Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Dalton, Conjoint Senior Lecturer School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

Over recent months, the news has been saturated with headlines claiming we’re experiencing a “killer flu season”. Researchers watching laboratory data are using the term “flunami”.

Data suggests this is a serious year for the flu, with a higher number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths recorded than at the same time point in previous years. But there’s more to the story.

Increased testing for influenza and a very early start to the flu season have driven these high figures. Meanwhile, we’ve seen heightened community awareness and concern as the media continue to report on the high numbers of flu cases.

Read more: It’s a bad year for flu, but it’s too early to call it the worst ever – 5 charts on the 2019 season so far

Increased concern leads to increased testing

Tragically, influenza causes deaths every year, including among infants and healthy young people. This still comes as a surprise to many. News coverage of these deaths presents human stories that make the risk feel real and threatening.

We can see the impact of this by looking at the trends in Google searches for “flu deaths” and “flu symptoms” in Australia this year. The steep rise is closely aligned with media reporting of deaths from early May.

The Google search interest in deaths in 2019 dwarfs the 2017 interest, when media reports of influenza deaths appeared more sporadically.

The fear of a uniquely severe and dangerous flu season leads more people to go to their GP or emergency department for an assessment if they’re experiencing flu-like symptoms. In turn, it may also lead more doctors to test for influenza, resulting in increased influenza counts.

Every Monday morning in winter our Flutracking survey asks around 45,000 Australians about their influenza-like symptoms (fever and cough). We also ask ill Flutrackers if their doctor tested them for influenza.

Every year, more and more Flutrackers answer yes. Comparing the percentage of Flutrackers with cough and fever who reported being tested for influenza during April and May increased markedly from 2016, with a very significant increase in 2019.

The season is earlier, but it’s not more severe

Since at least 2011, there has been an increasing summer to autumn blip in influenza activity. That trend has been particularly pronounced this year.

Systems like Flutracking are showing higher levels of influenza-like illness for this time of year, but the figures are not nearly as high as the typical August to September peak seen over the last five years.

Flutracking is not perfect, tracking only “influenza-like” symptoms. Influenza surveillance relies on multiple imperfect streams of data; each contribute to our understanding of the whole picture.

Another system providing objective information on the severity of influenza is the New South Wales death registration data. It showed a few unseasonal spikes in February and March, but is otherwise low and around half the rate we see in the middle of a typical influenza season.

Read more: The 2019 flu shot isn’t perfect – but it’s still our best defence against influenza

Hospitalisation rates for influenza are high across many hospitals for this time of year, and some may approach peak winter rates seen in 2017. But looking at the proportion of patients admitted to hospital with the flu requiring intensive care, there’s no indication the early influenza season is deadlier than usual.

The simplest way to describe the season is early, but average so far. The rates of influenza are high for this time of year, but the illness is no more severe compared to the typical peak we see in the middle of winter.

Comparing 2019 to 2018, which was a very mild year, further exaggerates the difference.

So when will it end?

In describing the season as “early”, the question arises as to how long it will last. No one knows. The dynamics of an influenza season are a mix of the particular strains circulating, underlying population immunity to the circulating strains from past infection or immunisation, levels of population density and interactions, and weather – all highly unpredictable factors.

If there is no change in the circulating strains then it’s possible the number of susceptible people in the community could be exhausted and the influenza season could “burn out”. If not, it could be a big year for influenza.

Note that this is a broad brush overview of a large country. Western Australia appears to be having a different experience this year with very high rates of laboratory notifications and influenza related hospitalisations. After experiencing a series of mild influenza seasons it may now have a much larger pool of people susceptible to influenza infection.

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

How worried should you be?

So far, the season is early but average. It’s not the worst flu season on record and not a “flunami”.

Is there any harm in the media being hyperbolic about the nature of each flu season? Some see no downside in using media interest as an opportunity to educate the public about influenza or promote research.

At the same time, there is a danger in tying reasonable public health advice to unreliable interpretations of what is actually happening. Crying wolf may undermine trust in public health messaging.

Hopefully, the messages around flu remain clear. You don’t want to get influenza, and if you do get it, you don’t want to spread it to other people. Immunisation, hand hygiene, anti-viral treatment and staying home if ill can all help.

Read more: Have you noticed Australia’s flu seasons seem to be getting worse? Here’s why

If you would like to help Flutracking track the flu near you, you can join at Flutracking.net.

Sandra Carlson, the Flutracking senior analyst, contributed to this article.

– ref. Media hype and increased testing: this year’s flu numbers are high, but there’s more to the story – http://theconversation.com/media-hype-and-increased-testing-this-years-flu-numbers-are-high-but-theres-more-to-the-story-120004

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Richard Braczkowski, PhD Candidate – Wildlife Cameraman, The University of Queensland

Last week saw the release of the rebooted The Lion King, an attempt to capitalise on the billion-dollar success of the 1994 original. With a star-studded cast, the reboot closely follows the plot of the first movie (spoilers to follow, obviously).

Mufasa, king of the lions (and of every other creature in his territory), raises his son Simba to follow in his footsteps. But Mufasa is murdered by his jealous brother Scar, and his young heir is chased into the desert. Years pass, and eventually Simba reclaims his rightful place as the ruler of Pride Rock.

Read more: Lions sometimes suffer if they attack a porcupine. So why do they do it?

The remake is likely to be the box office hit of 2019. But in my job as a big cat biologist, I spend plenty of time with Pride Rock’s real-life counterparts. While Disney was somewhat accurate, the real life dynamics of a lion pride in Uganda or Tanzania’s national parks can be far more Game of Thrones than The Circle of Life.

Sarabi’s pride: the anchors of lion society

The key to survival in lion society is strength in numbers, and lionesses are the anchors of lion prides. They form a matrilineal society, and generally stay in the territory of their birth. It is the males that leave.

The Lion King gets the fundamental premise of pride society right: its strength is the number of lionesses in a pride.

You might assume this would be for successful hunting, but far more fundamentally, it is the key to successfully raising young. Lionesses will often give birth at a similar time (usually a few months apart). This means they can suckle each others cubs.

Genetically, this makes sense, as they are related as mothers, sisters, aunts and nieces. If one lioness dies, a relative will raise her offspring. Moreover the strength of numbers means lionesses can defend their cubs from males trying to kill them.

Males (typically not the father) will kill cubs to force their mothers back into heat. Infanticide is one of the the leading causes of death for young lions; about 25% of all lion cubs will die in this way. It is perhaps understandable why Disney chose to omit this aspect of lion society from their children’s films.

Scar and Mufasa would be partners, not enemies

Where the Lion King takes a turn towards fiction is in the relationship between Scar and Mufasa. In the film they are brothers, and enemies. But in real life they would be partners and rely intimately on each other.

In lion society, young males are evicted from their mothers’ pride once they mature. To survive they band together, looking for a new pride they can take up residency in and sire offspring.

The more males in a coalition, the higher the likelihood they will secure tenure in a new female pride. Yes, Mufasa and Scar may have had the odd squabble over mating rights to females in the pride, but they wouldn’t kill each other.

Instead, their fight would be with other males. Arguably the best example of this was seen in the mid-2000s in South Africa’s Sabi-Sands game reserve. A coalition of six adolescent males, known as the Mapogos (meaning rogues or vigilantes), joined forces to rule an area of 170,000 acres for six years.

They sired a multitude of offspring, but killed at least 40 cubs, females and adult males during their reign, before finally being dispatched by two other lion coalitions (the Majingilanes and the Southern Pride).

Interestingly, in the 1994 original Scar was the bearer of a gorgeous, black mane, far darker than his brother Mufasa’s. Seminal experiments with dummy lions showed lionesses prefer males with darker manes.

Those same dark-maned males feature more testosterone and can heal up quicker after big fights. Rather than the outcast Scar is made out to be, his black mane would be an important indicator of fitness and very sexy to lionesses!

Run away and (really) never return

One of the key moments in The Lion King is Simba leaving his mother’s pride, fuelled by guilt over Mufasa’s death.

The act of leaving is dead right, but it would not have been voluntary. Adult lions cannot stand the presence of young and upcoming males in their areas, although they will tolerate young cubs to a degree. When males are between two and a half and about four, they are forcibly evicted by their fathers, uncles and other pride members.

I recently saw one of my favourite Ugandan lions, a 3 year-old male called Jacob (pictured below), get swatted around by a coalition of three massive mature males. Jacob immediately submitted, laying on his back and cowering. Simba’s journey away from home would not have been a smooth one.

When lions leave their birth pride, they’re setting out on a long, arduous journey (which makes it all the more important to have your brother or cousin with you).

Lions can move hundreds of kilometres in search of a new “home”, a new pride they can challenge the incumbent males for. They can cross electrified fences into new reserves, move across cattle farms and even international borders.

The likelihood of Simba returning to his mother’s pride are next to none, barring some extreme event resulting in the males dying (for example trophy hunters or poachers). Of course, if he did return, it would be to mate with as many lionesses as he could, many of whom – if not all – would be closely related to him.

While I personally revel in the opportunity to study lion society in its totality, even the fights and hardships, I can understand why Disney chose to skim over some of these aspects of lion life in favour of fantasy.

Read more: Dynasties: Lions may disappear without urgent funding for conservation

Although the story of the Lion King is ultimately positive, African lions are thought to have undergone a 50% decline since the original film. The new Lion King gives us all an opportunity to be inspired by this magnificent cat and help its conservation in the wild.

– ref. It’s Sarabi’s pride, Mufasa just lives there: a biologist on The Lion King – http://theconversation.com/its-sarabis-pride-mufasa-just-lives-there-a-biologist-on-the-lion-king-120660

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Felicity Fenner, Associate Professor at UNSW Art & Design, UNSW

Over the past few weeks, artists from around Australia have been creating small artworks depicting the endangered black-throated finch and sending them to politicians involved in decision-making around the Adani Carmichael mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin. Before being mailed, the artworks are photographed and uploaded to Instagram. Over 1,400 have been mailed to date.

This is not the first time Australian artists have banded together in protest. In 2014 Transfield Holdings was forced by artists’ protests to withdraw as principal sponsor of the Biennale of Sydney – a philanthropic role reaching back 40 years – when participating artists learned that a then-related company was involved in Australia’s offshore detention program.

Similarly, in 2017 artists led a successful campaign calling on the National Gallery of Victoria to sack its contracted security firm, Wilson, which is also active in the detention of asylum seekers.

To penetrate the public consciousness, however, artist-led protests need to move beyond the relatively niche arenas of art museums and Instagram. Peter Drew’s series of poster campaigns that began in 2015 with Real Australians Say Welcome, for example, have become accepted, even expected images in public spaces across the country. Brisbane artist Richard Bell took his Embassy project to the Venice Biennale this year, where it was embraced by the international art community and its thousands of acolytes, few of whom had prior understanding of the Aboriginal rights movement in Australia.

The current Black Finch Project takes its name from the tiny, almost extinct bird whose last key habitat is threatened by the Adani mine. There are thought to be only 1,000 of the species remaining and scientists have warned that the native finch may well be wiped out by the habitat-destroying mining operation.

Read more: Death by 775 cuts: how conservation law is failing the black-throated finch

Adani’s management plan for the endangered bird was initially rejected by the Queensland state government, before a revised plan was approved on May 31. Despite the revisions, scientists have serious reservations about the finch’s ability to survive.

The Black Finch Project was launched by Melbourne artist Charlotte Watson, who proposed that “we send the QLD government 1,000 black finches; drawings, sculptures, anything to make known the lives of these creatures. No text. No slogans. No messages of rage. Just dead finches”.

The results are a mix of professional and amateur art, mostly realistic portrayals of the little bird either standing alone or dead and upturned. Echoing the seemingly casual disregard by politicians for the finch, Laura E. Kennedy designed a circular panelled portrait of the small bird with a speech bubble that simply says “bye”; also clear in its message, Stephanie Hicks has contributed a pair of monochrome images in which the finch itself is whited out.

The Black Finch Project artworks have been referred to in the media as “heartbreaking”, with the federal environment minister Sussan Ley rather patronisingly describing some of those received by her office as “heartfelt”, saying she could recognise the “passion” and “creativity” behind them.

If she had described them, conversely, as “informed”, “insightful” and “thought-provoking”, the creators of the artworks could at least be satisfied that their message had hit their target.

Making art and craft can be therapeutic. The artist might achieve a sense of catharsis and even empowerment. Yet unless the artwork’s targeted audience is an openminded one, the artwork, no matter how accomplished, will have little impact on the status quo.

While the Black Finch Project is gaining traction on Instagram and successfully building public awareness of the issue, it will take more than art to stop the Adani juggernaut in Queensland.

History shows that art does have the potential to illuminate, educate and even change minds. As Friar Michele da Carcano explained in the late 1400s, narrative art commissioned by churches was introduced for three reasons.

First, for the benefit of “simple” folk who are unable to read, a reason which today might more appropriately be applied to impatient people unwilling to invest the time to read news and analyses; secondly, on account of what he called the “emotional sluggishness” of those who are not easily moved by words but can be influenced by pictures; and finally because many people cannot retain in their memories what they hear, but they do remember if they see images.

Read more: Friday essay: can art really make a difference?

Economics generally trumps science, which always trumps sentiment in environmental debates. Unlike 15th century churchgoers, today’s politicians are pragmatic, not easily swayed by emotion, let alone art.

The threatened extinction of the black-throated finch is more than an emotional issue. If art is going to have an impact in debates which rely on scientific fact to provide gravity for environmentally-based protest movements, it needs to take a leaf out of Friar da Carcano’s book and tell the full story. Sentimental images of baby Jesus, no matter how creative, passionate and heartfelt, were never solely relied upon during the Renaissance to effectively convey biblical tales.

Ironically, despite the Black Finch Project’s request for “no text”, one of the most succinct contributions is not by an artist but by Melbourne tour guide Matthew Webb, well placed to explain what we’re looking at. It includes the words “If the land Adani has set aside for the black-throated finch was suitable, they’d already live there”. That message is clear, even to the most time-poor, emotionally sluggish and forgetful of people.

– ref. Protest art: rallying cry or elegy for the black-throated finch? – http://theconversation.com/protest-art-rallying-cry-or-elegy-for-the-black-throated-finch-120593

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Campbell, Associate Professor, University of Sydney

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian made a “captain’s call” in recent months that raised the ire of many parents, teachers and education groups. She announced NSW would build a 49th selective school. It will be the first new fully selective school in the state in 25 years.

Selective schools are public schools that take high-achieving students. They are meant to offer opportunities for any higher achiever, regardless of social class, but research has consistently shown a high proportion of students in selective schools are from more advantaged households.

Despite this, NSW has 48 fully or partially selective schools, which is more than all other states combined. Victoria, for instance, has only four. This is because, over the last 150 years, NSW has responded to the demand for public secondary schooling differently from the rest of Australia.

A history of Australia’s public schools

Australian states have distinct histories when it comes to public secondary education. NSW began such schooling in the 1880s and Victoria not until just before the first world war. Queensland also held back founding public high schools, due to the earlier foundation of state grammar schools.

In Victoria there was some successful early opposition to government secondary schooling. The private, then church, colleges were the only available schools for most of the wealthy and professional middle class. Victoria developed a pattern of non-government school loyalty.

By contrast, the middle class in NSW used public secondary education from the late 19th century. Schools such as Fort Street (1849), Sydney Girls and Sydney Boys High School (1883), North Sydney Girls (1914) and North Sydney Boys High School (1915), and later Hurlstone Agricultural and James Ruse Agricultural School (1959), were academically selective from the beginning. They were meritocratic and hardly accessible to everyone.

Read more: Selective schools’ long and tangled history with race and class

In the 1890s, state Labor parties campaigned for greater educational opportunity for working-class youth and higher, and technical education for youth generally. As demand rose for universal secondary schooling, a parallel system was established from the 1920s for the “less clever” and the “less likely to succeed” with academic subjects.

So central, home-science and junior technical schools were established. These attempted to meet the assumed vocational aspirations of working-class youth (home-making and domestic service for girls, of course). This was the beginning of the great age of vocational guidance, usually based on intelligence tests.

Schools were differentiated, based on high or low IQs. This system gained criticism in the late 20th century for trapping children in educational streams that determined narrow futures. With the economy expanding after the second world war, pressure built for more schools and secondary schooling that opened, rather than closed, opportunities.

This led to the introduction of comprehensive secondary schools. These would take in all young people from a defined geographical area (usually zoned) regardless of students’ prior accomplishments at primary school.

In NSW, the director of education, Harold Wyndham, released a 1957 report that recommended comprehensive secondary schools replace the previous differentiated system. All high schools were to be turned into comprehensives.

Through the Wyndham Scheme in the early 1960s, NSW was an early adopter of the comprehensive ideal. The technical schools were subsequently closed. There was also the possibility NSW would no longer have any selective high schools (public) at all, unlike Victoria with its continuing dual system of academically oriented high schools, and technical schools.

Read more: Why tech schools won’t seem to go away

But the Wyndham Plan didn’t suit everyone. Old scholar and parent communities associated with the inner-city selective high schools, such as Fort Street, fought hard against their schools turning into comprehensives. Such schools had educated a large proportion of the professional middle class – proportionately more than similar schools in Victoria.

As the Wyndham Plan was progressively implemented in the 1960s, many of the high schools that had selective entrance, including Newcastle High for example, were converted into comprehensive schools. But not all. A rump of selectives survived, usually close to inner Sydney.

Fort Street High, the four single-sex Sydney and North Sydney high schools and the agricultural high schools, James Ruse and Hurlstone, formed an institutional base from which new selective establishments could be justified in the 1990s.

Why the small group of selective schools survived

In the 1970s and 1980s, two arguments shored up the acceptability of the surviving selectives. First, there were too few selective schools to affect the effectiveness of the comprehensive schools. The latter could attract, keep and promote opportunity for the academically able.

Second, the examination results of the selective schools brought distinction to the public education system. It was in the interest of public education that the “best” schools in NSW were public.

In 1988 the NSW Greiner Liberal-National government’s education minister, Terry Metherell, saw an injustice. Why should the mainly middle-class and professional families of the gentrifying inner city and suburbs have access to selective high schools that others in the outer suburbs did not?

Read more: Selective schools mainly ‘select’ advantage, so another one won’t ease Sydney’s growing pains

He decided that NSW needed more selective schools, at least across the outer suburbs of Sydney and in Newcastle and Wollongong. So, the Wyndham comprehensive project came to a halt. New selective schools were founded, usually through converting former comprehensive schools.

When the Carr Labor government came to power in 1995, it was too late for the democratic vision of the comprehensive high school. The Carr government’s contribution to selection in public education was to stream several comprehensive high schools as partially selective.

Not only would there be selective schools, but separated, selective streams would be created in new dual-purpose schools. For example, Newtown Performing Arts High School had a selective entrance stream, but also enrolled local students in its comprehensive stream.

Historically, the professional and aspiring middle classes have been the most successful in managing their children in ways that ensured their access to and success in academically selective schools.

With the rise in youth unemployment since the late 1970s, the anxieties associated with finding a school that may advantage a child have heightened, initially for the middle classes but increasingly for all.

More recently, traditional Anglo-Australian users of NSW selective schools have been losing the competition to migrant families, many of these from South and East Asia, who have been even more determined for their children to gain selective places.

Read more: Fewer students are going to public secondary schools in Australia

Whether the young people come from migrant families or other groups, the students in such schools and streams usually come to expect they will enter the more prestigious universities.

A market of schools has been fostered since the 1980s, as federal governments have deliberately increased the number of non-government schools and made access financially easier for parents. State governments have re-introduced differentiation in the public school sector (sports, language, performing arts and visual arts high schools, for instance.)

The ideal of the comprehensive school – a common school with a common curriculum for all youth in a community – has not been sustained. Many so-called comprehensive public high schools in high-unemployment areas have neither sustained enrolments nor a broad or comprehensive curriculum.

The survival of a small group of selective schools in NSW, with strategic and loyal support from left and right in politics and society, enabled the selective system’s rapid expansion from the 1980s, especially as public policy responded to new enthusiasm for markets – not only in schools.

– ref. New South Wales has 48 selective schools, while Victoria has 4. There’s an interesting history behind this – http://theconversation.com/new-south-wales-has-48-selective-schools-while-victoria-has-4-theres-an-interesting-history-behind-this-118823

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Beer, Dean, Research and Innovation, University of South Australia

Australia’s biggest city is abuzz with news of yet another housing development declared unsafe for human habitation. This time it is apartments built on a toxic dump the local council fears was not properly cleaned up.

In the past 12 months three other significant Sydney developments have all been evacuated due to major building defects. The plight of residents forced from their homes has focused national attention on issues to do with shoddy apartment construction, such as poor regulation and lax enforcement.

Read more: Buck-passing on apartment building safety leaves residents at risk

What gets less media attention is a greater systemic problem: the fact that hundreds of thousands of Australians are forced into inadequate or unhealthy housing by high housing costs. Thousands are evicted by landlords wanting higher rents. Some end up homeless.

These problems are underlined by the latest data on housing occupancy and costs from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Growing disparities

The figures show Australia has an excess of housing on average, but not enough for those in the greatest need.

Across Australia, an estimated 116,000 people are homeless while more than 300,000 households would like a home with an extra bedroom. Yet there are about 12 million empty bedrooms. One-third of all Australian homes have one unused bedroom. Another third have two, and 13% have three or more.

As you might expect, home owners are more likely to have an excess of bedrooms, while renters are more likely to need more space – and we’re increasingly a nation of renters than owners. Now 32% of households rent, compared with 27% a decade ago.

The main reason for all of this, unsurprisingly, is escalating housing prices.

After taking account of inflation, housing costs over the past decade increased 40% for home owners with a mortgage, but more than 50% for renters (both public housing and private).

Over the years governments have hatched schemes to address the issue of affordability, but the ABS data indicates such policies have made no real difference.

Across the board, these rising housing costs have bitten hardest on those with low incomes, as shown below. This chart tells us renters fare worse than home buyers and owners – and the gap is getting greater.

It’s a catch-22. Because homes cost so much to buy, you need a bigger deposit to get a mortgage. Because rents are so high, you cannot save enough for a deposit. It’s condemning whole generations to remain as tenants.

Unhealthy homes

The impacts of high housing costs affect households in many ways – from long-term financial stability to health.

Our research, using the household, income and labour data collected by the Melbourne Institute, for example, suggests 2.5 million Australians (about 10% of the population) live in homes harmful to their well-being and health.

Is a slowly accumulating impact. Usually there isn’t one part of housing that erodes health. It involves high housing costs hurting mental health as individuals struggle over years to pay their bills. It might be combined with living in, say, a damp and mouldy house that makes asthma or respiratory infections more likely. It includes living in a home that isn’t secure or distant to services such as a doctor.

Unhealthy housing doesn’t affect people at random: those most affected tend to be the sickest, poorest and most vulnerable.

As a nation we are right to sympathise with those forced out of their homes by circumstances beyond their control. But there’s something perverse if the attention only goes to cases affecting middle-class Australians, to affluent apartment developments and owners worried about their investments.

There’s a more fundamental housing problem in Australia. It is a problem of our own making, and we created it by thinking too much about rising house prices and the wealth they generated for owners. Booming housing markets have had a huge down side also. It has meant some people have gone without proper food or heating or medicines to keep a roof over their head.

Read more: How the housing boom has driven rising inequality

Here we have what economists call a market failure. It can only be fixed by acknowledging it. Earlier generations of policy makers – including the Productivity Commission’s predecessor, the Industry Commission – recognised government provision was the most effective way to provide low-cost housing. It’s time our current generation of politicians did the same.

It’s a case of not just individual developments being built on contaminated ground, but an entire system.

– ref. Dangerous to human health: that’s a housing problem much bigger than a few high-profile apartment blocks – http://theconversation.com/dangerous-to-human-health-thats-a-housing-problem-much-bigger-than-a-few-high-profile-apartment-blocks-120656

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Flannery, Planetary Scientist, Queensland University of Technology

This weekend marks 50 years exactly since humans first walked on the Moon. It also marks Australia’s small but significant role in enabling NASA to place boots on the lunar landscape – or at least to broadcast the event.

Those literally otherworldly images – beamed into countless schools, homes and workplaces – were at times routed through the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales.

Read more: Not one but two Aussie dishes were used to get the TV signals back from the Apollo 11 moonwalk

Thanks to a strong radioastronomy program dating back to the 1950s, a warm political relationship, and a geographically useful position in the Southern Hemisphere, Australian facilities have served NASA’s Deep Space Network for well over half a century.

Today, if you walk into the Spacecraft Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (which served as backup control room for the Apollo missions), you’re sure to notice an Australian flag positioned near a monitor showing a live stream of data from the Deep Space Network. The symbol for the Australian relay flashes as data arrive from spacecraft orbiting objects in the inner Solar System, and from others operating beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, Australia’s telescopes and tracking stations have played a role in every deep space mission since Apollo. However, our involvement is largely serendipitous rather than intentional, with generations of Australian governments having shown close to zero interest in space science.

Until the formation of the Australian Space Agency, almost 49 years to the day since the Parkes dish helped people everywhere watch the moon landings, Australia was the only OECD country without a national space agency.

Yet we were once a genuine space power. Australia was the third nation to launch a satellite from within its national borders, and the seventh overall. During the Apollo era, Woomera was the largest land-based test range in the Western world.

Notwithstanding a recently reinvigorated commercial light launch industry and a range of Earth observation and communications satellites, space science has followed a downward trajectory in Australia ever since. Deep space exploration in particular is viewed as the exclusive playground of superpowers, far too expensive for a middling nation.

Yet examples abound of smaller nations punching well above their weight in deep space. Take Canada, a country of comparable population and wealth to Australia, which has contributed numerous payloads to international missions. The Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, better known as the Canadarm, has worked on both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, inspiring a generation of robotics students along the way.

Canada will now build and operate a similar instrument on the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, the first stepping stone for astronauts headed to Mars.

Looking towards the next favourable launch window for Mars, which will occur in mid-2020, the United Arab Emirates (with a GDP less than a quarter of Australia’s) will launch its Mars orbiter. The European and Russian space agencies will launch a combined orbiter, lander and rover mission. China is on track to launch the first Chinese Mars rover in the same window, and shortly thereafter India will launch a new Mars orbiter based on the tremendously successful (and, at US$73 million, surprisingly affordable) Mars Orbiter Mission.

NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission will carry contributions from France, Norway, Denmark and Italy, to name a few.

Norway has channelled its experience studying glaciers with ground-penetrating radar into a geophysical instrument that will peer below the Martian surface. The Danish Technical University has designed a new lens that can photograph objects the size of a grain of sand on Mars.

And that’s just Mars.

Read more: What’s the next ‘giant leap’ for humankind in space? We asked 3 space experts

These and many other nations have a front-row seat on multibillion-dollar missions designed to address some of the biggest questions in science. The experience gained will all but ensure they stay on board for yet more ambitious international collaborations in the future.

This sort of contribution is within Australia’s compass, and we are well placed to collaborate with established space powers including the US, Europe, Japan and China. As more of the Solar System is explored and settled by robots, missing out means losing our voice on space policy issues.

Now we have a national space agency, we can at least rebuild the legal framework needed for international collaboration, and develop technologies to pitch to future missions. One hurdle here is the chicken-and-egg problem of having no current product pipeline because of no previous funding.

Fortunately, despite the near-total absence of a local space industry for decades, there is a considerable contingent of Australian expats working in space agencies overseas. This valuable talent pool can hopefully be enticed home.

A diverse and ambitious array of deep space missions is currently in development. Almost every part of the Solar System is receiving some attention. NASA is developing a lander to study organic molecules on Europa, and has just announced a nuclear-powered drone for exploring Titan. Numerous missions to comets, asteroids and Kuiper Belt Objects are in planning or already underway.

Where might Australia get the best bang for our buck? What’s the next “Moon shot”? After all, we might as well hitch our wagon to the largest beast in the yard.

Arguably, the next grand challenge is to bring Mars samples back to Earth. Both NASA and the Chinese Space Agency are planning missions that could culminate in achieving this during the 2030s.

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover represents the first mission in that series – indeed, one of its instruments will carry out a chemical analysis project led by Australian geologist Abigail Allwood. I am another Australian involved in this mission, and our compatriot Adrian Brown is the Mars 2020 Deputy Program Scientist.

Samples from Mars, some of which will be older than any surviving rocks on Earth, will provide new insights into the evolution of our own planet. They may even answer the question of whether life has evolved elsewhere in the Solar System, and thus whether we are likely ever to encounter living organisms beyond Earth.

Australia can help answer these kinds of questions, given our expertise in mining geology and remote sensing – not to mention studying the world’s oldest evidence for life on Earth: the ancient microbial fossils of Western Australia.

In this and in other deep space science opportunities, all we lack is the courage to imagine what is possible, and the confidence in our ability to succeed.

– ref. Why isn’t Australia in deep space? – http://theconversation.com/why-isnt-australia-in-deep-space-119533

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

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan – one with a reduced pace, despite the 24 hour news cycle. They talk about whether this new pace is a better way to govern, and what the next sitting week will bring on, including legislation to bring erring union officials into line. They also canvass Scott Morrison’s relationship with Donald Trump in light a State Dinner in his honour when Morrison visits Washington DC in September.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the next sitting week – and Scott Morrison’s relationship with Trump – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-next-sitting-week-and-scott-morrisons-relationship-with-trump-120680

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

The Building Ministers’ Forum (BMF) met yesterday yet again to discuss implementing the February 2018 Shergold-Weir Report they commissioned in mid-2017. The BMF is responsible for overseeing the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) and building regulation across Australia. The BMF announced yesterday it’s going to “strengthen” the ABCB, which will be “expanded to include greater representation and engagement from industry”.

This is the same regulator and the same industry that have been responsible for producing the dud buildings that have been making news across the country: Lacrosse, Opal, Neo200, Mascot Towers, the Gadigal Avenue apartments and countless others that have leaked, cracked and failed, but in less newsworthy ways.

Read more: Buck-passing on apartment building safety leaves residents at risk

On being appointed by the federal Coalition government in November 2017, the current chair of the ABCB, ex-NSW premier John Fahey, had this to say about his priorities:

The reform must reduce significantly red tape and have an over-riding focus of industry affordability.

In other words, the ABCB was to improve compliance by reducing red tape and focusing on “affordability”, which is about making buildings cheaper at completion. As the White Queen said in Alice in Wonderland: “Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Self-regulation has failed

Needless to say, virtually no progress has been made to re-regulate the industry, provide protection for consumers, or improve the durability and safety of buildings in the 19 months Fahey has held the reins.

Both major political parties have played a role in creating the policy and self-regulation regime that has produced so many faulty buildings over the last 30 years. It is about time the ALP, the Coalition, the BMF and the ABCB admitted that self-regulation has failed. NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian has already done so:

We allowed the industry to self-regulate and it hasn’t worked. There are too many challenges, too many problems, and that’s why the government’s willing to legislate.

The building ministers should instruct the ABCB to dump its focus on self-regulation and also require the regulator to start taking into account whole-of-life building costs, not just cost at completion. Senior ABCB staff, including the chair, appear to be part of the problem. Asking for their resignation or sacking them would not be unreasonable in the circumstances.

Regulations are far from watertight

Section F of the National Construction Code (NCC), which controls waterproofing, should be immediately rewritten to make it clear buildings should be waterproof. Section FP1.4 now reads:

A roof and external wall (including openings around windows and doors) must prevent the penetration of water that could cause — (a) unhealthy or dangerous conditions, or loss of amenity for occupants; and (b) undue dampness or deterioration of building elements.

What are “unhealthy or dangerous conditions”? What constitutes a “loss of amenity”? What is “undue dampness”?

No one can answer these questions, which is why builders and developers regularly try to dodge responsibility for leaks, by claiming moisture ingress is due to occupants “taking too many showers” or that “a bit of moisture is normal”.

The ABCB should change this clause to read:

A roof and external wall including all penetrations and inclusions must prevent the ingress of water and water vapour to the habitable part of a building for a minimum period of 40 years, without any maintenance.

Specifying durability standards is important. At present, most of the test methods in the NCC are satisfied if a sample component performs once in a lab. This does not deal with issues that occur in practice.

We know that any joint depending entirely on a sealant or paint is likely to last for only between seven and ten years if it is exposed to typical Australian sunlight and atmoshpheric conditions. That is nowhere near good enough on a tall building, where the entire facade will have to be scaffolded to rectify defects.

Read more: Australia has a new National Construction Code, but it’s still not good enough

Unfortunately, we can’t sack the past state and federal ministers who have presided over this fiasco. But the least the current politicians can do is not appoint them to the authorities that are supposed to be cleaning up the mess.

For example, former Victorian deputy premier John Thwaites was appointed to lead the Victorian Cladding Taskforce. Thwaites chaired the Australian Building Control Board (ABCB) from 2011 to 2017, appointed by the Rudd government.

Read more: Lacrosse fire ruling sends shudders through building industry consultants and governments

The problems are widespread

In 1996, according to ABS data, nearly one in five (18%) of all Australia’s occupied apartments were four storeys or over. By 2016 this had more than doubled to 38% of all occupied apartments (or 463,557 in total in 2016).

All of these buildings have been completed during a period where there has been “an over-riding focus on affordability” to use Fahey’s words. If the research we have is any guide, between 80% and 97% of these buildings may have serious defects.

If these buildings are defective, the owners and tenants have virtually no recourse. Development companies and building companies are routinely wound up after a building is completed, state governments have withdrawn from the insurance market and private insurers have been proven to provide limited protection – some have now withdrawn indemnity insurance.

Read more: Flammable cladding costs could approach billions for building owners if authorities dither

This situation is so bad, and trust in the industry so damaged, that we were treated last week to the unique spectacle of Meriton boss Harry Triguboff, among others, asking the government to do a better job of regulating builders.

What we need now is concerted and urgent action to stop defective buildings being built and a plan to help residential apartment owners rectify their buildings. (The commercial and government sector by-and-large can look after itself.)

The highest priority is to replace combustible cladding on tall residential buildings. The Victorian government should be congratulated for going forward with a scheme to achieve this.

Meanwhile, the BMF and the ABCB are still fiddling while Rome burns. They need to get on with it.

– ref. Ministers fiddle while buildings crack and burn – http://theconversation.com/ministers-fiddle-while-buildings-crack-and-burn-120592

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherie Hugo, Teaching Fellow, Nutrition & Dietetics, Bond University

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety this week turned its attention to food and nutrition. The testimony of maggots in bins and rotting food in refrigerators was horrific.

When so much of a resident’s waking hours is spent either at a meal, or thinking of a meal, the meal can either make or break an elderly person’s day.

So why are some aged care providers still offering residents meals they can’t stomach?

It comes down to three key factors: cost-cutting, aged care funding structures that don’t reward good food and mealtime experiences, and residents not being given a voice. And it has a devastating impact on nutrition.

Read more: Nearly 2 out of 3 nursing homes are understaffed. These 10 charts explain why aged care is in crisis

How much are we spending on residents’ food?

Our research from 2017 found the average food spend in Australian aged care homes was A$6.08 per resident per day. This is the raw food cost for meals and drinks over breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper.

This A$6.08 is almost one-third of the average for older coupled adults living in the community (A$17.25), and less than the average in Australian prisons (A$8.25 per prisoner per day).

Over the time of the study, food spend reduced by A$0.31 per resident per day.

Meanwhile the expenditure on commercial nutrition supplements increased by A$0.50 per resident per day.

Commercial nutrition supplements may be in the form of a powder or liquid to offer additional nutrients. But they can never replace the value of a good meal and mealtime experience.

Read more: What is ‘quality’ in aged care? Here’s what studies (and our readers) say

Cutting food budgets, poor staff training and insufficient staff time preparing food on-site inevitably impacts the quality of food provided.

At the royal commission, chefs spoke about using more frozen and processed meals, choosing poorer quality of meats and serving leftover meals in response to budget cuts.

Malnutrition is common, but we can address it

One in two aged care residents are malnourished and this figure has remained largely the same for the last 20 years.

Malnutrition has many causes – many of which are preventable or can be ameliorated. These include:

• dental issues or ill-fitting dentures
• dementia (because of difficulty swallowing and sensory sensitivities)
• a poorly designed dining environment (such as poor acoustics, uncomfortable furniture, inappropriate crockery and table settings)
• having too few staff members to help residents eat and drink and/or poor staff training
• not supplying modified cutlery and crockery for those who need extra help
• not offering residents food they want to eat or offering inadequate food choices.

My soon-to-be-published research shows disatisfaction with the food service significantly influences how much and what residents eat, and therefore contributes to the risk of malnutrition.

Malnutrition impacts all aspects of care and quality of life. It directly contributes to muscle wasting, reduced strength, heart and lung problems, pressure ulcers, delayed wound healing, increased falls risk and poor response to medications, to name a few.

Food supplements, funding and quality control

Reduced food budgets increase the risk of malnutrition but it’s not the only aged care funding issue related to mealtimes.

Aged care providers are increasingly giving oral nutrition supplements to residents with unplanned weight loss. This is a substandard solution that neglects fundamental aspects of malnutrition and quality of life. For instance, if a resident has lost weight as a result of ill-fitting dentures, offering a supplement will not identify and address the initial cause. And it ends up costing more than improving the quality of food and the residents’ mealtime experience.

Our other soon-to-be-published research shows the benefits of replacing supplements with staff training and offering high-quality food in the right mealtime environment. This approach significantly reduced malnutrition (44% over three months), saved money and improved the overall quality of life of residents.

Read more: So you’re thinking of going into a nursing home? Here’s what you’ll have to pay for

However, aged care funding does not reward quality in food, nutrition and mealtime experience. If a provider does well in these areas, they don’t attract more government funding.

It’s not surprising that organisations under financial pressure naturally focus on aspects that attract funding and often in turn, reduce investment in food.

A research team commissioned by the health department has been investigating how best to change aged care funding. So hopefully we’ll see changes in the future.

Aged care residents are unlikely to voice their opinions – they either won’t or can’t speak out. Unhappy residents often fear retribution about complaining – often choosing to accept current care despite feeling unhappy with it.

Read more: How our residential aged-care system doesn’t care about older people’s emotional needs

We lived in an aged care home. This is what we learned

New Aged Care Quality Standards came into effect on July 1 (I was involved in developing the guidelines to help aged care providers meet these standards).

However, they provide limited guidance for organisations to interpret and make meaningful change when it comes to food, nutrition and mealtime experience. Aged care providers will need extra support to make this happen.

We’ve developed an evidence-based solution, designed with the aged care industry, to address key areas currently holding aged care back. The solution offers tools and identified key areas essential for a happier and more nourishing mealtime.

At the end of 2018, our team lived as residents in an aged care home on and off for three months. As a result of this, and earlier work, we developed three key solutions as part of the Lantern Project:

• a food, nutrition and mealtime experience guide for industry with a feedback mechanism for facilities to improve their performance

• free monthly meetings for aged care providers and staff to discuss areas affecting food provision

• an app that gives staff, residents and providers the chance to share their food experiences. This can be everything from residents rating a meal to staff talking about the dining room or menu. For residents, in particular, this allows them to freely share their experience.

We have built, refined and researched these aspects over the past seven years and are ready to roll them out nationally to help all homes improve aged care food, nutrition and mealtime experience.

– ref. Why is nursing home food so bad? Some spend just $6.08 per person a day – that’s lower than prison – http://theconversation.com/why-is-nursing-home-food-so-bad-some-spend-just-6-08-per-person-a-day-thats-lower-than-prison-120421

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Children and Technology, Western Sydney University

Instagram is running a social media experiment in Australia and elsewhere to see what happens when it hides the number of likes on photos and other posts.

If you have an Instagram account, you’ll get to see the numbers but your followers won’t – at least, not automatically. They will be able to click and see who liked your post, but will have to count the list of names themselves.

The trial is taking place right now in six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. Canada has just finished its trial.

It’s a bold move by Instagram, but arguably a necessary one. There is growing concern about the effect of social media on young people’s mental health and self–esteem.

Read more: Women can build positive body image by controlling what they view on social media

Instagram explained:

We want your friends to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.

Likes, and their public tallying, have become the heart of Instagram and many other social media platforms. By hiding them, does Instagram risk devaluing a crucial currency?

Receiving loads of likes can feel like getting a gold star. It’s a public affirmation that you’re doing good work – a useful bit of quantitative feedback on your photographic skills or creativity. Under the new trial you’ll still get the gold star, but in private, and without broader recognition.

Nevertheless, the mental health repercussions of counting likes cannot be ignored. The design of social media promotes social comparison. You don’t have to spend long on Instagram to find a plethora of people who are evidently better-looking, more successful, and more glamorous than you.

As a result, young people can be left feeling inadequate and unworthy. Teens report that social media makes them feel closer to friends (78%), more informed (49%), and connected to family (42%). Yet many teens also report feeling pressure to always show the best versions of themselves (15%), overloaded with information (10%), overwhelmed (9%), or the dreaded “fear of missing out” (9%). These positive and negative reactions can see-saw, depending on a person’s particular mindset at the time.

Will comments become the new likes?

Without a public tally of likes, it is likely that comments will become an even stronger indicator of how people are interacting with a particular Instagram post.

Of course, comments can consist of anything from an emoji to an essay, and are therefore much more varied and adaptable than likes. Yet they can still affect users’ emotions and self-worth, particularly because (unlike likes), comments can be negative as well as positive.

Read more: Fairy-tale social media fantasies can demolish your confidence, but it’s not all bad

The reaction among Australian Instagram users has so far been mixed. Many are disgruntled about the change, feel manipulated by the platform, and argue that the change will reduce Instagram’s appeal, particularly among those who use it to support their business.

But others have applauded the move on mental health grounds, while others still have reported that they are already feeling the difference that the experiment is designed to deliver.

Nevertheless, people could potentially move away from Instagram if they don’t feel it benefits them in the way they want. This could conceivably leave the market open for new social media platforms that unabashedly count likes for all to see.

Finally, there is the question of whether this is nothing but a PR stunt by a global mega-brand.

It’s perhaps natural to be sceptical where the social media industry is concerned. But if this is a genuine move by Instagram to ameliorate the negative mental health effects of social media, then it’s a valuable experiment, and the results may be very beneficial for some. Let’s hope so.

– ref. What’s not to like? Instagram’s trial to hide the number of ‘likes’ could save users’ self-esteem – http://theconversation.com/whats-not-to-like-instagrams-trial-to-hide-the-number-of-likes-could-save-users-self-esteem-120596

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Cross, Research Fellow, Curtin University

Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au.

Billabongs in the northern Kimberley are welcome oases of colour in an otherwise brown landscape. This one reflected the clear blue sky, broken up by water lilies and a scattering of yellow Nymphoides flowers. A ring of trees surrounded it, taking advantage of the permanent water source.

My student and I approached with excitement. We had spent a week searching barren habitats, but now on the final day of our expedition we were ecstatic about the potential of this watering hole.

Read more: The strange world of the carnivorous plant

Between us we had been plant-hunting in northern Australia for nearly 20 years and knew well that where water seeped over sandstone, carnivorous plants often grew.

Clambering along some rocks at the edge of the billabong, I looked down by chance into a small rockhole and nearly fell in. Floating between two water lily leaves was a short stem of whorled leaves. And at the end of each leaf, a tiny snapping trap.

Looking out into the middle of the billabong I saw thousands of plants, and even a few tiny white flowers protruding above the surface of the water. After a decade of fruitlessly searching the swamps, creeks and rivers of the Kimberley for it, I had stumbled across a new population of Aldrovanda vesiculosa, the waterwheel plant.

The waterwheel plant must surely be among the most fascinating plants in the world. Its genus dates back 50 million years, and although we know of many species from the fossil record, A. vesiculosa is the only modern species.

The waterwheel plant is a submerged aquatic plant, first discovered by botanists in 1696 and studied by the likes of Charles Darwin, and is the only species to have evolved snap-trap carnivory under water. It takes just 100 milliseconds for the snapping leaves to close upon small, unsuspecting aquatic invertebrates such as mosquito larvae – one of the fastest movements in the plant kingdom.

Although the waterwheel plant also photosynthesises, it needs to eat prey to get enough nutrients to grow. And while its traps may be small, up to 1cm long, it can efficiently catch tiny insects and even small fish and tadpoles.

Mr Worldwide

Uniquely, the waterwheel plant is a global clone, with virtually no genetic differentiation between populations on different continents.

It has one of the largest and most disconnected distributions of any flowering species, growing in more than 40 countries across four continents, from sub-Arctic regions of northern Russia to the southern coast of Australia, and from western Africa to the eastern coast of Australia. Yet despite this global distribution, the waterwheel plant occupies a very small ecological niche, and grows only in the shallow and acidic waters of nutrient-poor freshwater swamps.

The waterwheel plant is sensitive, and is often the first species to disappear when these habitats become degraded.

As a result, this unique species has undergone a catastrophic global decline as humans have systematically degraded and destroyed nearly two-thirds of the world’s wetland habitats.

The past century has seen the systematic extinction of the waterwheel plant from more than half the countries it once occupied, and a rapid deterioration in almost all others. From more than 400 populations recorded since the 18th century, fewer than 50 now remain.

Three-quarters of these are in the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site, with the rest spread thinly across Africa, Australia and Europe, and isolated from each other by thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of kilometres. The species can be seen as a harbinger of the perilous state of our world’s freshwater ecosystems.

Conservation

Ecologists are working hard at conserving the waterwheel plant: monitoring habitats, reintroducing it into areas where it has become extinct and detailed study of its ecology and reproductive biology.

But ultimately, its future depends on the survival of wetlands – complex and sensitive ecosystems that can be affected by even small changes throughout their catchment area. Wetlands are often linked together by waterbirds and other animals that disperse plant seeds and spores between them, so the degradation of one area can have significant knock-on effects even for distant locations.

Read more: Why a wetland might not be wet

Without concerted wetland conservation, individual conservation for species like the waterwheel plant become little more than band-aids.

For the waterwheel plant, a single isolated population in a remote and untouched corner of the North Kimberley could represent a crucial refuge. It gives a thin sliver of hope that this remarkable species will still exist for future generations to marvel at.

Sign up to Beating Around the Bush, a series that profiles native plants: part gardening column, part dispatches from country, entirely Australian.

– ref. The waterwheel plant is a carnivorous, underwater snap-trap – http://theconversation.com/the-waterwheel-plant-is-a-carnivorous-underwater-snap-trap-120424

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

You’ve probably heard that this week marks 50 years since humans first set foot on the Moon – a feat that still boggles the mind given the limitations of technology at the time and the global effort required to pull it off.

If you’re as fascinated as we are about the history and future of space exploration, check out The Conversation podcast, To the moon and beyond, a five-part podcast series from The Conversation. We’ve featured a little taste of it on Trust Me today.

Through interviews with academic experts around the world – from space scientists to historians, lawyers, futurists and a former astronaut – science journalist Miriam Frankel and space scientist Martin Archer look at the past 50 years of space exploration and what the 50 years ahead have in store.

Episode two features Australia’s own space archaeologist, Alice Gorman, in conversation with Sarah Keenihan about why Apollo 11 landing spots could become heritage sites for future generations of visitors to the Moon.

Read more: To the moon and beyond 2: how humanity reacted to the moon landing and why it led to conspiracy theories

But today, The Conversation’s Molly Glassey sits down with a panel of astrophysicists to ask the big questions about space, like: what’s the next big thing that’s happening in space research, the thing that will blow us away or bring us together the way the Moon landing did back in 1969? And what’s the likelihood we’ll be living on Mars or the Moon in future?

Today, Molly chats to astrophysicists Jonti Horner and Belinda Nicholson from the University of Southern Queensland and planetary scientist Katarina Miljkovic from Curtin University.

You can find all the episodes of To the moon and beyond on your podcast app, or on our site here.

New to podcasts?

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Trust Me, I’m An Expert on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear us on Stitcher, Spotify or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Trust Me, I’m An Expert.

Credits:

To the moon and beyond is produced by Gemma Ware and Annabel Bligh. Sound editing by Siva Thangarajah. Thank you to City, University of London’s Department of Journalism for allowing use of their studios for To the moon and beyond, and to .

Music: Even when we fall by Philipp Weigl, via Free Music Archive

Fallen Stars by Ketsa, via Free Music Archive

Apollo 11 and 17 audio from NASA

Additional audio

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks.

Images

Pixabay/WikiImages

– ref. What’s the next ‘giant leap’ for humankind in space? We asked 3 space experts – http://theconversation.com/whats-the-next-giant-leap-for-humankind-in-space-we-asked-3-space-experts-120428

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dennis Gentilin, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University

As strange as it might sound, whistleblowers in Australia have reason to rejoice – so long as they are in the private sector.

Thanks to new laws that came into effect this month, private-sector whistleblowers have a range of new protections. This includes, in certain prescribed circumstances, the prospect of being compensated if they experience adverse outcomes after taking their concerns to the the media.

The timing is ironic, given last month Australia’s federal police launched raids on journalists and media outlets who received and published disclosures from public-sector whistleblowers. If identified and prosecuted, those whistleblowers could face lengthy prison sentences.

Read more: Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy

In fact, private-sector whistleblowers now have, for the first time, greater protection than their public-sector counterparts.

What the new laws do

The catalyst for the new laws was a parliamentary inquiry into whistleblower protection established in November 2016. The inquiry’s final report, published in September 2017, made a total of 35 recommendations. Though 19 were rejected by the federal government, the outcome is still a vast improvement on the previous provisions.

For the first time, federal legislation now defines, in broad terms, the following.

Who qualifies as a whistleblower. The list of those protected for making disclosures goes beyond company officers and employees. It includes suppliers, employees of suppliers, and relatives and dependants of officers, employees and suppliers.

What is a disclosable matter. Whistleblower protection isn’t just for disclosing illegal conduct. It also covers “misconduct” or an “improper state of affairs” (not including concerns about personal work-related grievances).

Who to make a disclosure to. To qualify for protection, whistleblowers no longer need to raise their concern through a “formal” whistleblowing channel. They can go to any officer or senior manager in a company, or to an auditor, or to regulators. Disclosures to journalists and members of parliament also qualify for protection in certain prescribed circumstances.

What constitutes detriment. Detrimental outcomes for whistleblowing are not constrained to dismissal or demotion. They include discrimination, harassment or intimidation, harm or injury (including psychological), and damage to property, financial position or reputation.

Read more: The secret’s in: how technology is making public interest disclosures even harder

Above all, the legislation empowers the courts to order payment of compensation to whistleblowers who experience detriment. To avoid any liability, organisations must demonstrate they have taken steps to protect whistleblowers.

Promoting protection

The prevailing view is that whistleblowing is a sure path to career suicide. The stories that loom large in the public consciousness are those of whistleblowers who, despite acting in the best interests of the organisations that employ them, are ostracised and abandoned.

Whistleblowing, to be sure, is an arduous undertaking that will always take some type of toll. But this prevailing narrative of significant adverse consequences is misleading.

I say this for two reasons.

The first is personal. In 2004, I was one of the whistleblowers in a major governance failure at the National Australia Bank. It led to four colleagues being jailed and senior executives resigning. Despite this, I went on to spend a further 12 years at the bank. The bank endorsed a book I subsequently wrote about the origins of ethical failure. Chairman Ken Henry even wrote the foreword.

The second, more importantly, is the evidence. The world-leading Whistling While They Work Research Project at Griffith University surveyed close to 18,000 people working in public and private sector organisations across Australia and New Zealand. Of the 4,382 respondents who reported wrongdoing in their organisations, 21% said they were treated well by both management and colleagues, compared to less than 13% who said they were treated badly.

There is no denying whistleblowers sometimes pay a significant price, but these results show positive outcomes are possible.

Beyond ‘tick-the-box’ compliance

The new whistleblowing laws aim to increase those positive outcomes and provide avenues for compensation when whistleblowers aren’t treated well.

The challenge for organisations now is making this happen.

A first step is to put in place a whistleblower policy. The legislation requires that all publicly listed and large proprietary companies have one. Among other things, the policy must detail:

• the internal channels through which whistleblowers can make disclosures
• how thorough, independent investigations will be conducted
• how the interests of the whistleblower will be protected.

As important as formal whistleblowing policies and programs are, however, they are not sufficient. Any “tick-the-box” compliance approach will inevitably fail to promote positive outcomes for whistleblowers without an ethical culture.

Read more: Solving deep problems with corporate governance requires more than rearranging deck chairs

Organisations must work hard to create environments that support those who raise concerns, and where leaders listen and take action. This will reduce potential liabilities for organisations and help shift the prevailing narrative surrounding whistleblowing.

We are now in a new era for private sector whistleblowers. Of course, the true litmus test will be when the laws are tested in the courts. But my hope is not just that the courts richly (and deservedly) compensate whistleblowers who suffer detriment. I hope the legislation is a catalyst for organisations to create environments that support whistleblowers, recognising the tremendous value they bring to any workplace.

– ref. It’s a new era for Australia’s whistleblowers – in the private sector – http://theconversation.com/its-a-new-era-for-australias-whistleblowers-in-the-private-sector-119596

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Griebsch, Specialist and Senior Lecturer in Small Animal Medicine, University Veterinary Teaching Hospital Sydney, Sydney School of Veterinary Science, University of Sydney

Recently reported cases of the often fatal bacterial infection leptospirosis in dogs in Sydney have raised the issue of animal diseases that also affect humans.

This zoonotic disease is spread by rats and other rodents. However, this latest cluster in dogs has not been accompanied by human cases in the Sydney area so far; dog cases aren’t always accompanied by human cases nearby.

So what is leptospirosis? And what can we do to protect ourselves and our pets from this potentially fatal disease?

Read more: Health Check: what bugs can you catch from your pets?

There have been at least six confirmed cases of canine leptospirosis so far in Sydney’s inner west and city in 2019, with three in May and June. Five of the six dogs died.

So far, these cases have been confined to one part of Sydney but we don’t know the source of the infection. Some people have speculated that recent building work may have dispersed rats and spread contaminated water through flooding.

How is it spread?

Leptospirosis is caused by Leptospira bacteria that rodents and other animals can transmit to animals and humans.

Dogs can become infected by direct contact (for instance, from a rat bite or from eating rats) or via indirect contact (for instance, by drinking urine-contaminated water).

Clinical signs might not show up in dogs for about seven days. Early signs can be vague — fever, lethargy, anorexia (loss of appetite), vomiting and diarrhoea.

Dogs can also shed bacteria in their urine without being clinically sick (“silent shedders”). This and contact with sick dogs poses a potential risk to other dogs and people coming in contact with their urine.

Read more: Hidden housemates: rats in the ranks

Severely affected dogs can develop acute kidney failure, liver injury and jaundice (yellow discoloration of the skin), uveitis (inflammation of the eyes), bleeding and in severe cases bleeding into the lungs leading to breathing difficulties. These clinical signs are the result of damage to the blood vessels (vasculitis) and resulting damage to organ blood supply.

Veterinarians can confirm the diagnosis after taking blood and urine samples. In suspicious cases, treatment with antibiotics needs to start quickly, even before the disease is confirmed by lab tests, to minimise organ damage. Severely ill dogs will require intensive care, ideally in an intensive care unit.

How do humans catch it?

As well as being exposed to bacteria from their infected pets’ urine, humans can become infected by rodents themselves. This can be directly (from a rat bite) or if a wound is exposed to soil or water contaminated with rat urine. Eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated water can also be responsible for transmitting the bacteria.

Humans might not have symptoms for two to 25 days. But in 90% of human cases, these are mild and mimic influenza.

Read more: Health Check: when are we most likely to catch viral diseases?

Less commonly, more severe disease can develop, which can be similar to what we see in dogs, and is known as Weil’s disease.

According to NSW Health, these more severe symptoms include kidney failure, jaundice (yellow colouration of the skin and eye balls which indicates liver disease), and haemorrhage into skin and mucous membranes. Meningitis (inflammation of the lining of the brain) and bleeding in the lungs can also occur. Most people who develop severe disease need to go to hospital, and severe leptospirosis can sometimes be fatal.

Leptospirosis is a notifiable disease in humans which means that laboratories have to notify cases of leptospirosis to the local public health unit. This year, 51 cases have been reported so far in Australia, but none of these have been linked to the current outbreak in dogs.

How do we prevent it?

We can prevent leptospirosis by limiting contact we and our pets have to sources of infection, and by vaccinating our dogs.

Make sure dogs don’t swim in and drink from stagnant water like ponds, lakes or puddles.

Wash your hands after contact with stagnant water, soil, urine from rodents, dogs or cats or simply after any contact with pets, especially before eating.

Similarly, avoid contact with rodents, and make sure you correctly dispose of garbage to reduce the chance of attracting rats.

Read more: Four ways having a pet increases your lifespan

Until now, leptospirosis has rarely been reported in Sydney. So, dogs are not routinely vaccinated. But we currently advise vaccination for all dogs in the inner west and city area.

The vaccine available in Australia protects against one serovar (type of the bacterium), and we do not know if this is the only type causing recent problems. Vaccines against multiple serovars are available overseas.

To learn more about the current cluster, we have started a research project. This will investigate the geographical distribution of the recent outbreak and the serovars of the bacteria involved. We are also collaborating with Sydney veterinarians who, with pet owners’ consent, are taking blood and urine samples from dogs before they get vaccinated against leptospirosis.

Hopefully then, we can better understand this latest cluster and how we can protect animal, and ultimately, human health in the future.

– ref. Explainer: what is leptospirosis and how can it harm us and our pets? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-leptospirosis-and-how-can-it-harm-us-and-our-pets-120221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lyndal Sleep, Research Fellow, Griffith University

In Australia’s social security laws, the “couple rule” is used to determine if a person is in a relationship, tying access to Centrelink payments to the income and assets of their partner.

For victims of domestic violence, it ties a woman’s access to social security payment to the perpetrator.

Recently I analysed Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) couple rule decisions from 1992 to 2016 that involved domestic violence. The full array of violence was represented in my sample of 70 decisions – from rape and enforced marriage to financial abuse.

Read more: Banks are enabling economic abuse. Here’s how they could be stopping it

I found that the very tactics perpetrators used to control and intimidate women were often used as evidence for a relationship. For example, financial abuse can be misinterpreted as “sharing finances”, which can indicate a relationship in the criteria of the couple rule.

As a result, women experiencing domestic violence were denied payment, made to repay a social security debt, or both. Some women were also be prosecuted for social security fraud through criminal courts.

And since many domestic violence victims rely on social security payment to become financially independent of the perpetrator, the couple rule must be seriously reviewed to give women a chance to begin a new life free from violence.

Criteria for the couple rule

The couple rule outlines criteria to determine if someone is in a relationship when it’s unclear.

The criteria considers various aspects of a relationship – financial, living arrangements, social, sexual (yes, they do ask), and commitment. A wide array of evidence is gathered to make this decision – from ATM records to children’s school records, and even hospital records.

Read more: Fleeing family violence to another country and taking your child is not ‘abduction’, but that’s how the law sees it

But the criteria rarely make an exception for domestic violence, despite difficulties determining when a violent relationship ends, as women often make multiple attempts to leave.

In the sample, the AAT decided that more than half (49 out of 70) of the women experiencing domestic violence were in a legitimate relationship.

Abuse tactics that indicate a relationship

Centrelink and AAT decision-makers used perpetrator tactics as evidence for a relationship.

For example, refusing to leave the family home when asked, and visiting a woman’s new address if she leaves, are examples of control over living arrangements. But cohabitation and “frequent visiting” could be considered indicators of a continuing relationship.

Read more: The long history of gender violence in Australia, and why it matters today

Perpetrators stealing money and denying finances to meet women’s and children’s basic needs are examples of financial abuse. But “sharing financial resources”, whether consensual or not, can be considered to be an indicator of a relationship.

And controlling information flow was recorded in the sample. In this case, the perpetrator can mould the image that Centrelink sees about the relationship. For instance, preventing a woman from receiving her own mail means he can make her miss important notifications and doesn’t respond to requests for updated relationship information.

Using police and hospital reports

Also concerning was the use of hospital and domestic violence police reports by social security decision-makers as evidence of a continuing relationship.

Centrelink has extensive legislative powers to compel the release of evidence from their customers, a person they believe to be the customer’s partner, and public and private institutions.

More than half of the decisions in the sample, 41 out of 70, used this type of information, and they have a very real impact on domestic violence victims receiving social security payments.

Read more: Four in ten Australians think women lie about being victims of sexual assault

For example, a woman admitted to hospital with injuries from her partner, which included him as next of kin, was considered an indication of a relationship.

Similarly, a woman asking for police support when harassed in her new home by her former partner was also considered evidence because he referred to her as his partner. A women’s opinion of her own relationship is only part of the evidence considered. Alarmingly, a perpetrator can also be asked to give evidence.

Victims can be punished for relationship fraud

The couple rule not only ties women’s access to social security payment to the assets and income of perpetrators, but it also puts them at risk of debt and imprisonment.

Women experiencing domestic violence and found to be in a relationship can be, and often were, asked to repay a Centrelink debt. And they can, and were, also be tried in criminal courts for social security fraud and imprisoned.

In a 2016 study, I found women could be doubly punished by being asked to repay a Centrleink debt through the AAT, and simultaneously tried for criminal prosecution and imprisoned through criminal courts.

Read more: See What You Made Me Do: why it’s time to focus on the perpetrator when tackling domestic violence

Essentially, the couple rule in Australian social security law punishes the victims of domestic violence. It needs serious review in both its application, and its legislative basis.

The National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

– ref. Domestic abuse or genuine relationship? Our welfare system can’t tell – http://theconversation.com/domestic-abuse-or-genuine-relationship-our-welfare-system-cant-tell-120223

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Walker, Lecturer (Management), Victoria University of Wellington

We live in a society obsessed with performance. For both young and old, competitions, awards and rankings are an inescapable feature of life.

How well we do – in the classroom, at work, on the sports field or even in life in general – influences how others see us, but also how we see ourselves. In some cases, this influence can be so strong that we come to see our performance as a key part of who we are.

Our research focuses on this potential identification with how good we are at what we do, and we argue that we need to recognise and better understand what we call performance-based identities.

Read more: Like to work with background noise? It could be boosting your performance

Why we build identity around performance

A performance-based identity arises when a person not only knows that they excel (or at the other extreme, are completely inept) at something, but feels fundamentally defined by that level of performance. Should they cease to perform to the same standard for any reason, they can lose their sense of self (or a big chunk of it).

Put simply, they’d struggle to answer that age-old question “who am I?” This in turn would raise all sorts of tricky questions about their place in the world, and their purpose and possibilities in life.

Not everyone will develop a performance-based identity, but we’re all potential candidates. This is simply because we all live in a world that constantly tells us doing well is important. This obsession with performance is pervasive beyond the realm of work and formal performance reviews. It is a part of our culture.

A recent survey of the values of more than 80,000 people worldwide found that over 65% of respondents thought being very successful or having others recognise their achievements was important to them. We see this focus on performance in all sorts of ways in everyday life. The most popular television shows are all about outperforming others on some activity, be it singing, cooking, creating a home, dating – or even marriage. In politics, voters are increasingly attracted to candidates who manage to portray themselves as “winners”, regardless of how much the evidence justifies their claims.

Not a new phenomenon

While the concept of performance-based identity is new, the phenomenon itself isn’t. About a century ago, the eminent German sociologist Max Weber developed the idea of the Protestant work ethic. He proposed that this religiously rooted drive to work hard was the psychological fuel of capitalism. In the 80s and 90s, Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura and colleagues produced a mass of research on the origins and outcomes of self-efficacy – what many people (to Bandura’s dismay) know as confidence.

More recently, another Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, has garnered a lot of popular interest for her research on “mindsets” – people’s assumptions about the changeability of their own skills and abilities. All these ideas point to the impact performance can have on how we see ourselves, and how we behave.

Yet the idea that people might go so far as to identify with their performance, at a very personal level, has so far eluded researchers’ attention, and recognition in everyday life. We aim to change this with our work, as we suspect that performance-based identities could be an influential part of many people’s mental makeup.

Why it matters

More often than not, we tend to think of performance-based identities in positive terms, and as having positive consequences. Think of the iconic status granted to boxer Muhammad Ali, and his famous “I am the greatest!” poem. Likewise, people usually admire – even envy – the intense self-belief demonstrated by the world’s top CEOs, movie stars and musicians.

It is indeed plausible that performance-based identities have many positive consequences for those who hold them. Defining yourself as exceptionally good at something presumably does wonders for self-esteem and confidence. Such an identity is also likely to provide protection during periods of poor performance or failure. If you and others know you are a top performer, moments of not so stellar performance will be brushed off as temporary anomalies.

Performance-based identities are also likely to inoculate against the well documented “impostor syndrome”, where people discount the role their own skills and abilities played in their achievements, which in turn leads to feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy.

Still, there’s undoubtedly a dark side to these identities as well. A positive performance-based identity could leave a person feeling as though they have no room to improve, making them overconfident and complacent about practice and development. Elite athletes sometimes speak about trying to avoid developing a performance-based identity for this very reason.

Read more: Five steps business can take to ensure aggressive performance targets don’t drive bad behaviour

Problems can also arise when people define themselves as top performers, but aren’t entirely certain of this identity. In these situations, people may be upset by even the most constructive feedback on their performance, or avoid helping (or sometimes even sabotage) their colleagues out of fear they’d lose their place at the top of the hierarchy.

Finally, negative performance-based identities – where individuals define themselves not as top performers but as exceptionally poor ones – are also likely to have a range of negative outcomes, such as low self-esteem and avoidance of challenging tasks.

More research that explores how performance-based identities impacts our lives is needed. In the meantime, Aristotle’s remark that “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” reminds us all of how our own sense of self might be shaped by the pervasive pressures to excel.

– ref. How our obsession with performance is changing our sense of self – http://theconversation.com/how-our-obsession-with-performance-is-changing-our-sense-of-self-120212

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan O’Connell, Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne

One-third of all preschools may lack a qualified teacher in the next four years if nothing changes, my new modelling shows.

Currently, half of all early childhood teachers have a bachelor degree, with a further one-third still working towards one. With many expected to drop out, my modelling shows a significant shortfall by 2023.

What are the numbers?

To lift children’s outcomes, early learning needs to be high quality, which includes being delivered by trained staff. This is why a focus on supporting the workforce to grow is so important.

The Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business predicts Australia will need around 49,000 preschool teachers by 2023. That means we’ll need an extra 29,000 from where we’re at now (some of the current workforce is expected to drop off).

We are a long way from meeting the shortfall given the current shortage of teachers and low numbers of teachers in training. Across Australia, around 4,000 students are enrolled in early childhood education teaching degrees per year.

Assuming the pass rate for these teachers is around the average of 56% (as for other teaching students), this would mean around 11,200 additional teachers would be available by 2023. That would leave a shortfall of 17,800.

Read more: Report finds every $1 Australia spends on preschool will return $2, but this won’t just magically happen

It’s worth noting many of these degrees are for teaching from birth to Year 8, or birth to Year 12, so not all graduates would seek to work in an early childhood setting. If more teachers choose school teaching with its higher wages and better conditions, the shortage will be far worse.

If we assume there is one qualified teacher per preschool service, this means by 2023 at least one-third of all services could be without the trained teacher they need.

We’re not meeting the goal

This is a far cry from the 2009 agreement made by all Australian governments to provide four-year-olds with access to preschool delivered by a trained teacher from 2013.

Early childhood teachers perform a variety of roles including planning and delivering learning programs and providing support for diploma and certificate-qualified educators, who make up the bulk of the early childhood workforce.

One outcome of the 2009 agreement was:

All children have access to affordable, quality early childhood education in the year before formal schooling.

And one of the performance indicators was:

The number of teachers delivering preschool programs who are four-year university trained and early childhood qualified.

In 2012, governments put transitional provisions in place. This was to give early childhood providers time to meet workforce provisions in hard-to-staff locations.

These provisions permitted educators working towards qualifications to be counted as teachers in remote and very remote areas. They also allowed services in these areas to remotely access teachers to meet their ratios.

The provisions were due to expire after five years, but were extended until 2020 given little attention was paid to workforce development for rural and remote services.

The Education Council, the meeting of all state and territory and Commonwealth education ministers, met recently to discuss early childhood.

Instead of deciding a workforce strategy to ensure these extensions end, they agreed another extension until 2021 in most states except Victoria, and until 2023 for Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

What is the potential impact on children?

Trained teachers and educators in early childhood make a difference to children’s academic outcomes in school. One study showed students who attended preschool led by a diploma or degree-qualified teacher were ahead the equivalent of 15 to 20 weeks of schooling at Year 3, based on their NAPLAN results.

Many children – more than one in four from remote areas, compared to one in five from major cities – are starting school behind their peers. In very remote areas, nearly half of children start behind.

Read more: Preschool benefits all children, but not all children get it. Here’s what the government can do about that

In addition to children living away from city centres, children from low socio-economic areas are most likely to be affected. They are already less likely to attend the highest-quality centres and more likely to start school behind their more advantaged peers.

A decade after all four-year-olds received their right to preschool, a shortage of trained teachers could mean one in three children miss out and start school further behind their peers as a result.

What could we do differently?

Governments have a few choices to make.

One choice is to accept the transitional provisions are actually an ongoing reality for many services and many children will miss out on trained teachers and fall further behind.

A better option would be to take workforce planning seriously and commit to investing in making sure every child has access to a trained teacher and a chance to succeed.

This would require efforts on a number of fronts. Attrition is a major issue in the early childhood education and care sector. Trained staff average just 7.4 years of experience and around 20% of the workforce intend to leave the profession within 12 months.

A key focus needs to be on keeping the current workforce. A raft of research has confirmed the major issues that need to be addressed to achieve this, including pay and conditions, professional status, and career and professional development.

A secondary focus needs to be on attracting, up-skilling and retaining new entrants to the profession. This includes examining what supports would be needed to up-skill educators to diploma and degree level.

Some of this work is happening in individual jurisdictions. For example, scholarships are available in Victoria to support the roll-out of three-year-old preschool.

A national workforce strategy is needed to build a workforce to ensure that all children, no matter where they live, are able to benefit from quality early learning.

– ref. One-third of all preschool centres could be without a trained teacher in four years, if we do nothing – http://theconversation.com/one-third-of-all-preschool-centres-could-be-without-a-trained-teacher-in-four-years-if-we-do-nothing-120099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Finch, Adjunct Research Fellow, University of Southern Queensland

For generations, libraries have helped people explore knowledge, information and culture. The invention of the public library meant more and more people got to use these collections and services.

In the digital age, a public library can connect even the most remote community to networks of knowledge and information. Today’s public libraries work to engage marginalised communities as users; pioneering projects like Townsville’s Murri Book Club explore ways to make the library meaningful to Indigenous people.

Despite all this, there is one area in which public libraries are underused. Libraries can also help us plan for the future.

Read more: The Murri Book Club and the politics of reading for Indigenous Australians

Long-term planning is always challenging. It’s simply impossible to gather data from events that haven’t happened yet.

Sometimes we may detect trends, but these can fall apart under what some foresight experts call “TUNA conditions”, when we face Turbulence, Uncertainty, Novelty or Ambiguity.

Think of someone trying to predict that experiments with debt on Wall Street would lead to the global financial crisis and the political ripples that have followed. Think of trying, today, to foretell all the long-term consequences of climate change.

Enter scenario planning

That means we’ve had to find new ways to look at the unpredictable future. Big business has used scenario planning since the 1960s, when Pierre Wack pioneered the approach for Shell.

In scenario planning, people come together to imagine future settings that challenge how we currently think. You don’t judge a scenario’s value by whether it’s likely to happen: its value lies in helping us to rethink our assumptions about the future.

Shell’s scenarios became famous in the 1970s when the company successfully anticipated the oil crisis that followed the Yom Kippur War. Shell hadn’t predicted the conflict, but had imagined scenarios where Middle Eastern oil producers worked as a cartel to control global supply. When those countries did start an oil embargo, scenario planning meant Shell had already thought through this possibility ahead of its competitors.

Today, experts thinking about the future acknowledge the need for engagement from the bottom up as well as top down. For example, the European Union’s new proposal for “mission-oriented innovation” aims to get all of us focused on solving society’s problems. In turbulent times, it’s important that at every level of society we strengthen our ability to imagine the future that awaits us – and our own future choices.

What is libraries’ role in this?

This chimes with the finding of research at the University of Southern Queensland, in support of a new vision for public libraries, that public libraries are a grassroots connector of people, ideas and resources:

Public library services are built on relationships, not just transactions; they are entwined with the specific and deeply local context of everyday life in the communities they serve.

Read more: Technology hasn’t killed public libraries – it’s inspired them to transform and stay relevant

Locally held scenario planning sessions, convened by communities at their public library, would make use of the library’s existing capacity to connect people – but this time with the goal of helping us reimagine the future.

Librarians would work with their local council to identify issues that call for a long-term perspective. Should we invest in “smart” tech for our small country towns? How much should we rely on recycled water or desalination in the big coastal cities?

Librarians would provide background research and host community workshops to develop local scenarios. People would start to have deeper, richer discussions about the future: there’s a reason scenarios have been called “the art of strategic conversation”.

The scenario process depends on bringing together a group of individuals in a trusted space, with enough information to give the scenarios detail and flavour. In a local community, the public library is that place of trust and information.

Much as public librarians use their skills to help with job seeking or support people’s health and well-being, as scenario planners they would apply their talents to a new domain.

Read more: Friday essay: why libraries can and must change

Conversations that could transform politics

Playful events we have run in collaboration with Ann Arbor Public Library in Michigan, to capture the attention of children as well as adults, have begun to engage local people with the notion of the long-term future. The next step is to develop a more rigorous and substantive conversation.

If public libraries were supported to deliver strategic foresight to their communities, politics could transform. The electorate would be better informed, thinking deeper and further ahead about political issues. Councils could take decisions with confidence that the community had been consulted about the long-term consequences.

Scenarios would offer a playbook of potential futures, already imagined and rehearsed. Every Australian could have access to the kind of foresight tools that have been informing the decisions of government and big business for the past half century.

Imagine the conversations we, as a country, would be having about our future if we democratised those tools via the local library.

Read more: Friday essay: the library – humanist ideal, social glue and now, tourism hotspot

– ref. How public libraries can help prepare us for the future – http://theconversation.com/how-public-libraries-can-help-prepare-us-for-the-future-120074

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsty Volz, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

Of all the mantras for modernism, the one I think most befitting for Australian mid-century modern houses is L’esprit Nouveau – The New Spirit. These houses represented more than style; they reflected a new Australian spirit that emerged in the postwar era.

Modernism was established in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. An intentional shift away from classical tradition, it was informed by new technology and mass production. While early modernism was weighed down by the avant garde and elitism, mid-century modernism – which includes architecture from the 1950s to the late 1970s – became accessible and was embraced internationally.

The current resurgence in popularity of mid-century modern houses in Australia has been spurred by websites such as Modernist Australia, social media groups for “MCM” enthusiasts, public exhibitions, and even real estate agents dedicated to selling the Modern House.

Read more: Explainer: what is modernism?

A fascination with mid-century modernism has also been explored in the two-part documentary Streets of Your Town, hosted by comedian and self-proclaimed “architecture tragic” Tim Ross. He describes how the popularity of these houses was underpinned by purpose as much as style:

Modernism may have had its birth in Europe and its glamour in America but I think it found its egalitarian purpose, unrivalled anywhere else in the world, in Australia’s suburbs.

Some enthusiasts point to the television series Mad Men as the catalyst for international mid-century modern revivalism. But visual culture has also been central to its popularity in Australia. As these homes emerged, so too did the suburbs, which became the setting for much of Australian television and theatre.

I think this is central to the popularity of these houses. Even if you didn’t grow up in one, you probably watched a family who did on television.

I grew up in a late 70s, mid-century modern home. It was designed by a draftsperson, not an architect, but featured many of the design elements commonly associated with the style. Just like the Kerrigan family in The Castle we had a pool room, complete with a purpose-built bar.

Mid-century modern in pop culture

Early 20th century Australian architecture, especially during the interwar period, had been burdened with the nationalistic desire to create a distinctly Australian house.

In the postwar era, however, the cultural landscape shifted from the wide brown land to the interior of our suburbs, and especially our homes. Australian culture was motivated by the kind of self-consciousness often associated with modernism. This was reflected in mid-century modern houses, with their humble facades and efficient planning.

Ray Lawler’s 1955 play Summer of the 17th Doll exemplifies this shift and is considered to be the first Australian play to be set inside a house. Around the same time, in 1956, Melbourne was hosting the Olympic Games, and with a shortage of hotel accommodation, families were asked to billet athletes. This placed Australian homes, in a very real sense, on an international stage.

It was this event that inspired the character Mrs Norman Everage (later Dame Edna Everage) of Moonee Ponds. The first Edna Everage show revolved around her domestic preparations for international guests in the lead up the 1956 Games. Barry Humphries then took a satirical view of Australian domesticity to an international audience.

Humphries’ critical view on Australian life, alongside books such as David Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964) and architect Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960), represented a maturing of Australian culture, which emerged from critical reflections on our position in the world through art, architecture, literature and film.

Boyd and Humphries shared an enduring friendship, and there are many overlaps in their critique of Australian domesticity. Boyd’s work has undoubtedly been at the centre of the current mid-century modern revival. The attention it attracts is not just about his architecture, but also the sentiments that informed it. For Boyd, architecture was not an isolated discipline, rather it possessed the capacity to shape, and be shaped by, broader social, political, economic and cultural ideas.

Boyd was instrumental in setting up the Small Home Service in 1947, which delivered designs for modern, small, flexible, and affordable homes in response to postwar housing shortages. It is probably this aspect of his work that resonates the most – a solution to housing inefficiencies led by professionals for the greater good, not financial greed.

Great Australian party houses

Of course, there is much to admire about Boyd’s designs, and those of the other architects working for the Small Home Service. Externally, the designs were refined and simple. Australian mid-century modern houses are unique with their pitched roofs in contrast to the flat roofs found in America and Europe. They introduced open plan living areas, a move away from a series of rooms connected by hallways.

This openness brought more light into living spaces, as did bigger windows and glass sliding doors that connected inside and outside. And, as Ross’ book The Rumpus Room, And other stories from the suburbs (2017) describes, this openness made them great Australian party houses.

Made of prefabricated elements, these houses were a builders’ delight – and affordable. By the 1960s, most large building companies, including AV Jennings offered a range of such houses for sale.

This year marks 50 years since the election party that inspired David Williamson’s play Don’s Party (1971). Williamson drew inspiration from his AV Jennings Type 15 home, built in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora in the 1960s.

In 2011, I asked him how his home had influenced the writing of Don’s Party. He told me:

a feature of these houses was the openness and connectedness of the living, dining and kitchen areas with the bedrooms down a corridor at the back. This openness allowed one to think of a set design. It was good for the dramatic structure. I drew a floor plan and had the characters’ names on slips of paper which I slid around the floor plan so I knew who was where at any particular time.

Williamson’s reflections show how these houses were a literal backdrop to writers and performers at the time.

The 1976 film Don’s Party was shot in a house built by Australian company Pettit and Sevitt, founded in 1961. Its design, known as the “Lowline”, was created by architects Ken Woolley and Michael Dysart.

Like the Small Homes Service, Pettit and Sevitt aimed to build good quality, affordable, architect-designed homes. Forty years after closing their business, they have recently re-opened it, such is the current enthusiasm for mid-century modernism.

It seems obvious that the combination of affordability and well designed homes is an irresistible quality. However, the popularity of mid-century homes, – both then and now – runs much deeper. I would argue that they are also a reflection of a nation quietly contemplating its place in the world.

The problem child of heritage

The rise of the mid-century modern house unfortunately coincided with the modernist urban planning principles that resulted in car dependent, low density suburbs on the outskirts of cities. The sprawling nature of these suburbs has contributed to the housing stress many Australians currently experience.

The location of these houses, along with their larger lot sizes, means many have now been demolished and replaced with higher density developments. There is now a sense of urgency about their protection and conservation.

Professor Philip Goad from the University of Melbourne describes modernism as the “problem child of heritage”. By this he means, it belongs to an era that has surely passed by, but is too young to be broadly admired as built heritage.

Read more: Uneasy heritage: Australia’s modern church buildings are disappearing

Publications such as Designer Suburbs, Hot Modernism, Australia Modern, An Unfinished Experiment in Living, and The Other Moderns have highlighted the broader cultural value of these houses. This has also been part of the mission of the Robin Boyd Foundation, which has conserved Boyd’s iconic Walsh Street House.

This year marks 100 years since Boyd’s birth. In August, an exhibition at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art will celebrate ten of his most iconic houses. The exhibition aims to share Boyd’s “humanist belief that good design can improve people’s lives and the world we live in”, capturing both the ethos of mid-century modern and the sense of nostalgia that now surrounds it.

Very few surveys of mid-century modern houses in Australian suburbs exist. In 2018, Bayside Council in Melbourne started a heritage survey of them in the suburbs of Beaumaris and Black Rock. Unfortunately, less than a year later, council had abandoned the project.

The connection between Australia’s mid-century modern houses and popular culture demonstrates their cultural and heritage value. However, heritage is not simply determined by perceived aesthetic merit – it also needs to address practical issues such as the maintenance of building materials, as well as good planning principles.

The efforts of mid-century modern enthusiasts have produced greater awareness of the cultural significance of these buildings. In time, they should secure the same heritage protection afforded to other architectural styles.

– ref. Friday essay: why old is new again – the mid-century homes made famous by Don’s Party and Dame Edna – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-old-is-new-again-the-mid-century-homes-made-famous-by-dons-party-and-dame-edna-113363

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

Australia’s relations with China will be further complicated by the news that Australian citizen Yang Hengjun is set to be charged with endangering state security.

This is a serious charge that carries the penalty of at least three years in jail.

Read more: Australian-Chinese author’s detention raises important questions about China’s motivations

Yang’s wife Yuan Xiaoliang was notified earlier today that her husband would be charged, a day before the six-month deadline determining whether he is to be released, charged or have his detention extended.

Charges against Yang appear to relate to his work as a writer and blogger in which he has been sharply critical of the Chinese regime. He developed a large following on Chinese social media and on Twitter, and his criticisms will have infuriated Chinese authorities.

Yang was arrested after he returned to China earlier this year with his family. He has been held in a Beijing state security prison since then, without access to lawyers, and denied contact with his family.

Australian attempts to secure access have been rebuffed.

Canberra’s relations with Beijing

China’s decision to charge Yang comes at an awkward moment in relations between Beijing and Canberra.

Australia this week was obliged to step up its consular efforts to persuade China to allow Uyghur families to leave Xinjiang to be reunited with their Australian families.

This followed broadcast an ABC four Corners program that drew attention to the plight of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Up to a million out of a population of 11 million in the region are reported to be in “re-education” camps.

This has drawn outrage globally.

Read more: Four Corners’ forced labour exposé shows why you might be wearing slave-made clothes

China’s official media responded harshly to the ABC program and to criticism of China’s treatment of Uyghurs more generally. The Global Times newspaper, which tends to reflect a hardline nationalist view, accused critics of “recklessly attacking” China.

Yang’s case reflects China’s extreme sensitivity to criticism.

This episode won’t help Australia’s efforts to get its relationship with China on more stable footing after several years of difficulties.

China had objected to criticism of its attempts to interfere in Australian domestic politics via Chinese nationals associated with Beijing. This led to a freeze on visits to China by Australian political leaders. While that freeze has thawed, tensions remain.

Chinese laws affect other western democracies

Australia is far from alone among western democracies whose citizens have fallen foul of opaque and arbitary Chinese law and legal procedures.

Canada is wrestling with the cases of two of its citizens who have been held without charge since last year. China has accused the pair of stealing state secrets.

This is a serious charge that can result in the death penalty.

The two Canadians were detained after the arrest at Vancouver airport of Meng Wanzhou, daughter of the founder of the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei. Meng is appealing attempts by the United States to extradite her to face charge of fraud.

This is a highly contentious issue, and one that is complicating relations between Washington, Ottawa and Beijing.

Read more: Avoiding the China trap: how Australia and the US can remain close despite the threat

Apart from arresting the Canadians accused of stealing state secrets, China has also taken aim at Canada economically. It has stopped Canadian rapeseed oil imports, dealing a hefty blow to a multibillion dollar canola industry.

What the Canadian arrests, and now that of an Australian writer, demonstrates is that relations with China are unlikely to become less complicated. Rather, it is likely they will become more so.

Among challenges for countries like Australia is how to quarantine issues of mistreatment of its citizens and broader human rights abuses, from the functioning of broad-ranging bilateral relations.

– ref. Australian writer Yang Hengjun is set to be charged in China at an awkward time for Australia-China relations – http://theconversation.com/australian-writer-yang-hengjun-is-set-to-be-charged-in-china-at-an-awkward-time-for-australia-china-relations-120605

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Kyne, Senior Research Fellow in conservation biology, Charles Darwin University

More than 28,000 species around the world are threatened, according to the Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The list, updated on Thursday night, has assessed the extinction risk of almost 106,000 species and found more than a quarter are in trouble.

While recent headline-grabbing estimates put as many as 1 million species facing extinction, these were based on approximations, whereas the IUCN uses rigorous criteria to assess each species, creating the world-standard guide to biodiversity extinction risk.

Read more: ‘Revolutionary change’ needed to stop unprecedented global extinction crisis

In this update, 105,732 species were ranked from least concern (little to no risk of extinction), to critically endangered (an extremely high risk of extinction) and extinct (the last individual of a species has expired).

This Red List update doesn’t hold a lot of good news. It takes the total number of threatened species to 28,338 (or 27% of those assessed) and logs the extinction of 873 species since the year 1500.

These numbers seem small when thinking about the estimated 1 million species at risk of extinction, but only around 1% of the world’s animals, fungi and plants have been formally assessed on the IUCN Red List. As more species are assessed, the number of threatened species will no doubt grow.

More than 7,000 species from around the world were added to the Red List in this update. This includes 501 Australian species, ranging from dragonflies to fish.

The shortfin eel (Anguilla australis) has been assessed as near threatened due to poor water and river management, land clearing, nutrient run-off, and recurring drought.

Twenty Australian dragonflies were also assessed for the first time, including five species with restricted ranges under threat from habitat loss and degradation. Urban and mining expansion pose serious threats to the western swiftwing (Lathrocordulia metallica), which is only found in Western Australia.

Plight of the rhino rays

I coordinate shark and ray Red List assessments for the IUCN. Of particular concern in this update is the plight of some unique and strange fishes: wedgefishes and giant guitarfishes, collectively known as “rhino rays”.

This group of shark-like rays, which range from Australia to the Eastern Atlantic, are perilously close to extinction. All six giant guitarfishes and nine out of 10 wedgefishes are critically endangered.

While rhino ray populations are faring comparatively well in Australia, this is not the case throughout their wider Indo-Pacific and, in some cases, Eastern Atlantic ranges, where they are subject to intense and often unregulated exploitation.

The predicament of rhino rays is driven by overfishing for meat and their valuable fins. Their meat is often eaten or traded locally and, along with other sharks, rays and bony fishes, is an important part of coastal livelihoods and food security in tropical countries. Their fins are traded internationally to meet demand for shark fin soup. The “white fins” of rhino rays are highly prized in the trade and can fetch close to US$1,000 per kilogram.

Read more: Undocumented plant extinctions are a big problem in Australia – here’s why they go unnoticed

This exploitation for a high-value yet small body part places the rhino rays in the company of the rhinoceroses in more than name alone.

Two species in particular may be very close to extinction. The clown wedgefish (Rhynchobatus cooki) from the Indo-Malay Archipelago has been seen only once in over 20 years – when a local researcher photographed a dead specimen in a Singapore fish market.

The false shark ray (Rhynchorhina mauritaniensis) is known from only one location in Mauritania in West Africa, and there have been no recent sightings. It’s likely increased fishing has taken a serious toll; the number of small fishing boats in Mauritania has risen from 125 in 1950 to nearly 4,000 in 2005.

This rising level of fishing effort is mirrored in the tropical nations of the Indo-West Pacific where most rhino rays are found.

Effective rhino ray conservation will require a suite of measures working in concert: national species protection, habitat management, bycatch reduction and international trade restrictions. These are not quick and easy solutions; all will be dependent on effective enforcement and compliance.

Read more: From sharks in seagrass to manatees in mangroves, we’ve found large marine species in some surprising places

The challenges of saving rhino rays illustrate the larger, mammoth task of tackling our current extinction crisis. But the cost of inaction is even larger: precipitous loss of biodiversity and, eventually, the collapse of the ecosystems on which we depend.

This article was co-written by Caroline Pollock, Program Officer for the IUCN’s Red List Unit.

– ref. More than 28,000 species are officially threatened, with more likely to come – http://theconversation.com/more-than-28-000-species-are-officially-threatened-with-more-likely-to-come-120430

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt University

Two Australian universities, University of Technology Sydney and Curtin University, are conducting internal reviews of their funding and research approval procedures after Four Corners’ revealed their links to researchers whose work has materially assisted China’s human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province.

UTS, in particular, is in the spotlight because of a major research collaboration with CETC, the Chinese state-owned military research conglomerate. In a response to Four Corners, UTS expressed dismay at the allegations of human rights violations in Xinjiang, which were raised in a Human Rights Watch report earlier this year.

Yet, UTS has been aware of concerns about its collaboration with CETC for two years. When I met with two of the university’s deputy vice chancellors in 2017 to ask them about their work with CETC, they dismissed the concerns.

Read more: Four Corners’ forced labour exposé shows why you might be wearing slave-made clothes

According to a report for the Jamestown Foundation, CETC openly declares that its purpose is “leveraging civilian electronics for the gain of the PLA (People’s Liberation Army).” Similar concerns had been raised about CETC’s military links and its work with the CSIRO.

Alex Joske, now an analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and I had also uncovered a pattern of widespread research collaborations between academics at Australian universities and Chinese scientists and corporations connected to China’s armed forces and security services.

Along with UTS, ANU and UNSW are the most heavily invested. Some of the collaborations have been partly funded by the Australian Research Council. Some of our research was published in June and October 2017.

Some universities challenged over their associations have reacted defensively. Responding to a story questioning the wisdom of UNSW’s huge commitment to a China-funded “Torch Technology Park”, DVC Brian Boyle dismissed the evidence and suggested the criticisms were motivated by xenophobia.

When UTS teamed up with CETC in 2016 to collaborate on research projects worth A$10 million in its CETC Research Institute on Smart Cities, CETC was already working with the Chinese state to improve the world’s most comprehensive and oppressive system of surveillance and control of its citizens.

CETC is upfront about its Smart Cities work, saying it includes “public security early warning preventative and supervisory abilities” and “cyberspace control abilities.” A report by the official Xinhua news agency in 2016 noted that CETC’s work on smart cities “integrates and connects civilian-military dual-use technologies.”

Defence controls

When asked about their collaborations with Chinese experts in military and security technology, universities have typically responded that all of their research proposals comply with the Defence Trade Controls Act, which restricts the export of technologies, including IP, deemed sensitive.

They were able to tick the right boxes on the relevant forms because it was possible to describe the planned research as “civilian.” But even well-informed amateurs know that the traditional distinction between civilian and military research no longer applies because major civilian technologies, like big data, satellite navigation and facial recognition technology, are used in modern weapons systems and citizen surveillance.

At the urging of President Xi Jinping, China’s government has been rapidly implementing a policy of “civilian-military fusion.”

Read more: Patriotic songs and self-criticism: why China is ‘re-educating’ Muslims in mass detention camps

UNSW scientists have collaborated with experts from the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), a top military research centre, on China’s Beidou satellite system, which has many civilian as well as military uses, including tracking the movements of people and guiding missiles.

Joske found that some two dozen NUDT-linked researchers have passed through UNSW as visiting scholars or PhD students in the last decade. A further 14 have passed through ANU. Some have backgrounds working on classified Chinese defence projects.

Having visited and studied at Australian institutions, these researchers, who hold rank in the People’s Liberation Army, return to China with deep international networks, advanced training, and access to research that is yet to be classified. In many cases, a clear connection can be drawn between the work that PLA personnel have done in Australia and specific projects they undertake for the Chinese military.

The same can be said for companies like CETC that take research output from Australian researchers and apply it to the security and surveillance technology used across China.

“Orwellian” seems inadequate for the types of surveillance and security technologies being implemented in China. Facial recognition scanners have even been set up in toilets to allocate the proper amount of toilet paper. The state tells you whether you can wipe your backside.

Fixing the system

Some universities pass the buck by saying that the department of immigration is responsible for any security concerns when assessing visa applications for researchers. (Now the authorities are doing more checks, but the universities are grumbling because visas for Chinese scientists are taking too long.)

The universities’ refusal to accept any responsibility tells us there is a cultural problem. Most university executives believe that international scientific collaboration is a pure public good because it contributes to the betterment of humankind — and, of course, the bottom line.

So asking them more carefully to assess and rule out some kinds of research goes against the grain.

Read more: The world has a hard time trusting China. But does it really care?

All of this suggests that the system is broken. The fact remains that Chinese military scientists and researchers at companies like CETC have been returning to China with improved knowledge of how to build better weapons and more Orwellian surveillance systems.

American universities are now alive to the problem by looking much more closely at the China links of scientists working in the US. So, in April 2018, it was reassuring to see the Australian minister of defence, Marise Payne, commission an inquiry into the effectiveness of the defence trade controls regime.

However, when it came time, the report failed to recognise Australia’s new security environment, especially the risks posed by China’s aggressive program of acquiring technology from abroad. It accepted the university view that the system is working fine and, apart from a few recommended adjustments to the existing Defence Trade Controls Act, kicked the can down the road.

In short, defence and security organisations, who can see how the world has changed, lost out to those who benefit from an open international research environment, one that has been heavily exploited by Beijing for its own benefit.

In the US, federal science funding authorities have been sending the message that continued funding will be contingent on universities applying more due diligence to the national security impacts of their overseas research collaborations. We can expect to see something similar in Australia.

– ref. Australian universities must wake up to the risks of researchers linked to China’s military – http://theconversation.com/australian-universities-must-wake-up-to-the-risks-of-researchers-linked-to-chinas-military-120574

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

The next US presidential election will be held on November 3, 2020. Incumbent president Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee, but there is a contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Republican and Democratic nominees will be the only candidates with a realistic chance of winning the presidency.

Both major parties will hold presidential primaries and caucuses in the various states between early February and early June 2020. These contests select delegates to the party conventions in mid-July (Democrats) and late August (Republicans), at which the party’s candidate is formally nominated. Primaries are administered by the state election authority, while caucuses are managed by the party.

Democratic delegates are allocated proportionally to candidates who clear a high 15% threshold, both within each Congressional District (CD) and state. The more Democratic-leaning a CD is, the more delegates it will receive. The total number of delegates for a state depends on that state’s population and how Democratic-leaning it is.

There will be a grand total of 3,768 pledged delegates, so 1,885 is needed to win on the first ballot at the Democratic convention. Superdelegates (Democratic members of Congress, governors and party leaders) cannot vote in the first round, but if no candidate has a first round majority, it becomes a “contested convention”, and superdelegates can vote.

Four Democratic contests are permitted in February 2020: the Iowa caucus (Feb 3), New Hampshire primary (Feb 11), Nevada caucus (Feb 22) and South Carolina primary (Feb 29). Relatively few delegates will be chosen at these contests, but they are still very important for establishing front runners and winnowing the field.

On “Super Tuesday” March 3, 14 states will vote including delegate-heavy California and Texas. 1,358 pledged Democratic delegates, or 36% of the total, will be determined as a result of these contests, so this could be the decisive moment of the Democratic presidential nomination.

Current Democratic primary polling

In the RealClearPolitics poll aggregate, Joe Biden has 28.4% support from national Democrat-aligned voters, followed by Bernie Sanders at 15.0%, Elizabeth Warren at 14.6% and Kamala Harris at 12.6%. Everyone else is at 5% or less.

The first Democratic presidential debate was held over two nights, June 26-27, to cope with the 20 candidates who qualified. As a result of this debate, Biden dropped from the low 30’s to the mid 20’s, but has recovered a little. Harris surged from 7% to 15%, but has fallen back since.

The next Democratic debate will also be held over two nights, July 30-31. For the following debate on September 12, the qualification threshold has been raised, so fewer candidates will qualify.

In early-state polls taken since the first debate, Biden had 24% in Iowa, Harris 16%, Warren 13% and Sanders 9%. In New Hampshire, Biden averaged 22.5%, Warren 18%, Sanders 14.5% and Harris 13.5%.

On current polling, Biden would win the Democratic nomination as he would be the only candidate certain to pass the 15% threshold in the vast majority of CDs and states. Unless one of Sanders, Warren or Harris can build their support beyond 20%, this is a viable scenario.

Biden appeals to older and more conservative Democrats, but an important reason for his lead is his perceived electability. After Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss in 2016, Democrats are desperate to ensure Trump is a one-term president. In a Quinnipiac poll of California, 45% of Democrats thought Biden had the best chance of any candidate to beat Trump, with no other candidate getting more than 12%.

By the time of the 2020 general election, Biden will be almost 78, Sanders will be 79, and Trump will be a mere 74. Warren will be 71. Harris is easily the youngest top-tier candidate; she will be 56 by the election. According to CNN analyst Harry Enten, only 33% of Democrats would feel comfortable with a nominee aged over 75.

Another reason for scepticism about Biden’s electability is that, like Clinton, he is an established politician who was first elected to the Senate in 1972. There are likely to be some things in Biden’s long political career that Trump will be able to exploit in the general election.

For the record, Trump has over 80% support for the Republican presidential nomination.

What about the general election?

In the FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate, Trump’s ratings are currently 42.4% approve, 52.8% disapprove with all adults. With polls of registered or likely voters, his ratings are 43.3% approve, 52.4% disapprove.

With the official US unemployment rate at just 3.7%, Trump’s ratings are weaker than they should be given economic data. There has been little change in his ratings since a slump during the January 2019 government shutdown, followed by a recovery once the shutdown ended.

Trump’s current ratings show that, if the next election is a referendum on his performance, he should be defeated. Trump’s best chance of re-election is if the Democrats nominate somebody who is also unpopular, as Clinton was in 2016.

On current economic figures, Trump will probably be defeated in 2020, but this is by no means certain. However, there is a major political risk to the economy: a “no-deal” Brexit. Right-wingers have strongly advocated a hard Brexit, and they may get what they want with Boris Johnson certain to be the next British PM – as I wrote for The Poll Bludger on July 10. The result of the Conservative members’ ballot for leader will be declared on July 23.

If a no-deal Brexit occurs on October 31, there is likely to be a large negative impact on the UK economy, with knock-on effects for the world economy. A no-deal Brexit and Trump’s tariffs are likely to have some impact on the US economy. A US recession in 2020 would be very bad for Trump’s re-election chances.

As I said in the article I wrote immediately after the May Australian election, I believe the left’s only hope to consistently win elections is if there is a major economic disaster that is blamed on the right.

Read more: Coalition wins election but Abbott loses Warringah, plus how the polls got it so wrong

Right wins Greek election, left wins Turkish Istanbul mayoral re-election

I wrote on my personal website on July 8 that the conservative New Democracy won the July 7 Greek election with 158 of the 300 parliamentary seats, ousting the far-left SYRIZA. In Turkey, the left won the June 23 Istanbul mayoral re-election by a much bigger margin than originally.

– ref. US Dem presidential primaries: Biden leading, followed by Sanders, Warren, Harris; and will Trump be beaten? – http://theconversation.com/us-dem-presidential-primaries-biden-leading-followed-by-sanders-warren-harris-and-will-trump-be-beaten-120340

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of Sydney

Review: Whiteley, Opera Australia, Sydney.

Opera Australia’s newest production, Whiteley, brings together three Australian icons. Elena Kats-Chernin, the doyenne of Australian composers, has written an opera on the life of a famous Australian painter and had it staged at that most recognisable of Australian buildings, the Sydney Opera House.

With Sydney Harbour described as “the jewel of Australasia”, there were moments when it felt like a tourism commercial. However, the artist in question, Brett Whiteley, had an equivocal attitude to his homeland, as the opera as a whole makes clear.

Like so many of his generation, Whiteley aspired to success abroad, and thanks to a travelling art scholarship, he first made a splash in the British art scene. The opera’s libretto by Justin Fleming traces his travels to Italy, his London stint, and his periods in America and Fiji, before his return to Australia. His expulsion from the Pacific island left Whiteley yelling “bugger” as Act I concluded, a heartfelt comment on his forced repatriation.

Nonetheless, after settling back in Sydney, his fame at home skyrocketed as his wider reputation faded. His biographer Ashleigh Wilson represents him as deliberately rejecting internationalism in favour of local celebrity, and certainly his canvases increasingly depicted Sydney scenes. Some of these featured as backdrops during the opera; for instance, the Harbour ferry at the start of Act II was clearly reproduced from a canvas.

Our fascination with creative artists runs deep, but when it comes to representing their lives in film or on stage, the focus is often on their personalities and biographies rather than on the acts of creation themselves. While several of Whiteley’s paintings did feature (good use was made here of projections by director David Freeman and production designer Dan Potra), the opera’s two main themes were the artist’s turbulent relationship with his wife, Wendy, and his addictions.

The centrality of Wendy was clear from the opening tableau, where the drink-sozzled artist sees her (or imagines her?) in a moment of crisis – but she rejects him. This wordless flash-forward was separate from the main course of the opera, which traced episodes of his life in chronological order.

With Whiteley’s widow present at the premiere, it was perhaps no surprise she was portrayed sympathetically; her affair with Michael Driscoll was preceded by her husband’s infidelities, and she urged him to follow her example and get clean of drugs. “All my heroes are addicts”, sang Whiteley, and his use of alcohol, heroin and other substances is represented as both creatively stimulating and personally destructive.

Read more: In Never Look Away we finally have a painter biopic offering insight into the creative process

Sensitive scoring

Kats-Chernin was recently voted 16th in an ABC survey of Australia’s favourite composers, which made her the second most-beloved living composer (after John Williams), the highest woman in the list and the top Australian.

Her score for Whiteley displayed in the abundance catchy rhythms, attractive melodies and sensitive scoring that have endeared her to so many. Some of the strongest numbers were the lighter ones: the satirical “Brett Whiteley has arrived”, where a stage full of critics pontificated pretentiously about the young artist, had a winsome verve to it.

Other plot elements were given recurring musical motifs. Drug use was signalled by thin, dissonant notes high on the strings, while creative acts were often accompanied by solo winds, including the rare alto flute. The melancholy saxophone music that began the overture later returned as Brett questioned whether Wendy still loved him.

With its shifts in location and time, the libretto sometimes became disjointed, and Kats-Chernin wasn’t always able to solve this. On a few occasions, conductor Tahu Matheson brought a number to an end, and left a few seconds before starting the next. These seams were not always jarring, but they were noticeable and could have been avoided by a few bars of transitional music.

Other parts less to my taste included the schmaltzy D major music in which Fiji was extolled as a paradise, and the ending, where Whiteley’s wife, daughter and mother provided reflections after his overdose.

This trio felt somewhat bloodless: euphonious without being truly melodious, not grief-stricken nor suggestive of the transcendent. Maybe this was the point: a life like Whiteley’s does not offer a clear moral message.

In the title role, Opera Australia newcomer Leigh Melrose was a titanic presence. He sang with power throughout the evening, capturing both the charisma and the darker side of the artist. Julie Lea Goodwin was good match for the role of Wendy, tracing the course from young lover to disillusioned wife in a ringing soprano.

Their daughter, Arkie, was played by two different singers: Natasha Green was the younger version, and sang with very pure tones and accurate pitching, while Kate Amos demonstrated a highly flexible soprano as the older Arkie. Dominica Matthews was as reliable as ever as Whiteley’s mother, and managed to coax some humour out of the part.

Richard Anderson was a strong dramatic presence as Joel Elenberg, one of Whiteley’s two closest Australian colleagues, while Nicholas Jones’s attractive tenor voice made his scenes as Michael Driscoll particularly enjoyable. Fitting a life lived on three continents, a large contingent of small roles was needed, among whom Celeste Lazarenko as a backpacker and Sitiveni Talei as a Fijian Police Officer stood out.

The female members of the Opera Australia chorus were unseen presences in some scenes, but shone when they appeared as the murder victims in a case that fascinated and stimulated Whiteley. The orchestra under Matheson negotiated the tricky corners of the score with aplomb, allowing the driving rhythmic pulse to emerge clearly.

The Whiteley opera appears at a time when debates around opera have ramped up a notch: is it too much in thrall to a canon of past works, and are these works consonant with social values today?

Meanwhile, can Australian opera establish itself on the world stage? Where Kats-Chernin’s work fits into such debates remains to be seen, but that it can be seen right now at Australia’s premier opera venue is an important first step.

Whiteley is on at the Sydney Opera House until July 30.

– ref. Opera Australia’s Whiteley brings together 3 icons to tell the artist’s complicated story – http://theconversation.com/opera-australias-whiteley-brings-together-3-icons-to-tell-the-artists-complicated-story-120575

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rona Macniven, Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Indigenous Australians have a long and proud heritage in both traditional sports and games, and in modern sport through the achievements of people like Johnathan Thurston and Ashleigh Barty.

There’s also long been the belief that sport can be used as a lever for improvement in outcomes for Indigenous communities. The 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, for instance, found that sport and recreation can play a role in the reduction of offending behaviour among Indigenous peoples.

Read more: In both schooling and sport, Australia has slowly come to recognise its Aboriginal talent pool

And while there are a number of physical activity and sports programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today, a parliamentary inquiry in 2013 recommended that much more comprehensive evaluation of sports programs should be conducted to gauge their impact.

The report said some government sports programs

are being rolled out with very little understanding of how the Close the Gap outcomes are being achieved.

Another study noted that sport has often been seen as a “panacea” for myriad problems in Indigenous communities, and this belief has led to

ambitious, ill-defined and, in terms of evaluation, often elusive social outcome goals.

What could sport achieve?

To better understand the impact sport can have on Indigenous communities and how government investment could be better targeted, we undertook a review of 20 Australian studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 2003 and 2018.

The research looked at how sport and physical activity programs for Indigenous adults or children improved outcomes in six different areas:

1) education 2) employment 3) culture 4) social and emotional well-being 5) life skills 6) crime reduction

Because of the low level of evidence in this area so far, we included all relevant studies. The 20 studies involved over 2,500 individual participants located in urban, rural and remote areas across Australia.

Our review, which was published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, found some evidence that sport and physical activity increases Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school attendance, improves self-esteem and can enhance cultural connectedness, values and identity.

But the studies were inconclusive on whether sport and physical activity can have longer-term benefits, such as improving educational or employment outcomes or reducing crime.

Read more: The long and complicated history of Aboriginal involvement in football

Education

Eleven of the studies we reviewed examined education. Overall, most showed positive outcomes for young people involved in sport.

A number of programs were shown to improve school attendance, such as two AFL youth programs in Cape York and the Northern Territory aimed at encouraging school attendance and improving behaviour through Australian rules football.

Other programs showed improvements in school retention and achievement rates, while two helped Indigenous youth prepare for higher education and success beyond school.

Employment

Only one study examined the impact of sport on employment: the AFL youth program in the NT. Almost all of the participants and stakeholders felt the program helped players to secure paid work or training, but the study didn’t link to employment data specifically.

Culture

Nine studies examined culture. And like education, most programs showed positive outcomes for participants when it came to cultural connections, values and identity.

For example, in Victoria, the Fitzroy Stars community sports club study found that social and community connection was an important way for participants to strengthen and maintain their cultural values and identity.

And the study on the impact of the Swan Nyungar sports education program for young people in Perth found the success of participants depended on incorporating their families and culture in the instruction.

Social and emotional well-being

Twelve studies examined social and emotional well-being. Improved self-esteem and confidence were found in the participants of several programs, such as the WA Girls Academy and Indigenous surfing programs in several states.

A study of Queensland’s Deadly Choices program, which aims to help Indigenous people make healthier lifestyle choices, found that participants had increased confidence and were more proactive about preventing chronic disease.

Life skills

Five studies examined “life skills.” The positive outcomes ranged from improved attitudes and lifestyle choices ([the AFL Cape York program]) to hygiene and health, self-reliance and fundraising skills (the WA Girls Academy).

Crime

Only five studies examined the impact of sport on crime prevention and prison inmate management, and the findings were limited.

The Aboriginal Power Cup, another youth football program in South Australia, was found to have positive impacts when it came to school achievement, but the study didn’t directly examine aspects of crime.

A study into a prison sport program in central Australia found that it was an effective diversion for inmates, but there were only six participants in the study, which is not a very robust sample size.

Meanwhile, the impact of the NT AFL program on community safety and violence was unclear, as was the impact of a sports program in Arnhem Land that aimed to steer Indigenous youth away from substance abuse.

This is a key challenge for researchers in this area – identifying the specific impacts of sport and physical activity programs on societal problems such as crime in which many factors come into play.

Read more: Radical rethink of Closing the Gap required, despite some progress

More evidence is needed

Substantial challenges remain in accurately measuring how sports programs like these can lead to better outcomes for Indigenous communities. Scoping reviews, for instance, do not include an assessment of study quality and therefore may overestimate the findings.

More studies are needed to track the impact of sport through a range of indicators. We also still need to know more about how programs can improve employment and crime outcomes.

With more robust evidence, a more targeted plan can be made for future programs that are better suited to the needs of individual communities.

– ref. Are sports programs closing the gap in Indigenous communities? The evidence is limited. – http://theconversation.com/are-sports-programs-closing-the-gap-in-indigenous-communities-the-evidence-is-limited-120413

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

It’s 50 years since the two Apollo 11 astronauts – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – spent 22 hours collecting samples, deploying experiments and sometimes just playing in the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon.

In doing so, they created an archaeological site unique in human history.

Now, with what’s been called the New Space Race and plans to return to the Moon, the Apollo 11 and other lunar sites are under threat. We need to protect this heritage for future generations.

Read more: How big is the Moon? Let me compare …

Apollo 11’s archaeological site

The archaeological site of Tranquillity Base consists of the hardware left behind, as well as the marks made in the lunar surface by the astronauts and instruments.

The hardware component includes the landing module, the famous flag (no longer standing), experiment packages, cameras, antennas, commemorative objects, space boots and many other discarded objects – more than 106 in total.

Around these objects are the first human footprints on the Moon as well as the tracks the astronauts made walking around, and the places where they dug out samples of rock and dust to take back to Earth for scientific analysis.

The artefacts, traces and the landscape constitute an archaeological site. The relationships between them can be used by archaeologists to study human behaviour in this environment so different to Earth, with one-sixth terrestrial gravity and no atmosphere.

Assessing the heritage value

Not only this, but the site has heritage value for people on Earth. To assess this, we can look at a number of categories of cultural significance. Those in the Burra Charter are widely used across the world for heritage assessment.

Historic: There is no doubt that, as the first place where humans set foot on another celestial body, this is a very important place in global history. It also represents the ideologies of the Cold War (1947-1992) between the US and the USSR.

Scientific: What can we learn from the site? More particularly, what questions would we no longer be able to answer if Tranquillity Base was damaged or destroyed?

This is not just about archaeological research into human behaviour on the Moon. Apollo 11 has been exposed to the harsh lunar environment for 50 years. The surfaces of the hardware are accidental experiments in themseves: they carry the record of 50 years of micrometeorite and cosmic ray bombardment. Finding out how well the materials have survived can also provide information about how to design future missions.

Aesthetic: This type of cultural significance is about how we experience a place. While we can’t assess it in person, there are films and photographs that give us a feeling for the place. This includes the light, shadows and colours of the lunar surface from the perspective of the human senses. The aesthetic qualities have inspired many artists and musicians, including astronaut Alan Bean who devoted his post-Apollo 12 life to painting the Moon.

Social: This is about the value that contemporary communities place on the site. For the 600 million-plus people who watched the television broadcast of the landing, it was a life-changing moment representing the ingenuity of human technology and visions of a space-age future.

But the mission did not mean the same for everyone. Some African-Americans protested against Apollo 11, seeing it as a waste of resources when there was such great economic and social disparity between white and black communities in the US. For them, it was a sign of human failure rather than a triumph.

The larger the community that has an interest in a heritage place, the higher its level of social significance. It could be argued that Apollo 11 has outstanding universal significance, like places on the World Heritage List (unfortunately the World Heritage Convention cannot be applied to space).

What are the threats?

In the past few years we have seen an increase in proposed missions to return to the Moon. Some have stated their intention to revisit the Apollo sites, by human crew or robot – and this could lead to the removal of material, for souvenirs or science.

But the sites are both fragile and unprotected. The two primary risks to their survival are uncontrolled looting, and damage from abrasive and sticky lunar dust.

Removing material from the sites damages the integrity of the artefacts and the relationships between them. A casual visit could erase the original footprints and astronaut traverses. The corrosive dust disturbed by surface activities could wear away the materials.

Dust was a problem for all the crewed lunar missions. Apollo 16 commander John Young said: “Dust is the number one concern in returning to the Moon.”

The dust can be stirred up by plumes from landing or ascending vehicles, driving vehicles, walking on the surface, or, in the next phase of lunar settlement, by construction and industrial activities, such as mining.

Attempts at protection

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids making territorial claims in space. Applying any national heritage legislation to a place on the Moon could be interpreted as a territorial claim.

The US states of California and New Mexico have placed the Apollo 11 artefacts left on the Moon on a heritage list. They can do this because, under the treaty, the US legally owns the artefacts. But this does not protect the site itself.

NASA has established a set of heritage guidelines for its sites on the Moon. The guidelines propose buffer zones around these areas, inside which no-one should enter. They make recommendations for approaching the sites to minimise dust disturbance.

In May 2019, a bill called the One Small Step to Protect Human Heritage in Space Act was introduced to the US Congress. Its purpose is:

To require any Federal agency that issues licences to conduct activities in outer space to include in the requirements for such licences an agreement relating to the preservation and protection of the Apollo 11 landing site, and for other purposes.

But the bill applies only to Apollo 11 and does not have similar requirements for the five other Apollo landing sites. It also applies only to US missions. It’s a step in the right direction, but there is still much more to be done.

Only in the last decade has the idea of space archaeology gained legitimacy. Until recently, there was no urgency to establish an international framework to manage the cultural values of lunar heritage.

Read more: Why the Moon is such a cratered place

Now we’re in a new situation. On Earth, it’s common for industrial or urban activities that disturb the environment to be subject to an environmental impact assessment, which includes heritage.

Even when there are no laws to force companies to pay attention to heritage, many consider it important to seek a Social Licence to Operate – support from stakeholder communities to continue their activities.

Everyone on Earth is a stakeholder in the heritage of the Moon. Fifty years from now, what will remain of the Apollo 11 and other sites? What new meanings will people draw from it?

– ref. We need to protect the heritage of the Apollo missions – http://theconversation.com/we-need-to-protect-the-heritage-of-the-apollo-missions-117007

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neal Hughes, Senior Economist, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES)

Water prices in the southern Murray-Darling Basin have reached their highest levels since the worst of the Millennium drought more than a decade ago. These high water prices are causing much anxiety in the region, and have led the federal government to call on the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to hold an inquiry into the water market.

Inevitably, whenever an important good becomes more expensive – be it housing, electricity or water – there is a rush to identify potential causes and culprits. In the past few years high water prices have been blamed on foreign investors, corporate speculators, state government water-sharing rules, new almond plantings and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Read more: The Murray-Darling Basin scandal: economists have seen it coming for decades

While some of these factors have had an effect on the market, they are in many ways a distraction from the simpler truth: that high water prices have mostly been caused by a lack of rain.

Supply drives the market

Market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s enabled water trading in many parts of Australia. By far the most active market exists in the southern Murray-Darling basin, which covers the Murray River and its tributaries in northern Victoria, southern New South Wales and eastern South Australia.

The market allows users – mostly irrigation farmers – to trade their water allocations (effectively shares of water in the rivers’ major dams). This trading helps ensure limited water supplies go to the farmers who value them the most, which can be crucial in times of drought.

Historical data shows the main driver of water market prices in the southern basin is change in water supply.

The following chart shows storage volumes (in orange) and water prices (in red) in the southern basin since 2006. Prices peaked at the height of the Millennium drought in 2007. During the floods of 2011, they fell near zero. Prices have increased again during the latest drought, and are now at their highest levels in a decade.

Lower rainfall, higher temperatures

While water prices have always been higher in dry years and lower in wet, we’ve been getting a lot more dry years in recent decades.

Over the past 20 years, rainfall, run-off and stream flow in the southern basin has been far less than historical conditions.

The below chart shows modelled flow data for the Murray River, assuming historical weather conditions and no water extraction, over the past century. It shows that average water flows this century are about 40% below the average of the 20th century.

We know these reductions are at least partly related to climate change, driven by both reduced winter rainfall and higher temperatures.

Lower rainfall and higher temperatures also make crops thirstier, increasing demand for irrigation water. This was evident in January, when temperatures exceeded 35℃ for 14 days and irrigators’ demand for water spiked from about 4.5 gigalitres to 7 gigalitres a day.

Read more: Droughts, extreme weather and empowered consumers mean tough choices for farmers

The basin plan in perspective

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan seeks to improve the environmental health of the river system by recovering water rights from irrigation farmers. To date, more than 1,700 gigalitres of water rights – about 20% of annual water supply – have been recovered in the southern basin.

By reducing supply, water recovery was always expected to increase water prices. However, the effects of water recovery on supply – while significant – are still small relative to the effects of climate over the same period, as shown in the below chart.

Measuring the precise effect of water recovery on prices is difficult. Water buybacks are straightforward and have been modelled by ABARES and others. But the effects of infrastructure programs – where farmers return a portion of their water rights in exchange for funding to upgrade infrastructure – are harder to estimate.

Read more: Billions spent on Murray-Darling water infrastructure: here’s the result

‘Carryover’ rule changes

Historically farmers had to use water allocations within a 12-month window. The introduction of “carryover” – most recently in Victoria in 2008 – means users can now hold their unused water in dams. This rule change was a good thing, as it encourages farmers to conserve water and build up a buffer against drought.

But it might also have contributed to anxiety about the water market’s operations.

Since water allocations can be bought and held for multiple years, information about future conditions can have a big effect on prices now. For example, we see large jumps in price following news of worse-than-expected supply forecasts. This may have helped fuel concern about “speculators”.

Over the longer-term, the ability to store water helps to “smooth” water prices, with slightly higher prices in most years offset by much lower prices in drought years. Again this is a good thing, but it may have added to the perception of higher prices in the market.

Water demand is rising

When a profitable new irrigation activity is willing to pay more for water – as is the case with almond farms in the southern basin – competition for limited supplies can potentially drive up prices.

ABARES’ research shows that between 2003 and 2016 there was little change in irrigation demand (aside from that linked to rainfall). Growth in demand from expanding activities such as almonds and cotton was offset by reductions in others including dairy, rice and wine grapes. However, there is evidence since 2016 that demand for water has started to increase, contributing to higher water prices. Longer-term projections suggest this trend may continue.

With drought and climate change reducing water supply, and demand for both environmental and irrigation water increasing, high water prices are only likely to become more common in the basin in future.

– ref. Drought and climate change are driving high water prices in the Murray-Darling Basin – http://theconversation.com/drought-and-climate-change-are-driving-high-water-prices-in-the-murray-darling-basin-119993

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

Even though we can see the Moon shining brightly in the night sky – and sometimes in daylight – it’s hard to put into perspective just how large, and just how distant, our nearest neighbour actually is.

So just how big is the Moon?

That answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think. Like Earth, the Moon isn’t a perfect sphere. Instead, it’s slightly squashed (what we call an oblate sphereoid). This means the Moon’s diameter from pole to pole is less than the diameter measured at the equator.

Read more: Why the Moon is such a cratered place

But the difference is small, just four kilometres. The equatorial diameter of the Moon is about 3,476km, while the polar diameter is 3,472km.

To see how big that is we need to compare it to something of a similar size, such as Australia.

From coast to coast

The distance from Perth to Brisbane, as the crow flies, is 3,606km. If you put Australia and the Moon side by side, they look to be roughly the same size.

But that’s just one way of looking at things. Although the Moon is about as wide as Australia, it is actually much bigger when you think in terms of surface area. It turns out the surface of the Moon is much larger than that of Australia.

The land area of Australia is some 7.69 million square kilometers. By contrast, the surface area of the Moon is 37.94 million square kilometres, close to five times the area of Australia.

How far is the Moon?

Asking how far away is the Moon is another of those questions whose answer is more complicated than you might expect.

The Moon moves in an elliptical orbit around the Earth, which means its distance from our planet is constantly changing. That distance can vary by up to 50,000km during a single orbit, which is why the size of the Moon in our sky varies slightly from week to week.

The Moon’s orbit is also influenced by every other object in the Solar System. Even when all of that is taken into account, the distance answer is still always changing, because the Moon is gradually receding from the Earth as a result of the tidal interaction between the two.

That last point is something we’ve been able to better study as a result of the Apollo missions. The astronauts who visited the Moon placed an array of mirror reflectors on its surface. Those reflectors are the continual target of lasers from the Earth.

By timing how long it takes for that laser light to travel to the Moon and back, scientists are able to measure the distance to the Moon with incredible precision, and to track the Moon’s recession from Earth. The result? The Moon is receding at a speed of 38mm per year – or just under 4 metres per century.

Drive me to the Moon

Having said all that, the average distance between the Moon and Earth is 384,402km. So let’s put that into context.

If I were to drive from Brisbane to Perth, following the fastest route suggested by Google, I would cover 4,310km on my road trip. That journey, driving across the breadth of our country, would take around 46 hours.

If I wanted to clock up enough kilometres to say that I’d covered the distance between the Earth and the Moon, I’d have to make that trip more than 89 times. It would take five-and-a-half months of driving, non-stop, assuming I didn’t run into any traffic jams on the way.

Fortunately, the Apollo 11 astronauts weren’t restricted to Australian speed limits. The command module Columbia took just three days and four hours to reach lunar orbit following its launch on July 16 1969.

An eclipse coincidence

The equatorial diameter of the Sun is almost 1.4 million kilometres, which is almost exactly 400 times the diameter of the Moon.

That ratio leads to one of astronomy’s most spectacular quirks – because the distance between the Earth and the Sun (149.6 million kilometres) is almost (but not quite) 400 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Read more: Explainer: what is a solar eclipse?

The result? The Moon and the Sun appear almost exactly the same size in Earth’s sky. As a result, when the Moon and the Sun line up perfectly, as seen from Earth, something wonderful happens – a total eclipse of the Sun.

Sadly, such spectacular eclipses will eventually come to an end on Earth. Thanks to the Moon’s recession, it will one day be too distant to perfectly obscure the Sun. But that day will be a long time coming, with most estimates suggesting it will occur in something like 600 million years’ time.

The moonwalkers

While we’ve dispatched out robot envoys to the icy depths of the Solar System, the Moon remains the only other world on which humanity has walked.

Fifty years after that first adventure, the number of people to have walked on the Moon who are still alive is in sharp decline. Twelve people have had that experience but, as of today, just four remain.

Read more: Five ethical questions for how we choose to use the Moon

Vast as the Moon is, those 12 moonwalkers barely scratched the surface. Hopefully, in the coming years, we will return, to inspire a whole new generation and to continue humanity’s in-person exploration of our nearest celestial neighbour.

– ref. How big is the Moon? Let me compare … – http://theconversation.com/how-big-is-the-moon-let-me-compare-118840

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Monica Barratt, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University

A NSW Coronial Inquest investigating a series of drug-related deaths at Australian music festivals has heard evidence of festival goers taking multiple concurrent doses of MDMA to avoid police detection and not receiving adequate medical attention.

But a lack of knowledge about the drug use patterns and demographic profile of festival goers has stymied capacity to develop evidence-informed policy responses.

Yesterday we published two data reports to inform the inquest and shed light on these patterns. Both reports are based on data from more than 5,000 Australian festival goers who completed the Global Drug Survey from late 2018.

It suggests common assumptions about Australian festival goers and the risks they take may be wrong.

Read more: Testing festival goers’ pills isn’t the only way to reduce overdoses. Here’s what else works

Who goes to music festivals and what drugs do festival goers take?

Most Australian music festival attendees we sampled were young (with a mean age of 22.4), male (55%), heterosexual (76%) and white (87%).

They were well-educated and most were employed (85.6%). Very few reported having a criminal conviction (6%).

And while it’s often assumed that people going to festivals are “hardcore” or regular attendees, almost half (49.6%) reported going to only one or two festivals a year.

The most common drug they took, unsurprisingly, was alcohol. Of the illicit substances, the most commonly used were MDMA, cannabis and cocaine.

We asked about drug use in all settings, not just festivals, and not just on the day of the festival.

While nearly half (44%) reported drinking alcohol weekly or more often, 64% typically drank at least five standard drinks.

Festival goers who used MDMA typically reported use ten times in the last 12 months. Those who used cocaine typically did so five times in the last 12 months.

Although MDMA use is the focus of the NSW Coronial Inquest, and public debates about festival safety, our data show that alcohol remains the biggest contributor to drug-related harm among festival goers.

Festival goers’ experiences with policing

Our analysis showed most festival goers (75%) reported they encountered police in relation to their drug use in the last 12 months. Some 69% reported drug dog encounters at festivals.

This is a concern because encounters with drug detection dogs are often traumatic and can lead to more harmful practices, such as taking multiple doses to avoid detection.

Read more: Why drug-detection dogs are sniffing up the wrong tree

NSW festival goers were 1.3 times more likely to report encounters with drug detection dogs than those from other states (79% versus 62%). This is notable, given our earlier analysis showed encounters with drug detection dogs are already seven times higher in Australia than in New Zealand.

Who seeks medical treatment?

Few festival goers we sampled sought medical attention. Just 280 respondents (6%) reported seeking medical help after alcohol or other drug use at least once in the last 12 months. We cannot tell from these data where these young people were located when they sought medical help, whether at a festival or in the community.

Young women aged 16 to 20 years were the most likely to report seeking medical help after drinking alcohol or taking other drugs (8.7%), followed by young men in the same age group (7.3%). Just 4.9% of men aged 21 and over and 5.2% of women in the same age group reported seeking help.

Festival goers who had problems with alcohol were more likely to seek help (4.3% of users) than those who were struggling after using other drugs including MDMA (2.5%), LSD (1.48%), cannabis (0.96%) and cocaine (0.67%).

Read more: How does MDMA kill?

Festival goers seeking help for alcohol consumption typically drank 15 standard alcoholic drinks.

The most commonly mentioned symptoms here were nausea or vomiting (45%), accident or trauma (40%) or passing out (37%). Some 65% reported being admitted to hospital.

Those seeking help after taking MDMA typically consumed three pills or 0.4g during the session. The majority (56%) reported taking a larger than usual dose of MDMA on that occasion.

Just 28% reported starting the session with a smaller “test dose” of MDMA.

Most (81%) reported combining MDMA with alcohol and or other illegal drugs. And most of those who drank alcohol with MDMA said they were “already drunk” before taking the MDMA.

The most common symptoms they experienced were confusion (40%), anxiety and panic (40%) and very low mood in the days afterwards (40%). Almost half (48%) reported being admitted to hospital.

What does this data tell us?

Despite the understandable focus on the harms from illicit drugs, most illicit drug use among Australian festival attendees appears to be occasional and isn’t problematic.

Nevertheless, there is a small but notable group of young people who experience higher rates of drug-related harms.

To reduce these harms, we should expand access to peer education services, such as those provided by the DanceWize team. DanceWize provides credible information about safer partying. It delivers harm-reduction services, including crowd care services (water, sunscreen and information). It also hosts a safe space for festival goers.

We should also expand trials of on-site drug checking services at festivals and outside these settings (for example, drop-in services at urban centres). Drug checking (or pill testing) services invite members of the public to anonymously submit drug samples for forensic analysis and then provide individualised feedback of results and counselling as appropriate.

Read more: Here’s why doctors are backing pill testing at music festivals across Australia

Given their high rates of policing, particularly with drug detection dogs, Australian festival goers may be reluctant to seek medical advice or support if they are afraid of being detected in possession of drugs.

Reducing the use of drug detection dogs at festivals, as well as expanding non-criminal alternatives for personal use and possession offences, should be prioritised to reset the balance between public health and public safety.

– ref. The profile of festival drug takers might be different to what you expect – http://theconversation.com/the-profile-of-festival-drug-takers-might-be-different-to-what-you-expect-120161

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neil R Jordan, Lecturer, UNSW

Humans and dogs go way back. From wolf totems to the big bad wolf of fact and fairy tale, through sheepdogs, lap dogs, and labradoodles, our relationships with these animals are complex, emotionally charged and sometimes contradictory.

The split between humanity’s lavishing of affection on domestic dogs and our contrasting animosity towards their wild relatives is well-documented. But what of domestic dogs and dingoes?

Our research, published today, found similarly contrasting relationships in Australia, where the dingo, Australia’s native dog, is frequently killed for management. We suggest that an inexpensive “dingo conservation levy” on domestic dog costs could fund more ethical management of dingoes. In this way our affection for domestic dogs could be harnessed to improve conservation outcomes for their wild relatives.

Canine economics

Australians collectively spend over A$10 billion each year on their domestic dogs – housing, feeding, and sometimes even giving them the status of honorary family members. Meanwhile, government and landowners jointly spend at least A$30 million on large-scale exclusion fencing and lethal control of dingoes.

Industry funded research suggests that dingoes killing livestock, especially sheep, and efforts to control dingoes, cost at least A$145 million annually. What’s more, such losses also come with psychological stress, which you can’t always put a price on.

Other research suggests dingoes, as top predators, provide considerable economic benefits. For example, dingoes prey upon kangaroos and other herbivores that may compete with livestock for food and water. In fact, some estimates suggest dingoes improve gross margins by $0.83 per hectare in this context.

They also help biodiversity by suppressing feral cats and foxes, and dingoes have considerable ecotourism appeal in locations like K’gari (Fraser Island) and Kakadu National Park.

Managing dingoes

Australia’s current approach to dingo management highlights the paradox of an animal viewed both as a valuable native predator that should be conserved, and as a pest to be destroyed. And this makes it a nightmare to manage.

Current dingo management relies heavily on exclusion fencing and lethal control, and around 200kg of 1080 powder (poison) is administered to baits and peppered across the continent annually.

Countless bullets are also fired, and traps set, as the lion’s share of management budgets is allocated to business as usual. To break this deadly cycle, there is a clear need to provide farmers and governments with good evidence that different approaches could work. This can only be done through substantial parallel investment in robust, independent experimental tests of alternative approaches.

Despite broad support in society for non-lethal management, accessing sufficient funds to support such a transition remains challenging.

A modest dingo conservation levy could fund this. With a levy on the A$10 billion domestic dog industry, we could harness humanity’s affinity for domestic dogs to improve conservation and welfare outcomes for their wild counterparts.

It wouldn’t need to be prohibitively expensive either.

A levy on the sale of pet dogs, dog food, or both, of only about 0.3% of the amount that pet owners spend on this annually – or A$7.36 per dog – would generate A$30 million each year.

That is similar to the lowest estimates of current national spending on dingo control, which means we would potentially see the current spending doubled.

Why should dog owners pick up the tab?

Applying a levy to all dog owners may seem unfair, and perhaps it is. But as Australia’s “dingo problem” is, arguably, at least in part caused by domestic dogs gone feral, such a levy would seem no more unfair on conscientious dog owners than third-party insurance is on careful drivers.

Given that pet owners tend to view wild animals more positively and show more concern for their welfare, such a levy might actually be well received by dog-owners anyway.

An alternative approach might be to seek the voluntary involvement of pet-food manufacturers in such a scheme, giving consumers choice over whether to support it.

A dingo conservation levy – perhaps supplemented by a voluntary fund for donors without dogs – might also be more acceptable and attractive if it were clear the funds would be specifically channelled towards research and uptake of non-lethal tools.

Generally, we are broadly in favour of any techniques designed to reduce the animosity towards dingoes, reduce the costs and negative impacts of living alongside them, and boost the positive effects dingoes have on ecosystems.

As some have already argued, they are all dogs at the end of the day. Perhaps then it is time that we treated them as such.

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Mike Letnic, Henry Brink, Brad Purcell and Hugh Webster to this article.

– ref. Dog owners could take the lead on dingo conservation with a ‘Fido fund’ – http://theconversation.com/dog-owners-could-take-the-lead-on-dingo-conservation-with-a-fido-fund-118124