DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality

Our lives depend on strong technological integration: attending a course, calling loved ones, making a bank transaction, or booking a medical appointment. Everything currently goes through a digital process.

However, 37% of women do not use the internet. 259 million fewer women have access to the Internet than men, even though they account for nearly half the world’s population.

If women are unable to access the Internet and do not feel safe online, they are unable to develop the necessary digital skills to engage in digital spaces, which diminishes their opportunities to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related fields By 2050, 75% of jobs will be related to STEM areas. Yet today, women hold just 22% of positions in artificial intelligence, to name just one.

Bringing women into technology results in more creative solutions and has greater potential for innovations that meet women’s needs and promote gender equality. Their lack of inclusion, by contrast, comes with massive costs.

The United Nations Observance of IWD, under the theme “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”, recognizes and celebrates the women and girls who are championing the advancement of transformative technology and digital education. The observance will explore the impact of the digital gender gap on widening economic and social inequalities, and it will also spotlight the importance of protecting the rights of women and girls in digital spaces and addressing online and ICT-facilitated gender-based violence.

https://www.un.org/en/observances/womens-day

Some cities only last a century or two, while others last for a thousand years or more. Often, there aren’t clear records left behind to explain why. Instead, archaeologists piece together clues from the cities’ remains to search for patterns that help account for why certain places retained their importance longer than others. In a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers examined 24 ancient cities in what’s now Mexico and found that the cities that lasted the longest showed indications of collective forms of governance, infrastructural investments, and cooperation between households.

“For years, my colleagues and I have investigated why and how certain cities maintain their importance or collapse,” says Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago.
In previous studies, Feinman and his colleagues cast a wide net in terms of the cities they looked at, ranging across Mesoamerica over thousands of years. They found a broad pattern of societies with good governance that fostered the well-being of their people lasting longer than ones with autocratic leaders and big disparities in wealth. This new study tightens the focus on cities from similar places and times: all 24 of the cities analyzed were in the western half of Mesoamerica and were founded between 1000 and 300 BCE.
To a non-archaeologist, looking at ancient ruins and trying to extrapolate what its government was like might seem like an impossible task. But remnants of the cities’ buildings, ground plans, plazas, and monuments contain clues.
“We looked at public architecture, we looked at the nature of the economy and what sustained the cities. We looked at the signs of rulership, whether they seem to be heavily personalized or not,” said Feinman. Art and architecture celebrating larger-than-life rulers point to more autocratic or despotic societies, whereas the depiction of leaders in groups, often masked, is more indicative of shared power arrangements.
Feinman and his co-authors, David Carballo of Boston University, Linda Nicholas of the Field Museum, and Stephen Kowalewski of the University of Georgia, found that among the 24 ancient cities they analyzed, the ones with more collective forms of governance tended to remain in power longer than the autocratically ruled cities, sometimes by a thousand years. However, even among places that likely had good governance, some cities outlasted others.
To get at why these similarly governed cities fared differently, the researchers examined other aspects of their makeup including infrastructure and indications of household interdependence. “We looked for evidence of path dependence, which basically means the actions or investments that people make that later end up constraining or fostering how they respond to subsequent hazards or challenges,” says Feinman.
Early efforts to construct dense, interconnected residential spaces and the construction of large, central, open plazas were two of the factors that the authors found contributed to greater sustainability and importance of the early cities.
To examine sustainability in the past, most research looks for correlations between specific climatic or environmental events and the human responses. This approach may make sense, but it is hard to know whether the timing is reliable. Such studies often emphasize a correlation between environmental crisis and collapse without also considering how other cities successfully navigated the challenges and continued as major population centers.
The authors use a different tack. Knowing residents faced hazards, including drought, earthquakes, periodic hurricanes/heavy rains, challenges from competing centers and groups, they examined the durational history of the 24 centers and what factors fostered their sustainability. The finding that governance had an important role in sustainability shows that “responses to crises and disasters are to a degree political,” says Linda Nicholas, an adjunct curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the study.
The cities that lasted the longest had a combination of infrastructural investments and collective governance. It’s a lesson still relevant today. “You cannot evaluate responses to catastrophes like earthquakes, or threats like climatic change, without considering governance,” says Feinman. “The past is an incredible resource to understand how to address contemporary issues.”

LUND, Sweden : Archaeologists say they have uncovered a “unique” cache of well-preserved spices, from strands of saffron to peppercorns and ginger, on the wreck of a royal ship that sunk off Sweden’s Baltic coast more than 500 years ago.

The wreck of the Gribshund, owned by King Hans of Denmark and Norway, has lain off the coast off Ronneby since 1495 when it is thought to have caught fire and sank as the monarch attended a political meeting ashore in Sweden.

Rediscovered by sports divers in the 1960s, sporadic excavations of the ship have taken place in recent years. Previous dives recovered large items such as figureheads and timber. Now an excavation led by Brendan Foley, an archaeological scientist at Lund University, has found the spices buried in the silt of the boat.

“The Baltic is strange – it’s low oxygen, low temperature, low salinity, so many organic things are well preserved in the Baltic where they wouldn’t be well preserved elsewhere in the world ocean system,” said Foley. “But to find spices like this is quite extraordinary.”

The spices would have been a symbol of high status, as only the wealthy could afford goods such as saffron or cloves that were imported from outside Europe. They would have been travelling with King Hans as he attended the meeting in Sweden.

Lund University researcher Mikael Larsson, who has been studying the finds, said: “This is the only archaeological context where we’ve found saffron. So it’s very unique and it’s very special.”

RANDABERG, NORWAY—Live Science reports that the face of a boy who died some 8,300 years ago has been reconstructed with computed tomography scans of remains discovered near the southwestern coast of Norway in 1907. Analysis of the remains indicates that the well-fed, healthy boy was about 15 years old at the time of death, and stood a little over four feet tall. His skull bones had fused too early, forcing his head to grow into an unusual shape. Osteologist Sean Dexter Denham of the University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology said that the condition of the boy’s skull, known as scaphocephaly, is not associated with any developmental problems or intellectual disabilities, however. DNA analysis of the remains suggests he had brown eyes, dark hair, and an intermediate skin tone, added forensic artist Oscar Nilsson. Decorated bone pendants; hooks, harpoons, and barbed stone tools for fishing; and animal remains were also uncovered in the cave where the remains were found

Global Tourism Resilience Day (17 February), proclaimed by the General Assembly in resolution A/RES/77/269, aims to emphasize the need to foster resilient tourism development to deal with shocks, taking into account the vulnerability of the tourism sector to emergencies. It is also a call for action for Member States to develop national strategies for rehabilitation after disruptions, including through private-public cooperation and the diversification of activities and products.

For many developing countries, including the least developed countries, small island developing states, countries in Africa and middle-income countries, tourism is a major source of income, foreign currency earnings, tax revenue and employment. Because tourism connects people with nature, sustainable tourism has the unique ability to spur environmental responsibility and conservation.

Sustainable tourism, including ecotourism, is a cross-cutting activity that can contribute to the three dimensions of sustainable development and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by fostering economic growth, alleviating poverty, creating full and productive employment and decent work for all.

It can also play a role in accelerating the change to more sustainable consumption and production patterns and promoting the sustainable use of oceans, seas and marine resources, promoting local culture, improving the quality of life and the economic empowerment of women and young people, indigenous peoples and local communities and promoting rural development and better living conditions for rural populations, including small-holder and family farmers.

The use of sustainable and resilient tourism as a tool to foster sustained and inclusive economic growth, social development and financial inclusion, enables the formalization of the informal sector, the promotion of domestic resource mobilization and environmental protection and the eradication of poverty and hunger, including the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and natural resources and the promotion of investment and entrepreneurship in sustainable tourism.

A Hebrew Bible more than 1,000 years old and described as “one of the most important and singular texts in human history” will go on show later this month, before going under the hammer.

The Codex Sassoon, dating to the late 9th to early 10th, is believed to be the earliest and most complete Hebrew Bible.

It will be on show at Sotheby’s in London from February 22-28, followed by an exhibition tour to Israel and the US. It will go up for auction in New York in May, where it is expected to fetch between $30 million and $50 million.

Sharon Mintz, Sotheby’s senior Judaica specialist, books and manuscripts, told CNN Wednesday that “this is the most important document to come to auction ever.”

Einstein’s ‘God letter’ breaks record and sells for $2.9M at auction

Mintz said this “astonishing record” is likely to generate huge interest from bidders. “This is the most significant document that I have ever had the pleasure of examining, researching [and] holding,” she added.

The Hebrew Bible is the foundation of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Scholars have long been aware of the codex named after renowned Judaica collector David Sassoon (1880-1942), but it has remained largely out of public view, Sotheby’s said in a press release Wednesday.

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/oldest-bible-auction-scli-intl/index.html

The Secretary General of Cultural Heritage of West Azarbaijan province in Iran has said, regarding the recent earthquakes in Khoi: “Parts of the market and the historical building of the city council, the museum and some other historical buildings in Khoi have been cracked and destroyed.

TORTORUŃ, POLAND—Science in Poland reports that a group of metal detectorists from the Kujawy-Pomerania History Seekers Group discovered a 2,500-year-old collection of bronze necklaces, bracelets, greaves, and pins in a plowed field that was once a lake in northern Poland and alerted the authorities. Researchers led by Wojciech Sosnowski of the Office of Conservator of Monuments of Toruń returned to the site, where they found three deposits that had not been disturbed by plowing, and pieces of fabric, rope, tools made of antler, bronze sheet fittings, and bronze horse harness fittings. Jacek Gackowski of Nicolaus Copernicus University examined the artifacts, and said that most of them can be associated with the local Lusatian culture, but some of them may have been made by the Scythians. “It was a time of growing unrest related to the penetration of groups of nomads coming from the Pontic Steppe, probably Scythians or the Neuri, into Central and Eastern Europe,” he said. Human bones found among the artifacts suggest that sacrifices may have been periodically made at the site. “They tried to secure their existence and give ritual resistance to the imminent, as it turned out, inevitable changes,” Gackowski concluded.UŃ, POLAND—Science in Poland reports that a group of metal detectorists from the Kujawy-Pomerania History Seekers Group discovered a 2,500-year-old collection of bronze necklaces, bracelets, greaves, and pins in a plowed field that was once a lake in northern Poland and alerted the authorities. Researchers led by Wojciech Sosnowski of the Office of Conservator of Monuments of Toruń returned to the site, where they found three deposits that had not been disturbed by plowing, and pieces of fabric, rope, tools made of antler, bronze sheet fittings, and bronze horse harness fittings. Jacek Gackowski of Nicolaus Copernicus University examined the artifacts, and said that most of them can be associated with the local Lusatian culture, but some of them may have been made by the Scythians. “It was a time of growing unrest related to the penetration of groups of nomads coming from the Pontic Steppe, probably Scythians or the Neuri, into Central and Eastern Europe,” he said. Human bones found among the artifacts suggest that sacrifices may have been periodically made at the site. “They tried to secure their existence and give ritual resistance to the imminent, as it turned out, inevitable changes,” Gackowski concluded.

The Gaziantep Castle, built in the second and third centuries, was among the more than 3,000 buildings destroyed.

Taylor Dafoe, February 6, 2023

A Roman-era castle in southeastern Turkey is among the thousands of structures damaged by the deadly earthquakes that struck the country and the neighboring state of Syria today. An estimated 2,300 people died in the disaster, and thousands more have been injured.

Now, as the totality of the destruction is still being measured, officials fear other significant cultural heritage sites may have been impacted too.  

An initial 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit in the early hours of February 6, centered near the Turkish city of Gaziantep. Since then, more than 40 aftershocks have been felt as far as Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon, while Turkey itself experienced a related 7.5-magnitude tremor.

The catastrophic incident comes at a particularly vulnerable time for Turkey and Syria, both of which are already facing economic turmoil and refugee crises.

Some 3,000 buildings across at least 10 Turkish cities have also been destroyed. Among them was the Gaziantep Castle, a historic structure first built as a watchtower in the second and third centuries, during the Roman period, and later expanded upon in the fifth century by Byzantine Emperor Justinian 1, according to the Turkish agency that oversees museums and archaeological sites in the country.

The 1,700-year-old site has since served numerous functions. Just last year, part of the castle was converted into the Gaziantep Defence and Heroism Panoramic Museum, a venue honoring the city’s fight against French and English occupation during the Turkish War of Independence a century ago.

“Some of the bastions in the east, south, and southeast parts of the historical Gaziantep Castle in the central Şahinbey district were destroyed by the earthquake,” the Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu reported. 

“The debris was scattered on the road. The iron railings around the castle were scattered on the surrounding sidewalks. The retaining wall next to the castle also collapsed. In some bastions, large cracks were observed,” the report said.

A 17th-century Şirvani Mosque located next to the capital also collapsed, according local reports.

https://news.artnet.com/

Innovate. Demonstrate. Elevate. Advance. Sustain. ( I.D.E.A.S.)

Bringing Everyone Forward for Sustainable and Equitable Development

This year, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (IDWGIS) will focus on the role of Women and Girls and Science as relates to the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) in review at the forthcoming High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), namely SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation), SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy), SDG 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities) and SDG17 (means of implementation), while following up on discussions on water held during from the “Water Unites Us” 7th IDWGIS, the 2nd High-Level International Conference on the International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development 2018-2028, held in Dushanbe, and the 2nd UN Ocean Conference and its High-Level Symposium on Water held in Lisbon, as a contribution for the 2023 UN Water Conference, and other UN Fora.

In doing so the IDWGIS aims to connect the International Community to Women and Girls in Science, strengthening the ties between science, policy, and society for strategies oriented towards the future. The IDWGIS will thus showcase best practices, strategies, applied solutions in addressing SDGs challenges and opportunities. It will also include for the first time a science workshop for Blind Girls and a session from the BLIND fellow SCIENTISTS on “Science in Braille: Making Science Accessible”.
women and girls in science
Get Involved

The 8th International Day of Women and Girls in Science Assembly will take place on 10 February 2023 at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City. Join women experts, youth, and professionals in dialogues and discussion to put Science, Technology, and Innovation at the heart of sustainable development programs.
Background

A significant gender gap has persisted throughout the years at all levels of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines all over the world. Even though women have made tremendous progress towards increasing their participation in higher education, they are still under-represented in these fields.

Gender equality has always been a core issue for the United Nations. Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls will make a crucial contribution not only to economic development of the world, but to progress across all the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well.

On 14 March 2011, the Commission on the Status of Women adopted a report at its fifty-fifth session, with agreed conclusions on access and participation of women and girls in education, training and science and technology, and for the promotion of women’s equal access to full employment and decent work. On 20 December 2013, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on science, technology and innovation for development, in which it recognized that full and equal access to and participation in science, technology and innovation for women and girls of all ages is imperative for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.