Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Bloomfield, Lecturer, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University

Over recent months, reports of “a horror flu season” causing serious illness and death have dominated the headlines.

The high number of cases has led some people to question the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, and whether it’s worth getting if it doesn’t guarantee you won’t get the flu.

The flu vaccine is designed to cover the strains of the flu anticipated to circulate during the season. But even with the most sophisticated scientific processes, determining the right strains to include in the vaccine isn’t 100% foolproof.

Read more: When’s the best time to get your flu shot?

Sometimes the virus undergoes major genetic changes or “mutations” in a relatively short space of time. Reports of a “mutant strain” this year means there’s concern some people might catch a strain the vaccine hasn’t protected against.

It’s too soon to tell the full extent of the effects of this mutation on how well the vaccine has worked. But the 2019 vaccine is showing early signs of being a good match for the common strains of the flu circulating this season.

What’s in a name?

Influenza or “flu” isn’t just one virus; different strains circulate each season.

Flu viruses that cause seasonal epidemics in humans fit under one of two major groups: influenza A or B.

Influenza A is further broken down into strains or subtypes based on surface proteins called hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

We’re currently concerned about two subtypes which cause outbreaks in humans: A/H1N1pdm09 and A/H3N2.

Influenza B viruses are similarly categorised into strains based on two distinct lineages: B/Yamagata and B/Victoria.

Understanding the circulating strains is important because it gives us clues as to which age groups will likely be worst affected. Influenza A/H3, for example, has historically been associated with higher rates of disease in people aged 65 and over.

But the circulating strains are also important because they inform how the vaccine will be developed. A good match between the vaccine strains and what is circulating will mean the vaccine offers the best possible protection.

So how do we decide which flu strains are covered by the vaccine?

Every year, a new vaccine is produced to cover the strains that are predicted to be circulating in the northern and southern hemispheres. The World Health Organisation (WHO) uses a range of measures to determine which strains should be included in the vaccine.

Many of us who were vaccinated this year would have received a quadrivalent vaccine. This means it covered four strains in total: two strains of influenza A, and two strains of influenza B.

People aged 65 and over are offered a “high-dose” trivalent vaccine, which covers both A strains, and one B strain.

Read more: High-dose, immune-boosting or four-strain? A guide to flu vaccines for over-65s

The Australian Influenza Vaccine Committee (AIVC) reviews the results and makes recommendations for the Australian vaccine, which in 2019 covered the following strains:

• an A/Michigan/45/2015 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus
• an A/Switzerland/8060/2017 (H3N2)-like virus
• a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (Victoria lineage) – not included in the trivalent vaccine recommendation
• a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (Yamagata lineage).

Do we always get it right?

The basic premise of forecasting is that it’s a “best guess”. It’s a highly educated guess, based on analysis and evaluation, but it’s not a guarantee.

The effectiveness of a vaccine depends on a number of factors, only some of which are within our control. While the choice for the vaccine is made on the best evidence available at the time, the viruses circulating in the population undergo changes as they replicate, known as antigenic “drift” and “shift”.

If the changes are only small, we can still get good cross-protection.

Less frequently, a big genetic “shift” happens. If this occurs after vaccine development has started and the strains have been chosen, we are dealing with a so-called “mutant flu” and the vaccine will likely not be a good match.

So is this year’s vaccine is working?

Data available for this year are showing the majority of influenza cases in Australia have been influenza A – with some states reporting more H3N2 than H1N1, and others reporting a more even mix of both.

The WHO Collaborating Centre in Victoria is also reporting that the majority of specimens of all four strains they’ve tested this year appear to be similar to the vaccine strains.

Read more: We can’t predict how bad this year’s flu season will be but here’s what we know so far

While early indications are that the vaccine has been a good match in the 2019 season, the WHO Collaborating Centre has also recently confirmed there has been a mutation in the A/H3N2 strain this season.

It’s not clear yet if this mutation will have a significant impact on vaccine effectiveness, but it may at least partially explain the high case numbers we’ve seen so far.

Large vaccine effectiveness studies done at the end of the flu season will help assess the impact of this mutation. In the meantime, a mismatch on only one strain means the vaccine will still provide reasonable protection against other circulating strains.

It’s still worth being vaccinated

In the same way wearing a seat belt is no guarantee we won’t be injured in a car accident, a flu vaccine is no guarantee we won’t develop influenza this season.

A person’s underlying susceptibility, due to factors such as their age and health, will also influence how well a vaccine works.

Read more: Kids are more vulnerable to the flu – here’s what to look out for this winter

But the flu shot remains a safe and reasonably effective strategy to reduce your risk of serious illness.

While flu epidemics remain complex, advice to prevent flu transmission remains simple. Regularly washing our hands, covering our mouth when we cough or sneeze, and staying home when we’re unwell are things we can all do to help stop the spread.

– ref. The 2019 flu shot isn’t perfect – but it’s still our best defence against influenza – http://theconversation.com/the-2019-flu-shot-isnt-perfect-but-its-still-our-best-defence-against-influenza-120088

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gillian Oliver, Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Organisational & Social Informatics, Monash University

The recent case of paper medical files from a Brisbane hospital found on a busy street highlights the need for secure, controlled disposal of medical records.

The files were said to be from out-patient clinics and contained patient names and their appointments, but not medical details. Now Queensland Health is investigating the circumstances of how the files came to be found in public, rather than being safely destroyed by a contractor.

So how are hospitals and clinics handling their old paper records as they move to electronic systems? How are they dealing with the tsunami of files that need to be safely disposed of?

Read more: The Cabinet Files show that we need to change the nature of record-keeping

Your medical records, whether paper or electronic, need to be kept while they’re relevant to your care, with restricted access to protect your privacy. But who decides when medical records are no longer needed? What happens then?

Governments at all levels have legislation for this. For instance, the Queensland health department specifies what is destroyed and when, according to a schedule from Queensland State Archives. This covers medical records in the public health care system in physical form (paper, photographs, film), in electronic form or a mixture of the two.

This, for example, says “records displaying evidence of clinical care to an individual or groups of adult patients/clients” should be kept “for ten years after last patient/client service provision or medico-legal action”. There are a number of exceptions relating to, for example, clinical trials, mental health and communicable diseases. For each exception, there is a specific time period of how long the file needs to be kept.

Queensland State Archives also advises on how records are to be securely destroyed, either by shredding, pulping or burning.

Read more: Our healthcare records outlive us – it’s time to decide what happens to the data once we’re gone

Hospitals can contract commercial services to destroy paper files. But the document owner, in this case the hospital, is ultimately responsible for ensuring this is carried out legally.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has established practice standards for GP clinics. These require the secure destruction (for instance, by shredding) of paper records before disposal.

So, hospitals and GP clinics need to develop and implement policies and procedures that state explicitly when and how medical records should be disposed of, and also keep a record of when that happens.

However, to determine whether an individual medical record among the vast quantities held has passed its “use by date” can be extremely resource-intensive for administrative staff.

This means the ultimate driver of paper record destruction is more likely to be the need to free up expensive office or storage space. It’s this sort of scenario that might eventually play out into records being accidentally or deliberately dumped wherever, whenever.

The move towards digital records

The Brisbane situation highlights the limitations of “business as usual” in relation to medical records, which includes paper records held in multiple locations, in hospitals, in GP clinics and with specialists.

Consider your own medical record “paper trail”, which may include files from hospital admissions, records held by your local doctor or other specialist, and results of blood tests and x-rays performed elsewhere.

At both a personal and whole-of-population level, there are clearly numerous opportunities for unintended access to these physical documents. Centrally and securely stored electronic records can address this risk, and also carry a number of other advantages.

Read more: Opting out of My Health Records? Here’s what you get with the status quo

Privacy breaches relating to paper medical records are in part a function of a worldwide transition from a trusted familiar environment of paper records to electronic medical records.

This dramatically multiplies the volume of paper records needing to be destroyed — from only those that are “out of date” to every record that is scanned and made redundant.

The Brisbane case also highlights the sensitivity of medical records in all their forms, a factor also playing out in the My Health Record debate.

Read more: My Health Record: the case for opting out

Who do we trust to keep our sensitive medical records safe? Should our trust be placed in the old paper records (part of the the status quo) or a centralised electronic medical record?

The Brisbane situation, by highlighting the limitations of paper records, certainly challenges notions of trusting the familiar and favouring the status quo.

Read more: My Health Record: the case for opting in

So, what can we expect?

Like all transitions of this scale, there are a range of costs involved in moving from paper to electronic medical records, one of which is the prospect of further paper record data breaches as mountains of redundant records are destroyed. However these transition costs need to be balanced against the ultimate benefit of electronic records.

Even accepting these benefits doesn’t necessarily mean people will automatically become more comfortable with electronic medical records, like My Health Record. For that to occur, people also have to overcome a general lack of trust in government.

However, our research shows it is possible to encourage people to use online government services. By harnessing behavioural science, we have shown that providing customer support and promoting the benefits and ease of online services helps the transition from queuing and paper forms to using online services.

Hope for the future

In the rush to drag people to shiny new online platforms, this illustrates the simple act of talking people through the advantages and supporting their transition can address many of the psychological barriers to change.

Then, hopefully, we can see the end of paper medical records and services, and fewer paper records being dumped on the side of the road. As long as paper records exist they will be vulnerable to unauthorised access – either within a storage facility or in transit to destruction. However, each case of unauthorised access is dwarfed by the number of paper records successfully and securely destroyed, never able to be physically accessed again.

– ref. Paper tsunami: how the move to digital medical records is leaving us drowning in old paper files – http://theconversation.com/paper-tsunami-how-the-move-to-digital-medical-records-is-leaving-us-drowning-in-old-paper-files-119534

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Sinclair, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences and The UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia

What did we use before single-use plastics became ingrained in our everyday lives? Before the 1980s, plastic bags were a rarity in our supermarkets. In 2019, excessive plastic use feels not just normal, but necessary to sustain our hectic lifestyles. From takeaway containers and supermarket packaging to cheap, low-quality goods, plastic permeates our daily lives.

However, with every passing year the scale tips further against the immediate convenience of single-use plastics, and towards the extreme inconvenience of piles of waste. The true cost to society and the environment of a “disposal economy” is becoming increasingly stark.

Read more: Will the discovery of another plastic-trashed island finally spark meaningful change?

Finding solutions to eliminate plastic waste in everyday life presents challenges, particularly during large events such as professional conferences. At some time during our careers as academics, scientists, researchers, or industry professionals, we may be part of a conference organising committee. Back in the 1990s, conferences proudly tallied how many coffee cups they used – how times have changed.

As organisers of this week’s national conference of the Australian Marine Sciences Association, we took on the challenge to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk – by holding a plastic-free conference for 570 marine science professionals, academics, and students. But how do you cater for so many people while limiting waste and using no plastic at all?

Turning the tide – be part of the solution

We started this journey 12 months ago, once we knew the challenge we were facing: a marine conference, themed around the blue economy, during July, in the Western Australian port city of Fremantle – the birthplace of the Plastic Free July movement.

From day 1, we were clear we wanted to eliminate plastic and reduce overall waste – everything from day-to-day rubbish to plastic take-home novelties that feature at so many conferences but inevitably make their way into landfill.

Recycling is only a small part of the solution. We need to “refuse, reduce, and recycle” to really tackle plastic.

What we did

We began by selecting a like-minded event organiser to work with us. Then we looked for non-plastic alternatives for obvious conference items. Here’s what we came up with:

• stiff cardboard name badges with no plastic pockets

• bamboo lanyards with metal clips

• 100% natural conference tote bags

• no printed envelopes for registration packs, and no printed conference abstracts

• all necessary printing was done on sustainably sourced paper, by a company using a solar-powered printer

• delegates were asked to bring their own reusable water bottles and coffee cups, or pre-register to buy a reusable coffee cup at the conference

• coffee carts with returnable cups that can be washed and reused

• water jugs with glassware (or to refill personal water bottles) at the back of each presentation room

• no packaged mints or lollies

• sustainably sourced pencils instead of pens (with sharpening stations provided!)

• plates, silverware and glassware for all meal breaks

• vegetarian catering for tea breaks

• all exhibitors, workshop organisers and additional functions (such as the student night and public lecture) were committed to reducing plastic waste for free giveaway products and catering.

Most importantly, we delivered these changes without increasing the budget or impacting the bottom line.

What we learned

Plan early. Going against the grain can take a bit of work, but there are usually plastic-free options available. Take the extra time and file the solution away for your next event.

Work with everyone. Create a shared goal with your whole team: event organisers, venue, exhibitors, caterers – more ideas make for better solutions. This creates a ripple effect, not only for the event, but in developing more sustainable practice for other events.

Do a site visit. Identify potential problems and devise solutions ahead of time. Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder and executive director of Plastic Free July, visited our conference venue and provided valuable insights.

Don’t assume. At another marine conference we attended, plastic water bottles were replaced by jugs of water (great!) and polystyrene cups (not so great!). Not all suppliers are knowledgeable about sustainable materials, so make the effort to talk through what plastic-free and zero-waste really mean.

Removing ‘hidden’ plastics

No matter how much planning you do, there will always be “hidden plastics” in the supply chain. It is impossible to control every aspect of operation of the conference venue, their suppliers (food, linen services, waste removal), and the other hotels used by delegates (who may provide guests with water bottles, drinks, and personal hygiene products in rooms).

Read more: Climate change: seeing the planet break down is depressing – here’s how to turn your pain into action

Early buy-in by all service providers can help reduce this, but remember the goal is to change people’s attitudes towards waste, not to reinvent the entire events industry in one conference.

But if we can do it for 570 people, then everyone can start making similar changes at their own home and workplace too.

AMSA will host its annual public lecture, sponsored by the UWA Oceans Institute, in Fremantle on Wednesday July 10 at 6.30pm. It addresses the issue of plastic pollution and what can be done about it, both globally and locally.

– ref. We organised a conference for 570 people without using plastic. Here’s how it went – http://theconversation.com/we-organised-a-conference-for-570-people-without-using-plastic-heres-how-it-went-120157

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Thomas Henry Wright, PhD Candidate, Murdoch University

These days all text is digital. From writing an email to publishing a new edition of War and Peace, text nearly always exists on a computer first. Yet there are writers who take full advantage of the computer’s possibilities, utilising new technologies to broach complex subject matter.

Electronic or digital literature does not refer to e-books, but to works that depend on electronic “code” to exist. Put simply, you can print an e-book, but you cannot print electronic literature.

Within the field there is emphasis on experimentation. Many works are the result of authors simply trying new things out and seeing what happens. Here, then, are ten significant works of electronic literature you should know about.

Read more: When books go digital: The Kills and the future of the novel

A digital love story

Alan Bigelow’s How to Rob a Bank reinvents Bonnie and Clyde for the digital age. It can be viewed on a smart phone or in-browser. Users swipe the touchscreen or hit the space bar to reveal a narrative told through iPhone web searches, text messages, and app activities.

Critiquing a classic

Digital poet Benjamin Laird wrote Core Values in response to Dorothea Mackellar’s classic Australian poem My Country. Laird’s work is displayed in a three-dimensional box, viewed in-browser or using a virtual reality headset.

Text is broken, animated, and infused with geographical coordinates and data. Unlike Mackellar’s “sweeping plains”, “mountain ranges”, and “flooding rains”, Laird’s poem evokes claustrophobia. It critiques Mackellar’s poem, creating an Australia where the reader feels trapped.

Rewriting AI

Montréal-based David Jhave Johnston produced ReRites, using artificial intelligence trained to imitate contemporary poetry. The AI generates text which is then edited by Jhave. Recordings show this process in real time.

Twitterbots

Piotr Marecki’s Cenzobot is a Twitter “bot” (an automatically generated Twitter account) that tweets fragments from real Polish censors’ reviews of publications from the communist era.

Marecki conceived of this project following the Twitter Bot Purge of February 2018. He suspects Cenzobot will also be purged. Indeed, it is the goal of his work.

An environmental statement

T⁠h⁠e⁠ ⁠t⁠e⁠r⁠m⁠ “c⁠l⁠o⁠u⁠d⁠”⁠ computing ⁠emerged⁠ ⁠b⁠e⁠c⁠a⁠u⁠s⁠e⁠ ⁠⁠c⁠l⁠o⁠u⁠d⁠s⁠⁠ ⁠a⁠r⁠e⁠ ⁠p⁠e⁠r⁠c⁠e⁠i⁠v⁠e⁠d⁠ ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠b⁠e⁠ ⁠i⁠n⁠f⁠i⁠n⁠i⁠t⁠e⁠ ⁠r⁠e⁠s⁠o⁠u⁠r⁠c⁠e⁠s⁠. However, neither type of cloud is infinite, and few people acknowledge the energy used by large data centres. J.R. Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud tackles the environmental impact of “cloud” computing by calling attention to the clouds above us.

Fragments from Luke Howard’s 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds are pared down to produce Carpenter’s poetic verses with hypertext links that users can interact with.

The poetry is accompanied by animations of animals, which bridge the link between clouds in the sky and “cloud” computing. A cumulus cloud weighs as much as 100 elephants. By indicating 100 elephants in animation, the full weight of “cloud” computing’s environmental impact is evoked.

Political speech

A Dictionary of the Revolution by Amira Hanafi is an experiment in multi-vocal storytelling. Hanafi created a vocabulary box containing colloquial Egyptian words. Hundreds of voices were then asked to define the evolving language of the Egyptian revolution.

Choosing cards from the box, subjects discussed what the words meant to them and how the words’ meanings had changed. This research informed the project that includes woven imagined dialogues around each term.

Users click on the word to learn the story behind its meaning. Each word is connected to several others, forming a linguistic maze users are encouraged to get lost in. A Dictionary of the Revolution is available in both Arabic and English.

A novel idea

novelling by Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean is a novel combining text, video, and audio, available to read on a computer.

The work arranges media fragments in six-minute cycles to suggest a narrative between four characters. The interface changes every 30 seconds, or whenever the user clicks the screen, creating an ever-evolving story.

Robot interaction

The Listeners by John Cayley is a third-party app that creates a work of spoken, interactive literature. It builds on the infrastructure of the domestic robot “Alexa” (it is also possible to experience The Listeners using a smartphone and the Alexa app).

The user begins by addressing Alexa, saying: “Alexa, ask The Listeners.” The Listeners responds, listening and speaking in its own way. The user may extend the performance by saying “Continue” or “Go on” or “I am filled with anger”. This work explores themes of surveillance, and the very notion of allowing a domestic robot such as Alexa into one’s home.

Poetry/fiction hybrids

Jason Nelson’s Nine Billion Branches is a poetic narrative accessed online. Each page has numerous arrows, poems, and highlighted areas to read, play, and explore.

Nine Billion Branches is preoccupied with the poetry of the immediate world. Poetry exists beside photographs of escalators, garbage bins, and bedside tables. Much of Nelson’s recent work exists beyond the web, sometimes projected onto real buildings or landscapes.

Virtual reality

In the past decade, Mez Breeze has merged digital literature with virtual reality. In 2017, she created the virtual reality Poem/Experience Our Cupidity Coda, which can be viewed online or with a virtual reality headset.

This work emulates the conventions of early cinema. Just as early motion picture devices had the viewer look through a peephole window, the viewer (or reader) of Our Cupidity Coda is encouraged to treat the virtual reality headset in the same way.

– ref. From Twitterbots to VR: 10 of the best examples of digital literature – http://theconversation.com/from-twitterbots-to-vr-10-of-the-best-examples-of-digital-literature-110099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hanika Rizo, Assistant Professor, Carleton University

Earth’s magnetic field protects and makes our planet habitable by stopping harmful high-energy particles from space, including from the Sun. The source of this magnetic field is the core at the centre of our planet.

But the core is very difficult to study, partly because it starts at a depth of about 2,900 kilometres, making it too deep to sample and directly investigate.

Yet we are part of a research team that found a way to get information about Earth’s core, with details published recently in Geochemical Perspective Letters.

Read more: We made a moving tectonic map of the Game of Thrones landscape

It’s hot down there

The core is the hottest part of our planet with the outer core reaching temperatures of more than 5,000℃. This has to affect the overlying mantle and it is estimated that 50% of volcanic heat comes from the core.

Volcanic activity is the planet’s main cooling mechanism. Certain volcanism, such as that which is still forming volcanic islands of Hawaii and Iceland, might be linked to the core by mantle plumes that transfer heat from the core to Earth’s surface.

Yet whether there is any exchange of physical material between the core and the mantle has been a subject of debate for decades.

Our findings suggest some core material does transfer into the base of these mantle plumes, and the core has been leaking this material for the past 2.5 billion years.

We discovered this by looking at very small variations in the ratio of isotopes of the element tungsten (isotopes are basically versions of the same element that just contain different numbers of neutrons).

To study Earth’s core, we need to search for chemical tracers of core material in volcanic rocks derived from the deep mantle.

We know the core has a very distinct chemistry, dominated by iron and nickel together with elements such as tungsten, platinum and gold that dissolve in iron-nickel alloy. Therefore, the metal alloy-loving elements are a good choice to investigate for traces of the core.

The search for tungsten isotopes

Tungsten (chemical symbol W) as the base element has 74 protons. Tungsten has several isotopes, including ¹⁸²W (with 108 neutrons) and ¹⁸⁴W (with 110 neutrons).

These isotopes of tungsten have potential to be the most conclusive tracers of core material, because the mantle is expected to have much higher ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratios than the core.

This is because of another element, Hafnium (Hf), which does not dissolve in iron-nickel alloy and is enriched in the mantle, and had a now-extinct isotope (¹⁸²Hf) that decayed to ¹⁸²W. This gives the mantle extra ¹⁸²W relative to the tungsten in the core.

But the analysis required to detect variations in tungsten isotopes is incredibly challenging, as we are looking at variations in the ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratio in parts per million and the concentration of tungsten in rocks is as low as tens of parts per billion. Fewer than five laboratories in the world can do this type of analysis.

Evidence of a leak

Our study shows a substantial change in the ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratio of the mantle over Earth’s lifetime. Earth’s oldest rocks have significantly higher ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W than than most rocks of the modern-day Earth.

The change in the ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratio of the mantle indicates that tungsten from the core has been leaking into the mantle for a long time.

Interestingly, in Earth’s oldest volcanic rocks, over a time frame of 1.8 billion years there is no significant change in the mantle’s tungsten isotopes. This indicates that from 4.3 billion to 2.7 billion years ago, little or no material from the core was transferred into the upper mantle.

But in the subsequent 2.5 billion years, the tungsten isotope composition of the mantle has significantly changed. We infer that a change in plate tectonics, towards the end of the Archean Eon from about 2.6 billion years ago triggered large enough convective currents in the mantle to change the tungsten isotopes of all modern rocks.

Why the leak?

If mantle plumes are ascending from the core-mantle boundary to the surface, it follows that material from Earth’s surface must also descend into the deep mantle.

Subduction, the term used for rocks from Earth’s surface descending into the mantle, takes oxygen-rich material from the surface into the deep mantle as an integral component of plate tectonics.

Experiments show that increase in oxygen concentration at the core-mantle boundary could cause tungsten to separate out of the core and into the mantle.

Read more: The ‘pulse’ of a volcano can be used to help predict its next eruption

Alternatively, inner core solidification would also increase the oxygen concentration of the outer core. In this case, our new results could tell us something about the evolution of the core, including the origin of Earth’s magnetic field.

Earth’s core started as entirely liquid metal and has been cooling and partially solidifying over time. The magnetic field is generated by the spin of the inner solid core. The time of inner core crystallisation is one of the most difficult questions to answer in Earth and planetary sciences.

Our study gives us a tracer that can be used to investigate core-mantle interaction and the change in the internal dynamics of our planet, and which can boost our understanding of how and when the magnetic field was turned on.

– ref. Earth’s core has been leaking for billions of years – http://theconversation.com/earths-core-has-been-leaking-for-billions-of-years-119395

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The Morrison government plans to hold a referendum in the next three years on whether to enshrine constitutional recognition of Australia’s Indigenous people.

Announcing the commitment on Wednesday, the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, said he would

develop and bring forward a consensus option for constitutional recognition to be put to a referendum during the current parliamentary term.

He said he had begun seeking the counsel of Indigenous leaders on the best way forward.

Wyatt stressed the importance of bipartisanship, and will establish a cross-party parliamentary working group to assist with engagement to develop a “community model” for the referendum. The referendum’s chances of passage will depend on achieving a high degree of consensus with Indigenous communities and MPs in both major parties.

Labor’s shadow minister for Indigenous affairs, Linda Burney “will be integral to this process”, Wyatt told the National Press Club in a major speech outlining the Morrison government’s approach to Indigenous affairs. Both Wyatt and Burney are Indigenous.

Read more: Ken Wyatt faces challenges – and opportunities – as minister for Indigenous Australians

Wyatt did not indicate how he envisioned changing the constitution, which has been highly controversial in the last few years.

The May 2017 “Uluru Statement from the Heart” called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution”.

The Referendum Council proposed a national Indigenous representative assembly be added to the constitution, but this was rejected by the Turnbull government.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has recently shifted course and begun speaking with Labor leader Anthony Albanese about a bipartisan approach to constitutional recognition. Without bipartisanship, any referendum is doomed to failure; passage is difficult enough even with agreement of the major parties. The last successful referendum of any sort was in 1977.

Changing the constitution through a referendum requires an overall majority of votes and a majority in a majority of states. When Prime Minister Tony Abbott wanted to hold a referendum on Indigenous recognition, the plan slipped away amid arguments over its content and doubts about getting the necessary support.

Read more: Listening but not hearing: process has trumped substance in Indigenous affairs

Wyatt also promised the development of “a local, regional and national voice”. He did not spell out the detail of a national “voice”.

He said the concept of the “voice” in the Uluru Statement from the Heart “is not a singular voice”.

It is a cry to all tiers of government to stop and listen to the voices of Indigenous Australians at all levels.

All they want is for governments to hear their issues, stories of their land and their local history.

He said Indigenous communities are asking the three tiers of government to stop and take the time to listen to their voices.

The national interest requires a new relationship with Indigenous Australians based on their participation and establishing entrenched partnerships at the community and regional levels.

Wyatt also said he would work on “progressing how we address truth telling.

Without the truth of the past, there can be no agreement on where and who we are in the present, how we arrived here and where we want to go in the future.

Read more: Treaty talk is only one problem for Indigenous recognition referendum

On the treaty issue, he said it was was important for states and territories to take the lead.

Wyatt said the significance of symbolism must never be forgotten but “it must be balanced with pragmatism that results in change for Indigenous Australians”. He highlighted the new National Indigenous Australians Agency, which was set up by Morrison to oversee Indigenous affairs policy.

With the establishment of the agency on 1 July, we began a new era for the government to work in partnership with Indigenous Australians. It will provide opportunities for growth and advancement in education, employment, suicide prevention, community safety, health and constitutional recognition.

The most important thing that I and the agency will do is to listen – with our ears and with our eyes.

I intend to have genuine conversations, not only with Indigenous leaders and peak bodies, but with families, individuals and community organisations so that I can hear their voices and work together to agree to a way forward for a better future for our children.

He also wanted businesses “to sit with me around boardroom tables – and around campfires – and discuss how they can contribute”.

– ref. The Morrison government proposes an Indigenous recognition referendum this term – http://theconversation.com/the-morrison-government-proposes-an-indigenous-recognition-referendum-this-term-119998

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shahram Akbarzadeh, Professor of Middle East & Central Asian Politics, Deputy Director (International), Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

Iran’s announcement last Sunday that it would break the limit on uranium enrichment agreed to in the nuclear deal with world powers was not a surprise. It came hot on the heels of another breach only a few days earlier on the 300-kilogram limit agreed to in the deal on stockpiles of low-enriched uranium.

Iran had warned Europe that it would start dismantling the nuclear accord if the promised economic benefits of the agreement did not materialise. A year after the US withdrew from the nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, and imposed very strict sanctions on Iran, the Iranian leadership appears ready to give up on finding a diplomatic solution to this deadlock.

Read more: Iran’s nuclear program breaches limits for uranium enrichment: 4 key questions answered

This bodes ill for the future of President Hassan Rouhani and regional security. A weakened Rouhani will find it difficult to fend off his hard-line critics in Iran and keep the nuclear deal alive.

With every step away from diplomacy, the hard-liners have taken a step forward and appear to be now setting the political agenda in Iran.

Rouhani’s riskiest gamble

The JCPOA was signed in 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany.

This was Rouhani’s greatest achievement and riskiest gamble. He faced the ire of hard-liners in Iran who continue to have a formidable presence in the parliament, as well as the security and judicial system.

They accused Rouhani of selling out Iranian sovereignty and betraying the ideals of the Islamic revolution by scaling back Iran’s nuclear program and subjecting it to an unprecedented international monitoring regime.

Rouhani nonetheless pushed through his agenda of finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation because he believed that years of sanctions and mismanagement had pushed the Iranian economy to the brink of collapse.

He staked his political fortunes on bringing Iran out of isolation.

The JCPOA was the compromise deal to assure the international community that Iran would not pursue a nuclear weapons program in return for sanctions relief to revive the Iranian economy.

But US President Donald Trump never liked the deal. He campaigned against it and often questioned Iran’s commitment to it, though the UN International Atomic Energy Agency consistently reported on Iran’s compliance with the terms of the agreement.

Read more: Why Donald Trump is backing the US into a corner on Iran

Despite much lobbying by European powers, Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018 and reimposed severe unilateral sanctions on Iran, and anyone dealing with Iran.

Losing control to the hard-liners

Trump’s decision to tear up the nuclear deal was seen by the conservatives in Iran as a vindication of their feelings towards the United States. They lambasted Rouhani for putting his trust in the US.

In May 2019, the situation got even more tense after Trump announced that US warships were sailing to the Persian Gulf to counter potential Iranian hostility. No intelligence regarding a suspected Iranian threat was shared.

The escalation of tensions following the alleged Iranian attack on two oil tankers last month, and the downing of a US reconnaissance drone by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards has made it very hard to find a diplomatic solution. Drums of war are silencing voices of diplomacy.

While Rouhani came to office with an olive branch, he realises that he has effectively lost the political contest against his hard-line critics. He has another two years in office, but is at risk of losing the presidency if the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who yields ultimate power in Iran, is disillusioned with his performance.

This realisation has seriously undermined Rouhani, who appears to have adopted the language and posture of the hard-liners in relation to the US. It is unclear if this can save him in office, or embolden his critics who seem to be gaining significant momentum.

In May, the Supreme Leader appointed General Qasem Soleimani as the commander of the Basij paramilitary force, an arm of the Revolutionary Guards that suppresses domestic dissent.

Read more: Iran nuclear deal is hanging by a thread – so will Islamic Republic now develop a bomb?

This was a significant development for the hard-liners in case they seek to assert political control. Basij has been a ruthless security force inside Iran, and under Soleimani, could provide the necessary street support for a potential coup against Rouhani.

Soleimani has enjoyed a meteoric rise in Iran due to his performance as commander of Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ international arm operating mostly in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State.

He is considered a war hero by the public and now has the confidence of the Supreme Leader. This is an ominous development for Rouhani.

Breaking with the tenets of the nuclear deal was also clearly not Rouhani’s objective, as it would reverse his hard-won diplomatic gains and discredit his legacy.

Iran’s recent breaches on uranium enrichment and stockpiles were incremental steps to exert pressure on European leaders to adhere to their promises of sanctions relief. This strategy was predicated on the assumption that Europe has more to lose with the collapse of JCPOA than a rift with the United States. It can only be described as a desperate move, showing that Rouhani is fast running out of options.

The window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution is fast closing and the alternative scenario of the return of a combative government in Tehran is looking more and more unavoidable. This would shut the doors to diplomacy and increase the chance of confrontation with the West.

Trump accused Iran of not wanting to sit at the table. He may be fulfilling his own prophecy.

– ref. Iran’s leader is losing his grasp on power. Does this mean diplomacy is doomed? – http://theconversation.com/irans-leader-is-losing-his-grasp-on-power-does-this-mean-diplomacy-is-doomed-119997

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

Alice Gorman is a space archaeologist working on space junk in Earth orbit, deep space probes, and planetary landing sites. She explores what we can learn from these items and places as material objects, and also their heritage significance – what they actually mean for people and communities on Earth.

Alice features in The Conversation’s podcast series To the Moon and beyond, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing of July 1969. This is an edited extract from Alice’s interview with The Conversation’s Sarah Keenihan, published as part of our occasional series Zoom Out.

There is a lot of documentation about what’s been left on the Moon – but it’s amazing how much we don’t know.

There are things that have gone missing, like part of a thermal blanket that got ripped off a landing module. There are things that may have gone up there that we didn’t know about. An Apollo test module went walkabout in solar orbit and has only recently been found again.

Read more: Friday essay: shadows on the Moon – a tale of ephemeral beauty, humans and hubris

This is actually where archaeology becomes interesting. I don’t believe, for example, that anyone has ever fully documented the position of all of the boot prints of the Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

We know what they look like. We know that they’re there. They’re reproduced in countless photographs of the Apollo sites.

But has anyone ever actually catalogued them? Has anyone studied them for what they can tell us about how these human bodies moved across the lunar landscape, how they adapted to this environment so different to that of Earth?

What archaeology does is look at the difference between what people say they do, and what they actually do. Those footprints may reveal that astronauts were doing things that they didn’t even consciously recognise, since they didn’t speak about them or record them.

If you did an archaeological study of those footprints, we would expect to see differences from Apollo 11 through to Apollo 17.

We ought to be able to see the evidence of how each astronaut crew incorporated the knowledge of the previous one, and how the design of the suits and the equipment was changed or adapted from each previous mission. We should be able to actually chart this using physical evidence.

Protecting the Moon’s heritage

We must be strategic in how we protect our heritage on the Moon.

In 1969 the Apollo 12 mission landed just 180 metres away from Surveyor 3 – a robotic landing craft the US sent to the Moon in 1967. The astronauts approached Surveyor 3 and removed a camera and some other bits and pieces to take back to Earth.

When NASA analysed the materials, they found that the landing of Surveyor 3 itself plus the landing of Apollo 12 just on the edge of the crater had blown up lunar dust, which had abraded surfaces.

This gave us an idea of the dangers of lunar dust for human-manufactured materials.

A lot of the new missions being planned at the moment are talking about going to the Apollo and other sites, and removing samples for analysis that they can use to to gauge the impact of the lunar environment on human materials.

This is obviously extremely useful for planning missions further into the future, but at the moment there isn’t any sort of systematic way to do this. They could approach the Apollo sites and in the process completely erase all of those footprints and cause further damage by stirring up the lunar dust again.

There is an archaeological principle that you never excavate all of a site. You always leave an unexcavated deposit, or you leave rock art on the walls. You leave material for future scientists to sample because we don’t know what techniques will be available in the future.

Read more: Australian archaeologists dropped the term ‘Stone Age’ decades ago, and so should you

If we look at this from an archaeological perspective first of all, we ought to be sitting down and thinking: OK, what materials do we really need to collect? We’ve got the baseline from Surveyor 3 – what are the best materials to compare to that?

Perhaps we don’t need to take physical samples. We may have techniques we can use to remotely gather data from these sites without being destructive.

We also need to consider access to data. Let’s just say a Space X lunar mission visits a previous landing site – maybe one of the Apollo ones, and removes samples, studies them now. These objects are the property of the US government under the Outer Space Treaty. But SpaceX is a private company. Are they required to share the results of this analysis with their competitors?

This is something I haven’t seen much discussion about yet, but it needs to be worked out as everybody’s planning to go back to the Moon.

Cemeteries in space

It’s 50 years since humans went to the Moon – and now people are so focused on getting to Mars.

But what happens when another planet becomes home, when the first generations are born, live, and just as importantly, die in space?

Read more: Looking up a century ago, a vision of the future of space exploration

I often think the first death in space is going to be a big turning point for how we relate to it. There haven’t really been any so far. There was the unfortunate USSR Soyuz 11 mission to Earth orbit, where three cosmonauts died when they left the spacecraft – but they were recovered on Earth. [The crew died on their descent back to Earth after a technical fault caused their Soyuz capsule to depressurise.]

There have been other deaths, for example on the tragic Space Shuttle accidents, but they haven’t actually been in space.

It’s something people often overlook when talking about the prospect of settling on Mars. The risks are so great. People are going to die. They’re probably going to die if there’s any human settlement on the Moon as well.

So how will that impact how we look at space?

The first living things have already died on the Moon. The recent experiment in the rover deployed by China had little seeds inside that sprouted and then died.

Death is already “off Earth”, and we can expect more deaths in the future.

This is going to have to change how we feel about space. When we look at those planets in the sky and think there are cemeteries there; perhaps there are human bodies being incorporated into the lunar regolith or into the red Martian dust.

How does that make these places feel to us if they become cemeteries?

The Moon in 2069

In terms of sites on the Moon right now, there are around 50 different places where human culture has landed, and they’re quite diverse. A huge amount of USSR stuff, a huge amount of US stuff – but also Japanese and Indian and Chinese.

If we look 50 years into the future I expect that landscape will be even more diverse. We will have many countries who maybe at the moment are not considered to be spacefaring, but who will have sent their own missions to the Moon. Or maybe they’ve had experiments that are part of other people’s missions. Maybe they’ve sent their own astronauts.

I think the Moon is going to be culturally very diverse, with an archaeological record that reflects all of those different cultures as well.

Read more: Trash or treasure? A lot of space debris is junk, but some is precious heritage

We can also expect there will be mining installations. It’s likely these will be focused on the lunar poles, in craters where the Sun has not shone for 2 billion years. They’ve been in deep shadow all this time. They’re filled with this valuable resource people can use for fuel: water ice. So the craters might be the industrial centres of future lunar industries.

We may not see all of this from the surface of the Earth – but there will be satellites constantly streaming back footage of the surface, so we can see what’s going on there.

We might have our particular astronauts we like to follow. There might be constant updates on social media streams about what what they’re doing on the Moon.

We may be very intimately involved in the daily lives of these astronauts.

It’s likely there will be a form of lunar tourism, which involves us projecting ourselves into robots and going for a little jaunts across the lunar surface.

But I suspect the lunar tourism industry may not completely take off in the way people are imagining – simply because there will be too much at stake in protecting proprietary information about technologies and resources on the Moon.

In the future it won’t be rare anymore to think about being an astronaut. At the moment, over 500 people have been in space. Only those very few Apollo astronauts have been to the Moon.

Looking forwards, there’ll be hundreds of people who’ve been to the Moon and back, maybe even thousands. These experiences may not be rare and extraordinary anymore.

We might get sick of hearing people tell their stories about the work they did on the Moon. Maybe this will be commonplace. The Moon will just be like thinking about Antarctica. It’s remote, but still part of our world.

– ref. Footprints on the Moon and cemeteries on Mars: interview with space archaeologist Alice Gorman – http://theconversation.com/footprints-on-the-moon-and-cemeteries-on-mars-interview-with-space-archaeologist-alice-gorman-118911

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heiko Timmers, Associate Professor of Physics, UNSW

In his latest book, strategist and defence analyst Hugh White has gone nuclear, triggering a debate about whether Australia should develop and maintain its own nuclear arsenal.

But developing and sustaining modern nuclear weapons requires a certain combination of technologies and industries that Australia simply does not have. In fact, it may be safely estimated on the basis of approval and construction times for nuclear power reactors in other western countries that it would take some 20 years to establish such capabilities in the present legal and economic environment.

Opting for nuclear weapons also fails to consider the global implications of Australia abandoning its almost 50-year stance against nuclear proliferation.

The first step: nuclear power generation

White argues quite rightly that China may eventually overtake the US in terms of its industrial production and military reach. Speculating that this could entail a strategic withdrawal of the US from the western Pacific, he suggests Australia might find itself without the American defence umbrella to deter Chinese influence, or worse.

Read more: With China’s swift rise as naval power, Australia needs to rethink how it defends itself

But Australia would struggle to replace its long and successful alliance with the US with a limited nuclear deterrence capability. Even ignoring the issues generally involved in adopting new defence capabilities – evident in the many problems hindering Australia’s efforts to replace its ageing submarine fleet – the idea is fanciful given our current stance on nuclear energy.

Nuclear power reactors, uranium enrichment plants, missile technology and high-tech electronics manufacturing would all be essential to support truly independent efforts to develop a compact nuclear weapon that could be delivered by missile from a submarine and kept in a permanent state of readiness.

Neither power reactors nor enrichment facilities exist in Australia today, despite some pioneering research in both areas in the past.

Australia’s missile development and high-tech electronics sectors, meanwhile, are in catch-up mode or in their infancy due to years of economic reliance on mining, tourism and services. Advancing and establishing nuclear industries for the sole purpose of developing a nuclear weapons program would neither be practically nor economically viable.

Political will for nuclear energy?

The only way such industries could be developed realistically would be if Australia added nuclear power to its suite of power generation technologies.

Of course, Australia has large uranium deposits and a well-established uranium mining and export industry. And there appears to be increasing public support for nuclear power. A recent survey found that 44% of Australians support nuclear power plants, up four points since the question was last asked in 2015. Other polls indicate support might even be higher.

A well-developed nuclear power industry would eventually give Australia almost all the necessary technologies, personnel and materials to make and maintain a nuclear weapon. This includes, in particular, the ability to enrich uranium and breed plutonium.

Read more: A short history of Australia’s love/hate relationship with uranium

But herein lies the problem. Even if the public did eventually support a nuclear energy program, it remains unclear whether the necessary political will would be there.

Legally, the Howard government banned domestic nuclear power plants in the late 1990s – an act that would now need to be overturned by parliament.

In 2006, the federal government commissioned an inquiry led by Ziggy Switkowski into the future feasibility of nuclear power generation in Australia. The final report found that nuclear energy would be 20-50% more expensive than coal without carbon pricing. It also said a nuclear power industry would take between 10 and 15 years to establish.

Recently, Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the Morrison government was open to reversing the country’s nuclear energy ban, but only if there was a “clear business case” to do so. With the current widespread availability of cheaper, renewable energies in Australia, this makes the economics of nuclear power generation less convincing.

Lastly, in order to ensure true self-reliance, a delivery option for a nuclear weapon would have to be developed without purchasing technologies from other countries, such as the US. This would be incredibly costly and difficult to do.

When it comes to this sort of missile technology and high-tech electronics manufacturing, Australia is currently not leading in research and development.

Australia’s long-time stance against nuclear weapons

Even though Australia is not in a position to contemplate nuclear weapons due to its technological and industrial limitations, there are moral arguments against pursuing such a goal that should be considered carefully.

The country has been at the forefront of the international non-proliferation movement, ratifying both the UN Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1973 and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1998.

A 2018 poll also showed that 78.9% of Australians supported joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while only 7.7% were opposed.

Australians should remind themselves that these treaties have greatly contributed to peace and security in the world. Abandoning such longstanding principles of its foreign policy, which are aimed at creating a better, more peaceful world, would be an implosion of Australian character of massive proportions.

– ref. Why developing nuclear weapons is an unrealistic option for Australia – http://theconversation.com/why-developing-nuclear-weapons-is-an-unrealistic-option-for-australia-120075

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gery Karantzas, Associate professor in Social Psychology / Relationship Science, Deakin University

If you listen to any number of love songs, dating “experts”, or plunge head first into a romance novel, you’re likely to think it’s in our destiny to find that special someone – your soul-mate.

But how do you know if you’ve found “the one”? Will the birds sing? Will you see fireworks or a shooting star?

And for those who are yet to find “the one”, should you keep searching, or is it a misguided quest?

Research into the science of relationships spanning the last two decades shows maintaining a “destiny” mindset – that we are all meant to find that ideal person who completes us in every way – can be problematic for our love lives.

Read more: We all want the same things in a partner, but why?

Destiny mindsets affect how we evaluate romantic partners, as well as how we maintain lasting relationships.

For some, this mindset can even include a mental picture as to what that person should look like.

What are the costs of a mindset?

A destiny mindset may make a person less open to developing a relationship with someone who possesses many excellent qualities, but does not match an individual’s mental picture of “the one”.

A person who holds a destiny mindset may be more likely to focus on the potential faults or inadequacies of another, for example, rather than centre on their good qualities.

On the other hand, a person may not pursue a potential love interest in the hope that something better comes along that matches their vision of destiny. By maintaining a destiny mindset, they may reject real opportunities at finding love.

For those in an existing relationship, maintaining a destiny mindset can be associated with relationship satisfaction, if the current relationship closely (if not perfectly) matches one’s idea.

Read more: Mind the gap – does age difference in relationships matter?

But if the relationship is not in line with one’s vision of destiny, or if the relationship is evaluated as no longer matching one’s destiny, dissatisfaction can ensue.

Research suggests people who hold a destiny mindset don’t work as hard at their relationships because they have a very fixed view of their partner and relationship. They tend to accept things the way they are – either a relationship is meant to be or it is not – rather than putting in time and effort to make relationships things work and deal with relationship problems.

Is there a better alternative?

In contrast to a destiny mindset, some people hold a “growth relationship” mindset. This includes beliefs and expectations that a partner and relationship has the capacity to develop and change over time, and that problems or challenges can be overcome.

Research to date suggests a growth mindset is associated with more effective ways of coping with relationship challenges and using more problem-solving to deal with relationship difficulties.

People with a growth mindset experience various positives such as greater relationship and sexual satisfaction and have a better, more constructive way of handling conflict. A growth mindset has also been found to reduce the risk of a relationship ending.

Can you have both?

Some people recount meeting their partner and knowing they were “the one”. But when describing how their relationship has progressed over time, it’s clear they put time and effort into it and work on problems when they arise.

These people may hold beliefs about destiny, but overall, hold more of a growth mindset about their relationship.

These couples often acknowledge their partner and relationship has changed, for example, and often note that they’ve helped each other develop and grow over time.

Read more: ‘I’m not a mind reader’: understanding your partner’s thoughts can be both good and bad

So if you work hard at your relationship, and you and your partner help one another develop and grow, you may get to know each other so well that you feel as if you share one soul. Maybe that’s what is meant by a true soul-mate.

– ref. Have you found ‘the one’? How mindsets about destiny affect our romantic relationships – http://theconversation.com/have-you-found-the-one-how-mindsets-about-destiny-affect-our-romantic-relationships-117177

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Petty, Honorary Fellow in Criminology, University of Melbourne

Last week, Victoria Police arrested seven people who were alleged members of a professional begging “syndicate”. They were flown in from China on tourist visas.

In reporting this story, Australian media generated a considerable amount of public outrage. The idea that people who beg are somehow “faking” homelessness or poverty is one often used in tabloid media. Add an element of foreignness, and this story appears especially scandalous.

Most of the time, accusations of so-called “professional” begging are misleading, intended to demonise those who beg as deceitful and to legitimise the vilification of people who beg and/or are homeless.

Read more: Carelessly linking crime to being homeless adds to the harmful stigma

But in this case, it appears the label is accurate, or, more accurate than usual anyway. And given the commonalities shared by those arrested, such as age, nationality, and that they were reportedly living together in Melbourne’s CBD, there does appear to be a level of coordination involved.

Still, this doesn’t make their poverty and desperation any less legitimate, nor their exploitation more acceptable, and the use of criminal charges does not seem appropriate.

And given homelessness and begging are emotive issues prone to hyperbole and misinformation, this story highlights a few misconceptions worth addressing.

There’s no such thing as ‘professional begging’ in the law

In state law, there is no such thing as “professional begging”. Begging is a crime under Victoria’s Summary Offences Act, which makes no mention of “professionalism” or coordination other than to prohibit the procuring of a child to beg.

The people in this case have also been charged with possessing proceeds of crime. But this is only possible because begging, controversially, remains a criminal offence in Victoria, whereas other states have decriminalised the activity.

Read more: ‘I didn’t want to be homeless with a baby’: young women share their stories of homelessness

What’s more, it has been alleged in the past, but denied by the police, that Victoria Police has confiscated money from people begging in Melbourne.

Being homeless has a broad definition

Acting Inspector John Travaglini from Victoria Police stated that because those arrested were residing together, their claims of homelessness were “false” and “deceitful”.

But the majority of people experiencing homelessness in Australia do have access to some shelter – only a small proportion of the homeless sleep rough.

As well as rough sleeping, homelessness in Australia involves being in situations that fall below the minimum standard of housing, such as couchsurfing, staying in bedsits, hostels or boarding houses, or in living arrangements that are unsafe or overcrowded.

Given those arrested were reportedly sharing the same accommodation, they may very well meet definitional criteria for homelessness.

Read more: What’s in the name ‘homeless’? How people see themselves and the labels we apply matter

You don’t need to be rough sleeping to beg

Begging and rough sleeping are not the same thing. Some homeless people beg, others don’t. Some people who have somewhere to sleep engage in begging, because they are very poor or otherwise marginalised.

Those arrested had somewhere to sleep, but it doesn’t mean they are not extremely poor.

Travaglini also claimed these people were not vulnerable, unlike others who beg. But the arrested individuals were aged in their late 60s and 70s, and allegedly flew to another country for the purpose of begging on the streets: they look pretty vulnerable to us.

So if the allegations are true, these people seem especially vulnerable. Think of the older Australians you know: how many would agree to be flown to China to beg on the streets there?

Were criminal charges appropriate?

Ten years ago, the idea of people flying to Australia to beg as a scheme to make money might have seemed unlikely. But in an increasingly globalised and connected world, poverty and vulnerability have fewer geographic limitations.

It’s likely that Australia, given its enviable standard of living and economic standing, will see more examples of these kinds of activities, not fewer. And how we respond to these kinds of events will have increasing importance in the years to come.

Read more: Homelessness soars in our biggest cities, driven by rising inequality since 2001

In this case, we certainly support an intervention into this seemingly exploitative situation. But we question the appropriateness of criminal charges for those deployed on the streets to beg.

Charges may be appropriate for those coordinating this apparent scheme. But, like society’s responses to illegal drug use, levelling criminal charges at those on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy is unlikely to address anything in a meaningful way.

There is often debate about whether you should give to people who beg, and people will likely come to their own conclusions on this.

What worries us is that stories such as these further entrench public perceptions of the homeless as criminal, and of the vulnerable as exploitative and, worse, potentially dangerous.

We urge that people, should they wish, continue to give donations to those who seek them, and, more crucially, to demand action on homelessness and poverty from their politicians. Because continued inaction on these issues, whatever form they take, is the true crime.

– ref. Begging ‘professionally’ doesn’t make their poverty and vulnerability any less legitimate – http://theconversation.com/begging-professionally-doesnt-make-their-poverty-and-vulnerability-any-less-legitimate-120010

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anir Kumar Upadhyay, Lecturer in Built Environment, UNSW

Australian houses use significantly more electricity to stay warm or cool than estimated during the design stage.

To design a new house in Australia, the building needs to meet the national construction code. One way to do this is by using software to simulate the building’s thermal efficiency, to see if it meets the minimum requirements of the national house energy scheme. The scheme divides Australia geographically into 69 different climate zones and requires new houses to be thermally appropriate for their environment.

Read more: Are heatwaves ‘worsening’ and have ‘hot days’ doubled in Australia in the last 50 years?

Unfortunately, this software does not properly take into account our warming weather. Our recent report found the climate assumptions used by the government drastically underestimate the length and heat of summers in the near future.

In fact, buildings that perform best for heat waves predicted by 2030 are actually banned by the government’s building code. We urgently need to update our building codes to cope with our changing climate.

Understand the future local climate

We took Richmond in New South Wales as an example to understand the effect a changing climate might have on building performance. By taking predictions from CSIRO’s medium greenhouse gas emissions scenario, we analysed Richmond’s likely weather for every week of 2030.

The future outlook, shown below, is strikingly different from the weather files used to determine whether houses meet the minimum thermal performance requirement of the National Construction Code. In 2030, Richmond will experience a warm period almost four times longer than predicted by the official weather file.

Design for the future

Based on the future climate scenario, the design strategy for buildings in Richmond should focus on well shaded and insulated buildings to avoid any heat gain in the warm period, but should also harness sunlight to warm up the indoors in the cool period.

The warm period will last from December to March, when keeping the house cool is the priority. Passive solar heating, such as northern windows and well-insulated walls, floor and ceilings, are important during the May to September cool months, while direct ventilation is largely all that’s needed during the mostly comfortable April and October to November.

To test how houses will perform in a hotter future, we modelled a house in Richmond using AccuRate software. We found a design and construction solution that performed well (achieving 7.6 stars out of 10) for the 2030 scenario failed to meet a heating threshold that is legally required in NSW. In effect, the house that makes the most sense for the immediate future, could not be built.

These thresholds for heating and cooling are based on assumptions that are out of step with current conditions, let alone the future. Between 2016 and 2018 Richmond’s annual average temperature was 17.8℃, whereas the NatHERS weather file assumes it to be 16.7℃. This difference is set to increase.

In a 2019 amendment, the National Construction Code adopted NSW’s approach to heating and cooling thresholds to other climate zones in other states. The heating threshold puts a restraint on designing buildings that are optimised to mitigate extreme heat events.

This highlights the limitation of out-of-date climate files, and the current regulation that acts as a barrier to developing energy efficient designs for a future warmer climate.

Build to perform

A 2013 CSIRO study found that houses with higher star ratings using more energy in summer.

One of the reasons is the trade-offs on the thermal performance of one building component against another in the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) software. For example, a window without shading on the western façade is acceptable in a NatHERS simulation, whereas the same window would not be allowed if a glazing calculator developed by the National Construction Code were used to demonstrate the thermal performance of a house.

Other issues are trade workmanship, such whether a building is airtight. Airtightness in residential buildings is ignored in the national construction code. However, considerable energy savings can be achieved if a house can be made airtight.

Similarly, missing or displaced insulation in the ceiling, as shown above, can cause significant discomfort and additional heating and cooling costs. We all, from builders to homeowners, need to understand insulation must be carefully installed and cannot be moved later, or even well designed buildings will become inefficient.

Windows are the main option for ventilating most houses. However, if you live in a high-pollution or noisy area, or in a place with very little wind, open windows might not be desirable or practical. Consequently, households may not be getting enough fresh air to maintain a healthy indoor environment. A mechanical ventilation system, which uses little energy, is an ideal alternative.

Read more: Too many Australians have to choose between heating or eating this winter

The current weather files and heating thresholds used to develop minimum building standards are inadequate for our warming climate. Our report presents a framework for designing and building houses that consider climate change. We hope to see further research on other Australian population centres, so we can develop a comprehensive overview to help us build energy efficient and healthy houses for the future.

– ref. Houses for a warmer future are currently restricted by Australia’s building code – http://theconversation.com/houses-for-a-warmer-future-are-currently-restricted-by-australias-building-code-120072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Wilks, Adjunct Professor, Southern Cross University

Australia prides itself on being a safe travel destination. And feeling safe is one of the leading considerations for international students when choosing to study here.

So, a spate of robberies and physical attacks targeting international students in Melbourne in recent weeks is particularly concerning. This is especially so on the tail of media accusations that Australian universities are treating international students as “cash cows” .

Admittedly, international education is huge business. In the 2017-18 financial year, more than 500,000 international students injected nearly A$32 billion into Australia’s economy. The majority of these were university students.

International education is also Australia’s third-largest export earner. As Universities Australia’s Deputy Chief Executive Anne-Marie Lansdown said last year

Australians should be fiercely proud of this incredibly important industry. They should also be fiercely protective of it.

And this means being protective of its customers.

Federal education minister Dan Tehan responded quickly to the Melbourne attacks. He said the government was working with education providers to “ensure Australia is a safe and welcoming country for international students”.

Many safety frameworks already exist. The 2018 National Code of Practice for Providers of Education and Training to Overseas Students requires education providers to give overseas students information about safety on campus and while living in Australia.

It also states universities should have staff and support mechanisms in place to assist students. Mechanisms include health and counselling services, and immediate response to critical incidents such as severe verbal or psychological aggression, violence and physical or sexual abuse.

Universities generally do a good job on campus. Universities already have CCTV camera coverage, emergency phone points and active security services patrolling. Crisis counselling is also available at all campuses.

But it’s a huge challenge to protect international students travelling to and from the university, and in day-to-day living in local communities.

Safety outside university

University students are often victimised on public transport. In one Melbourne study of all students (local and international) nearly 80% of female students surveyed and an equivalent proportion of LGBTI+ students, said they had been the victims of unwanted sexual gestures, comments, advances, exposed genitals, groping, or being followed on public transport in the previous three years. More than half of men reported having been victimised.

Read more: Students don’t feel safe on public transport but many have no choice but to use it

Women said they adopted a range of behaviours, from avoiding certain lines and stops to ensuring they are met at a stop. They said they were on constant alert to mitigate their risk of victimisation. A concerning finding was that only 5.7% of those who had been victimised reported this to anyone in authority.

The recent rape and murder of 21-year-old international student Aiia Maasarwe in Melbourne highlights the danger of travelling alone at night and use of public transport. Ms Maasarwe was walking home at night after getting off a tram near La Trobe University in Bundoora.

Another study on the community safety of international students in Melbourne found international students were more likely than domestic students to report that, when their safety was threatened, there was a racial, religious or cultural element to the threat.

Violence can also be opportunistic, with environmental factors such as travelling at night and the use of public transport heightening the risk.

What universities can do

Orientation programs are a good start and an opportunity to offer safety information to international students. This can be done through videos and presentations by police and other service providers, along with online resources that can be accessed 24/7.

Personal safety tips include leaving valuables at home when going out and not carrying large amounts of money, knowing the 000 (triple zero) national emergency number and how to interact with the operator. Many universities now have mobile apps that provide access to emergency and security resources.

But orientation programs, two or three times a year, are intense periods of information overload where personal safety is one of many topics to be covered in a limited amount of time. They are not enough by themselves.

Universities can address some public safety issues through measures such as thoughtful timetabling that reduces night travel to and from campus, working directly with transport authorities to enhance safety on buses and trains and establishing a close working relationship with local police.

These strategies are part of a growing international approach called Healthy Universities that promotes health, safety and well-being for staff and students.

As part of its Safe Campuses It’s On All of Us program, Griffith University offers self-defence classes to staff and students. The focus is not just on protecting oneself but also understanding when and where you might be vulnerable and how to develop strategies to avoid personal injury.

Most universities have a MATES (Mentoring and Transition Equals Success) or equivalent mentoring program for new students to help connect with other students and learn about university life. This existing network could be mobilised to promote international student safety if the mentors were appropriately trained, resourced and supported by their universities.

Read more: Meet me at the bar! How uni students interact on a campus, and why chocolate can help

Australian universities have proactively addressed sexual assault and sexual harassment through the Respect. Now. Always. initiative. This means a broad framework for international student safety is already in place to run the necessary face-to-face workshops and training programs, liaise with police and encourage reporting of incidents.

Of course this will require more dedicated staff and resources in the international offices so programs are sustainable.

There is already enough policy and general advice in place about the safety of international students. What we need is more operational programs with the police and other key stakeholders, leading to evidence-based practice.

In particular, evaluation of real world initiatives is needed to know what works and what does not. This way we can confidently reassure international students and their families that personal safety is a priority.

Mid-year orientation is occurring right now. This provides a timely opportunity to focus on international student safety.

– ref. Recent campus attacks show universities need to do more to protect international students – http://theconversation.com/recent-campus-attacks-show-universities-need-to-do-more-to-protect-international-students-120082

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute

Compulsory superannuation was sold to Australians on the basis that it would make us better off.

But as the government prepares for an independent inquiry into retirement incomes, new Grattan Institute research finds that increasing compulsory contributions from 9.5% of wages to 12%, as has been legislated, would leave many Australian workers poorer over their entire lifetimes.

They would sacrifice a significantly increased share of their lifetime wage in exchange for little or no increase in their retirement income.

The typical worker would lose about A$30,000 over her or his lifetime.

More compulsory super means lower wages

Superannuation delivers higher incomes in retirement at the expense of lower incomes while working.

Yet the superannuation lobby usually presents only one side of the pact, urging an increase in compulsory super to get the higher retirement incomes while ignoring the income that workers have to forgo to get them.

Compulsory super contributions are paid by employers. But they appear to come out of funds the employers would otherwise have spent on wages.

This means increases in compulsory super come at the expense of wage increases – something that was acknowledged when compulsory super was set up (indeed, it was part of the reason it was set up) and has been acknowledged by advocates of higher contributions, including the former opposition leader Bill Shorten).

Read more: Productivity Commission finds super a bad deal. And yes, it comes out of wages

Grattan Institute calculations suggest that lifting compulsory super to 12% by 2025 will take up to A$20 billion a year from workers’ pockets. For most, the trade-off isn’t worth it.

The reality is that most Australians can already look forward to a better living standard in retirement than they had while working – even if they interrupt their careers to care for children. Workers with interrupted employment histories lose super in retirement, but get larger part-pensions.

The poorest Australians get a clear pay rise when they retire: the age pension is worth more than their after-tax income while working.

Other Grattan Institute research finds retirees are more comfortable financially than any other group of Australians and are much less likely to suffer financial stress than working-age Australians.

It needn’t lead to better retirement

So what about Middle Australia?

Despite the “magic” of compound returns, just about all of the extra income from a higher super balance at retirement would be offset by lower pension payments, due to the pension assets test.

It is always possible the pension rules will change, but it isn’t usually regarded as wise to assess proposals on the basis of changes that haven’t happened and aren’t being suggested.

Pension payments themselves would also be lower under a 12% superannuation regime. They are benchmarked to wages, which would be lower if employers have to put more into super.

The graph below shows that the big winners from higher compulsory super would be the wealthiest 20% of Australian earners, who would benefit from extra super tax breaks and would be unlikely to receive the age pension anyway.

Higher compulsory super redistributes income from the middle to the top. Middle earners would be no better off.

Over a lifetime, it could be a net loss

As higher compulsory super would leave Middle Australians no better off in retirement, but poorer while working, it follows that it would make them poorer over their entire lives.

How much poorer? We calculate that, after adjusting for inflation, the typical (median) 30-year-old Australian worker earning A$58,000 today would lose about 2.5% of wages each year and get less than a 1% boost to retirement income.

As a result, that person’s lifetime income would be almost 1% lower – about A$30,000 lower.

A post published on the Grattan Blog today gives more detail on the method we used to calculate the impact of higher compulsory super on lifetime incomes.

And it would cost the budget

Higher compulsory super might be justified if it saved the budget money on the pension – because those savings could be used to compensate middle-income earners via lower taxes or more services.

But in fact, higher super would cost the budget.

Our modelling shows that lifting compulsory super to 12% of wages would cost taxpayers an extra A$2 billion to A$2.5 billion per year in super tax breaks, overwhelmingly directed at high-income earners.

Read more: Myth busted. Boosting super would cost the budget more than it saved on age pensions

Those extra super tax breaks would dwarf any budget savings on the age pension until about 2060 – by which time there would be 80 years of budget costs from compulsory super to pay back before the whole exercise saved the government money.

Here’s the bottom line, worth keeping in mind in the lead-up to the independent inquiry: it’s hard to think of a policy less in the interests of working Australians than more compulsory super.

– ref. Super shock: more compulsory super would make Middle Australia poorer, not richer – http://theconversation.com/super-shock-more-compulsory-super-would-make-middle-australia-poorer-not-richer-120002

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlin Vincent, Lecturer in Creative Industries, University of Melbourne

In the first act of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical A Little Night Music, the long-suffering Countess Charlotte Malcolm mentions her younger sister, noting, “Dear Marta has renounced men and is teaching gymnastics in a school for retarded girls in Bettleheim”.

When first written for the show’s Broadway premiere in 1973, this was intended as a laugh line that transitions into the famous duet, Every Day a Little Death. But nearly 50 years later, it stands out for all the wrong reasons.

During Victorian Opera’s recent production of the musical in Melbourne, the use of the pejorative term “retarded” prompted an audible intake of breath from the audience, with many visibly shifting in their seats.

When the performers began the duet, the audience’s discomfort was largely forgotten. Yet the moment highlights one of the most significant challenges facing opera companies in the 21st century: an ever-widening gap between a repertoire that is frozen in time and an audience that is continuing to evolve.

This issue is increasingly coming to the fore in opera circles, as the stories presented on stage seem more and more removed from the modern realities of #MeToo and efforts to achieve racial and gender equality. In Australia recently, more than 190 composers, directors, and musicians signed a call to action to remove sexism and gendered violence from operatic works.

But the problem is deep-rooted and stems from opera’s nature as a historical art form.

The problem of the canon

The music and text of an opera are largely fixed, but stage interpretations can vary wildly depending on the performers, stage direction, design, venue, and budget.

This tension between score and stage has existed since opera’s emergence in 17th century Venice. With the turn of the 20th century, however, the operatic canon became codified as a collection of Greatest Hits, in which long dead composers like Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini still reign supreme.

Opera companies are diversifying their programming with musical theatre, 20th century offerings (for example, works by British composer Benjamin Britten), and newly-commissioned works. Still, consider the five most performed operas in the world in 2018-2019: La Traviata, The Magic Flute, La bohème, Carmen, and The Barber of Seville. The most recent of these? La bohème, which premiered in 1896.

It’s not surprising that some of opera’s most canonical works struggle to find relevance with a modern-day audience. But this tension reaches a boiling point when it comes to operas that contain racist and misogynistic elements.

See, for example, the ethnic exoticism deployed in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Delibes’ Lakmé; the Chinese stereotypes in Puccini’s Turandot, the lightly-veiled anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the Muslim caricatures in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, and the gendered violence in Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Tosca, to name just a few.

Read more: Why we must keep talking about Wagner and antisemitism

Many of these works have become even more problematic because of longstanding production conventions. Up until 2015, white tenors were still wearing “blackface” makeup when performing the titular role in Otello at The Metropolitan Opera. Productions of Madama Butterfly, Turandot, and The Mikado regularly put non-Asian performers in “yellowface” makeup.

Russian soprano Anna Netrebko recently caused a firestorm on social media after posting a selfie of herself wearing “brownface” makeup for a production of Aida.

Opera Australia prompted a similar backlash after casting a non-Hispanic performer as Maria for its 2019 production of West Side Story, a work with its own lengthy tradition of white performers playing Puerto Rican characters.

Opera traditionalists have long clung to the view that opera productions should function as historical artefacts, adhering to the intentions of the original composer and librettist as well as the way a work has “always” been done. The Facebook page Against Modern Opera Productions, which boasts more than 59,000 followers, is an online bastion of this viewpoint.

But when a work’s score and staging traditions are at odds with modern-day cultural norms, traditionalists may find themselves defending aspects of works that, in any other context, would be classified as racist and/or sexist.

Strategies for change

As opera audiences continue to dwindle, companies need to find a way forward that doesn’t alienate either traditionalists or the younger, more socially-minded generation.

One strategy used by the Canadian Opera Company was to rewrite the dialogue for Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio in order to remove racist language. Companies such as Seattle Opera have endeavoured to foster dialogue around troubling works like Madama Butterfly by scheduling accompanying events on diversity and representation.

Another common strategy is to commission new translations or use modernised supertitles (the opera equivalent of subtitles) that revise outdated language. In the case of Victorian Opera’s A Little Night Music, a minor edit to replace “retarded” with an alternate term might have been appropriate.

More generally, arts organisations are facing broader calls to diversify their casts and creative teams. The US-based organisation Final Bow for Yellow Face actively lobbies companies to “replace caricature with character” in productions across ballet, opera, and theatre.

These goals are difficult to achieve, particularly when traditional productions of works like Madama Butterfly and Turandot regularly pack in audiences worldwide. As audiences continue to evolve, however, the opera industry will soon need to grapple with larger questions about which works still belong in the “canon”.

In the meantime, perhaps the best option is to imagine what the original composer and librettist would really want. Would they rather have an audience that is wholly engrossed in the narrative unfolding on stage … or one that is uncomfortably shifting in their seats?

– ref. Opera is stuck in a racist, sexist past, while many in the audience have moved on – http://theconversation.com/opera-is-stuck-in-a-racist-sexist-past-while-many-in-the-audience-have-moved-on-120073

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Sevior, Associate Professor of Physics, University of Melbourne

Iranian officials this week revealed that the country’s nuclear program will break the limit for uranium enrichment, set under the terms of the deal struck in 2015 between Iran and world powers including the United States under former president Barack Obama.

Read more: Uranium, plutonium, heavy water … why Iran’s nuclear deal matters

What is uranium enrichment?

The nucleus of a uranium atom is a very rich source of energy. The splitting of a uranium atomic nucleus – a process called nuclear fission – produces more than 20 million times more energy than a strong chemical reaction such as burning a molecule of natural gas.

Atomic nuclei are made of two types of subatomic particles: protons and neutrons. All uranium atoms contain 92 protons, but can contain varying numbers of neutrons. Each specific combination of neutrons and protons is called an isotope. Isotopes are named according to the total number of protons and neutrons – hence, uranium-238 (U-238) contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons, whereas U-235 contains three fewer neutrons.

U-235 undergoes nuclear fission more readily than U-238, making it more valuable as a source of nuclear energy. What’s more, only U-235 can sustain a “nuclear chain reaction”, in which enough neutrons are released during nuclear fission to trigger fission in neighbouring atomic nuclei. This process is necessary to efficiently release large amounts of energy – either in a controlled way, such as in a nuclear power station, or in an uncontrolled explosion such as in a nuclear bomb.

Natural uranium, however, contains just 0.7% U-235, and 99.3% U-238. Commercial nuclear reactors designs generally require uranium fuel with U-235 concentrations of between 3.5% and 5%.

Uranium enrichment is the process of artificially increasing the proportion of U-235 in a sample of uranium to meet this requirement.

What does the process involve?

The technical details of uranium enrichment technology are highly classified, but we know the most efficient technique uses a process called centrifuge enrichment.

This involves reacting the uranium with fluorine to form a gas called uranium hexafluoride (UF₆). This is then spun at very high speeds in a series of centrifuges.

UF₆ molecules containing the heavier U-238 isotope are forced to the outside of the centrifuge, where they are removed. The remaining gas is thus richer in U-235, hence the term “enrichment”.

By feeding the mixture through a succession of centrifuges, the uranium becomes successively more enriched. Higher levels of uranium enrichment are therefore more expensive and time-consuming.

A typical 1-gigawatt commercial nuclear reactor contains one reactor and uses around 27 tonnes of enriched uranium fuel per year, although this depends on the quality of the nuclear fuel used. In a commercial market this costs around US$40 million, which is a small fraction of the US$450 million revenue that would be generated if we assume an electricity price of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Does it inevitably lead to weapons?

The technical details of nuclear weapons development are more closely guarded still. But we know that a uranium fission weapon requires tens of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, with U-235 concentrations of around 90%.

While the level of enrichment is much higher, there is no difference in the equipment used to make weapons-grade uranium, as opposed to nuclear fuel.

The same facilities used to produce 27 tonnes of 3.6% U-235 fuel for a commercial reactor could conceivably also be used to make one tonne of U-235 enriched to 90% – roughly enough for 20 nuclear weapons.

However, the post-processing of the UF₆ to make nuclear fuel is considerably different to that required for a weapon. In the case of nuclear fuel, it is formed into uranium oxide pellets and encased in zirconium alloy tubes. Weapons require pure uranium metal.

What limit has Iran breached, and what does it stand to gain?

Under the treaty, Iran agreed to enrich uranium to no more than 3.6%, and to only stockpile enough fuel to run its single commercial nuclear reactor for one year.

It has already breached the stockpiling limit, and has now broken the enrichment limit.

Read more: The Iran nuclear deal could still be saved, experts say

In theory, these breaches could allow Iran’s nuclear reactor to run more economically and for a longer time before the fuel needs to be replaced. However, these higher-enrichment fuels require very specialised processing, and only a handful of companies worldwide have the technology to do this. The waste handling required for the spent fuel is also more sophisticated.

Whatever Iran’s ultimate aim, and despite the diplomatic tensions, its uranium enrichment levels are not yet near those required for nuclear weapons.

– ref. Iran’s nuclear program breaches limits for uranium enrichment: 4 key questions answered – http://theconversation.com/irans-nuclear-program-breaches-limits-for-uranium-enrichment-4-key-questions-answered-119992

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robin Daly, Professor of Exercise and Ageing, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University, Deakin University

As we grow older, the size and strength of our muscles progressively deteriorates. This can affect our capacity to perform everyday activities like standing up from a chair, climbing stairs or carrying groceries.

For some people, muscle wasting becomes more severe, leading to falls, frailty, immobility and a loss of autonomy.

People who experience a marked loss in their muscle mass, strength and function may be suffering from a major but poorly recognised muscle-wasting condition called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is to our muscles what osteoporosis is to our bones.

Sarcopenia is now recognised as a disease after being added to Australia’s formal list of diseases, called the (ICD-10-AM).

Read more: I’ve Always Wondered: why do our muscles stiffen as we age?

Given the condition may affect almost one-third of older adults in the community, it’s high time its impact is recognised and talked about.

The good news is that people with sarcopenia can rebuild their muscle mass and strength via strength or resistance training and some diet modifications. In fact, these are things we can all do to protect ourselves.

What causes sarcopenia?

Ageing disrupts the body’s ability to produce the proteins needed to grow or maintain muscles. As we age, fewer signals are also sent from the brain to the muscles, leading to a loss in the mass and size of our muscles.

Other causes of sarcopenia can include:

• Physical inactivity
• Malnutrition
• Changes in hormones like testosterone and growth hormones
• Increased inflammation
• The presence of other age-related diseases

Read more: Diseases through the decades – here’s what to look out for in your 40s, 60s, 80s and beyond

Who gets sarcopenia?

It’s been estimated that sarcopenia affects 10-30% of older adults living in the community, varying by age and ethnicity. This increases to around 40-50% in those aged over 80 or living in nursing homes, and up to 75% in older hospital inpatients.

Sarcopenia is most common in older people, but can also occur earlier in life. In our 40s, muscle mass and strength begin to decline, and without intervention such as regular exercise, this loss accelerates with age. By the age of 70, up to half of muscle mass is lost and this is often replaced with fat and fibrous tissue, particularly in people who are inactive.

Sarcopenia is common in people with other diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Many of the drugs used to treat these conditions can contribute to sarcopenia, as they can cause an imbalance in muscle metabolism and disrupt the pathways that control muscle mass.

Yet because many health professionals have little knowledge of sarcopenia and its consequences, they don’t necessarily consider or treat age-, diet– or drug-related muscle wasting.

Consequences of sarcopenia

Skeletal muscle is the largest organ in the body, making up around 40% of body weight. It’s essential for both movement and metabolic functions such as regulating blood glucose levels. So it’s not surprising that sarcopenia is linked to many adverse health outcomes.

Sarcopenia has been associated with impaired mobility, osteoporosis, falls, fractures, frailty, poor outcomes after surgery, institutionalisation, hospital admissions, impaired quality of life and premature death.

Treating sarcopenia

There are currently no approved medications to treat sarcopenia, and research to identify new drugs has been inconclusive. The most effective approach we have is resistance or strength training, which should be done at least twice a week in combination with a nutritional (protein-enriched) intervention.

Skeletal muscle has a remarkable ability to adapt and regenerate in response to loading. Gains in muscle mass of 5-10% and improvements in muscle strength or power of 30-150% have been observed after 12 weeks of resistance training, even in older nursing home and hospitalised patients and the very old. This is equivalent to regaining the muscle mass lost over a decade.

Read more: Why hip fractures in the elderly are often a death sentence

Everyone will respond to resistance-type exercise if it’s appropriately prescribed, but fewer than 15% of older Australians participate in twice-weekly resistance training.

Accredited exercise physiologists are best positioned to prescribe and deliver evidence-based exercise programs for older people and those with chronic diseases including sarcopenia.

Nutritional factors, such as protein, are also important for maintaining muscle, particularly in older patients who may be malnourished. To ensure an adequate intake of protein each day, most people should aim for one to three serves of lean meat, poultry, fish/seafood, eggs, nuts/seeds, or legumes.

Low vitamin D has also been linked to muscle weakness and falls. Sunlight exposure is the main way to get vitamin D, but where appropriate, a doctor may recommend a vitamin D supplement.

Moving forward

Recognition of sarcopenia as a distinct disease in Australia is critical to raise awareness of the condition among health professionals and the wider community.

Improved awareness will lead to better routine treatment for people with sarcopenia. For example, a GP who identifies a patient with sarcopenia can refer them to an exercise physiologist under a chronic disease management plan, which includes up to five Medicare-rebated sessions with an allied health professional over a calendar year.

Read more: Do you even lift? Why lifting weights is more important for your health than you think

More broadly, recognition is an essential step if we’re going to see any changes to public health policy. It will enable the collection of more rigorous data on the prevalence of sarcopenia, and pave the way for additional resources to be targeted towards prevention.

Right now, the biggest challenge in the field is accurately and consistently diagnosing the condition. The type of assessments for muscle mass, strength and function used to diagnose sarcopenia continue to be debated. We need to progress towards a single international definition that includes region- and ethnic- specific criteria.

– ref. The muscle-wasting condition ‘sarcopenia’ is now a recognised disease. But we can all protect ourselves – http://theconversation.com/the-muscle-wasting-condition-sarcopenia-is-now-a-recognised-disease-but-we-can-all-protect-ourselves-119458

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Griffith Law School, Griffith University

The Lowy Institute has launched a three-year study on gender representation in Australia’s diplomatic, defence and intelligence services, and the findings are critical: gender diversity lags significantly behind Australia’s public service and corporate sector, as well as other countries’ foreign services.

In a field which has long ignored research on gender or feminist approaches to understanding international relations, this report is welcome and sets forth an important research agenda within Australia.

Gender diversity is an important issue for all who value the pursuit of Australia’s national interests overseas. Attracting and retaining the best talent is more important now than ever before.

As then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in June 2017:

The economic, political and strategic currents that have carried us for generations are increasingly difficult to navigate.

The report’s most significant findings

The Lowy Institute found that of all the fields in international relations, women are least represented in Australia’s intelligence communities.

As the funding and resources of the intelligence sector continue to grow, this is a serious problem with little transparency. The sector appears to be struggling with a “pipeline” and “ladder” problem: women are both joining at lower rates and progressing at far slower rates than their male counterparts.

Another important finding is that the presence of female trailblazers in these fields, such as foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Marise Payne and Labor’s shadow foreign minister, Penny Wong, may be masking more systemic issues. This may be leading some agencies to becoming complacent, rather than proactive, on gender diversity.

Read more: In the bid for more female leaders, ‘mansplaining’ probably won’t help

Women’s pathways to leadership continue to be impeded by institutional obstacles, such as unconscious bias and discrimination built into the cultures of these sectors, as well as difficulties in supporting staff on overseas postings. For instance, the report notes that in 2017 the government cut assistance packages for overseas officers, including government childcare subsidies. This has gendered ramifications given that women continue to do the bulk of domestic labour.

As such, the most important and high-prestige international postings are still largely dominated by men. DFAT’s Women in Leadership Strategy has proved successful in meeting initial targets for improving women’s representation, however the industry as a whole has not yet followed suit.

Further, it is not enough to just consider how many women there are, but what roles they occupy, given that women have often been siloed into “soft policy” or corporate areas and out of key operational roles needed for career progression.

The report also draws attention to the marginalisation of women from key policy-shaping activities.

From the study’s research on declared authorship, a woman is yet to be selected to lead on any major foreign policy, defence, intelligence, or trade white paper, inquiry or independent review.

Read more: Women in combat: the battle is over but the war against prejudice grinds on

We would mention a few exceptions of women in other high-profile foreign policy roles – Heather Smith’s stewardship of the G20 during Australia’s presidency and Harinder Sidhu’s leadership in the crucial India High Commission. We would also note the contribution of Jane Duke to the ASEAN Summit in Sydney.

Rebecca Skinner has served as associate defence secretary since 2017 and Justine Grieg was appointed deputy secretary defence people in 2018. Major General Cheryl Pearce was also appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus – the first Australian woman to command a UN peacekeeping mission.

While the under-representation of women in international affairs remains a core concern, we would argue the report could have taken a broader look at gender representation in foreign affairs-focused academic communities, think tanks and publishing industries, as well.

Many of these organisations have similarly woeful records when it comes to gender diversity. For instance, Australian Foreign Affairs magazine has been criticised for the lack of women authors it publishes. We know that it is not for lack of credible voices, but rather seems indicative of a systematic form of marginalisation of women within the wider foreign affairs community.

Bright spots for gender diversity

However, there is some cause for optimism. For instance, our current PhD project is documenting the gender make-up of leaders and internationally deployed representatives in the departments of foreign affairs and trade, defence and home affairs, as well as the Australian Federal Police. As of this January, women represented 39.5% of those in the senior executive service in DFAT, and 41.4% of those employed as heads of Australian embassies and high commissions globally.

Further, we’ve found an increase recently in the number of women who work in diplomatic defence roles. While the Lowy report notes that women held just 11% of international roles in defence in 2016 (it is unclear exactly what international roles they are talking about), we found a slightly higher percentage of women (19%) currently employed in defence attaché roles.

Read more: Australia’s performance on gender equality – are we fair dinkum?

The achievements made in this sphere are not just limited to gender either, with women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds forming an important and growing part of representation.

In fact, a more in-depth analysis of the Lowy report’s data would have produced some very interesting, and more nuanced, findings. For instance, foreign affairs has long been the preserve of men, however it has also been the preserve of certain types of men. Diplomacy remains a bastion of prestige, social class, heteronormativity, and in Australia, Anglo-Saxon privilege. It was only last year, for example, that Australia’s first Indigenous woman, Julie-Ann Guivarra, was appointed ambassador (to Spain).

Overall, as the report outlines, gender equality is not just nice to have, nor is it a marginal issue in foreign policy. Rather, the findings are clear: addressing the continued gender gaps are imperative to Australian foreign policy, national security and stability.

We can, and must, do better. Australian foreign policy needs good ideas, and it needs a lot of them. We cannot assume they will all come from the same place.

– ref. Diplomacy and defence remain a boys’ club, but women are making inroads – http://theconversation.com/diplomacy-and-defence-remain-a-boys-club-but-women-are-making-inroads-119984

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Stewart, Marine Physicist, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

The ocean that surrounds Antarctica plays a crucial role in regulating the mass balance of the continent’s ice cover. We now know that the thinning of ice that affects nearly a quarter of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is clearly linked to the ocean.

The connection between the Southern Ocean and Antarctica’s ice sheet lies in ice shelves – massive slabs of glacial ice, many hundreds of metres thick, that float on the ocean. Ice shelves grind against coastlines and islands and buttress the outflow of grounded ice. When the ocean erodes ice shelves from below, this buttressing action is reduced.

While some ice shelves are thinning rapidly, others remain stable, and the key to understanding these differences lies within the hidden oceans beneath ice shelves. Our recently published research explores the ocean processes that drive melting of the world’s largest ice shelf. It shows that a frequently overlooked process is driving rapid melting of a key part of the shelf.

Read more: Ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica predicted to bring more frequent extreme weather

Ocean fingerprints on ice sheet melt

Rapid ice loss from Antarctica is frequently linked to Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW). This relatively warm (+1C) and salty water mass, which is found at depths below 300 metres around Antarctica, can drive rapid melting. For example, in the south-east Pacific, along West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea coast, CDW crosses the continental shelf in deep channels and enters ice shelf cavities, driving rapid melting and thinning.

Interestingly, not all ice shelves are melting quickly. The largest ice shelves, including the vast Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves, appear close to equilibrium. They are largely isolated from CDW by the cold waters that surround them.

The contrasting effects of CDW and cold shelf waters, combined with their distribution, explain much of the variability in the melting we observe around Antarctica today. But despite ongoing efforts to probe the ice shelf cavities, these hidden seas remain among the least explored parts of Earth’s oceans.

Read more: Climate scientists explore hidden ocean beneath Antarctica’s largest ice shelf

It is within this context that our research explores a new and hard-won dataset of oceanographic observations and melt rates from the world’s largest ice shelf.

Beneath the Ross Ice Shelf

In 2011, we used a 260 metre deep borehole that had been melted through the north-western corner of the Ross Ice Shelf, seven kilometres from the open ocean, to deploy instruments that monitor ocean conditions and melt rates beneath the ice. The instruments remained in place for four years.

The observations showed that far from being a quiet back water, conditions beneath the ice shelf are constantly changing. Water temperature, salinity and currents follow a strong seasonal cycle, which suggests that warm surface water from north of the ice front is drawn southward into the cavity during summer.

Melt rates at the mooring site average 1.8 metres per year. While this rate is much lower than ice shelves impacted by warm CDW, it is ten times higher than the average rate for the Ross Ice Shelf. Strong seasonal variability in the melt rate suggests that this melting hotspot is linked to the summer inflow.

To assess the scale of this effect, we used a high-precision radar to map basal melt rates across a region of about 8,000 square kilometres around the mooring site. Careful observations at around 80 sites allowed us to measure the vertical movement of the ice base and internal layers within the ice shelf over a one-year interval. We could then determine how much of the thinning was caused by basal melting.

Melting was fastest near the ice front where we observed short-term melt rates of up to 15 centimetres per day – several orders of magnitude higher than the ice shelf average rate. Melt rates reduced with distance from the ice front, but rapid melting extended far beyond the mooring site. Melting from the survey region accounted for some 20% of the total from the entire ice shelf.

The bigger picture

Why is this region of the shelf melting so much more quickly than elsewhere? As is so often the case in the ocean, it appears that winds play a key role.

During winter and spring, strong katabatic winds sweep across the western Ross Ice Shelf and drive sea ice from the coast. This leads to the formation of an area that is free of sea ice, a polynya, where the ocean is exposed to the atmosphere. During winter, this area of open ocean cools rapidly and sea ice grows. But during spring and summer, the dark ocean surface absorbs heat from the sun and warms, forming a warm surface pool with enough heat to drive the observed melting.

Although the melt rates we observe are far lower than those seen on ice shelves influenced by CDW, the observations suggest that for the Ross Ice Shelf, surface heat is important.

Given this heat is closely linked to surface climate, it is likely that the predicted reductions in sea ice within the coming century will increase basal melt rates. While the rapid melting we observed is currently balanced by ice inflow, glacier models show that this is a structurally critical region where the ice shelf is pinned against Ross Island. Any increase in melt rates could reduce buttressing from Ross Island, increasing the discharge of land-based ice, and ultimately add to sea levels.

While there is still much to learn about these processes, and further surprises are certain, one thing is clear. The ocean plays a key role in the dynamics of Antarctica’s ice sheet and to understand the stability of the ice sheet we must look to the ocean.

– ref. How solar heat drives rapid melting of parts of Antarctica’s largest ice shelf – http://theconversation.com/how-solar-heat-drives-rapid-melting-of-parts-of-antarcticas-largest-ice-shelf-118835

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sherif Abbas, Research Fellow, RMIT University

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

How does electricity work? – Edie, age 5.

Electricity is all around us. Maybe some of the toys you play with run on batteries, which have electricity stored in them. You or your parents are reading this article on a computer, phone or tablet, all of which use electricity. The light bulbs, the television, the traffic lights, cars, aeroplanes – they all run on electricity. Electricity is exciting and important, so I am glad you asked this excellent question.

Everything is made from atoms

Everything is made from little tiny things called atoms. They are so small we cannot see them. They are much smaller than chickpeas, rice, ants, and ant eggs.

Because atoms are so small, we need a lot of them to make things. For example, a grain of rice has billions and billions and billions of atoms. Those atoms make up the rice, in the way LEGO pieces make up a LEGO car or house. They atoms click together and hold onto each other.

Even though an atom is extremely small, it is also made from even smaller things.

One of the things that make up the atom is called an “electron”. Electrons have many jobs. Some electrons help the atoms hold onto each other. Scientists call these electrons the “bonding electrons”. Bond means to stick together.

Other electrons just keep running around in the atoms. They are free electrons and they’re always on the move. Sometimes, they can move from one atom to another.

Electricity happens when electrons move from one atom to another.

Electricity in the power cable

So, the story so far: we know there are billions and billions and billions of atoms. There are also billions and billions and billions of electrons in everything around you. A leaf, a plastic cup, your pet – they all have electrons. Some things, like metals, have more free electrons than other things. A plastic cup, for example, doesn’t have as many free electrons.

You probably have a lot of power cables at home. They might be plugged into the TV or computer or a phone charger. Power cables have a huge number of free electrons.

When the free electrons in a power cable move from one atom to another, almost all in the same direction, you get something called an “electric current” running through the power cable.

How do we push the electrons through the cable? Adults do that by plugging the cable into a wall socket.

Remember, electricity can be very dangerous and can even kill people, so it’s important that kids just let adults handle the cables and wall sockets.

The socket makes a thing called “voltage”, which is like an invisible force that pushes all the electrons in the same direction down the cable.

Once the cable is plugged into the socket, the socket pushes the electrons inside the cable, like cars moving down lots of lanes in a highway. The electrons inside the cable then keep pushing each other forward (and sometimes back and forth depending on the type of electricity). This creates an electric current inside the cable.

The cables have a kind of jacket (which we call “insulation”) on the outside to keep the electrons moving along the metal safely. These jackets make it safe for us to use electricity by keeping them in the metal.

But where does electricity come from?

Electricity comes from power stations – great, big places that can make electricity in different ways.

One way is by burning coal. But this way is bad for our environment. Some power stations use the light from the Sun to make electricity, using large solar panels. Or they might use wind, or water to make electricity. These methods are not as bad for our environment.

If you’re interested in learning more about how electricity is made, check out this Curious Kids article over here.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: how does electricity work? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-does-electricity-work-118686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Review: Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia, National Gallery of Australia

They talk of a family of nations, or families of nations. In Australia, the UK can still be referred to as the mother country, while the English talk of their American cousins. Geographic neighbours usually have these relationships down pat, though with a frisson of sibling rivalry or pecking orders of favouritism.

However, one of the truths about Australia and Indonesia, so physically close, is that there is pretty well no familial relationship at all. It’s like we are different species.

I think this is central to the on-again, off-again, try-hard, well-meant, scratchy relationship that struggles to get to first base, always slipping back into the no-man’s-land of “it-is-all-too-hard” and “who-cares-anyway-ville”.

I recently listened to an ABC RN arts program on the Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia exhibition, now at the National Gallery of Australia, where the announcer spoke of Australian artists travelling to “New York or Berlin or London” with no instinctive, familial thought that, just maybe, travelling to “Jakarta, Singapore or Tokyo” might also be part of the mix.

Indeed Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia could be from outer space. Despite 30 years of close contact with Indonesia by Australian curators and artists; despite goodwill and a lot of government rhetoric about the “importance of the relationship”; despite so many exchanges and residences and lectures, the nuance is still irredeemably “other”.

I’ve been involved in arts management training programs in Indonesia, curated exhibitions (from 1990, when I organised Eight Views at the National Gallery in Jakarta), been behind the Asialink Artist-in Residency program in Indonesia, served on the Australia-Indonesia Institute (pushing always for strong, intelligent, meaningful arts programs to be supported) and I still see Australians not able to catch Indonesian names, or artists, and hold them as important. Teaching of Indonesian language is struggling; academic inclusion of Indonesian cultural material remains minimal.

Yet Indonesian art was and is great. This exhibition shows many of the reasons why: it is fresh, energetic, human, performative, warm, serious, funny, clever, sensitive, political and not political.

There are many wonderful works: Tita Salina has built a raft of rubbish that she rides into Jakarta Bay (shown here as a video), a totally pertinent comment on pollution, but also beautiful and elegaic.

Yudha “Fehung” Kusuma Putera dresses and photographs motley groups of people and animals in cloths that distort their forms – out of it comes humorous but pointed comment on what we are.

Eko Nugroho’s graphic work based on popular culture is relatively well known in Australia, but here he blows three-dimensional air into his usually flat cartoon forms, which then seem about to waddle off down the street.

Mella Jaasma’s work is classy as usual: a video of a Sufi dancer outlined against the sky, twirling his skirt made of mock Mooi-Indie (“beautiful Indies”) sentimental colonial landscapes. His trance-dance is a comment on humanity’s capacity to seek and find inner strength despite fake news – current and past.

And then there’s Entang Wiharso’s just wonderful magic house made of cut metal (but it could be of lace cobwebs), lit by a chandelier. It throws shadows to the walls like any self respecting environment for the flat, back-lit forms of wayang puppetry, though on closer inspection the cut forms are illustrations of the artist’s life and world, totally of this day.

This is some of the art of the archipelago. It is an art scene as lively as anywhere and both this and the art is increasingly recognised around the world as being a hot spot of creative energy and interest. Why do Australians not know this?

Missed opportunities?

We have had heaps of opportunities, yet this exhibition in Canberra is the first ever of “contemporary” Indonesian art for our premier national visual arts gallery. The NGA has previously held exhibitions of Islamic Indonesian imagery, with calligraphy to the fore, and textiles – both of great quality – but they are not what would be called contemporary art.

Jaklyn Babington, one of the two in-house curators of this new exhibition, was candid about the paucity of Indonesian art in the NGA collection during her talk at the associated conference. This is despite leading curators being nearby at ANU, Caroline Turner in the main, the leader with David Williams and Jim Supangkat in the selection of Indonesian work for the First Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, nearly 30 years ago (with a selection trip in November 1991 in which I also took part). That selection and subsequent ones have seen a significant collection of Indonesian work held in Brisbane … But not Canberra.

The exhibition now in Canberra was obviously put together quickly – too quickly, as Babington noted them not having “long enough” (no criticism here of the curators, caught between changing administrations of the gallery).

Compare the time now put into collecting at the National Gallery Singapore, which recently acquired one of the icons of Indonesian 20th century art, Semsar Siahaan’s Olympia. This is the gallery that had the chutzpah to research and bring together the seminal show of Raden Saleh’s 19th century Indonesian paintings a year ago, and put on their current Awakenings, a serious investigation of 1960-90s art of the region including Indonesia – a show that really offers new research work into this area.

The great themes of Indonesian art need space to emerge: to find the sense of theatre, of the magic lurking in shadows, of the mischief and moral purity of the gods, of the elegance of line and style of a culture trained to see the angle of an arm or the bend of the knee as highly pondered action. The art is also permeated by an easy communal sense of coming together to make cultural objects and performance, including friends and members of villages, both urban and rural, in their creation.

Sunshower, the 2017 exhibition of Southeast Asian Art by major institutions in Tokyo, was given due space and time to work itself into its proper shape. The miraculous program the Japan Foundation instigated in Indonesia ten years ago, Kita! Japanese Artists Meet Indonesia, sent curators and artists to work with Indonesians, in a project that sang with energy and creative interest.

In 2014, there was an inspiring show of Indonesian art at the National Gallery of Victoria in a much smaller space than the NGA has provided, but the two curators Joel Stern and Kristi Monfries, uniting sound with visual art, used their expertise to create something new.

A way forward

Australia used to be considered a player in Indonesian art scenes. We were proactive; we created collaborative projects; we worked throughout the archipelago – from Timor Barat to Sumatra. In the early 2000s we fell back, just as Indonesians were starting to hit their international stride. Jim Supangkat, doyen curator, said to me around 2005: “where have you Australians gone?”

We went. Partly deterred by events, that is sure, like the Bali bombing, but also by an Australian arts fraternity probably relieved not to have to face Indonesia any more. The Australia Council’s funding of Indonesian projects sank like a stone in these years; only the Australia-Indonesia Institute keeping a frail flame alight.

This review started by talking about families, an implication of blood families. If that doesn’t work with Indonesia, what about marriages? Or even engagements? Even dating needs a commitment and, it would be hoped, some sense of a future, some idea that actions now can lead to positive outcomes later.

What about a commitment to trying something for a length of time, say a five-year plan mentality? The big institutions, and the Australia Council, could build programs of yearly collaborations; significant regular talk series; regular curatorial and “interested-others” tours of Java in particular, seeing the arts sights, visiting studios, attending the many performances that abound.

Or what about a commitment to a new Australian Cultural Centre in Yogyakarta? That was mooted some 15 years ago, and a budget put forward, but it languished with the bombing threats. Almost every other country that deals with Indonesia culturally has one of these, except us. It was to be a site for engagement, a site for linkages, for some discussions and exhibitions; not expensive; not staffed by public servants; a bit free and loose like so much in Java that makes the art scene there so beguiling.

This is about a commitment over tokenism; about the long-term; about building knowledge and about keeping delivering. If we aspire in this way, then maybe those personal links will lead to outcomes we all acknowledge as part of our inheritance.

Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia is on at the National Gallery of Australia until October 27.

– ref. Indonesian art is fresh, energetic and lively. Why do we not see more of it? – http://theconversation.com/indonesian-art-is-fresh-energetic-and-lively-why-do-we-not-see-more-of-it-119747

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Onno van der Groen, Research Fellow in the school of medical and health sciences, Edith Cowan University

Like to work in a noisy environment while your colleague prefers silence? It could be your brain is simply less “noisy” so this extra, external noise improves your cognitive functioning.

Every day of our lives we effortlessly use our senses to perceive the world around us. We take in information so we can learn new things, taste our food, watch our favourite Netflix show. What we often don’t consider is that our senses are being bombarded with “noise”, and by that I mean random interference.

This interference can be noise that you hear – for example the humming of an air-conditioner in your office or listening to background music played through your headphones – or noise that you see (for example when your TV is not tuned in properly and you see some “snow” on your screen).

Such noise would usually be considered a nuisance, but evidence shows that small amounts of noise can actually be beneficial for our senses. The phenomenon is known as “stochastic resonance”.

Read more: Our centuries-long quest for ‘a quiet place’

Noise can improve performance

Stochastic-resonance was originally investigated in animals. For example, crayfish were shown to be better at avoiding predators when a small amount of random electrical currents were added to their tail fins. Paddlefish caught more plankton when small currents were added to the water.

These experiments demonstrate that sensory signals can be enhanced by noise and improve behaviour in various animals. Research in humans has manipulated noise levels by making people listen to noisy sounds, look at static on a screen or by adding random vibration to the skin.

It’s been shown that as the intensity of noise is increased, a certain optimal noise level allows people to see, hear and feel better. Too much noise degrades our performance.

This inverted-U relationship between performance and noise levels is a characteristic of stochastic-resonance. The phenomenon has real life applications. For example, adding noise to the feet of people with vibrating insoles can improve balance performance in elderly adults. It also has applications for patients with diabetes, those recovering from stroke and it may be used to augment muscle function.

Read more: Playing sound through the skin improves hearing in noisy places

Noise plays a crucial role in the brain

Human behaviour and perception occurs due to the firing of brain cells. Sometimes your brain cells fire randomly. There is more and more evidence that this random activity of your brain cells can be beneficial for your perception and cognitive performance.

My research team is interested in finding out what happens when we change noise levels in the brain directly with non-invasive brain-stimulation.

Your brain cells use electricity for their communication. In experiments conducted with my colleague Nicole Wenderoth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, we applied currents to the brain to activate brain cells in a random fashion with transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS). We found that when participants received stimulation, it improved how well they could see a low-quality image. This suggests that brain noise can help us see better.

In two additional experiments, conducted with Jason Mattingley and Matthew Tang at the Queensland Brain Institute, we used tRNS to provide further insight into how noise affects the brain. In one study we found that decision making can actually be improved. That is, decisions were more accurate and faster when brain cell noise levels are tuned up. Improved decision making only occurred for difficult decisions, such as when the information was ambiguous.

In a third study we found that tRNS can influence what you see during a visual illusion. This suggests that noise is important in making sure that your brain doesn’t get stuck on one way of looking at things.

In summary, our data showed that brain noise is a crucial part of human perception, decision making and being able to see from different perspectives.

Read more: Growing evidence that noise is bad for your health

How much noise you need

The optimal level of noise that can enhance cognitive functions could be different for everyone. That might explain why some people perform best in noisy environments, while others prefer silence.

There might also be a role played by brain noise in various neurological conditions. For example, it seems that individuals with autism, dyslexia, ADHD and schizophrenia have excessive brain variability compared to others.

Elderly individuals might also have more brain noise, which might be associated with a decline in cognitive performance. Small amounts of noise can improve performance, but excessive amounts degrade performance. This could explain some of the disease characteristics and cognitive and perceptual problems occurring with increasing age.

The level of brain noise can be altered with tRNS, which opens up new avenues of studying the role of brain noise on human performance. Our understanding of the role of noise in the human nervous system is expanding. This allows us to develop interventions or devices to manipulate noise levels, which could improve cognitive functioning in health and disease.

For now, if you do prefer to work in a noisy environment, you can safely make the argument that it’s likely boosting your performance.

– ref. Like to work with background noise? It could be boosting your performance – http://theconversation.com/like-to-work-with-background-noise-it-could-be-boosting-your-performance-119598

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annette Greenhow, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Bond University

In the not too distant past, players who suffered head injuries in professional contact sports quickly returned to the field of play, sometimes in the same game, seemingly able to shake off any concussion concerns.

Australian professional sports leagues likewise were unconvinced of the long-term effects of head injuries – and specifically the US-based research suggesting a connection between head injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE – preferring instead to wait for Australian scientific evidence to lead the way.

Last month, however, a report was released by researchers from the University of Sydney and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital finding scientific evidence of CTE in the brains of two middle-aged, former National Rugby League (NRL) players who had each played more than 150 games over many years.

The report, published as a “letter to the editor” in a medical journal, is the first time CTE has been identified in rugby league players anywhere in the world.

Medical experts have described CTE as

a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma.

The Sydney researchers acknowledge that their report is limited by a lack of clinical information collected during the lifetimes of the two NRL players and note that

it is difficult to assess whether these two CTE cases are serendipitous findings, or emblematic of a more common issue with Rugby League and other Australian football codes.

Nonetheless, in the face of this discovery, a legal question has arisen in the rugby league world: who should be responsible for brain injuries suffered by former players? The answer is likely to be determined in Australian courts if a threatened class action lawsuit is brought by former NRL players against the league and its clubs.

Read more: What does concussion do to the brain?

The key questions for a class action lawsuit

According to media reports, several former, but as yet unnamed, NRL players have expressed interest in joining a proposed class action suit, claiming the league and its clubs failed to provide a safe workplace.

Without full details of the complaints, media reports have suggested the case will revolve around whether the league and clubs did enough to protect players from the long-term effects of repetitive concussive and subconcussive injuries and whether they knew or ought to have known about the risks associated with mismanaging such injuries.

Central to the case will be whether the players can demonstrate they were owed a duty of care by the league and whether that duty was breached. Another critical question will be whether players can prove that any breach of duty caused or contributed to the players’ long-term injuries.

A key challenge in any class action suit is to first establish that the claims of several parties are against the same person or organisation, and arise from the “same, similar or related circumstances” involving a substantial common issue of law or fact.

Read more: Who should be responsible for brain injuries in sport?

Like most professional sports leagues, the NRL has adopted its own concussion protocols over the years to properly manage how and when players can return to the sport following a head injury. As NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg says:

We have made huge changes going back to 2014 and I’m very confident those rules are in place for the primary reason for the care of our players.

A key question in the proposed class action, therefore, is how this was handled in the past, before the current protocols were put in place. Were players returning to competition too soon after a head injury? And were the concussion protocols properly implemented and enforced?

These questions rely on first establishing whether the NRL, as the sport’s governing body, owed a legal duty to provide and invest in a safe workplace to prevent or reduce the risk of mismanaging head injuries.

Another important question is the level of scientific understanding of the risks associated with mismanaging concussions at the time the players were injured. Was the sport following best practices based on the scientific understanding at the time?

Who is legally responsible for players’ safety?

A professional sportsperson can legally be classified as an employee, with the right to expect a safe working environment. In professional team sport, this includes an obligation to remove a player from a game or training when they are believed to have suffered a concussion.

In 2000, the High Court in Agar v Hyde established that the governing body of a sport does not owe a duty to voluntary, amateur participants to amend the rules of the game to make it safer. One of the reasons for this decision was a finding that a sport governing body lacked any real or effective control over recreational or amateur participants.

However, the court left open the possibility of re-examining whether professional athletes who are classified as employees and injured at work fall within a different category.

Since the Agar v Hyde case, this question has not been determined in any Australian case, so it is likely to arise in a rugby league class action suit, should it proceed to trial.

How cases have been handled elsewhere

The heightened awareness around CTE in Australia follows the 2011 class action lawsuit filed in the United States by former football players against the National Football League. The case involved allegations the league knew about the dangers associated with repetitive concussive and subconcussive injuries but, among other things, fraudulently concealed this information and failed in its duty of care to ensure the safety of players.

The NFL case settled for US$1 billion before going to trial, so these allegations were not tested in court. The NFL case did, however, bring into sharp focus the role of a sport’s governing body and who is ultimately responsible for the long-term health of players.

Read more: Concussions and CTE: More complicated than even the experts know

In a culture known for its litigation appetite, hundreds of legal cases have since been filed in US courts – against clubs, schools, colleges, doctors, coaches, hospitals and insurers, to name a few. The National Hockey League has also been sued by former players, but the case was settled last year.

But the US and Australian sports and court systems are different, and any Australian case will need to be based on Australian law in accordance with the federal or state-based civil procedures.

The long-term impact of such lawsuits also remains to be seen. In the US, there are fewer high school students playing football due to concerns over the long-term effects of brain injuries. Whether the links between CTE and rugby league players will have the same effect on participation rates in Australia is another issue worth further study.

– ref. Is the National Rugby League legally liable for the long-term impacts of concussions? – http://theconversation.com/is-the-national-rugby-league-legally-liable-for-the-long-term-impacts-of-concussions-119880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katja Siefken, Lecturer, University of South Australia

Inactivity in school children has been in the news again with the release of a study into the health of Australian 11-12 year olds from around the country.

The 1,800 person study found most children were healthy. But there was room for improvement in areas including physical activity and weight.

It’s a different story for Finnish children and their other Nordic counterparts. They outperform most other highly developed nations when it comes to childrens’ physical activity levels and obesity rates.

So what can Australia’s school system learn from the Nordic approach to physical education?

Read more: They believe in teachers and in education for all: why Finland’s kids often top league tables

Active kids do well, wherever they are

Throughout the world, physical education is recognised for its contribution to education itself (teaching movement skills), development of personal and social skills (including learning rules, strategy and cooperation with others) and of course children’s physical health.

More research is also suggesting physical activity (which in school, is achieved through physical education and active play during break periods) is positively associated with educational attainment, particularly in maths. In other words, active kids tend to do better at school.

Read more: Move it, move it: how physical activity at school helps the mind (as well as the body)

Does the curriculum need to be more specific?

The Australian national curriculum combines health and physical education as one learning area.

The health component sets out to teach children about many aspects of health, including alcohol, nutrition, relationships and sexuality. The physical education component offers children the chance to take part in games, adventure activities, fundamental movement skills, sports and rhythmic movement activities such as dance.

The curriculum says children should engage in “regular movement-based learning experiences”. However how regular this needs to be and how long for is not specified or even recommended.

This contrasts with the Nordic countries which enforce weekly minimums for physical education in schools. For example, Denmark has a mandatory 60-90 minutes of physical education a week.

In Finland, physical activity classes are also mandatory. Data suggests primary and secondary schools provide an average two hours a week. The Norwegians provide an average two to three hours a week.

How about specialist teachers?

Delivering effective physical education classes requires a varied skill set, including:

• motivating children
• developing skills
• managing behaviour
• engaging children, particularly ones with lesser skills, and
• modifying activities to challenge children with different needs and abilities.

Classroom teachers often report they are not fully equipped to plan, implement and assess physical education lessons.

So Nordic countries are aiming to only use specialist physical education teachers.

Specialist physical education teachers are also better at motivating students to engage in physical education and physical activity.

Read more: From grassroots to gold: the role of school sport in Olympic success

The Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance recommends all physical activity classes be delivered by specialist, tertiary-qualified physical education teachers.

However, a recent review by Active Healthy Kids Australia found no Australian states or territories are meeting this recommendation.

On the right track, but could do better

The Australian national curriculum is on the right track in many ways. Gone are the harrowing days of waiting to be picked for a team, being made to run for punishment, and measuring children’s weight or skinfolds in front of the class.

The national curriculum emphasises enjoyment and participation in movement-based activities, positive challenges, leading to personal and social outcomes, intended to set children up for lifelong activity.

However, by failing to mandate physical education time each week, we risk physical education being “pushed to the periphery” and losing out to other priorities.

Australia could learn from the Nords by:

• introducing nationwide mandatory physical education policy that ensures every school in Australia schedules weekly classes as part of the core curriculum;
• mandating every school in Australia delivers high-quality physical education through tertiary-trained physical education teachers for all students.

Without these mandates, great things are happening in some schools. However, other schools are slipping through the cracks. It’s time to learn from the Nordic countries to ensure high-quality physical education for all. Because the right physical education can lay the foundations for an active lifestyle, for life.

Read more: Kids’ diets and screen time: to set up good habits, make healthy choices the default at home

– ref. Look up north. Here’s how Aussie kids can move more at school, Nordic style – http://theconversation.com/look-up-north-heres-how-aussie-kids-can-move-more-at-school-nordic-style-112957

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graham Fulton, PhD student, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

I would like to find out something about swallows: we have noticed that they return to the same nests each year, but there must be younger birds that have no nest. Where do they sleep until they have built their new nest? – Nefeli, age 13, Corfu, Greece.

Thank you for your question, Nefeli.

It’s true that some swallows return to the same nests each year. But what do they do there?

We need to understand what nests are really for – and they are not for sleeping. They are for putting eggs into. The eggs need protection from the weather (hot and cold, wind and rain) and from other animals that would eat them. For predators, eggs taste great!

Eventually the eggs hatch, then a blind and featherless baby swallow emerges. The babies are called nestlings or sometimes chicks. So nests are not for sleeping, they are for raising a family.

It is true that when an adult is sitting on eggs and nestlings, it may sleep, especially at night.

But the young swallows who don’t have a nest to return to must build their own nest (to protect and feed their babies) or sleep on a tree branch, a rock ledge of a cliff face, or inside the hollow of a tree.

When swallows sleep away from the nest they sleep in places called roosts.

So remember: nests are mostly for babies; roosts are for sleep.

Read more: Curious Kids: is water blue or is it just reflecting off the sky?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: where do swallows sleep? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-where-do-swallows-sleep-116658

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Alexandra, PhD candidate, RMIT University

Greening our cities has become one of the great global imperatives of the 21st century including to tackle climate change. And Australia’s sprawling car-based cities are gradually changing to embrace green or living infrastructure.

Green cities bring together elements of architectural design and urban planning, often combining plants and built infrastructure to meet the needs of humans, such as our love of nature.

Read more: Australian cities are lagging behind in greening up their buildings

Trees, plants, waterways and wetlands can deliver climate conditioning, cooling cities by reducing the urban heat island effect. They also absorb carbon dioxide, filter wastewater and create habitats.

Living elements can be incorporated with built infrastructure at a range of scales, from individual buildings with green walls and roofs, through to citywide strategies. And there are a suite of strategies to guide more widespread integration of biological elements and ecological processes in cities.

In recent months, we profiled Australian examples of living infrastructure that show some of Australia’s approaches to developing green infrastructure, from greening Melbourne’s laneways to Canberra’s urban forest. These cities are already redesigning their water systems and implementing urban forest strategies to create green belts and protect and restore waterways.

Melbourne and Canberra provide some useful examples of the green cities movement, but to make it mainstream, these techniques need to be adopted widely through policies supporting more holistic and better integrated urban planning.

Why we need urban forests

Percival Alfred Yeoman was one of the first Australian pioneers of urban forestry. In 1971, he articulated a clear vision for enhancing cities with trees.

Read more: Why ‘green cities’ need to become a deeply lived experience

Local governments in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, are implementing his ideas, committing to ambitious increases in urban canopy cover. Their targets range from 25% to 40%.

This revived interest in urban forestry comes from its well documented potential for accelerating the transition to more climate adaptive cities.

The social, environmental and economic benefits of urban trees, or “ecosystem services”, are becoming better recognised, including for their recreational and cultural values.

Melbourne and Canberra are leading Australia’s green cities movement

Melbourne

Melbourne has a rich legacy of urban parks and green belts thanks to planning decisions made in the city’s early years.

Read more: Urban greening can save species, cool warming cities, and make us happy

These parks underpin a new wave of urban greening, with projects that aim to deliver action on climate change, biodiversity and the health and well-being of communities.

The Melbourne green infrastructure plan includes:

• a “growing green guide” that provides practical advice to community and business groups on planning, design and maintenance of green infrastructure

• the greening laneways strategy, which builds on the commercial revitalisation of Melbourne’s laneways over three decades. Laneways with greening potential were mapped and demonstration project developed to display techniques for making them more vibrant green spaces for business, tourists and locals to enjoy

• an urban forest strategy, with an overall target of 40% canopy cover by 2040. And 5 to 8 million trees will be planted over coming decades for the greater Melbourne metropolis.

Canberra

Canberra is often described as “a city within a landscape” and the “bush capital”. But its higher altitude, hot dry summers and cold winters bring a set of challenges for green infrastructure.

With more than 800,000 planted trees, Canberra is an urban forest. But these trees require special care and attention given they are ageing and suffering from a hotter, drier climate.

Read more: How do we save ageing Australians from the heat? Greening our cities is a good start

Wildfire also represents a significant risk where urban and rural areas connect. This means Canberra needs urban forests that will cool the city in warmer months without also escalating wildfire risks.

The ACT Government has committed to action on climate change, legislating targets for 100% renewable electricity by 2020 and carbon neutrality (no net carbon emissions) by 2045.

Integrated approach needed to expand green cities

Greening cities requires a holistic approach – for instance, not leaving the health of waterways entirely to water engineers.

Greening cities is more than just a technical challenge. Transforming the form and functions of urban systems, through urban forests and other living infrastructure, requires greater leadership and political commitment, integrated planning and community participation, and long-term thinking.

An integrated approach to greening cities involves mapping diverse opportunities and mobilising support for change in the community. As an example, urban storm water can be a productive resource when used in constructed wetlands or to irrigate urban forests.

And often urban drainage lines and wastelands can be transformed into green spaces, but it’s worth recognising there is intense competition for space for housing.

But for more widespread adoption of integration, institutional support within local governments and metropolitan water and planning agencies is needed.

So to scale up living infrastructure in our urban landscapes, we must learn from local success stories, conduct more research, and better understand how to deal with climate adaptation and mitigation challenges.

Read more: If planners understand it’s cool to green cities, what’s stopping them?

Jason Alexandra would like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Barbara Norman to this article.

– ref. For green cities to become mainstream, we need to learn from local success stories and scale up – http://theconversation.com/for-green-cities-to-become-mainstream-we-need-to-learn-from-local-success-stories-and-scale-up-119933

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Q J Wang, Professor, University of Melbourne

Earlier this year, researchers suggested the amount of water returned to the Murray Darling Basin under a federal program has been “grossly exaggerated”, to the tune of hundreds of billions of litres.

The report argued that government investment in irrigation improvements might even result in a net loss of water for the environment.

Read more: The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought

To investigate these claims, the Murray Darling Basin Authority commissioned us to undertake an independent review to examine the best available data for every irrigation efficiency project funded across the basin.

We found the government investment into irrigation efficiency projects has achieved 85% of the 750 gigalitres per year target. The remaining 15% of the target may be affected by unintended side-effects.

This result highlights the need for continued review of risks to the basin plan, as Australia grapples with the management of an extraordinary complex natural system.

How is water for the environment recovered?

The Water Act 2007 introduced significant reforms aimed at setting aside more water for the environment. At the time, record high levels of surface water were being consumed. Aiming to save 2,750 gigalitres of surface water (water flowing in the open air, rather than underground) the federal government began buying back water rights and investing in more efficient infrastructure.

The Commonwealth is providing A$3.1 billion to buy these water rights, of which A$2.5 billion has been spent. It is also providing more than A$8 billion for modernising infrastructure and water efficiency improvements, of which more than A$4 billion has so far been spent.

These projects aim to improve water delivery – reducing leaks and evaporation – and make irrigation more efficient. The water saving generated from these projects is shared between the governments for environmental use, and irrigators.

What are “return flows”?

To understand why the government investment in irrigation efficiency projects have not achieved 100% of the original target, we need to talk about return flows.

When water is diverted from the river for irrigation, not all of it gets consumed by the plants. Some water will make its way back to the river. This is called return flow. A large part of the return flow is through groundwater to the rivers, and this part is extremely difficult to measure. More efficient infrastructure and irrigation generally means less return flow to the river.

If these reductions are not considered when calculating the water savings, it is possible there will be implications for irrigators, the environment and other water users downstream, that previously benefited from return flows.

What we tried to determine is how much the efficiency projects reduced return flow.

Read more: We wrote the report for the minister on fish deaths in the lower Darling – here’s why it could happen again

Are the water savings real?

For the first time, we attempted to bring together data on individual projects in order to assess return flows across the basin. We developed a framework for calculating return flows, which took into account water in the rivers, groundwater, and efficiency projects.

This is the first attempt to bring together the existing data on individual projects to assess return flows in the basin at a detailed level. A large portion of the data used in this study was collated for the first time and not previously available in a readily accessible format.

We found a reduction in return flow of 121 gigalitres per year as a result of the government funded projects. This is comparable to 16% of the recovery transferred to environmental entitlements.

What does this mean for the Basin Plan?

There are several important details that must be considered to assess the importance of the return flow volume for the environment and Basin Plan objectives. We do not attempt here to quantify the outcomes, but instead to raise a number of important considerations beyond simply “volume”.

1. Recovered water should be legally protected

Return flows are good for the environment, but are essentially accidental. As irrigation becomes more efficient, inevitably they will diminish.

On the other hand, formally allocated environmental water entitlements are legally protected. It is more secure for the environment – and far easier to keep track of.

2. It’s not ‘efficiency vs the environment’

Part of this debate centres around the idea that reducing return flows means less water for the environment. But in Victoria and New South Wales, before water is allocated to anyone (irrigators or the environment), a base level is set aside. This is the minimum required to keep the rivers physically flowing and to meet critical human needs.

Efficiency projects mainly affect this base-level flow of the river. This means the water reduction is shared across everyone who holds a water licence – the majority of which are irrigators.

This policy means it does not make sense to compare the effect of efficiency projects directly with the recovery of environmental water.

3. Volume is a crude measure of environmental benefit

The focus of the debate around return flows has been based on the annual volume of returned environmental water in comparison to the stated Basin Plan target.

However, the real objective of the water recovery is to achieve environmental objectives in the Basin. This is not just about annual volumes, but the quantity, timing, and quality of fresh water.

How should we move forward?

Our review has particularly highlighted the need for better ongoing data collection and regular evaluations.

Read more: Aboriginal voices are missing from the Murray-Darling Basin crisis

Both taxpayer investments and the water market are changing irrigation to become more efficient and reducing the river’s base flow. With this in mind, we need to regularly reexamine how we share water between everyone (and everything) that needs it, particularly in extended dry periods.

The Murray-Darling Basin is a constantly changing system, both in terms of climate and irrigation. Return flows are one of a number of potential threats to the Basin Plan. As the system is continually changing, these threats will need to be reassessed with each Basin Plan review.

A Four Corners program on the $13 billion Murray-Darling Basin Plan will air on ABC at 8.30pm on July 8.

This article was co-written by Glen Walker, a former CSIRO employee and now private consultant, who worked with the University of Melbourne on the independent review.

– ref. Billions spent on Murray-Darling water infrastructure: here’s the result – http://theconversation.com/billions-spent-on-murray-darling-water-infrastructure-heres-the-result-119985

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Burch, Accredited Dietitian/Nutritionist & PhD Candidate, Griffith University

Want to boost your immune system, reduce your physical signs of ageing, or cleanse your blood to get rid of toxins? Intravenous (IV) vitamin therapy, or vitamin drips, promise to help. Some claim they can even benefit serious conditions like cancer, Parkinson’s disease, the eye condition macular degeneration, the pain of fibromyalgia and depression.

Celebrities have promoted them on social media. The demand has led to alternative therapy lounges popping up around the world, including in Australia. Patients can kick back in comfy leather chairs while they’re hooked up to IVs in the infusion lounge, watch Netflix and have some tea.

But do they work? Or are you just paying for really expensive urine? Let’s look at what the science says.

What is IV vitamin therapy?

IV vitamin therapy administers vitamins and minerals directly into the bloodstream via a needle that goes directly into your vein. Fans of the therapy believe this enables you to obtain more nutrients as you avoid the digestion process.

Providers of these injections say they customise the formula of vitamins and minerals depending on the perceived needs of the patient.

Right now for example, many Australian lounges are offering drip “cocktails” containing immune boosting vitamins like vitamin C and zinc to help protect against the flu. Other popular therapy sessions come under names like “Energy Cocktail” and “Glow”. One vitamin IV therapy session can take 30-90 minutes and will cost between A$80 to $1,000.

Read more: Why eat your vitamins when you can now shoot them up?

Does IV vitamin therapy work?

IV therapy itself is not new and has been used in the medical profession for decades. In hospitals, it is commonly used to hydrate patients and administer essential nutrients if there is an issue with gut absorption, or long-term difficulty eating or drinking due to surgery. Single nutrient deficiencies like vitamin B12 or iron are also often treated in hospital with infusions under medical supervision.

But the “cocktails” IV vitamin therapy clinics create and administer are not supported by scientific evidence. There have been no clinical studies to show vitamin injections of this type offer any health benefit or are necessary for good health. In fact, there are very few studies that have looked at their effectiveness at all.

Read more: Why are some people more gullible than others?

There is one review on the use of the “Myers’ cocktail” (a solution of magnesium, calcium, vitamin C and a number of B vitamins). But it just contains a collection of anecdotal evidence from singular case studies.

Another trial looked into the effectiveness of IV vitamin therapy in reducing symptoms of 34 people with the the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia. It found no significant differences between those who received the “Myers’ cocktail” once a week for eight weeks and those who did not. In fact, the authors noted a strong placebo effect. In other words, many people said their symptoms improved when they were only injected with a “dummy” cocktail.

Read more: Explainer: what is fibromyalgia, the condition Lady Gaga lives with?

Another study that examined IV vitamin use in fibromyalgia patients was missing a placebo group, involved just seven patients and showed only short-term improvement in symptoms. The only other published study examined IV vitamin therapy use for asthma. But that study was of even poorer quality.

What are the risks of IV vitamin therapy?

Even when it comes to vitamins and minerals, you can have too much of a good thing. For example, if you take in more of the fat soluble vitamin A than you need, your body stores it, risking damage to major organs, like the liver.

IV vitamin therapy “cocktails” also often contain significant levels of the water soluble vitamins C and B. These are processed by the kidneys and excreted into urine when the body cannot store any more. This makes for some very expensive urine.

Read more: New vitamin supplement study finds they may do more harm than good

There is also the risk of infection with IV vitamin therapy. Any time you have an IV line inserted, it creates a direct path into your bloodstream and bypasses your skin’s defence mechanism against bacteria.

People with certain conditions like kidney disease or renal failure shouldn’t have IV vitamin therapy because they cannot quickly remove certain minerals from the body. For these people, adding too much potassium could lead to a heart attack.

People with heart, kidney or blood pressure conditions should also avoid IV vitamin therapy as there is risk of fluid overload without consistent monitoring. The consequences of fluid overload in these patients can include heart failure, delayed wound healing, and impaired bowel function.

What’s the bottom line?

For most of us, the quantities of vitamins and minerals needed for good health can be obtained by eating a healthy diet with a wide range of foods and food groups. Obtaining vitamins and minerals from your diet is much easier, cheaper, and safer.

Unless you have a medically diagnosed reason for getting a vitamin infusion and it was prescribed by your doctor, you are always better off obtaining vitamins and minerals through food.

– ref. Do vitamin drips really work? The evidence says ‘no’, so save your money and eat real food – http://theconversation.com/do-vitamin-drips-really-work-the-evidence-says-no-so-save-your-money-and-eat-real-food-116823

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Priya Dev, Blockchain Researcher & Lecturer Data Analysis, Australian National University

Amid the hype around Facebook’s plan to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra, there’s one big question. How is the company going to profit from it?

The project relies on developing blockchain technology. But blockchain’s whole raison d’être is to challenge the way corporate capitalism and businesses like Facebook make money.

Facebook has also established, with several dozen equally capitalistic partners, the Libra Association, a nonprofit organisation based in Switzerland, to spearhead the venture.

Read more: The lowdown on Libra: what consumers need to know about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency

After years of copping criticism for questionable business practices, has Facebook decided to take an altruistic turn?

Probably not. It’s more likely that blockchain, and even Libra, is a means to a end; it’s about Facebook wanting to be not only the world’s biggest social media platform but also the globe’s go-to marketplace, putting Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google in the shade.

To appreciate why this suggestion isn’t also hyperbole, we need to talk not so much about Libra but its companion technology, the “custodial wallet” called Calibra.

Blockchain, but not blockchain

First, let’s do a quick recap of some fundamentals.

In 2008, a person or group calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a method for transacting over the internet without a trusted third party such as a bank. It uses a distributed ledger known as a blockchain and cryptography to maintain a tamper-proof record of ownership of electronic cash – hence the term cryptocurrency.

Blockchain’s core innovation is to do away with the need for trusted entities like banks. So how do people safely send or receive cryptocurrency? Well, they can use a “cryptocurrency wallet”. A cryptocurrency balance is recorded against a blockchain address. Proving ownership depends on a secret code (or “private key”) known only to the owner. The “wallet” is essentially software that allows people to manage their private keys and authorise transactions.

Facebook has other ideas for its cryptocurrency. The Libra Association says it wants to “make sending money as easy and cheap as sending a text message”. Tapping addresses and secret codes into a wallet interface every time wouldn’t be that easy. These codes can be long – up to 64 characters, compared to 16 for a credit card.

So Facebook will instead provide a “custodial wallet” – Calibra. It will be the custodian of your cryptocurrency, much like a bank is custodian of your money, and thus manage your wallet for you.

Facebook can certainly argue that this makes it much easier to use Libra – and it wants to make Libra easy to use so you can buy items through Facebook and its other platforms, such as Whatsapp and Instagram.

But this aspect has little to do with the original ideals behind blockchain. It makes Calibra more like a bank, with a record of your electronic payments. It will know everything you buy or sell through its wallet; and it will share “Calibra customer data with managed vendors and service providers — including Facebook”.

How Facebook monetises data

Why is this important? Because Facebook is in the business of gathering your personal data.

It now uses this information to make about 99% of its income from selling advertising – US$14.9 billion in the first quarter of 2019 alone.

Its value as an advertising delivery mechanism comes not just from its sheer number of users (1.56 billion daily users, and 2.37 billion monthly users) but from what it knows about them.

This goes way beyond basic personal details like your birthdate. Almost everything about Facebook is designed to get you to reveal personal information. You do this through what you post and the posts you like or respond to. You do this even when not directly using Facebook. Lots of online stores report back to Facebook when you visit them, for example.

Read more: Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

Identifying key personality traits can be used to predict purchasing behaviour – or political preference, as demonstrated in the Cambridge Analytica controversy. The British-based political consultancy bragged it effectively swung the US 2016 election to Donald Trump by using Facebook to harvest user data and then directing customised political messages to users’ newsfeeds.

Read more: We need to talk about the data we give freely of ourselves online and why it’s useful

While there is some scepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s electoral impact, it is generally agreed the process of “micro-targeting” can be very effective for marketers.

So the more information Facebook has about you, the more money it can potentially make by influencing you.

Becoming bigger than Amazon

There’s more.

Facebook’s value as an advertising powerhouse has made its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, extremely wealthy – worth an estimated US$73 billion. But that’s less than half of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, who’s worth US$158 billion.

Both companies are in the business of helping merchants sell products. But Amazon’s position as an online marketplace is more lucrative than Facebook’s role as a shop window. Amazon can take a cut from every sale. Its retail business makes up about 80% of its US$950 billion value, which is greater than Facebook’s total value of US$550 billion.

What if Facebook could be both the shop window and the cash register? What if it no longer just introduced users to merchants but also became the digital marketplace supporting those merchants? What if it could collect not just social data but also buyer history data?

This is what Libra, and more critically, Calibra, could mean for Facebook.

Libra’s an important part of this picture. But it’s Calibra that could deliver the data Facebook needs to become possibly the most valuable, and powerful, online company in the world.

– ref. All the hype around Libra is a red herring. Facebook’s main game is Calibra – http://theconversation.com/all-the-hype-around-libra-is-a-red-herring-facebooks-main-game-is-calibra-119595