Meet the Bay of Plenty's only search and rescue dog team
Failing her police training has not stopped 7-year-old German shepherd Kora from saving lives.
Tauranga's Nick Petry adopted Kora years ago after he recognised her potential to become a successful tracking dog.
After extensive training, she qualified as a search and rescue dog and the pair now work together as
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NZ Herald
6 days ago
- NZ Herald
Taiwan's rubbish trucks offer classical music and a catch-up
For the elderly, taking out the rubbish has become a social event and many arrive early to sit and talk around the collection points. 'I can chat with some old neighbours and friends, it's nice,' Lee said, before disposing of several bottles and cans. 'It's also a kind of exercise,' she added. But not everyone is a fan. 'I think it's quite inconvenient because it comes at a fixed time every day,' said 31-year-old beautician Dai Yun Wei after dumping her rubbish in the truck. 'Sometimes we're not home or we're busy, so we can't throw away the trash.' 'Save a lot of time' Taiwan's musical garbage trucks have been an almost daily feature of life on the island since the 1960s, Shyu Shyh Shiun of Taipei's Department of Environmental Protection told AFP. Taiwan imported German garbage trucks pre-programmed with Fur Elise, Shyu said, but added it was not clear how the Maiden's Prayer became part of the repertoire. The trucks operate five days a week, usually in the late afternoon and evening. Yang Xiu Ying, 76, has made a living out of helping her neighbours dispose of their garbage. She receives NT$11,200 ($380) a month from 28 households in her lane to sort their rubbish, load it onto a trolley and take it to the refuse trucks. 'Some people get off work late, some elderly people find it inconvenient, so they take it downstairs and I dump the garbage for them,' Yang said, wearing two layers of gloves and long protective sleeves. Others have turned to digital solutions for their rubbish problem. The young founders of Tracle created an app enabling people to book a time for their rubbish to be taken away. 'I think our value is that we save a lot of time for them,' co-founder Ben Chen said. 'We enhance their life quality.' Cleaning up Over the past 30 years, Taiwan has been cleaning up its waste management act. An economic boom had led to an explosion of garbage, with almost no recycling, landfills overflowing, and people protesting at air and ground pollution. In response, the island ramped up recycling, increased incineration, and made people responsible for sorting and dumping their own rubbish in the trucks instead of leaving it on the ground for collection. Taipei residents are also required to buy government-approved blue plastic bags for their general waste to encourage them to use less and recycle more. 'In the beginning, everybody feels ... that it's not very convenient,' Shyu said. But once people started noticing the cleaner streets, 'they feel this is a good policy'. The city's recycling rate has surged to nearly 67%, from 2% in 2000, and the amount of garbage sent for incineration has fallen by two-thirds, Shyu said. And, he said, smiling, the trucks are 'almost' always on time. -Agence France-Presse
Otago Daily Times
7 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Three people killed as train derails
Rescue workers search for passengers in the derailed train in the Biberach district between the districts of Zweifaltendorf and Zell. Three people were killed and others seriously injured when a passenger train derailed in southwestern Germany today, police said in a statement. There were around 100 people on board when two carriages left the tracks between the towns of Riedlingen and Munderkingen, near the corner of Germany that borders France and Switzerland, police in the city of Stuttgart said. The train was on a roughly 90km route between Sigmaringen and Ulm. The cause of the crash was under investigation, the police statement said. A picture by German news agency DPA showed carriages largely intact but jackknifed into each other and rolled onto their sides. German national rail operator Deutsche Bahn said in a statement there were "many injured" and its thoughts were with the victims and their loved ones. It was not clear what had caused the train to derail, it said, adding that it would support the authorities in their investigation.
Otago Daily Times
25-07-2025
- Otago Daily Times
The fine art of communicating ... with others
J. Edgar Hoover — head of the FBI from 1924 to 1972 — did not suffer fools. In the 1960s, he once returned a memo on internal security with the words "watch the borders" scrawled in his handwriting. His agents knew to take the message seriously. Calling various departments, however, they failed to find any cause for concern at the US boundaries with Mexico or Canada — and were too scared to ask the man himself about the scrawled note. According to Hoover's assistant, Cartha DeLoach, it took days for his staff to get to the bottom of the mystery. A supervisor finally noticed that Hoover had scrawled his message on a memo with very narrow margins. To Hoover, the meaning could not have been clearer: the command "watch the borders" related to the page's sloppy formatting. He had failed to imagine that others might consider it to be a warning of an impending crisis. We might not direct an intelligence agency, but clear communication is essential for any human relationship, personal or professional — and we are not nearly as good at it as we think. A wealth of recent research suggests we vastly overestimate how successfully others can interpret what we have said and how accurately we interpret what others have said. There can be no doubt the intricacies of human communication require enormous cognitive effort, particularly in the rapid back-and-forth of spoken conversation. On average, we need about 900 milliseconds to fully plan what we are going to say — a luxury we're rarely afforded in everyday conversation. While working at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Ruth Corps analysed recordings of natural conversations in German, Dutch and American English. She found many conversational turns fall well below this 900 millisecond threshold, meaning people often fail to respond to their partner's last point. Instead, they simply continue with the thought they'd been saying before the other person interjected. "Conversation is not like ping-pong," Corps and her colleagues concluded in a paper published in 2022. "Instead, [interlocutors] develop their utterances in parallel." Imagine you are talking to your friend about a break-up that happened during a dinner date. You start to relay your break-up story, but your friend assumes the story is about the dinner itself and becomes intent on talking about the food you ate. "We may both be talking about something that is related, but I may not be directly responding to something that you just said," Corps says. In most cases, any confusion that may arise from such a situation will be resolved relatively quickly, but there is plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding to occur before that happens. Even when we have plenty of time to plan what we have to say, we may fail to apply our "theory of mind" — our capacity to place ourselves in other people's shoes and consider how their perspective, knowledge or beliefs may differ from our own. Theory of mind is considered to be a huge developmental milestone and it is often measured with the Sally-Anne test, in which a child is shown a cartoon of a mischievous girl. In the cartoon, Anne moves her friend Sally's toy from a basket to a box after Sally has left the room. The child being tested is asked to say where Sally will look for her toy when she returns. Very young children will say "the box"; they are still thinking egocentrically and assume that everyone — including Sally — knows what they know. The correct answer is, of course, the basket, where Sally had left the toy before she vacated the room, but you can only arrive at this response by overcoming your egocentric viewpoint to recognise her perspective — a theory of mind. Most neurotypical people develop theory of mind in late infancy. Just because we have an ability does not mean we will always use it, however — and many subsequent studies have shown we regularly forget to take other people's perspectives into account during our conversations. Boaz Keysar, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led many of these experiments, points out the participants were often incredibly bright students at prestigious universities. "It's got nothing to do with intelligence," he says. One consequence of our egocentrism may be an overconfidence that our beliefs are widely held — a phenomenon called the "false consensus effect". Athletes who take banned drugs, for example, tend to assume their behaviour is far more widespread than it actually is. They may simply forget that others think and feel differently. Crucially, our naturally egocentric thinking may lead us to overestimate how clearly we have stated our aims in both spoken and written communication. Like Hoover and his reminder to "watch the borders", we become so fixated on the message we wish to convey we fail to consider how else our words may be interpreted. The result is known as an "illusion of understanding". We may send passive-aggressive texts or emails to express displeasure with another's behaviour, but it's unlikely that our emotions come across exactly as we intended. As a result, they will continue to act in the way that had annoyed us, without even recognising that there is a problem. Our egocentric thinking may also prevent us from fully expressing our gratitude. According to various recent studies, we wrongly assume others know how much we value them, without us saying so explicitly. Theory of mind failures may explain why jokes often fall flat when they are retold — as Justin Kruger of New York University and colleagues found in one of my favourite experiments. Half the participants watched sketches from the comedy show Saturday Night Live before sending an email describing the jokes. The rest simply read the scripts before sending out the email, without watching the sketch first. Kruger found those who had viewed the clips were considerably more likely to overestimate how funny the recipient would find their email. They were anchored in their own experience of viewing the professional comedians and misunderstood how much of the humour came from their delivery, rather than the words alone. A failure to take another's perspective into account may even lead us to ignore obvious language barriers. Keysar's colleagues, for instance, recently asked Chinese Mandarin speakers to record messages for American English participants, who then had to guess the meaning. "Both speakers and listeners [significantly] overestimated their communicative abilities," says Becky Ka Ying Lau, the lead author of the study. Our failures to take other people's perspectives may have far more serious consequences, however — even when we are speaking the same language. Doctors must frequently hand over cases at the end of their shift, for instance. But questioning paediatric interns, Keysar found the second physician failed to grasp the main point about 60% of the time — despite the first doctor feeling highly confident they had communicated the message effectively. "I think it's a little scary," he says. Simply cultivating more self-awareness may allow us to avoid some of these errors, given there is evidence training can reduce cognitive biases. "From my own life, having learned about this illusion has been really helpful," says Janet Geipel, of Exeter University's business school. We may also seek more feedback by actively asking others what they think of what we have just said, or checking our own interpretation is correct before proceeding. This may be particularly important when dealing with friends and family. The better we know someone, the more likely we are to believe that we share the same perspective on all matters, which may discourage us from checking the other person can interpret us correctly — a phenomenon known as the "closeness-communication bias". Keysar describes how even he takes his wife's viewpoints for granted — resulting in disagreements that could be easily avoided with some conscientious perspective-taking. "Assume that you're going to be misunderstood," he says, and then correct the potential error. "It might just prevent divorce." — The Observer David Robson is the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life.
