

A presentation at University College Cork, 17 September 2024

References cited

Community Affairs References Committee (2013) Australia’s domestic response to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health report “Closing the gap within a generation”, Australian Senate: Canberra.

ECHP. (1999). Gothenburg Consensus Paper on Health Impact Assessment: Main concepts and suggested approach.

Haigh, F., Crimeen, A., Green, L., Moeller, H., Conaty, S., Prior, J., & Harris-Roxas, B. (2023). Developing a climate change inequality health impact assessment for health services. Public Health Research and Practice, 33(4). https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp3342336

Harris, P., Harris-Roxas, B., Harris, E., & Kemp, L. (2007). Health Impact Assessment: A practical guide. UNSW and NSW Health. http://www.hiaconnect.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Health_Impact_Assessment_A_Practical_Guide.pdf

Harris-Roxas, B., & Harris, E. (2011). Differing forms, differing purposes: A typology of Health Impact Assessment. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 31(4), 396–403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2010.03.003

Harris-Roxas, B., Viliani, F., Bond, A., Cave, B., Divall, M., Furu, P., Harris, P., Soeberg, M., Wernham, A., & Winkler, M. (2012). Health impact assessment: The state of the art. Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, 30(1), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14615517.2012.666035

Kim, J., Dannenberg, A., Haigh, F., & Harris-Roxas, B. (2024). Let’s Be Clear—Health Impact Assessments or Assessing Health Impacts? Public Health Reviews, 45, 1607722. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2024.1607722

Office for Health Improvement & Disparities. (2024). Health Equity Assessment Tool (HEAT): What it is and how to use it. Office for Health Improvement & Disparities. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-equity-assessment-tool-heat/health-equity-assessment-tool-heat-executive-summary

O’Mullane, M., Smith, K., Archibong, U., McHugh, S., Mullally, G., Purdy, J., Pursell, L., Harris-Roxas, B., Kelly, I., Kavanagh, P., Daly, H., O’Mahony, T., Green, L., Ward, J., Burke, S., Connolly, B., & Cave, B. (2023). Development of a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Implementation Model: Enhancing Intersectoral Approaches in Tackling Health Inequalities (Irish Health Research Board)

Pollard, E. E. (2023). Interrupting white business as usual: Applying the Health Equity Assessment Tool in health service and programme planning in Aotearoa [PhD]. University of Otago.

Sally, S., Felicity, B., Christina, Z., Serene, Y., Anna, P., & Kathryn, B. (2024). A realist impact evaluation of a tool to strengthen equity in local government policy-making. International Journal for Equity in Health, 23(1), 179. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-024-02266-5

Winkler, M. S., Furu, P., Viliani, F., Cave, B., Divall, M., Ramesh, G., Harris-Roxas, B., & Knoblauch, A. M. (2020). Current Global Health Impact Assessment Practice. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(9), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17092988

Winkler, M. S., Krieger, G. R., Divall, M. J., Cissé, G., Wielga, M., Singer, B. H., Tanner, M., & Utzinger, J. (2013). Untapped potential of health impact assessment. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 91(4), 298–305. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.12.112318

Winkler, M., Viliani, F., Knoblauch, A., Cave, B., Divall, M., Ramesh, G., Harris-Roxas, B., & Furu, P. (2021). International Best Practice Principles: Health Impact Assessment (2nd edition) (Special Publication Series). International Association for Impact Assessment.

Zanella, N. (2021). ‘Treading waves’ on the Qiantang River: An exploration of wave riding in Chinese history and literature. TEXT, 25(Special 65). https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.28071

The post Tide players surf the currents appeared first on Ben Harris-Roxas.

Slides from a presentation to the Unpacking Vaping Cessation Special Interest Group.

Slides (PDF 1.4 Mb)

More about the project at Shisha No Thanks and the Raising awareness of the harms of waterpipe smoking: Five years of progress report.

The post Shisha No Thanks! Five Years of Progress appeared first on Ben Harris-Roxas.

This is a great read, especially for anyone who’s spent time in Turin

A basic Turinese problem here is that Torino is progressive, but a heritage tourist industry, which is very attractive to tourists, has no avant-garde. Their stifling interest in your past holds you back. You can’t do “futuristic heritage industry.” Why? Because you can’t move forward into the past.

Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling bruces.medium.com

Reader: bruces.medium.com

Image credit Title: Turin Creator: Ben Harris-Roxas Date: 20 April 2017 Type: Colour digital photo Rights: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0

Interesting article on France diminished global influence and the crisis this represents for their national identity:

One would have to go back 20 years to find a moment when Paris last demonstrated the will to step out from beneath the shadow of the U.S. and exercise a critically important decision on its own. In 2003, it opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. French diplomacy, under the auspices of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, effectively cemented a coalition with Germany and Russia, depriving the American initiative of international legitimacy. Since that time, France has once more found its place in European affairs to be subordinate to Germany and within the orbit of U.S. countenance.

Macron and the French Identity Crisis intpolicydigest.org

Archiving...

Timely, given the ongoing crisis in New Caledonia.

Image credit Title: Incendies sur Nouméa Creator: Lilian Alizert Date: 16 May 2024 Type: Colour digital photo Rights: Copyright Lilian Alizert

A really interesting interview with André 3000 by Hanif Abdurraqib:

“The thing is, I can only give what I’m feeling. I’m interested in discovery. If there’s not any discovery, it doesn’t feel real to me. I’ve never considered myself the best producer or the best singer or the best rapper or any of those separate categories. But one thing I do have confidence in is my feeling.”

André 3000 is at peace - The Bitter Southerner

This is pretty wild. Brazil has created a (massively underfunded) JSOC for the environment.

In 2013, Cabral secured approval to build a unit of rangers who were committed to saving the environment, by force if necessary. The next year, he was shot in the shoulder when he and his men surprised illegal loggers in the woods; he was back at work in less than two months.

The members of the G.E.F. (the acronym stands for Specialised Inspection Group in Portuguese) are biology nerds who found themselves carrying guns—a gang of jungle Ghostbusters. They undergo intensive training, developed by a specialized police unit that fights organized crime.

Most members of his team had graduate degrees in the sciences. Renato, a muscular man of thirty-four with a shaved head, had specialized in fish ecology. During raids, he did a lot of the heavy lifting, keeping up a cheerful patter as he destroyed mine equipment; other times he fixed engines. Alexandre, forty-eight and the father of two young girls, had worked in a national park and in fisheries regulation before taking the G.E.F. training course. “I’d never imagined working with weapons,” he said, but he had shown an unexpected aptitude. He was generally a guard, calmly scrutinizing the surrounding forest with a gun at his shoulder.

The only nonscientist was Marcus—a former lawyer, forty-two, tall and rangy, with an easygoing manner. At the headquarters, in Brasília, he procured weapons and ammunition for the group; in the field, he was often a guard. Growing up in the interior province of Goiás, he aspired to be a photographer for skate magazines, until his parents persuaded him to go to law school instead. Halfway through, he attended a ceremony of the União do Vegetal, a Christian sect that incorporates ayahuasca in its sacraments. “During the opening chant, I left my body,” he recalled. “I started to see the Amazon rain forest and found myself walking through it in a uniform with a team, while Indigenous people chanted behind me. That moment filled me with joy, and there I discovered the mission of my life.”

The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon newyorker.com

Reader: www.newyorker.com

A great story about uncovering the words locked inside carbonised Roman scrolls. We should be using machine learning for more things like this, and using it to impersonate humans less.

In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”

Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”…

Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.

Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World? - Businessweek

“The beach has always been a special privilege to us. It has enriched our quality of life despite the low pay that is available to us,” Serrano said. “Traditionally, people have called it the Poor People’s Beach.” Now, the tourists who visit the shore (when it isn’t closed to beachgoers) to gawk at the SpaceX rockets in the distance have a different name for it, Serrano said: Elon’s Beach.

Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover - Mother Jones

Village Landais, which opened in 2020 and was recently highly commended in Dezeen’s annual design awards, aims to give as much agency and freedom, real and apparent, to the villagers, as the staff call them, as possible. The five-hectare complex has a fence around it, as it must for the safety of vulnerable residents, but within its boundary people can come and go, more or less as they choose. They can stroll around the open spaces (or run, or cycle, as people with Alzheimer’s can also be physically fit), visit their neighbours, go to the restaurant or to a show in the village auditorium, attend to animals and plants in a mini-farm and a kitchen garden.

Hopefully this kind of approach can be made more accessible, and not simply for the rich.

‘They don’t just stay in a room waiting to die’: new buildings giving older people beauty, freedom and dignity - The Observer

Interesting piece by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian:

Billions of people use such a device now, but hardly anyone peeks inside or thinks about the people who mined the metal or assembled the parts in dangerous conditions. We now have cars and appliances designed to feel like an iPhone – all glass, metal, curves and icons. None of them offer any clue that humans built them or maintained them. Everything seems like magic.

Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill - The Guardian

I was incredibly excited when my father bought a Mac in 1985. I even made the invitations for my eighth birthday party in Paint.

Vaidhyanathan is right though. It represented a clear transition, where computers began to mask their origins and impacts. They were seen as countercultural items for those seeking to be "both hip and rich”. The first objects from interstitial space, rather than markers of those spaces.

Image credit: Mac by Thomas Hawk

From Scientific American:

Archaeologists recently rediscovered the long-hidden traces of an ancient Indigenous society in western Ecuador’s Upano Valley: more than 6,000 earthen platforms that once supported houses and communal buildings in 15 urban centers, set amid vast tracts of carefully drained farmland and linked by a network of roads

Link to peer reviewed publication

The picturesque Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan holds general elections on Tuesday with serious economic challenges calling into question its longstanding policy of prioritising “Gross National Happiness” over growth.

Both parties contesting the vote are committed to a constitutionally enshrined philosophy of a government that measures its success by the “happiness and well-being of the people”.

Bhutan to vote as economic strife hits ‘national happiness’ - RTL

I’ve been fortunate to meet John Cook to discuss this work in the past. The crackpot relative is a great framing device, and interesting that it’s so universal:

“Everyone has a variation of that cranky uncle,” Cook says. “But climate misinformation is a very western construct and now we are going into countries that are culturally quite different.

“But we’re finding that the cranky uncle is a universal human experience.”

Climate and vaccine misinformation seemed worlds apart – but it turned out the Cranky Uncle was a universal figure - The Guardian

Nasri, from Iraq’s Assyrian Christian minority, has come to be known as the “father” of Iraqi counterfeit cigarettes. Starting in the late 1980s, he built alliances with powerful political figures and monopolized the smuggling of black-market tobacco into Iraq before constructing a network of facilities to produce his own knock-off brands.

From last year, and an amazing story.

Smoke and Mirrors: How the “Father” of Iraq’s Cigarette Smugglers Built An Empire - OCCRP

The fascinating world of chip flavours:

Crucially, however, the expectations of what lasagne should taste like are not as high for a Thai consumer as an Italian. After all, there’s a reason we don’t eat shepherd’s pie crisps. “An Italian would think: how can a crisp taste of authentic mother’s lasagne?” Wade says. Peggy puts it another way: “They’d just think it was horrendous if you put something like lasagne on a potato chip!”

Bizarrely, it seems as though flavour houses take internal walls more seriously than major consulting firms:

In fact, the seasoning house is strictly siloed to guarantee exclusivity. Reuben’s team work on the Pringles account; the team making flavours for PepsiCo is in an entirely different country. “So the recipe, if you will, of the Pringles salt and vinegar can’t be seen by the other team,” Reuben says.

‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours - The Guardian

Maladaptation is usually understood as referring to the unintended consequences of well-meant measures to reduce climate vulnerability. But it also includes the fallout from decisions that favour technical fixes over more holistic approaches.

Climate adaptation is not a neutral or apolitical process. It can perpetuate problematic approaches, including colonial land practices and the exclusion of Indigenous voices. This can create tenuous resource distribution, erode democratic governance and compromise Indigenous sovereignty, exacerbating vulnerabilities. It can also subvert community-driven bottom-up adaptation, instead focusing on national agendas caught up in international politics.

Useful points in this Conversation article by Ritodhi Chakraborty and Claire Burgess:

Climate adaptation projects sometimes exacerbate the problems they try to solve – a new tool hopes to correct that

A small city in New Zealand plagued by “siren battles” – cars decked out in loudspeakers commonly used in emergency warning systems and often blaring Céline Dion hits – is calling on authorities to step in and end the noise.

The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds.

Siren kings: New Zealand city terrorised by Céline Dion ‘speaker battles’

Jacob Reed asked 130 artists and animators to create scenes from the season 1 finale of Frasier My Coffee with Niles in different styles. The results are sublime.

Our Frasier Remake

This alchemic-like ambition to turn discarded plastics into new objects can also be seen at the hands of government agencies. One such example, is the efforts of the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (MoPWH) to incorporate discarded single-use plastics into road tar for building national roads in the country. According to Danis Sumadilaga, the head of the Agency for Research and Development at the MoPWH, mixing plastic waste with asphalt will result in stronger and more stable roads.

While it is certainly better to have wild plastic discards sequestered inside a road, rather than scattered in the environment or buried deep inside animals’ entrails, this development undoubtedly erects a speed bump on the road towards the nationwide ban on single-use plastics. In other words, mixing single-use plastics with asphalt makes plastic appear as unproblematic. To return to the concept of Plasticene, the plastic road is representative of both the human alteration—the plastification—of the environment, and the blind assumption that the circular economy can coalesce economic growth with sustainability.

The plastipelago

During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, and no conscious stake in maintaining biodiversity. Today there is a species that should know it is not able to wait millions of years for its life-support systems to be restored after a mass extinction. Ironically, the scale that species’ activities is the sole cause of today’s biological holocaust.

What is crystal clear is that the trajectory of the dimming future of civilization will be directed in part not just by the overall loss of biodiversity but by the pattern of our mutilation of the tree of life.

Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120)

In a February 1973 lecture, he explained how his cybernetic approach to management would empower the Chilean people and put the power of science at their disposal. “I know that I am making the maximum effort towards the devolution of power,” Beer told the audience. “The government made their revolution about it; I find it good cybernetics.” Beer stressed that the tools he was developing in Chile were the “people’s tools” and that his systems were designed for and in consultation with Chilean workers. Critics from the Chilean opposition pushed back and equated the system to a new form of government surveillance that would lead to increased government control and abuse.

Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism

This article is a few years old, but provides a good overview of Cybersyn.

Twitter/X really is the new Gab:

“Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.”

While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants

“Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village after nightfall, and Tenzin sold them all to a middleman for $300. Two weeks of unusually good days like this would bring in roughly the average income for a Tibetan household for an entire year.”

An excellent article about the fascinating, valuable and doomed prcatice of collecting catepillar fungus. I saw some of this in the highlands of Bhutan when I was there for work in 2016, where its also prized for traditonal medicine.

The Last of the Fungus - A young scientist’s quest to transform a dying way of life

I borrowed a GoPro to take some photos while snorkelling. It was pretty fun!

The pre-print version of this paper written with my colleagues Holly Seale, Anita Heywood, Ikram Abdi, Abela Mahimbo, Ashfaq Chauhan and Lisa Woodland is available. It provides timely evidence about the need for the development of COVID-related resources, messages and financial support for culturally diverse communities.

N.B. it’s a preprint so it hasn’t been through peer review yet.