Category Archives: Oceania

Photo Credit: Aitor Alcalde FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images

Brazil have overcome Italy in an incredible back-and-forth FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup final in Dubai to win their 6th title.

Italy playing in their first ever FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup final had it all to do, facing the most successful nation in the competitions history. Brazil had looked impressive in overcoming Japan and Iran in the knockout stages to reach the final, whilst Italy had won a thriller against Belarus in their semi-final on penalties, having eliminated OFC representative Tahiti at the quarter-final stage.

Despite their underdog status, it was Emiliano Del Ducas side who took the lead. Gianmarco Genovalis volley giving Italy a crucial lead before the game settled into a end-to-end pattern as Brazil started to kick into gear.

The difference maker proved to be Brazils superstar Rodrigo. Playing in his fifth World Cup, the veteran forward has well over 100 appearances for his country and sealed his second FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup with an outstanding hat-trick, proving too much for Italy to handle. Their cause wasnt helped by a second period red card to Leandro Casapieri.

A late strike from Genovali gave Italy a sliver of hope as they chased the game but Marco Octavios side showed their class, seeing out the final minutes to confirm the trophy would be heading back to Brazil.

Brazil: 6 (RODRIGO 0023/1P, 0553/2P, 0733/3P, Bruno XAVIER 0334/2P, OWN GOAL 0120/2P, BRENDO 0933/3P) Italy: 4 (Gianmarco GENOVALI 0814/1P, 0322/3P, Tommaso FAZZINI 0549/2P, Tommaso FAZZINI 0927/3)

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Brazil claim record-extending 6th FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup - Oceania Football Confederation

Aiden Gimed successfully lifts a snatch in the 81kg youth category of the 2024 Oceania Weightlifting Championships in Auckland, New Zealand.

AIDEN Gimed will return home with a silver medal in the 81kg youth category of the 2024 Oceania Weightlifting Championships, which was held in Auckland, New Zealand on Feb 17-25.

Gimed said he is very happy with his overall performance as he recorded a snatch of 95kg, clean & jerk of 115kg, and total weight of 210kg.

My overall experience was very good, he said. I got to meet my goals while making new friends and learning new things. The young weightlifter recorded a new personal best in snatch, clean & jerk, and total weight.

Everything was perfect, he added. I made 6/6 of my lifts having Coach Angel [San Nicolas], Coach John Davis, and Leowell [Cristobal] helping me. It just worked out well for me, warming up and doing my lifts on the platform. It definitely helped having competition experience because I had an idea on what to expect.

Asked whats next for him, Gimed said, To get stronger and be prepared for my next competition and to give it my 110%.

He added, Ive no competitions lined up yet. Ill see what my coach and the CNMI Weightlifting Federation have planned for me.

Gimed also wants to thank the CNMI Weightlifting Federation for allowing me to represent the CNMI. Thank you, too, to Getfit CNMI for being my home to train and getting me started in this journey. And thank you to my family, friends, teachers and classmates for supporting me.

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NMI's Aiden Gimed wins silver in Oceania Weightlifting Championships - Marianas Variety News & Views

Fiji U20s secures 39-25 win over Tonga at round 1 of Oceania Rugby U20s Challenge

The Vodafone Fiji Under 20 rugby side had a solid start to their Oceania Rugby U20s Challenge campaign after beating the Junior Ikale Tahis 39-25 yesterday.

Fiji dominated with their lethal speed and flamboyance as they came out with a solid attacking effort in the first half of the game scoring three tries to flanker Ebenezer Navula, Number 8 Rupeni Nakiyoyo and Hooker Joshua Uluibau and two penalty kicks.

Tonga only managed one penalty in the first spell as the game went into the break with Fiji holding a comfortable 29-3 lead.

The Ikale Tahi made a fierce comeback in the second half with three consecutive tries in the first 10 minutes as the score suddenly was 29-22.

Fiji only managed to score 10 points in the second half through a converted try and a penalty kick which was enough to hold off a spirited Tongan side.

Captain Nalani May says they tried to keep their opponent guessing, kept them on their heels, and played the Fijian style of rugby.

May says they definitely got caught off guard in the second half, but they just regrouped on the field and stayed together.

In other matches yesterday, Moana Pasifika U20s beat Manu Samoa U20s 27-20.

Fiji will take on Moana Pasifika in round 2 this Saturday at 2pm.

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Fiji U20s secures 39-25 win over Tonga at round 1 of Oceania Rugby U20s Challenge - Fijivillage

Vakuruivalu wins bronze in the senior men's 109kg category at the Oceania Weightlifting Championship

24-year-old Timothy Vakuruivalu has made his mark in the senior men's 109kg category after winning a bronze medal at the Oceania Weightlifting Championships that was held on the 24th of February, 2024, in Auckland, New Zealand.

With a weightlifting journey spanning nine years, Vakuruivalu showcased his prowess by snatching 120kg and clean and jerking 140kg, securing a well-deserved bronze in the senior category.

In a heartfelt dedication, Vakuruivalu expressed his gratitude and love for his family in New Zealand and abroad and also extended his appreciation to the Papatoetoe Weightlifting Club, where he has been based and training for the past few years.

The club's support and camaraderie played a significant role in his success.

Vakuruivalu also wishes to convey his thanks to Weightlifting Fiji for entrusting him with the responsibility of representing his country on the international stage.

His acknowledgment of their confidence in his abilities reflects the strong bond between the athlete and the national weightlifting body.

Weightlifting Fiji celebrates Timothy Vakuruivalu's bronze medal victory and commends him for his dedication, skill, and sportsmanship.

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Vakuruivalu wins bronze in the senior men's 109kg category at the Oceania Weightlifting Championship - Fijivillage

Peter Jonsson, Executive Editor, of Ericsson Mobility Report, Ericsson, says: The rate of data growth in mobile networks reflects consumers passion for enhanced mobile broadband-related applications. This trend will increase in pace as more consumers worldwide embrace 5G and new use cases emerge, triggering further growth in data traffic. As most traffic is generated indoors, where people typically spend most of their time, there is a growing need to extend 5G mid-band coverage both indoors and outdoors to ensure a comprehensive 5G experience in all locations.

5G mid-band combines high capacity with good coverage, making it an ideal choice for delivering the full 5G experience. Global 5G mid-band population coverage is currently more than 40 %, an increase from 30 %in 2022. The increase is mainly driven by large-mid-band deployments in India, but also several mid-band deployments in Europe.

The report also explores wireless connectivity for the manufacturing industry, how 5G is becoming a key determinant of production output and how it enables the agility required to support rapid changes and reallocation of resources.

Southeast Asia Highlights: 5G subscriptions will reach around 550 million in Southeast Asia and Oceania by the end of 2029. Beyond creating the initial 5G infrastructure in the region, the focus of the service providers is towards diversifying service offerings for both consumers and enterprises. Enhancing customer experience, expanding network coverage and promoting digital transformations for businesses remain top priorities across the region.

Mobile data traffic per smartphone continues to grow strongly in Southeast Asia and Oceania and is expected to reach around 66GB per month in 2029 from 24GB per month in 2023 a CAGR of 19 Percent.

Head of Ericsson Thailand, Igor Maurell says, Enhancing customer experience, expanding network coverage and promoting digital transformation for businesses remain top priorities for service providers in Thailand. At Ericsson, we are looking to support the Thai service providers to provide the full benefits of 5G to consumers and enterprises in Thailand.

The November 2023 Ericsson Mobility Report includes three in-depth articles:

Large-scale 5G SA deployment to drive digital transformation in India.

Demand for indoor connectivity driving the need for enhanced performance.

5G-enabled agility in gigafactories and green steel plants

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5G subs in SE Asia & Oceania to hit 550M by 2029-end - Nation Thailand

Engineering | News releases | Technology

November 29, 2023

University of Washington researchers found that when prompted to create pictures of a person, the AI image generator over-represented light-skinned men, sexualized images of certain women of color and failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. For instance, compared here (clockwise from top left) are the results of four prompts to show a person from Oceania, Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Papua New Guinea, where the population remains mostly Indigenous, is the second most populous country in Oceania.Ghosh et al./EMNLP 2023 AI GENERATED IMAGE

What does a person look like? If you use the popular artificial intelligence image generator Stable Diffusion to conjure answers, too frequently youll see images of light-skinned men.

Stable Diffusions perpetuation of this harmful stereotype is among the findings of a new University of Washington study. Researchers also found that, when prompted to create images of a person from Oceania, for instance, Stable Diffusion failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. Finally, the generator tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru) as well as those from Mexico, India and Egypt.

The researchers will present their findings Dec. 6-10 at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore.

Its important to recognize that systems like Stable Diffusion produce results that can cause harm, said Sourojit Ghosh, a UW doctoral student in the human centered design and engineering department. There is a near-complete erasure of nonbinary and Indigenous identities. For instance, an Indigenous person looking at Stable Diffusions representation of people from Australia is not going to see their identity represented that can be harmful and perpetuate stereotypes of the settler-colonial white people being more Australian than Indigenous, darker-skinned people, whose land it originally was and continues to remain.

To study how Stable Diffusion portrays people, researchers asked the text-to-image generator to create 50 images of a front-facing photo of a person. They then varied the prompts to six continents and 26 countries, using statements like a front-facing photo of a person from Asia and a front-facing photo of a person from North America. They did the same with gender. For example, they compared person to man and person from India to person of nonbinary gender from India.

The team took the generated images and analyzed them computationally, assigning each a score: A number closer to 0 suggests less similarity while a number closer to 1 suggests more. The researchers then confirmed the computational results manually. They found that images of a person corresponded most with men (0.64) and people from Europe (0.71) and North America (0.68), while corresponding least with nonbinary people (0.41) and people from Africa (0.41) and Asia (0.43).

Likewise, images of a person from Oceania corresponded most closely with people from majority-white countries Australia (0.77) and New Zealand (0.74), and least with people from Papua New Guinea (0.31), the second most populous country in the region where the population remains predominantly Indigenous.

A third finding announced itself as researchers were working on the study: Stable Diffusion was sexualizing certain women of color, especially Latin American women. So the team compared images using a NSFW (Not Safe for Work) Detector, a machine-learning model that can identify sexualized images, labeling them on a scale from sexy to neutral. (The detector has a history of being less sensitive to NSFW images than humans.) A woman from Venezuela had a sexy score of 0.77 while a woman from Japan ranked 0.13 and a woman from the United Kingdom 0.16.

We werent looking for this, but it sort of hit us in the face, Ghosh said. Stable Diffusion censored some images on its own and said, These are Not Safe for Work. But even some that it did show us were Not Safe for Work, compared to images of women in other countries in Asia or the U.S. and Canada.

While the teams work points to clear representational problems, the ways to fix them are less clear.

We need to better understand the impact of social practices in creating and perpetuating such results, Ghosh said. To say that better data can solve these issues misses a lot of nuance. A lot of why Stable Diffusion continually associates person with man comes from the societal interchangeability of those terms over generations.

The team chose to study Stable Diffusion, in part, because its open source and makes its training data available (unlike prominent competitor Dall-E, from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI). Yet both the reams of training data fed to the models and the people training the models themselves introduce complex networks of biases that are difficult to disentangle at scale.

We have a significant theoretical and practical problem here, said Aylin Caliskan, a UW assistant professor in the Information School. Machine learning models are data hungry. When it comes to underrepresented and historically disadvantaged groups, we do not have as much data, so the algorithms cannot learn accurate representations. Moreover, whatever data we tend to have about these groups is stereotypical. So we end up with these systems that not only reflect but amplify the problems in society.

To that end, the researchers decided to include in the published paper only blurred copies of images that sexualized women of color.

When these images are disseminated on the internet, without blurring or marking that they are synthetic images, they end up in the training data sets of future AI models, Caliskan said. It contributes to this entire problematic cycle. AI presents many opportunities, but it is moving so fast that we are not able to fix the problems in time and they keep growing rapidly and exponentially.

This research was funded by a National Institute of Standards and Technology award.

For more information, contact Ghosh at ghosh100@uw.edu and Caliskan at aylin@uw.edu.

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AI image generator Stable Diffusion perpetuates racial and ... - University of Washington

The Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Australasias packaging training and education body the Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP).

The strategic move will help strengthen the packaging industry in both Australia and New Zealand.

It will also allow the APCO and AIP to promote a circular economy for packaging in the region.

As part of this agreement, the APCO and the AIP will work together to improve the knowledge and adoption of sustainable packaging practices throughout the industry in the Australia and New Zealand regions.

The joint effort will involve providing proof points for the sustainability professionals related to their packaging and sustainability credentials.

These proof points will be delivered via AIP facilitation, as well as through various focused educational courses that will be provided to regional industry partners by the APCO in 2024.

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APCO Communications and Engagement head Chloe Rose said: Its important that sustainability professionals can provide proof points on their expertise in packaging recyclability.

This is an especially important step for organisations who need guidance on who has the knowledge, skills and experience in assessing recycled content in packaging. We are very pleased to be able to offer this APCO capability evidence to the industry.

The APCOs courses will primarily focus on honing the skill levels of industry partners and help them in understanding the existing concepts of the APCO and topics related to packaging sustainability, including the Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) programme.

The APCO also released its ARL Consumer Insights Report for financial year 2023.

AIP executive director Nerida Kelton said: After serving the industry for 60 years this agreement not only highlights our commitment to education but also signifies a pivotal step toward a more sustainable circular economy for Australasian packaging.

Together, AIP and APCO aim to elevate packaging knowledge and training and improve core technical competencies across the industry. This will drive positive change and set new standards for designing better packaging for the region.

Give your business an edge with our leading industry insights.

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APCO and AIP partner to strengthen Oceania packaging industry - Packaging Gateway

Auckland United will represent New Zealand at the OFC Womens Champions League tournament in the Solomon Islands next March.

By winning the Grand Final of the Womens National League, the Ben Bate-coached United side earned automatic qualification to the tournament, which is scheduled to be staged from March 10-23, 2024.

READ MORE: Auckland United claim Womens National League title with 2-0 Grand Final win >>>>

Main photo: Auckland United winners of New Zealands Grand Final at Go Media Stadium Mt Smart.Photo: Shane Wenzlick / Phototek.

The dates and tournament venue have been confirmed in the Oceania Football Confederations release of its competition calendar for 2024.

The OFC Womens Champions League will be the second such tournament, with the inaugural event won by New Caledonias AS Academy Fminine in June.

AS Academy Fminine won the five-team tournament in Papua New Guinea.

New Zealands representative club, Eastern Suburbs, withdrew in May, citing concerns over costs, timing and security.

READ MORE: Eastern Suburbs pull out of inaugural OFC Womens Champions League>>>>

Of the withdrawal, OFC says: The matter has been referred to the independent Ethics and Disciplinary committee.

A decision has yet to be announced.

The first OFC tournament drew praise from FIFA who are expected to announce plans to launch a FIFA Womens Club World Cup, possibly in 2025.

READ MORE: Inaugural OFC Womens Champions League draws praise from FIFA>>>>

The OFC Womens Championship is expected to provide the pathway for the regions clubs to qualify for the Club World Cup, in a similar way to how the mens competitions work.

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Solomon Islands to host OFC Women's Champions League in March - Friends of Football

Wellington Olympic or Auckland City will represent New Zealand at the next OFC Mens Champions League tournament to be held in Tahiti next May.

The Oceania Football Confederation have confirmed the tournament will be held from May 11-24, 2024.

Olympic and Auckland City will meet in a two-legged play-off in February/March to decide which club will head to Tahiti.

Main photo: The OFC Mens Champions League trophy. Photo: David Joseph / Phototek.

Eight clubs will contest the OFC Champions League in Tahiti.

Each member association decides the format for qualification to this tournament, and NZ Football chose for it to be the play-off between the top two teams in the Mens National League.

Seven of the qualifiers will come from play-offs to be held in February/March, including the two-legged contest between Auckland City and Wellington Olympic.

The eighth qualifier will be decided through a mini-tournament in February, involving clubs from the four lowest-ranked countries.

In recent years, the winner of the OFC Champions League has become the regions representative at the lucrative FIFA Club World Cup.

Auckland City, as current OFC champions, will go to this years Club World Cup in Saudi Arabia in December.

READ MORE: African champs await Auckland City if they win opening tie at FIFA Club World Cup>>>>

However, the format for the FIFA Club World Cup is changing to an expanded competition, for 32 clubs, and will be held four-yearly.

The first under the new format will be staged in 2025.

The Oceania representative will be the best-performing club in the OFC Champions League over the previous four-year cycle (2021-2025).

Auckland United will represent New Zealand at the OFC Womens Champions League tournament in the Solomon Islands next March.

READ MORE: Solomon Islands to host OFC Womens Champions League in March >>>>

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Tahiti tournament next prize for Wellington Olympic or Auckland City - Friends of Football

Industry veteran Gordon Treanor has been appointed as Licensed Sales Director for Australia at Suntory Oceania, the new $3bn partnership between Beam Suntory and Frucor Suntory.

Treanor brings more than 25 years of industry experience and insights into the international beverage sector. He played a pioneering role in establishing Lions global drinks business in Europe and Asia. As Managing Director for Lion Europe and APAC, he successfully integrated three businesses to deliver a platform to service beer, wine, and spirit brands.

He has also held Board roles for companies such as Heaps Normal, Remedy Drinks, and Schibello Coffee Group.

This is the first key appointment for Suntory Oceania, which will have a portfolio of more than 40 market leading brands, including Jim Beam and Makers Mark Bourbon, Hibiki Japanese Whisky, Canadian Club Whisky, -196, V Energy, Maximus, Suntory Boss Coffee among many more, and spans premium spirits, RTD, juice, water, soft drinks, coffee, energy, and sports drinks.

In his role, Treanor will establish and lead the Alcohol Route to Market team, a new unit dedicated to executing sales, channel, and customer growth strategies in the Australian market.

Speaking of his new role and the strategic direction for Suntory Oceania, Treanor said that the next few years will be transformational for Suntory and for the broader ANZ beverage industry.

At the core of the Suntory Oceania business is a new $400m cutting-edge manufacturing and distribution facility in Ipswich, Queensland, which will enable the business to own its supply chain from end-to-end unlocking capacity and capability.

Im excited to hit the ground running and to have the opportunity to build a best-in-class team as we work to become a $3bn multi-beverage powerhouse by mid-2025, said Treanor.

Under the Suntory Oceania partnership, Treanor will partner with Beam Suntory Oceanias Managing Director, Mark Hill and Frucor Suntory Oceanias Chief Commercial Officer Drew Fairnham to establish and deliver a brand-new alcohol commercial function.

Expressing his enthusiasm for Treanors appointment, Hill said: Gordons extensive industry expertise and unwavering enthusiasm for our One Suntory vision make him the ideal choice to lead the Licensed Sales Team. We look forward to his fresh perspective and industry acumen as we embark on this next chapter.

Frucor Suntory Oceania CEO Darren Fullerton said that Treanors appointment marks an important milestone in the business transformation.

His wealth of experience and proven track record will be instrumental in driving the success of our licensed sales strategy. We believe that under Gordons guidance, our licensed team will be a driving force in the Aussie beverage industry.

Treanor will work closely with the Beam Suntory team and will report into Frucor Suntory Oceania Chief Commercial Officer, Drew Fairnham.

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Gordon Treanor joins $3bn drinks giant Suntory Oceania - The Shout