All posts tagged: Lessons

Lessons from UK’s first ozone-based micropollutant removal plants

Lessons from UK’s first ozone-based micropollutant removal plants

Published by skeptic

Britain’s first ozone-based micropollutant removal plants hold lessons for utilities preparing to tackle PFAS and micropollutants before regulation is introduced. Since Curio Water engineered and helped deliver the UK’s first ozone-based micropollutant plants at Severn Trent last year, we’ve learnt a lot about the practicalities of how utilities can deploy the latest innovations to deal with new and emerging contaminants. This includes PFAS, microplastics and micropollutants – all of which are currently facing growing public and regulatory scrutiny. For utilities and those seeking to work with them, the challenge is essentially threefold. First and foremost, any treatment infrastructure must be built around rigorous pilot testing to fully understand the water matrix and its behaviour in response to treatment. This is not simply a matter of understanding what contaminants are present, but whether they fluctuate seasonally, how the presence of certain contaminants can affect previously proven treatments and ultimately the long-term effectiveness of a co-ordinated train of removal technologies. The second is a dose of realism when it comes to working with existing infrastructure and understanding …

U.K. Box Office Back to Full Health — But What Lessons Do We Learn?

U.K. Box Office Back to Full Health — But What Lessons Do We Learn?

Published by Daniella Wilson

It really is the year of original voices at the box office. Cinema-going in the U.K. and Ireland is currently up 21 percent on 2025. “We haven’t had year-on-year growth like that since the pandemic,” began Charles Gant, Screen International‘s box office editor, who was hosting a BFI London Film Festival Industry Forum session with cinema programmers on Thursday morning. He was joined by reps for three major players in the country’s theatrical market: Curzon’s head of cinema programme Ben Lyndon, the director of programming at Picturehouse Carol McKay, and programme manager at BFI IMAX Madeleine Mullett. The panel reflected on the state of cinema-going in the U.K., shared insights into audiences’ behaviours and discussed how the lessons learned from recent releases can shape their future programmes, both with mainstream and indie features. Like our friends across the pond, British and Irish audiences have responded well to such a vast array of genres on offer, with musical films (Michael, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger), beloved franchise sequels (Toy Story 5, Devil Wears Prada 2, …

AI companies could learn safety lessons from the history of nuclear weapons

AI companies could learn safety lessons from the history of nuclear weapons

Published by skeptic

An AI model built by US tech company OpenAI has hacked into the Australian government healthcare portal, Medicare. The news, which emerged on September 23, follows a string of similar incidents reported over the summer by OpenAI and its main rival, Anthropic. These reports have underscored fears that AI labs may be losing control of their creations. They also helped feed the most recent spate of doomsday warnings about the risks posed to human civilisation by AI. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has called for the pace of AI development to be slowed, a proposal backed by OpenAI head Sam Altman and Elon Musk. There have also been calls for national regulation and greater international cooperation to counter the threat. The current debate over how to control AI bears striking parallels with how the world tackled another existential threat to human civilisation: nuclear technology. J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw development of the first nuclear weapons through the US government’s Manhattan Project. But Oppenheimer also lobbied for international control of these weapons. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report, published …

Star Wars: The Force Awakens — Science Lessons vs. Story Rules

Star Wars: The Force Awakens — Science Lessons vs. Story Rules

Published by Jenni Sidey

Last Saturday, I began discussing the Starkiller Base and the callous way Abrams wiped out five civilizations just to reach the next plot point. Now, it’s time to go into the issues with Starkiller Base in more detail. First, there’s Finn. When he sees the red streaks in the sky, he leaves the men who were supposed to help him escape and tells Han that they’ve finally succeeded, which means he knew about the base. So, why didn’t he say anything about this mega-death machine before? And why hasn’t the Republic found out about this and tried to stop it? This film isn’t talking about one secret base in an armada of bases scattered throughout the galaxy. This is a base the size of a planet. How does one keep the workers, the guys running supplies, the soldiers, everyone required to create this system destroying machine quiet? You can’t. And the Republic should’ve been on The First Order’s case a long time ago, but somebody was apparently hoping that the audience wouldn’t think about all …

Relationship Lessons People Wish They’d Known Sooner

Relationship Lessons People Wish They’d Known Sooner

Published by Jenni Sidey

“I wish I knew all of this sooner.” I hear this from clients all the time. They also ask, “Where were you in my 20s?” The right information about relationships can save you a lot of heartache. Breakups hurt, and not just metaphorically. When people look at a photo of an ex who broke up with them, the brain regions that process physical pain light up (Kross et al., 2011). Yet, we often leave our relationship outcomes completely to chance (or fate, if you’re feeling romantic). That lets us fall into patterns that run our love life for years. What Everyone Wishes They Knew Sooner Drawing on 25+ years as a relationship scientist, college professor, and author, here are my top 10 strategies for forming healthy connections. Consider these a head start or a way to quickly catch up. 1. Be the Right Person Don’t look to relationships to fix problems or fill in what’s missing from your life (that’s your job). When you feel lost or broken, you attract partners who like incomplete or …

Rylee Arnold on DWTS Pro Lessons, Juniors Reboot, Lindsay Return

Rylee Arnold on DWTS Pro Lessons, Juniors Reboot, Lindsay Return

Published by Daniella Wilson

Rylee Arnold was destined to become a Dancing With the Stars professional dancer. Having been on the cast for four years now, she’s learned a lot about herself. Rylee’s older sister, Lindsay Arnold, appeared on DWTS as a pro for 11 seasons, winning season 25 with Jordan Fisher in 2017. One year later, Rylee joined the show’s family alongside her sibling on Dancing With the Stars: Juniors, the spinoff that spotlighted younger stars and dancers. Rylee became the first Juniors alum to join the main cast in 2023 for season 32, at a mere 18 years old, also making her the youngest pro ever cast. She tells The Hollywood Reporter she graduated high school a month before she was offered the job, and she’s grateful for that early career opportunity. “I feel like looking back at that time, I was a completely different person,” she says. “But I also love that Rylee so much, because I feel like she went through a lot and she learned a lot about herself. And because of that, I’m …

The Lessons of Hitler’s Rise for the Trump Era

The Lessons of Hitler’s Rise for the Trump Era

Published by Sam Flores

Does history repeat itself, or merely rhyme? The historian Timothy W. Ryback has thought about this question a lot. Ryback, the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at The Hague, has written extensively about Adolf Hitler’s Germany, including in books such as Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life and Hitler’s First Victims: The Quest for Justice. Ryback’s new book, 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, which grew out of a series of articles he wrote for The Atlantic, is a straightforward narrative of the period from Monday, January 30, 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor, to Thursday, March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag legislative body passed the so-called Enabling Act, which effectively gave the chancellor the power to dissolve the democratic Weimar Republic and inaugurate the Third Reich. As Joseph Goebbels noted at the time, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means of its own destruction.” Ryback’s 53 Days makes no reference to contemporary politics. And yet certain echoes of the …

Embracing Glory Amidst Trials: Lessons from Amos

Embracing Glory Amidst Trials: Lessons from Amos

Published by Sam Flores

Seige of Jerusalem by David Roberts, 1850, Wikipedia, Public Domain By R. Loren Sandford    What’s coming in the next few years? There’s bad news and there’s good news. The prophet Amos in ancient times brought a set of indictments against Israel that read very much like the sins of America and the Western world. 1. They rejected God’s law (Amos 2:4). In many ways too numerous to list here, so have we. 2. They believed in lies concerning false gods and demonic philosophies (Amos 2:4). The list of deceptions in modern times is long and spans a range of doctrines and philosophies, from open theism taught in the church to post-modernistic philosophy dominant in the world around us. The former denies the foreknowledge of God and, by extension, the fullness of His sovereignty; the latter writes God out of the equation altogether. And those are just two examples. 3. They had fallen into an economic self-focus that led to abuse (Amos 2:6-8). This is the America and the West that I have known all …

Inside Jessica Tarlov’s ‘I Disagree’: Lessons from the front lines of Fox News

Inside Jessica Tarlov’s ‘I Disagree’: Lessons from the front lines of Fox News

Published by Sam Flores

After appearing last year on a contentious political panel discussion in Washington, D.C., Jessica Tarlov, co-host of the the popular Fox News show “The Five,” was approached by a transgender woman from Alabama. Tarlov had said that Democratic candidates in tough races might have to concede that transgender collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas should not be competing against women assigned female at birth. But the matter never came up. Instead, the Alabama woman thanked Tarlov for making the case for Democrats against four conservatives on “The Five,” the most watched program in cable news and a favorite of family members who no longer speak to her. On the Shelf I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends By Jessica Tarlov Random House: 272 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. “If more people talked like you, I might get my family back,” the woman said. “I’m just happy my parents can hear someone like you.” Tarlov describes the encounter in her …