Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Merja Myllylahti, Research Fellow, Auckland University of Technology

Facebook and quality journalism are uneasy companions. Recent headlines suggest the platform’s “lies” about video metrics “smashed” journalism and the platform “crashed and burned” news companies’ referral traffic after it changed its algorithm in January.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is currently holding a digital platform inquiry to investigate what kind of impact social media platforms, search engines and other content aggregators have on the local media market. In the United Kingdom, the Cairncross review is assessing similar issues, looking for ways of sustaining high-quality journalism in a changing market.

My research suggests these enquiries should pay attention to the impact of Facebook and the lessons we’ve already learned about the social platform.

Read more: Class action against Facebook over facial recognition could pave the way for further lawsuits

Lesson one: overstated metrics

You should not trust all the metrics platform companies offer.

A recent article in The Atlantic revealed that a lawsuit has been filed against Facebook, because it allegedly overstated its video statistics for years, “exaggerating the time spent watching them by as much as 900% percent.”

The article asserts that “hundreds of journalists” lost their job after Facebook lured news companies to invest in video. However, Facebook has denied these claims.

The Spinoff, a digital native media company in New Zealand, recently posted a story with a similar analysis of the platform’s impact, saying that Facebook’s fake video statistics “smashed New Zealand journalism” because when it encouraged news companies to invest in online video production, they followed.

New Zealand media were collateral damage in Facebook’s obsessive desire to grow at all costs.

Read more: How to stop haemorrhaging data on Facebook

Lesson two: traffic dependency

You should not rely on Facebook traffic.

A recent report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows that in the United States, news companies have a substantial presence on Facebook. The report found that roughly 80% of the local news outlets are using the social platform.

Additionally, two recent studies demonstrates how news companies rely on Facebook to drive their traffic. My own research of four New Zealand news companies shows that 24% of their traffic came from social media, and most of that came from Facebook. Together social and search drove 47% of New Zealand news sites’ traffic.

A larger study of 12 newspapers and broadcasters in Europe, conducted by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, notes:

… news organisations are making major investments in social media and report receiving significant amounts of traffic” from social media.

These studies confirm news companies’ Facebook dependency in terms of traffic, although the level of dependency differs between media outlets. The Reuters study found that Facebook’s algorithm changes in January had a severe impact on some of the news companies’ traffic. However, the severity of impact differed between media outlets. For example, Le Monde saw its interactions drop by almost a third, but for The Times these grew.

In New Zealand, The Spinoff suffered a substantial drop in its traffic after Facebook’s algorithm tweaks: its traffic from the platform dropped from 50% to 30%. We have seen similar drops in other markets, too.

The Nieman Lab, which reports on digital media innovation, found that following Facebook’s algorithm change, the drop in referral traffic was not universal. Some not-for-profit media organisations benefited.

Bottom line: The decline in referrals to publishers from Facebook is not universal, and in the face of those declines, other sources of traffic are more important than ever.

Indeed, it would be wise for all news outlets to grow their direct traffic which delivers better user engagement and monetisation.

Lesson three: don’t do it for the money

You don’t make much money on Facebook.

My research suggests if news companies abandoned Facebook, they would hardly lose any money. For the companies studied, social media traffic made up 0.03%–0.14% of their total revenue, and social shares 0.009%–0.2% of total revenue. These figures don’t take into account advertising income from platforms or subscription conversion.

The reason news companies continue to distribute their content on social media platforms is because they gain attention. News companies believe they can turn this attention into money, but so far with little success.

However, some news publishers have reported that they have gained digital subscriptions from the platforms. The Reuters study notes Facebook delivers news companies audience engagement that is “considered more cost effective at driving digital subscription sales.”

The bottom line is there is no data yet to verify how well news publishers manage to convert social media attention to digital subscriptions. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all offering, or are in the process of offering, digital subscription services to news publishers, but how well these will work for news companies remains to be seen.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Flinders University

Review: While I Was Waiting, OzAsia Festival.

Unrest breaks out in a proud and ancient city, its inhabitants are divided against one another, local big shots control neighbourhoods, war rages outside the city gates, and many inhabitants scatter to all corners of the earth. This is not ancient Troy, rather Damascus today.

The tragedy of Syria, which since 2011 has been broadcast into our homes via television, computers, and hand-held devices, is perhaps amplified because the place once looked so familiar to us. This is true especially of pre-2011 Damascus, with its cosmopolitan, well-dressed people enjoying middle-class lives in a beautiful city with attractive, tree-lined streets.

Given what has happened in Syria, that a piece of theatre could be made about the intersecting lives of six people living in Damascus in 2015 is itself the real miracle of this Arabic language production of While I Was Waiting. It was created in Marseilles, France, where a group of diasporic Syrian actors came together with a few remaining in their home country to create this hard-hitting play, crafted by playwright Mohammad Al Attar and under the direction of Omar Abusaada.

Since that time, the play, which received its Australian premiere at Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, has toured extensively to Europe, the US and Japan. It is easy to understand the play’s international appeal. It is written and presented by very people who themselves are, in the words of Abusaada, “living in that in-between space.” This space, between “staying and going”, is presented in a mode between “documentary and drama,” integrating clips of dynamic and deeply affecting videos taken surreptitiously on the streets of Damascus by Reem Alghazi.

The play’s action, which unfolds between spring and winter 2015, revolves around each character’s relationship to a young man, Taim (Kinan Hmidan), who, we soon learn, was found comatose in the back seat of a car. Like his friends and family who gather to attend to him, we want to know more, who did this to him and why, but these questions are left unanswered, as they are for those who love him.

At the start of the play, Taim lies immobile on a hospital bed as his mother recites verses. The actor rises from the bed and it soon becomes apparent that for the rest of the play it will be his spectral presence that moves in and around those who gather at his bedside.

In addition to his mother, we are soon introduced to his elder sister Nada (Nanda Mohammad), who had fled to Beirut to build an independent life, his girlfriend Salma (Reham Kassar) and an older friend, Ousama (Mohamad Alrashi) who gets through the day self-medicating with hashish.

At times, the drama was overloaded with unnecessary and cumbersome dramatic questions, with conflicts quickly flaring in predictable ways between mother and daughter, mother and girlfriend, the daughter and the hash-smoking brother’s friend. There is perhaps too much drama over the long-dead father, the making of Taim’s film, which connects the story of the family with the city, and unanswered phone calls on the night of his death.

But it is in the quiet, confessional moments where this play is most affecting. In one such sequence, Nada shows her comatose brother a series of photos that connect the personal with the mad world outside. We see the little girl, safe and protected, the time when “the family was the limits of my world.”

When we later see the sadness in her adult eyes, it hurts. She recalls “the last time I’ll ever see your name come up on my mobile.”

At such moments, of which there are many in this production, there is no acting, no artifice, only the pain borne of real, incalculable loss.

A dramatic and emotional counterpoint is created by another young man, an aspiring DJ whose life was cut short years earlier. He occupies a kind of DJ’s booth onstage, activating the urban soundscape that weaves in and out of the play’s action from a position that floats above the city. His hovering world, the world of “the unburied dead,” becomes the Damascus that we want to see restored.

And it is on high above the city that the play’s emotional arc comes full circle for the audience. Here we see Taim on the roof of his building, just before the “accident,” looking out at a sea of lights. As he lingers to connect one last time with the city he loves and has decided to leave, we too are there with him, enveloped by the sounds of a broken city.

While I Was Waiting is being staged as part of the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide until October 31.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Webb, Lecturer in music education and ethnomusicology, University of Sydney

On November 4, New Caledonians will go to the polls to vote for either continued French governance, or independence.

Many Australians, who might holiday there to taste French culture in the Pacific, are unaware of the continuing struggle for sovereignty of the Kanak people (Indigenous New Caldeonians) since the catastrophe of their colonisation by France in 1853. This struggle has often been told through music.

Our research looks at the role of music in political struggles in Melanesia, particularly in West Papua and New Caledonia. Across Melanesia, music is not only evidence of ancient and living cultures, it is also a celebration of Indigenous resistance, agency and resilience.

Songs of resistance

Just now in the street I saw my children
Advancing, shouting “Freedom!”
The high school was empty, where are the youth?
In the streets the city was in protest

Written in 1985, these opening lines, from pioneer Kanak protest singer Jean-Pierre Swan’s song Liberté, refer to les évènements, “the Events”. These were a bloody civil war in New Caledonia in the 1980s that culminated in the massacre of 19 Kanaks by French commandos in 1988, and the assassination in 1989 of the great Melanesian pacifist independence campaigner, Jean-Marie Tjibaou.

Resistance to French rule has ebbed and flowed since French annexation but was re-energised in 1969 with the formation of the Foulards Rouges (the Red Scarves), a group that combined anti-colonial leftism and Pacific cultural nationalism.

The Red Scarves were led by Nidoish Naisseline, heir to a high chief, whose arrest and imprisonment in September 1969 sparked a riot and ultimately, the Kanak Awakening, a period of intense Indigenous resistance to overseas occupation.

This movement was immortalised in the song, Jamulo Ataï, with lyrics penned by Naisseline himself. Jamulo, in the title, was Naisseline’s nickname and Ataï was the 19th century Kanak resistance leader. By pairing his name with Ataï’s, Naisseline was equating himself to the great leader.

One verse of the song mentions the quest for self-rule:

In September ’69
The crown of Jamulo remains
And we will support it forever
Leave the natives their independence

Almost a century before, in 1878, Ataï had led an uprising in which 1,200 Melanesians were slaughtered. Ataï was assassinated and his head sent to France as a trophy.

In the mid 1980s, Kanak musician and intellectual Théo Menango’s funk-rock band, Yata (Ataï in reverse), looked to the past for inspiration, memorialising the slain hero in a song that provocatively compared him with Christ:

Ataï the pure, the steadfast, the great saint
Like Christ your blood was shed
Ataï your name must last
Like Christ your work is immortal
Ataï, oh, you’re revealing to me the path to take
In your footsteps is freedom!

Past traumas

The relentless drive to dismantle Kanak culture and shut down anti-colonial protest gave birth in the 1980s to the kaneka music genre, which combined musical elements and the Black pride and rights stance of Jamaican reggae with the “tchap” rhythm and sound of Indigenous percussion instruments.

There was an outpouring of kaneka songs marking past and present traumatic events and injustices. Here is a selection:

Ouvanu by the kaneka band Waan, remembers the guillotining on the orders of the colonial governor in 1868 of 10 Kanak men at Ouvanu in Puébo, in the north of Grand Terre (the large island of New Caledonia).

The lament Loulou by the kaneka band Bwanjep, refers to the night ambush by settlers at Wan’yaat in 1984 of several cars containing prominent Kanaks.

Ten people were shot, including two brothers of the visionary Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou. One of them was nicknamed Loulou.

Homage a Eloi Machoro by the kaneka band JDVK, celebrates Eloi Machoro, the Kanak militant who became known as a destroyer of ballot boxes.

He was shot dead in 1985 by police a few kilometres from where Chief Atai had fallen 110 years earlier.

Gossanah Iaai by the kaneka band Nodeak documents the massacre by French Special Forces of 19 Kanaks in the Gossanah caves on Ouvéa in the Loyalty Islands in 1988.

A music festival

A year ago, we flew to Lifou in the Loyalty Islands for Fest Mela, a weekend music event at the town of Hapetra organised by the kaneka superstar, Edou Wamai, who lives locally.

Fest Mela was headlined by the Melbourne-based West Papuan group, Black Sistaz, who are daughters of the renowned West Papuan independence activist band of the 1980s, the Black Brothers.

The roster of local bands included Kool Groove who played a local style of guitar-based folk music. Draped in the Kanak flag, members expressed pride in their local language, culture and future nation.

On Lifou, we were received by the Chief of Hapetra, who requested that the Black Sistaz sing for him. They responded with a moving a cappella song from the island of Biak in West Papua.

As Melanesian nations still under colonial rule, West Papuans and Kanaks consider their fate to be intertwined — each believes the other can assist in achieving sovereignty over their own soil. Kanak musicians have also composed songs advocating for an independent West Papua, such as Free West Papua by the acoustic kaneka band, Lyric Kanak Gong.

In Melanesia, at crucial moments when the destiny of Pacific First Peoples is being decided, such as in this week’s referendum, songs can remind of past sacrifices and help to imagine possible futures.

Our thanks to Rosie Makalu, Eric Gawe and Nina Soler in Kanaky (New Caledonia).

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Jabour, Leader, Ocean and Antarctic Governance Research Program, University of Tasmania

Antarctica is owned by no one, but there are plenty of countries interested in this frozen island continent at the bottom of the Earth.

While there are some regulations on who can do what there, scientific research has no definition in Antarctic law. So any research by a country conducted in or about Antarctica can be interpreted as legitimate Antarctic science.

Read more: How a near-perfect rectangular iceberg formed

There are 30 countries – including Australia – operating bases and ships, and flying aircraft to and from runways across the continent.

Russia and China have increased their presence in Antarctica over the past decade, with China now reportedly interested in building its first permanent airfield.

It is not surprising there is significant interest in who is doing what, where – especially if countries ramp up their investment in Antarctic infrastructure with new stations, ships or runways.

Their actions might raise eyebrows and fuel speculation. But the freedom of countries to behave autonomously is guided by the laws that apply to this sovereign-neutral continent.

Treaties and signatories

There are 12 original signatories to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, including Australia, and they do not have to prove their commitment to the treaty since they wrote the rules.

Another 41 countries have signed on since 1959, and they do need to prove commitment.

Non-signatory countries, such as Iran or Indonesia, are freed from many of these legal obligations.

Until such time as the Antarctic Treaty has been designated customary international law applicable to all states by a high authority (such as the International Court of Justice), non-signatories can essentially do what they like in Antarctica.

The appliance of science

Autonomous freedom of activity by signatory countries is legitimised through the fact that science is the currency of credibility in Antarctica. This is important for two reasons:

1. scientific research has legal priority
2. new signatories can become decision-makers when they do science.

The “freedom of scientific investigation” is preserved in Article II of the Antarctic Treaty. It directs that signatories to the treaty can conduct scientific research of any kind anywhere in the Antarctic, without anybody else’s permission.

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) coordinates Antarctic research, but being a member is not a prerequisite for doing Antarctic science.

Further, the treaty outlines the process for new signatories (that is, other than the original 12) to achieve Consultative Party (decision-making) status.

Decisions are made by consensus (that is, everyone agrees or there is no formal objection). So every country’s “vote” counts and new countries aspire to gain a seat at the table to further their national agendas.

They become Consultative Parties by conducting “substantial scientific research activity” (Article IX.2) and when this has been accomplished to the satisfaction of the other decision-makers, they will be accepted.

Piggy backing

Demonstrating interest in Antarctic science was initially interpreted as building a base or dispatching an expedition (Article IX.2). But after the adoption of the environmental protocol to the treaty in 1991, this was re-interpreted.

Parties were encouraged (but not legally bound) to consider piggy-backing on existing national scientific expeditions of other countries, and to share stations and other resources such as ships and aircraft where possible.

Currently there is only one jointly operated scientific base – Concordia, occupied by both France and Italy. The Novolazarevskaya airfield is a joint operation coordinated by Russia.

This encouragement was designed to reduce the potential for expansion of the footprint of human activities.

In 2017 the Consultative Parties adopted revised guidelines for how to become a decision maker. These outline new rules on a concept that has never been articulated publicly in an Antarctic forum before – evaluating the quality of scientific research.

This could put the brakes on the rapid addition of new signatories to the table.

There are limits

Although there is freedom to conduct science anywhere in Antarctica, what any country cannot do is lay claim to territory on the basis of its research efforts.

The treaty expressly excludes new claims or the extension of existing claims. Signatories that conduct research, and support those endeavours by building a base and infrastructure such as an airstrip, cannot use those actions as a basis of a claim while the treaty is in force.

Seven countries claim Antarctic territory: Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom. Two others – the United States and the Russian Federation – have reserved their rights to claim any or all of Antarctica in the future.

These paper claims are acknowledged by Article IV of the treaty. But its artful craftsmanship prevents conflict over the claims and reservations during the life of the Treaty – which incidentally has neither an expiry nor a future review date.

Because the Article II freedoms permit research to be undertaken anywhere on the continent, the borders delineating claims become irrelevant to all but the claimant.

A party has an option of recognising a claim, or not, and does not need anyone’s permission to build a station or send an expedition. This means that the claimants have very limited capacity to exercise sovereignty in their territory. This effectively reduces their power to that of jurisdiction only over their own nationals.

Read more: How a trip to Antarctica became a real-life experiment in decision-making

The sting in the tail is that conducting substantial scientific research activity in Antarctica – including the building of support infrastructure – is the pathway new states must take to achieve decision-making status.

This is only constrained by the legal requirement to undertake an environmental impact assessment of any activity prior to its commencement.

Irrespective of whether the activity’s proponent complies with best practice environmental evaluation, under the rules, no other party can veto that activity.

Essentially, any country – whether a party to the treaty or not – can do whatever they like in Antarctica.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Few areas of public policy are as hotly debated as how to close the income gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. There are some uncontroversial goals, such as improving job opportunities and reducing the high rate of Indigenous unemployment. But other ideas to better target welfare are bitterly divisive.

The cashless credit card, for example, has been described as a vital response to the problem of welfare policies that systemically enable illicit drug use, alcohol abuse and gambling. It has also been called the epitome of neocolonial and punitive policy implemented for some imagined political gain at the expense of vulnerable people.

Both assessments may be valid, given the context. One of the problems with Indigenous welfare policy is an oversupply of assumptions and a lack of detailed information about the realities of lived experience.

Read more: How to get a better bang for the taxpayers’ buck in all sectors, not only Indigenous programs

It is generally assumed, for example, that the patterns of why people in Australia are poor, and how they manage the money they have, are largely the same for Indigenous and non-Indigenous. But this might be incorrect.

We decided to dig into the statistics and compare the experience of financial stress in Indigenous and non-Indigenous households.

Our findings surprised us.

While financial stress is much more common in Indigenous households, we found evidence of substantial capacity to manage scarce resources. Indigenous households in remote areas seem to manage better than those in urban areas. Large Indigenous households do better than non-Indigenous ones.

We are hesitant to draw any grand policy conclusions, except to underline a clear truth: those in the field of Indigenous policy need to base their decisions on accurate information, lest they undermine the capabilities and strengths that people already possess.

Defining financial stress

Financial stress is a relative experience. It’s not just about income level, but how individuals or households cope. The degree of stress can be different for two people on the exact same income, depending on the choices they make.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines a range of indicators to determine financial stress. Spending more than your income is one. Being unable to pay power and phone bills is another. Going without meals and not having money to heat your home are two others.

We split financial stress into “cashflow” (inability to pay housing costs or utilities or borrowing from friends) and “hardship” (missing meals, pawning something, not being able to pay to heat the home or applying for welfare) problems. These two types of problems are fundamentally different. Hardship problems are rarer and more likely to be associated with severe disadvantage.

We then devised a method to better compare the experience of these two forms of financial stress in Indigenous and non-Indigenous households. For this we use two large surveys covering more than 12,000 households: the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) and the 2014-15 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS).

Cashflow stress

Indigenous households experience more cashflow problems than comparable non-Indigenous households, even when we control for income and other household characteristics.

That is, an Indigenous household with the same income as an average non-Indigenous household is more likely to experience cashflow problems – in some cases substantially so.

There is evidence this financial stress is exacerbated by the widespread demand-sharing custom known as “humbugging”. An Indigenous person is more likely, for example, to let someone else use their ATM card.

Hardship

Yet when it comes to the more extreme form of financial stress, Indigenous households are at least as effective as non-Indigenous households at avoiding hardship.

That is, while Indigenous households experience more financial stress – because they have, on average, much lower incomes – our model indicates an Indigenous household with the same income as the average non-indigenous household has the same or smaller probability of experiencing financial hardship.

Remote households

Our modelling also shows Indigenous households in remote and very remote areas appear to do better at avoiding financial stress than counterparts in non-remote areas.

Again, while remote households have, on average, much lower incomes – and therefore more financial stress – our method is able to show that a remote household is less likely to experience financial stress than a non-remote household with the same income.

This suggests there is value in traditional practices for Indigenous households.

Large households

Finally, large Indigenous households seem to manage better than large non-Indigenous households. As household size grows, Indigenous households need less extra income to have the same probability of experiencing financial stress.

This is significant because it suggests policies that encourage better sharing of resources among large extended family groups could be a highly efficient social insurance mechanism.

Interestingly, the presence of multiple families in a household has no significant effect on the probability of experiencing financial stress. This contradicts the policy assumption that multiple families in a house makes things worse.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: is $30 billion spent every year on 500,000 Indigenous people in Australia?

Overall our research suggests Indigenous people, particularly those in remote areas, have substantial capacity to manage scarce financial resources. Policy makers need to leverage these capabilities through implementing policies that support and enhance them.

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

What have you eaten today? And how much do you know about how it was produced, what was added to it along the way, and how it made its way to your plate?

Even as most of us grow increasingly removed from actual food production, many consumers still take food fraud and perceptions of food purity incredibly seriously.

Scandals around “meat glue” or milk and honey contamination, and the skyrocketing global interest in organic foods, underscore the fact that many of us still care quite deeply about the foods we eat and how they’re produced – and that’s affecting food labelling, regulation and consumer behaviour.

One person who’s studied that terrain closely is Dr Andrew Ventimiglia, a Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, who researches food fraud and how it relates to science, culture, trademark law and food regulation.

Read more: Trust Me, I’m An Expert: Cyclone season approacheth, but this year there’s a twist

He sat down with The Conversation’s deputy politics and society editor Justin Bergman to talk about the weird history of food adulteration and certification – everything from 19th century dairy farmers adding sheep brains to skim milk to make it look frothier, to centuries-old oil and wine adulteration scandals.

Dr Ventimiglia said types of food fraud laws have been recorded as early as the 13th century, but the issue really came into focus in the 1800s.

Adulterated milk was one of the first issues that got national attention, and this was roughly in the mid 1800s to late 1800s, both particularly in the UK and the US. And the earliest form of adulterated milk that was really concerning to regulators was actually simply skim milk.

Producers who were making skim milk were adding flour or starch, sometimes carrots for sweetness, but they were also adding things that did pose a public health risk.

So, for instance, chalk was added to increase the whiteness of milk, as well as often sheep or calf brains to froth the milk […] those posed really legitimate health risks that were recognised by early analytic chemists and that really initiated some early food regulations.

And while food scandals persist today, food standards are increasingly more concerned with fraudulent claims on packaging and innovations in food production. For instance, is yoghurt made with coconut milk still considered yoghurt? What to do about foods that claim to be “all natural?”

Special thanks to our multimedia intern, Dilpreet Kaur Taggar, for editing this segment together.

Read more: Trust Me, I’m An Expert: How augmented reality may one day make music a visual, interactive experience

From food adulteration to food poisoning

We also hear from Associate Professor Shauna Murray from the UTS Plant Functional Biology and Climate Change Cluster, about her research into ciguatera fish poisoning. It’s a non-bacterial illness associated with fish consumption and symptoms in humans may include gastrointestinal, neurological and even sometimes cardiovascular problems.

Editorial intern Jordan Fermanis spoke to Dr Murray about why this tropical disease is showing up further south, and how recreational fishermen are helping researchers unlock the mysteries of ciguatera.

Trust Me, I’m An Expert is a podcast where we ask academics to surprise, delight and inform us with their research. You can download previous episodes here.

And please, do check out other podcasts from The Conversation – including The Conversation US’ Heat and Light, about 1968 in the US, and The Anthill from The Conversation UK, as well as Media Files, a brand new podcast all about the media. You can find all our podcasts over here.

Additional audio and credits

Additional editing by Dilpreet Kaur Taggar

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

Free Music Archive: Podington Bear, Clouds, Rain, Sun

Demand increases for organic produce, 23 ABC News.

Is your honey real honey or just “sugar syrup”? ABC News Australia.

Fake honey: Study finds disturbing results, ABC News Australia.

Meat glue secret, Today Tonight.

Chinese milk report, CNN.

Missouri Wine History, MissouriWine.

Pure. Fresh. Milk. 1991 Promo.

Australian milk ad.

Sad Marimba Planet by Lee Rosevere from Free Music Archive

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Brown, Associate Director, The Victoria Institute; National Director, AVID Australia, Victoria University

You have an exam tomorrow and you’re not feeling prepared. With only a few waking hours to go, how is it best you spend your time?

To pass tomorrow’s exam, cramming might help you write more on the paper than you would have without doing any form of study, depending on how stressed out you are. But it certainly won’t help you learn the information deeply. You will have forgotten most of what you crammed within a week.

Cramming doesn’t work for retaining information

Research shows we overestimate our ability to remember information and underestimate the importance of actively learning information. Students will often say they don’t need to take notes because they have great memories. But this research suggests we assume we’ll remember things forever as well as we do now (we won’t). We underestimate our need to learn and relearn information to be able to recall it when we need it.

As an article in The New York Times put it, cramming is like jam-packing your brain:

But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

So if your exam is tomorrow then cramming might help, but research shows when students see the same material again at a later date, it’s like they have never seen it before.

Cramming and stress

If you’re feeling anxious, it might be better to put the books down and not attempt to cram. Cramming can clog working memory and that can result in cognitive overload, making you feel overwhelmed.

Going to bed late because of a cramming session, overstimulated from too many energy drinks, then tossing and turning with an overloaded brain, could be worse for you than just giving up now and going to bed.

Four study strategies that are better than cramming

It’s never too late to adopt good study habits that will improve your exam success and relieve your exam anxiety.

1. Get organised

A major reason for cramming is poor organisation of time. Time-poor students should use a planner to identify the times available for study and block out those times in the planner. Then actually be disciplined and use that time to study.

Get a study binder – electronic or hard copy – and keep it organised. Use it regularly to store and review your study notes and materials.

Being organised with your study materials helps you to be organised in your thinking, too, as you can easily access the materials you need to help you study in the time you have prioritised to study.

2. Take, make, interact with and reflect on notes

Taking notes is important. An active note-taking process is important to help you transfer new information from short-term memory and then recall it more easily after it is stored in the long-term memory.

Read more: What’s the best, most effective way to take notes?

Read more: What’s the best way to take notes on your laptop or tablet?

3. Keep interacting with the content

Research has found the rate you forget information is minimised if you interact with (reread/discuss/write) new information within 24 hours of first receiving it. A second, shorter repetition within 24 hours brings recall back up to 100%. A third repetition within a week for an even shorter time brings recall back to 100%.

Going back to the suitcase analogy:

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

When cramming, students often concentrate on one thing intensively for a long period of time. That doesn’t work either. Research shows learning is more effective if the type of material being studied is mixed and study periods are spaced out over time.

That’s why athletes, musicians and students should mix up their training/rehearsal/study sessions by practising different skills over different time periods, rather than focusing on just one thing for an extended time.

Read more: Why block subjects might not be best for university student learning

4. Self-testing

So once you have a good set of notes, what is the best way to interact with them? Self-testing is a powerful way to study and learn.

Other tools you can use to help you self-test are to use mnemonics and flash cards. Mnemonics are memory devices that help you to recall information. An example of a well-known mnemonic is “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”.

Flash cards are a great way to self-test. Good organisation of where you store your flash cards and effective use of them are essential to maximise their study potential. It’s good to mix up sets of flash cards and study them in short bursts.

For tomorrow…

If all you want to do is retain the information until after your exam tomorrow, a bit of cramming now might help. But if you’re feeling highly anxious your brain might not retain new information anyway. It might be a better idea to eat a nutritious dinner, go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep.

When you wake up, take a few deep breaths and remind yourself you can only do as well as you can do, and it will all be over in a few hours anyway.

But next time save yourself the stress and take the time to engage with the content frequently. Only this will ensure it’s locked up tight in your brain for a long time. And, finally, good luck!

Read more: HSC exam guide: maximising study and minimising stress

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin Moodie, Adjunct professor, RMIT University

A few days have now passed since we learnt that in 2017 the former Minister for Education and Training, Simon Birmingham, secretly rejected 11 grants recommended by the Australian Research Council.

Naturally enough the research community reacted with outrage, and since then criticism has snowballed. Andrew Norton, The Grattan Institute’s Higher Education Program director weighed in while others lined up to express their dismay.

Read more: Simon Birmingham’s intervention in research funding is not unprecedented, but dangerous

‘National interest’ test

Now the new minister for education Dan Tehan has announced what a “new national interest test” for research grants. He also announced that the Coalition government will follow Labor’s lead and reveal when an application recommended by the ARC is rejected by the minister:

As Minister for Education, I can guarantee the sector that I will be transparent in reporting ARC grant funding decisions. I have asked the ARC to add an additional category to the grant outcomes so applicants are notified of instances where a project is ‘recommended to but not funded by the Minister’.

Because of the secrecy of the minister’s rejections, the only previous known rejection of ARC recommendations was in 2005 by the then Coalition minister for education Brendan Nelson.

But the idea of a national interest test for ARC grants isn’t exactly new.

What’s going to change?

The ARC’s current funding rules, signed by Birmingham on 22 August 2017, include these selection criteria:

d. Benefit

• Will the completed Project produce significant new knowledge and/or innovative economic, commercial, environmental, social and/or cultural benefit to the Australian and international community?
• Will the proposed research be cost-effective and value for money?

What is likely to be new is a narrower restriction of grants to the government’s science and research priorities adopted after a consultation process led by the former Chief Scientist Ian Chubb.

The minister has asked the ARC Chief Executive Officer Sue Thomas and a panel of experts to update these priorities for the ARC and to align the ARC’s “financial structure” to the priorities.

This is a long way from the traditional understanding of peer research grants that should only have one criterion: how much the proposed research would extend knowledge.

It also could be narrower than the view common in the 1990s, and partly expressed in the government’s science and research priorities, that since it’s impossible to be strong in everything, the government should concentrate research in selected areas and institutions. That, at least, accepted the principle that Australia should aspire to contribute to the world’s stock of fundamental knowledge.

Read more: Some questions for Simon Birmingham, from two researchers whose ARC grant he quashed

What do we want from research?

A focus on “national interest” could easily restrict research grants to those projects with obvious utilitarian benefits, and would accentuate the erosion of pure basic research from 40% of all higher education research in 1992 to 23% in 2016.

While this may assuage critics of “useless” university research, it gets close to introducing a “pub test” for ARC grants, as observed by highly respected Orientalist Roger Benjamin, whose was behind one of the grants rejected by Birmingham.

It’s also ironic that at least some of the grants rejected by Birmingham would have supported research into Western civilisation, something right wing members of the government are keen to have funded by the Ramsay Centre.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bill Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University

There’s no question about it: parks and protected areas are the absolute cornerstone of our efforts to protect nature. In the long term, we can’t save wildlife and ecosystems without them.

But people want to use parks too, and in rapidly growing numbers. Around the world, parks are destinations for recreational activities like hiking, bird-watching and camping, as well as noisier affairs such as mountain-biking, snowmobiling and four-wheel-driving.

Where do we draw the line?

Road risks

Let’s start by looking at the roads that take us into and through parks. They can be a double-edged sword.

Roads are needed to allow tourists to access parks, but we have to be very careful where and how we build them.

In regions where law enforcement is weak, roads can rip apart a forest — sharply increasing illegal activities such as poaching, deforestation and mining.

According to my (Bill’s) research, new roads – often driven by foreign mining or timber investors from nations such as China – could damage up to a third of all the protected areas in sub-Saharan Africa.

Read more: The global road-building explosion is shattering nature

In Nouabale Ndoke Park in the Congo Basin, poaching wasn’t a big problem until a new road was built along the edge of the park.

Suddenly the fatal rak-rak-rak of AK-47 rifles – often aimed at elephants by ivory poachers – was being heard all too often.

Trails on trial

Roads are one thing, but what about a simple bike trail or walking track? They let in people too. But they are harmless, right?

Not always. A 2010 Canadian study found that mountain biking causes a range of environmental impacts, including tyres chewing up the soil, causing compaction and erosion. This is a significant problem for fragile alpine vegetation in mountainous areas where many bikers like to explore.

Rapidly moving cyclists can also scare wildlife. In North America and Europe, many wild species, such as bears, wolves, caribou and bobcats, have been shown to flee or avoid areas frequented by hikers or bikers.

In Indonesia, even trails used by ecotourists and birdwatchers scared away some sensitive wildlife species or caused them to shift to being active only at night.

Every type of human activity – be it hiking or biking or horse riding — has its own signature impact on nature. We simply don’t know the overall effect of human recreation on parks and protected areas globally.

However, a study earlier this year found that roughly one-third of all terrestrial protected areas worldwide – a staggering 6 million square kilometres, an area bigger than Kenya – is already under “intense” human pressure.

Read more: One-third of the world’s nature reserves are under threat from humans

Roads, mines, industrial logging, farms, townships and cities all threaten these supposedly protected places. And on top of that are the impacts – probably lesser but still unquantified – of more benign human activities aimed at enjoying nature.

Keep people out?

Is the answer to stop people from visiting parks?

Not really. Visitors in many parts of the world help to fund the operation of national parks, and provide vital income for local people.

Exposure to nature is also one of the best ways to enhance human health, build support for environmental protection, and generate political momentum for the establishment of new protected areas.

What’s more, locking people out of land is a very unpopular thing to do. Governments that block people from accessing nature reserves often face an electoral backlash.

How to manage humanity

If we accept that people must be able to use parks, what’s the best way to limit their impacts on ecosystems and wildlife? One way is to encourage them to stay on designated trails and tourist routes.

A recent study (using geotagged data from photos) showed that half of all photos by park visitors were taken in less than 1% of each park.

In other words, most visitors use only a small, highly trafficked part of each park. That’s good news for nature.

If people tend to limit their activities to the vicinity of pretty waterfalls, spectacular vistas, and designated hiking areas, that leaves much of the park available for sensitive animals and ecosystems.

There are many opportunities for practical science and management. We want to help design protected areas in a way that lets people enjoy them – but which also focuses their activities in particular areas while retaining large intact areas where wildlife can roam free with little human disturbance.

And while we’re designing our parks, we want to use every opportunity, and every visit, to educate and empower tourists. We need people using parks to understand, appreciate, and stand up for nature, rather than thinking of parks as simply playgrounds.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute

This week we’re exploring the state of nine different policy areas across Australia’s states, as detailed in Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018. Read the other articles in the series here.

House prices might now be falling, but Australians’ anxiety over housing affordability is not. Price falls of a few percentage points in Sydney and Melbourne are cold comfort to first home buyers. They are still paying 50% more than they would have five years ago.

Further price falls are likely, but even then housing will still be less affordable than it was two decades ago.

Read more: Three charts on: poorer Australians bearing the brunt of rising housing costs

Home ownership rates are declining across Australia, especially among the young and the poor. An increasing proportion of low-income earners are in rental stress in all states except Queensland and Tasmania.

STATE HOUSING SCORECARD

The required policy response remains the same. As Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018 shows, state governments need to ensure a lot more housing is built.

What has happened to housing?

Australia’s population is growing rapidly. Our cities have not kept up, so there is less housing per person. The primary obstacle appears to be planning rules that delay or prevent development.

All states except Tasmania have less housing per person than a decade ago

The New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland governments have all changed planning rules and processes over the past five years or so. This has resulted in new building finally catching up with population growth, even if a significant backlog remains.

The extra supply has already contributed to flattening rents and falling apartment prices in Brisbane. It will help push rents and prices lower in Sydney and Melbourne as well.

But today’s record level of housing construction is the bare minimum needed to match rapid population growth largely driven by immigration.

Read more: How migration affects housing affordability

And yet authorities in NSW and Queensland are responding to NIMBY pressures by making it harder to increase density. In the Victorian election campaign, Opposition Leader Matthew Guy is promising to do the same.

Record housing construction will need to be maintained to meet city plan housing targets

What should governments do?

Resisting higher-density development is the wrong response. To enable more homes to be built in inner and middle-ring suburbs of our largest cities, state governments should:

1. Introduce a new small redevelopment housing code. It would protect neighbours, reduce planning uncertainty and improve the quality of new developments. The code would include the things that worry neighbours the most, such as privacy, height and overshadowing.

2. Allow taller developments of four to eight storeys “as of right” on major transport corridors and around train stations.

3. Set housing targets for each local council. The targets should be linked to plans for the growth of the city as a whole. Where councils fail to meet planning targets, independent planning panels should step in.

The best evidence is that building an extra 50,000 homes a year for a decade could leave Australian house prices 5-20% lower than what they would have been otherwise, stem rising public anxiety about housing affordability, and increase economic growth.

Reform tenancy rules

As well as boosting supply, state governments should make renting more attractive by changing residential tenancy laws to increase the security of renters and help renters make their property feel like their home. The Victorian government recently tipped the balance more towards tenants. Other state governments should follow suit.

Read more: An open letter on rental housing reform

Of course, changes in tenancy laws in favour of renters could reduce the supply of rental housing and increase rents, but any such effects are likely to be vanishingly small. More likely some investors will sell their properties to first home buyers, which means one less rental property and one less renter.

Boost the public housing supply

The housing affordability crisis has made life particularly hard for low-income earners. There is a powerful case for extra public support for the most vulnerable Australians. But not all policies will be equally effective.

Boosting social housing will be expensive. Increasing the stock by 100,000 dwellings – broadly sufficient to return social housing to its historical share of the total housing stock – would require extra public funding of around A$900 million a year, or an upfront capital cost of between A$10 billion and A$15 billion.

Even then social housing would house only one-third of the poorest 20% of Australians. Most low-income Australians would remain in the private rental market.

The big problem is that there is not enough “flow” of social housing available for people whose lives take a big turn for the worse. Tenants generally take a long time to leave social housing; most have stayed more than five years

To overcome these issues, governments should build more social housing, and tightly target it to people most at risk of becoming homeless for the long term. Extra support for the housing costs of low-income earners should otherwise be delivered primarily by boosting Commonwealth Rent Assistance.

Read more: Super. If Labor really wanted to help women in retirement, it would do something else

Stop offering false hope

State governments also need to stop offering false hope. Even though policies such as first home owners’ grants have proved ineffective time after time, they were the centrepieces of the housing plans of NSW and Victoria announced last year. Inevitably these are really second home sellers’ incentives: the biggest winners are people who own homes already, and property developers with new homes ready to sell.

Similarly, state governments shouldn’t claim that housing and business incentives and regional transport projects will divert a lot of population growth to the regions. Such policies haven’t made much difference in the past. And they provide excuses not to make the tough calls on planning.

Read more: Australia’s dangerous fantasy: diverting population growth to the regions

None of the policies recommended in our State Orange Book 2018 are easy politically. But Australians need to face up to a harsh truth: either people accept greater density in their suburb, or their children will not be able to buy a home.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samuel Hinton, PhD, The University of Queensland

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome: find out how to enter at the bottom. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

If a star explodes, will it destroy the Earth? – Sascha, age 8, Hurstbridge Victoria.

What a great question. Thank you, Sascha. The answer is a resounding “I hope not!”

Luckily for us, not all stars explode and then die. When stars age, they change from a dwarf star (our Sun is actually currently a dwarf star) into a giant star. If a star is big enough it can then explode in what we call a “core-collapse supernova”. But it would need to be around ten times more massive than our Sun for that to happen.

So, we’re safe from the Sun exploding. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe in general, because giant stars are big!

In several billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen (that’s a gas it burns for fuel) and as it shifts to sticking different atoms together it will expand outwards. First, it will swallow Mercury. Then Venus. And then it will swallow Earth.

This is not great for Earth.

The good news is we have billions of years to prepare for this and leave the planet, if humans are even still around by then.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do stars twinkle?

But you asked about exploding stars. So are there stars other than the Sun, which might explode soon close to us?

Yes, there are! As long as by “soon” we mean within a million years.

If you find the constellation Orion in the sky, there is a bright red star at one end – this is Betelgeuse. It is a red supergiant star – so big that if we swapped its position with the Sun, Betelgeuse would swallow Mars, and the asteroid belt. It might also swallow Jupiter as well.

And within the next million years Betelgeuse is expected to explode. Luckily for us, it is around 600 light years away, far enough that when it explodes Earth is safe.

When Betelgeuse explodes it will be so bright that it will outshine the full moon for over a month. We’ll be able to see it in the day time and walk around at night, able to see solely from Betelgeuse’s light.

But it won’t destroy the Earth.

The good thing about space is that – even though it has lots of dangerous stuff floating in it – it’s so big and empty that it almost doesn’t matter.

Two galaxies smashing together and merging into one sounds catastrophic. But space is so empty that even with the hundreds of billions of stars from the Andromeda galaxy shooting towards us, we don’t expect any collisions between stars at all. There’s just too much space between them. That’s not just with our Sun, but with any of the billions of stars in the Milky Way.

It’s crazy how big space is!

Read more: Curious Kids: Why is the Earth round?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter by tagging @ConversationEDU with the hashtag #curiouskids, or
* Tell us on Facebook

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Gibbons, Adjunct Professor in Linguistics, Monash University

In a trial involving a jury, the judge gives the jury instructions on various issues including the relevant laws, trial process and evidence. In Victoria, these instructions are know as jury directions.

Jury directions are necessary to ensure a fair trial. Juries need to understand the directions to reduce the likelihood of a miscarriage of justice, which may result in an innocent person going to prison, or even dying in systems where there is a death penalty. Equally, it could lead to a guilty person being released to commit more offences. Miscarriage of justice is by definition unjust, damaging for the participants, and reflects poorly on the justice system.

However, jury directions can be complex and difficult to understand, and can therefore may not fulfil their main purpose of instructing the jury. To avoid miscarriages of justice, we need a jury direction process that leads to maximum juror understanding.

Read more: Eight cases from across history which still shape the law today

What are the issues with jury directions?

The main purpose of jury directions is to communicate with the jury about the issues mentioned above. But judges have a second hidden audience – appeal court judges – and a secondary motive, which is to avoid retrials on the grounds that the directions were not given correctly.

In order to ensure their jury directions are legally watertight and avoid successful appeals, judges will use language and procedures that a court or jurisdiction has previously approved. This has led to judges using legalistic processes and wordy, complex language that may be poorly understood by jurors. In practice, this second motive has come to dominate the process and undermine the primary purpose of communicating with the jury.

Some factors on the jury’s part may also impede communication. Jurors may have limited understanding of the legal system and legal language. They may be overwhelmed by the complexity of jury directions, making it difficult to process and retain the information. Limits on jurors’ attention spans can also be an issue, as jury directions often take several hours, during which jurors can be affected by stress, fatigue and boredom. Judges have said that jurors’ attention is often lost during this.

The archaic dress, strange procedures, extreme formality, and hierarchy of the courtroom can confuse and intimidate jurors.

Read more: Language puts ordinary people at a disadvantage in the criminal justice system

Then there is the method of communication between judge and jurors, which is overwhelmingly spoken and one-way: from the judge to the jury. The process for the jury to communicate to the judge can be onerous. In Victoria, the jury communicates with the judge by writing down their message and pass it to the tipstaff, the judge’s assistant, who then passes it to the judge. This places a barrier on verbal interaction and decreases communication.

What can be done to improve jury directions?

To judge whether jury directions have been successfully communicated, we need to ask whether the demands made by the procedures and language of the jury directions matched the capacity of the target audience.

Advocates for clearer legal language, known as the plain legal language movement, believe that communication is enhanced if it is brief, orderly and clear (particularly not unnecessarily complex).

For example, take a relatively standard jury direction, given at the start of a trial, which is instructing them to make their decision solely on the evidence presented in the trial. The direction is 202 words long, plus an additional example, and most of the sentences are long and complex. Furthermore, it is disorganised and redundant.

Here is a suggested revision, made with the lawyerly help of Matthew Weatherson of the Judicial College of Victoria:

What is evidence?

There are two kinds of evidence.

First – what the witnesses say or agree to. It is not what the lawyers suggest.

Second – exhibits. These are things that we will show you. I will tell you when there is an exhibit, and we will give it a reference letter or number.

It is around one quarter the length of the original. The complexity of the language has been considerably reduced. The information has been logically re-organised. It is more orderly, briefer and clearer, and therefore more likely to be understood.

Read more: If small print ‘terms and conditions’ require a PhD to read, should they be legally binding?

Some other possible procedural changes are:

• questioning jurors about the meaning of the directions to ensure they understand them
• having more direct interactive communication between the judge and jurors
• providing written forms of the directions as well as spoken
• making the written directions available during the trial.

Currently, jury directions inadequately instruct jurors because the need to address a secondary audience, the appeal court, has overridden the needs of the primary audience, juries.

Perfect communication is unachievable. However, improving communication is certainly possible, and it is important to do so when so much is at stake.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sabine Cotte, Honorary fellow of the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, University of Melbourne

Book Review: Mirka & Georges, A Culinary Affair (MUP).

Launched in the year of Mirka Mora’s 90th birthday – and sadly, her death – Mirka & Georges, A Culinary Affair is a lovely book about two very influential figures in Melbourne’s artistic and food history.

Holocaust survivors, Mirka and Georges Mora arrived in Australia from Paris in 1951, ready to live a new life and inject their European culture and bohemian joie de vivre into a sedate and dull Melbourne. The couple opened cafes and restaurants that became the rendez-vous of the city’s art world, as well as the place to enjoy fine French dining.

They were close friends of the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, and Georges was instrumental in the establishment of Heide, the Reeds’ property, as a Museum of Modern Art in 1981. Later, they went their separate ways to become an influential art dealer (Georges) and a renowned artist (Mirka).

Written by Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan, senior curators at Heide, the book mixes a history of the Moras and their restaurants until their separation in 1970, with recipes retrieved from Mirka’s papers and family photos. The recipes are illustrated with photos of Mirka’s artworks, which I found slightly too staged compared to the joyous, organic clutter of her real life studio.

Read more: Diaries, petticoats and copious research: a rare glimpse into Mirka Mora’s artistic process

In the first chapter, La jeunesse (Youth), we see gorgeous images of Mirka’s happy years before the war, with her antiques dealer father, inventive seamstress mother, two sisters and a family friend who frequently took her on holidays in Normandy. They were followed by the sombre years of German occupation and the arrest of Mirka, her sisters and her mother in Paris in July 1942, and their subsequent deportation to a camp in the city’s outskirts.

In Paris’ Winter Velodrome, where they were detained for a few days, we get a glimpse of Mirka’s mother in the face of adversity: although hungry, she directed her girls to throw the hot potatoes they were eventually given to eat at the policemen below them in the stands, much to their enjoyment and “laughter amidst the tears”. No wonder her daughter grew into a sparkling woman, prone to food flicking and anything mischievous and atmosphere-lifting.

The family’s miraculous liberation from the Pithiviers camp, the years in hiding in a small village in Bourgogne, although they have been recounted several times by Mirka, remind us how life can change at a minute’s notice.

Georges’ youth, much less known until recently, is equally well documented. It his helped by his son Philippe’s recent research into his father’s past, told in the movie Monsieur Mayonnaise (2016), and interviews with his second wife Caroline Williams Mora.

We follow him from his youth in Leipzig where he was born Günter Morawski, into a wealthy family of art collectors, to the university years in Berlin and his flight from the Nazis to Paris in 1933. Reborn as a patent agent for inventors, he briefly joined the French foreign legion before starting to work for a Jewish orphanage, smuggling many children out of France. It was there that he met the 19-year-old Mirka, working as a junior supervisor.

The couple’s arrival in Melbourne in 1951 was a great contrast to Paris. Far from being defeated, they embraced their new life. They developed strong friendships with local artists and their studio in Collins Street became a focal point for meetings, exhibitions and parties.

Mirka Mora, Family Gathering in the Dream Park, 2008, Oil on canvas, 65 x 182 cm. Courtesy William Mora Galleries, Melbourne

This naturally led to opening Mirka café, where the couple’s legendary hospitality and vivacious conversation were accompanied with hearty French food, including Georges’ favourite dish Langouste à la Parisienne. The children’s memories pepper the chapters with funny cameos (such as artist Francis Bacon being transfixed by Philippe’s painting of the nanny in the shower).

One can only imagine the Balzac restaurant – with Charles Blackman as the cook, its walls decorated by Mirka, displaying sculptures by John Perceval – in full flight during the Melbourne 1956 Olympics.

Still from Gertie Anschel’s home movies, showing the Mirka Café street sign. Title no. 525755. National Film and Sound Archive, courtesy Phillipe Mora

The ups and downs of family life, the couple’s bohemian circle and running restaurants make for a string of stories featuring international and local celebrities. This continued with the Tolarno hotel and restaurant from 1964 to the early 1970s, when the marriage ended, heralding new lives for Georges and Mirka.

An easy book to flick through, this will please cooking enthusiasts as well as lovers of anecdotes. However it is worth poring over the text, which gives a glimpse of the intensity of a time when the pair contributed so much to Melbourne.

As Philippe Mora notes in the foreword:

Baillieu Myer famously said our father ‘made Melbourne a city’ … In an absurdly misogynist society, Mirka cut a swathe for all women —artists and writers in particular. Her humour, ghastly to us at the time, was a sword that cut hypocrisy deep.

Mirka Mora Pas de Deux — Drawing and dolls is showing at Heide until 24 March 2019.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Lund, Deputy Editor: Science + Technology, The Conversation

How much do you really know about your friends? Your co-workers? Your community and your country?

The fact is that much of what we think we know about the people around us is likely to be skewed, because people tend to lie. We lie in conversation, on social media, and in surveys. But there exists an online trove of data that allows us to paint a much more accurate picture of who we really are.

That’s the argument of US data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the book Everybody Lies and our guest on today’s episode of Speaking with.

Stephens-Davidowitz says he uses data from the internet – what he calls “the traces of information that billions of people leave on Google, social media, dating, and even pornography sites” to tell us the surprising and sometimes disturbing truth about who we really are.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz spoke with David Tuffley, a senior lecturer in applied ethics and sociotechnical studies at Griffith University, to talk about what he learned.

Edited by Dilpreet Kaur.

Recorded by Michael Lund.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is in Australia to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on this Sunday, November 4.

Subscribe to The Conversation’s Speaking with podcast on Apple Podcasts, or follow on Tunein Radio.

You can find more podcast episodes from The Conversation here.

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