Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodolfo Ocampo, PhD student, Human–AI Creative Collaboration, UNSW Sydney

An art prize at the Colorado State Fair was awarded last month to a work that – unbeknown to the judges – was generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.

Social media have also seen an explosion of weird images generated by AI from text descriptions, such as “the face of a shiba inu blended into the side of a loaf of bread on a kitchen bench, digital art”.

Or perhaps “A sea otter in the style of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Johannes Vermeer”:

You may be wondering what’s going on here. As somebody who researches creative collaborations between humans and AI, I can tell you that behind the headlines and memes a fundamental revolution is under way – with profound social, artistic, economic and technological implications.

How we got here

You could say this revolution began in June 2020, when a company called OpenAI achieved a big breakthrough in AI with the creation of GPT-3, a system that can process and generate language in much more complex ways than earlier efforts. You can have conversations with it about any topic, ask it to write a research article or a story, summarise text, write a joke, and do almost any imaginable language task.

Read more:
Robots are creating images and telling jokes. 5 things to know about foundation models and the next generation of AI

In 2021, some of GPT-3’s developers turned their hand to images. They trained a model on billions of pairs of images and text descriptions, then used it to generate new images from new descriptions. They called this system DALL-E, and in July 2022 they released a much-improved new version, DALL-E 2.

Like GPT-3, DALL-E 2 was a major breakthrough. It can generate highly detailed images from free-form text inputs, including information about style and other abstract concepts.

For example, here I asked it to illustrate the phrase “Mind in Bloom” combining the styles of Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Brett Whiteley.

Competitors enter the scene

Since the launch of DALL-E 2, a few competitors have emerged. One is the free-to-use but lower-quality DALL-E Mini (developed independently and now renamed Craiyon), which was a popular source of meme content.

Around the same time, a smaller company called Midjourney released a model that more closely matched DALL-E 2’s capabilities. Though still a little less capable than DALL-E 2, Midjourney has lent itself to interesting artistic explorations. It was with Midjourney that Jason Allen generated the artwork that won the Colorado State Art Fair competition.

Google too has a text-to-image model, called Imagen, which supposedly produces much better results than DALL-E and others. However, Imagen has not yet been released for wider use so it is difficult to evaluate Google’s claims.

In July 2022, OpenAI began to capitalise on the interest in DALL-E, announcing that 1 million users would be given access on a pay-to-use basis.

However, in August 2022 a new contender arrived: Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion not only rivals DALL-E 2 in its capabilities, but more importantly it is open source. Anyone can use, adapt and tweak the code as they like.

Already, in the weeks since Stable Diffusion’s release, people have been pushing the code to the limits of what it can do.

To take one example: people quickly realised that, because a video is a sequence of images, they could tweak Stable Diffusion’s code to generate video from text.

Another fascinating tool built with Stable Diffusion’s code is Diffuse the Rest, which lets you draw a simple sketch, provide a text prompt, and generate an image from it. In the video below, I generated a detailed photo of a flower from a very rough sketch.

In a more complicated example below, I am starting to build software that lets you draw with your body, then use Stable Diffusion to turn it into a painting or photo.

The end of creativity?

What does it mean that you can generate any sort of visual content, image or video, with a few lines of text and a click of a button? What about when you can generate a movie script with GPT-3 and a movie animation with DALL-E 2?

And looking further forward, what will it mean when social media algorithms not only curate content for your feed, but generate it? What about when this trend meets the metaverse in a few years, and virtual reality worlds are generated in real time, just for you?

These are all important questions to consider.

Some speculate that, in the short term, this means human creativity and art are deeply threatened.

Perhaps in a world where anyone can generate any images, graphic designers as we know them today will be redundant. However, history shows human creativity finds a way. The electronic synthesiser did not kill music, and photography did not kill painting. Instead, they catalysed new art forms.

I believe something similar will happen with AI generation. People are experimenting with including models like Stable Diffusion as a part of their creative process.

Or using DALL-E 2 to generate fashion-design prototypes:

A new type of artist is even emerging in what some call “promptology”, or “prompt engineering”. The art is not in crafting pixels by hand, but in crafting the words that prompt the computer to generate the image: a kind of AI whispering.

Collaborating with AI

The impacts of AI technologies will be multidimensional: we cannot reduce them to good or bad on a single axis.

New artforms will arise, as will new avenues for creative expression. However, I believe there are risks as well.

Read more:
So this is how it feels when the robots come for your job: what GitHub’s Copilot ‘AI assistant’ means for coders

We live in an attention economy that thrives on extracting screen time from users; in an economy where automation drives corporate profit but not necessarily higher wages, and where art is commodified as content; in a social context where it is increasingly hard to distinguish real from fake; in sociotechnical structures that too easily encode biases in the AI models we train. In these circumstances, AI can easily do harm.

How can we steer these new AI technologies in a direction that benefits people? I believe one way to do this is to design AI that collaborates with, rather than replaces, humans.

Rodolfo Ocampo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI art is everywhere right now. Even experts don’t know what it will mean – https://theconversation.com/ai-art-is-everywhere-right-now-even-experts-dont-know-what-it-will-mean-189800

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia A. O’Brien, Faculty Member, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University; Visiting Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University; Adjunct Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC., Georgetown University

If you are trying to find traces of the United States’ long and layered ties with the Pacific Islands in Washington D.C., you need to look hard. Apart from the names of iconic battles chiselled into the Washington Mall’s second world war memorial, evidence of America’s complex Pacific history stretching back to the beginning of the Republic is not there.

Until very recently, this absence was replicated throughout Washington’s institutions, where the Pacific Islands have been at the back of mind since those epic battles were fought 80 years ago.

But over the past few months, things have changed.

The reason for this dramatic shift is plain for all to see: China. Washington is now undergoing a Pacific re-discovery that goes all the way to the top.

At the end of September, US President Joe Biden will host Pacific leaders at the White House for the first US-Pacific Island Country Summit. This will be in the style of the ASEAN meeting held in May.

After the second world war, the US was largely absent in the Pacific. There were notable exceptions, not least the shameful Marshall Islands atomic testing programme that continues to deeply affect the present.

Now the US is striving to be seen and viewed as a force for good in a part of the world where China has been making deep, transformative and worrying inroads for over 15 years.

Read more:
75 years after nuclear testing in the Pacific began, the fallout continues to wreak havoc

This isn’t the first time US postwar hegemony has been challenged in the Pacific. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was disrupting the Pacific Islands power balance and the US responded with a series of treaties and agreements. One was the 1987 South Pacific Tuna Treaty, signed with 16 Pacific Islands. The treaty’s ongoing importance was underscored in recent weeks as part of the renewed US diplomatic drive.

The US also brokered three Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with its former United Nations Trust Territories that became the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau in the mid-1980s. (Rather than becoming independent at this time, the Northern Marianas Islands opted to join American Samoa and Guam as US territories).

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, so too did US interest in the Pacific. But the compacts spurred the formation of numerous Micronesian diaspora communities across the US. Meanwhile, in exchange for certain rights, the COFA states gave the US exclusive control over their oceanic territories and a vital military base on Kwajalein Atoll.

In the current geopolitical context, these 20-year agreements were expiring and languishing, much to the frustration of several congressional representatives from both political sides. Fears of Chinese encroachments spurred the White House into action in March.

Since then, the visibility of the US’s Pacific outreach has risen. Congress took the lead in upping the US game in the Pacific, with numerous bills such as the 2021 Blue Pacific Act. Its budget lines were also designed to address both the immense needs of the region and shore-up the geopolitical interests of the US and its friends and allies, not least Australia.

In August, the urgency of US outreach has been on display in the Solomon Islands, the nation most precariously situated in the unfolding geopolitical contest thanks to the security deal signed in April with China.

At the beginning of August, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy led poignant and very personal commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the commencement of the Battle of Guadalcanal in August 1942.

At the month’s end, the US hospital ship Mercy docked in Honiara, where it was welcomed by Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Only days before, he had prevented US coastguard cutter, Oliver Henry, from doing likewise.

Along with urgently needed medical, dental and veterinary aid, the Mercy brought music and a sense of celebration, with the US navy band even singing Solomon Islands tunes, in a demonstration of distinctive tone the US now seeks to set.

Also in August, USAID released its five-year Strategic Framework. This detailed how the US is going to rapidly restore itself in the region as it challenges “authoritarian actors” who “challenge the region’s stability and democratic systems”. The three development objectives are:

• strengthening community resilience particularly in the face of acute climate challenges
• bolstering Pacific economies
• strengthening democratic governance.

The framework cites the regional objectives laid out by the Pacific Islands Forum over the past eight years as the framework’s guide in 12 Pacific Island nations. It has a particular agenda to drastically improve the lives and status of women and girls across the region. The USAID plan is ambitious in its hope to transform conservative Pacific societies, while at the same time offer opportunities more attractive than those of China, thereby limiting its power projection throughout the region.

It is the 12 Pacific nations where USAID seeks to expand operations that have been invited to the White House in late September. The withholding of invitations to the remaining members of the Pacific Islands Forum – the Cook Islands, Niue, French Polynesia and New Caledonia – has been duly noted.

It is a puzzling move, but one that indicates the agenda for the summit: for Biden’s administration to specifically develop its US programmes. The recent revelation that the five foreign ministers heading the Partners in the Blue Pacific Initiative (US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Britain) will meet before the summit also suggests multilateral proposals will be tabled too.

Given how little the region has been seen and heard in Washington, the summit offers a rare opportunity for the administration to listen to what Pacific leaders have to say and reshape their approach accordingly.

Patricia A. O’Brien received funding from the Australian Research Council as a Future Fellow, the Jay I. Kislak Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and New Zealand’s JD Stout Trust.

– ref. US takes a renewed interest in the Pacific – and China’s role in it – https://theconversation.com/us-takes-a-renewed-interest-in-the-pacific-and-chinas-role-in-it-190053

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ralph Cooney, Professor Emeritus in Advanced Materials, University of Auckland

More than half of the thousands of satellites in orbit are now defunct, and this accumulation of floating space debris has been described as a “fatal problem” for current and future space missions and human space travel.

An estimated 130 million objects smaller than 1cm and 34,000 larger than 10cm are travelling in orbit at speeds of thousands of kilometres per hour, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). A report presented at this year’s European conference on space debris suggests the amount of space junk could increase fifty-fold by 2100.

While many fragments of space junk are small, they travel so fast their impact has enough energy to disable a satellite or cause significant damage to space stations.

Both the Hubble Telescope and the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) satellites had coin-sized holes punched into them by flying debris and a mirror on Nasa’s James Webb space telescope was damaged by micrometeoroids.

Most satellites were not designed with the end of their usefulness in mind. About 60% of the 6,000 satellites in orbit are now out of order. Along with the smaller objects these defunct satellites constitute a major problem both for existing and future satellites and space stations.

Mega constellations of satellites currently being sent into space by corporations such as SpaceX and Amazon are expected to transform access to the internet for all countries. But these private telecommunications ventures will also contribute 50,000 more satellites to already dangerously populated orbits.

Scientists have warned the rapid development of mega constellations risks several “tragedies of the commons”, including to ground-based astronomy, Earth’s orbit and Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Read more:
Soon, 1 out of every 15 points of light in the sky will be a satellite

Methods to remove space debris

There is a growing concern, described as the Kessler Syndrome, that we may be creating an envelope of space debris which could prevent human space travel, space exploration and the use of satellites in some parts of Earth’s orbit. This scenario, perpetuated by collisions between space objects creating ever more debris, could also damage our global communications and navigation systems.

This is why the development of practical debris removal technologies is important and urgent. So far, various strategies have been conceptualised to solve the space debris problem and some have been recently prioritised.

To date, not a single orbiting object has been recovered from space successfully.

One of the main problems in designing space debris removal strategies is how to transfer the energy between the debris (target) and the chaser during the first contact. There are two prioritised approaches and a third in development:

• Impact energy dissipation methods seek to decrease the impact energy of the debris. In one approach, the chaser satellite deploys a harpoon to penetrate the space debris. After the successful shot, the chaser satellite, harpoon and target would become connected by an elastic tether and the chaser would pull the debris to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up together.

• Neutral energy balance includes a magnetic capture method which uses magnetic coils to achieve perfect energy balance between chaser and target. This is a soft docking method which is a preliminary step to some subsequent method of debris disposal.

• Destructive energy absorption aims to destroy small debris targets using a high-powered laser. But the challenge is to develop a laser and battery combination that is powerful but lightweight enough. A laboratory in China has been developing a space-based laser system to be installed on a chaser satellite capable of targeting debris of up to 20cm in size. The Nasa Orion project uses ground-based lasers to destroy small debris.

Read more:
A chunk of Chinese satellite almost hit the International Space Station. They dodged it – but the space junk problem is getting worse

The first space removal project is scheduled for 2025 and will be led by the ESA. It involves a consortium approach based on a Swiss spinoff company, ClearSpace.

The ClearSpace chaser will rendezvous with the target and capture it using four robotic arms. The chaser and captured launcher will then be de-orbited and burn up in the atmosphere.

High cost and more pollution

A key challenge is the substantial cost associated with these proposed solutions, given the immense scale of the space debris problem. Another important aspect is the potential impact of space-clearing efforts on our planet’s atmosphere.

The idea that a growing number of satellites and other objects would be incinerated in the atmosphere as they are removed from space concerns climate scientists. Space debris is pulled downward naturally and burns up in the lower atmosphere, but increasing levels of carbon dioxide are reducing the density of the upper atmosphere, which could diminish its capacity to pull debris back towards Earth.

The combustion of more and more satellites and other space debris (80 tonnes per year at present) falling either naturally or via the new removal methods will also release decomposition products into the atmosphere.

These will certainly contribute more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The decomposition of certain materials in satellites is also likely to release chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases, which could damage the ozone shield.

One cannot miss the parallels between the space junk problem and waste recycling. Clearly, we need to devise a circular economy strategy for our space waste.

At present the legal responsibility for space debris lies with the country of origin. This seems to militate against future international cooperative programmes of space junk removal.

Ralph Cooney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Harpoons, robots and lasers: how to capture defunct satellites and other space junk and bring it back to Earth – https://theconversation.com/harpoons-robots-and-lasers-how-to-capture-defunct-satellites-and-other-space-junk-and-bring-it-back-to-earth-189698

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Tomkins, Geologist, Monash University

A “folded diamond” doesn’t sound entirely plausible. But that’s exactly what we’ve found inside a rare group of meteorites known as ureilites, which likely came from the mantle of a dwarf planet or very large asteroid that was destroyed 4.56 billion years ago in a giant collision.

Within these space rocks, we found layered diamonds with distinctive fold patterns. Our discovery is published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Now of course, everyone knows diamond is the hardest naturally occurring material, so the obvious question was – how on Earth (or in space!) could a folded diamond possibly form?!

This was exactly the sort of curiosity-piquing observation that sends scientists diving down rabbit holes for months on end.

A new analysis technique

Carbon, one of the most abundant elements in the universe, can form all kinds of structures. Among the more familiar ones are graphite and, of course, diamond. But there’s also an unusual hexagonal form of diamond known as lonsdaleite, which has been suggested to be even harder than standard cubic diamonds.

Our team includes a bunch of people who drive development of advanced analysis techniques. At CSIRO, Nick Wilson, Colin MacRae and Aaron Torpy developed a new approach in electron microscopy to map the distribution of diamond, graphite and lonsdaleite in the meteorites.

When our mapping suggested the folded diamond might actually be lonsdaleite, we – Dougal McCulloch, Alan Salek and Matthew Field at RMIT – performed a more detailed investigation via a method called high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

The results were exciting: we had found some of the largest lonsdaleite crystallites (microscopic crystals) ever discovered, about 1 micrometre across. So, those intriguing fold shapes were composed of polycrystalline lonsdaleite, meaning they were made from numerous tiny crystals.

Reconstructing the cataclysm

And there was even more. We found the lonsdaleite had been partially converted to diamond and graphite, giving us clues to the sequence of events that had happened in the meteorites. Follow-up work at the Australian Synchrotron by Helen Brand confirmed this result.

By comparing the diamond, graphite and lonsdaleite across 18 different ureilite meteorites, we started to form a picture of what probably happened to produce the folded structures we found. At the first stage, graphite crystals folded deep inside the mantle of the asteroid thanks to high temperatures causing the other surrounding minerals to grow, pushing aside the graphite crystals. (You can see this in the schematic below.)

The second stage happened in the aftermath of the gigantic collision that catastrophically disrupted the ureilite parent asteroid. Evidence in the meteorites suggested the disruption event produced a rich mix of fluids and gases as it progressed.

This mix then caused lonsdaleite to form by replacement of the folded graphite crystals, almost perfectly preserving the intricate textures of the graphite. Of course, it’s not actually possible to fold lonsdaleite or diamond – it formed by replacement of pre-existing shapes.

We think this was driven by the hot fluid mix as pressure and temperature dropped immediately after the cataclysm. Then, shortly after, diamond and graphite partially replaced the lonsdaleite as the fluid further decompressed and cooled to form a gas mixture.

Read more:
How rare minerals form when meteorites slam into Earth

Manufacturing clues from nature

The process is quite similar to a process used to manufacture diamonds known as chemical vapour deposition. These manufactured diamonds are widely used in industry today, particularly for cutting and grinding because diamond is so hard. The difference is that we think the lonsdaleite replaced the shaped graphite at moderately higher pressures than those normally used to grow diamonds, from a supercritical fluid rather than a gas.

So, nature appears to have given us clues on how to make shaped ultra-hard micro machine parts! If we can find a way to replicate the process preserved in the meteorites, we can make these machine parts by replacement of pre-shaped graphite with lonsdaleite.

Being able to study these weird folded diamonds was possible because lead author Andrew Tomkins had time to follow his nose – we call this type of research “curiosity-driven science”. However, although curiosity-driven science produces important breakthroughs, it isn’t normally funded by major funding agencies. They like to see well thought-out details for grand projects that already have a solid foundation of prior research.

We think a good way to boost Australia’s innovation would be to provide recognised science innovators a small grant annually to spend on research as they see fit; no questions asked, no justification or follow-up required.

For curiosity-driven research like our project, scientists need a small amount of time (and money) that can be spent with complete freedom; this produces the creativity that drives innovation. You never know what else we might find out there.

Read more:
We created diamonds in mere minutes, without heat — by mimicking the force of an asteroid collision

Andrew Tomkins receives funding from the Australia Research Council.

Alan Salek receives a RSS Scholarship.

Dougal McCulloch receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Folded diamond has been discovered in a rare type of meteorite. How is this possible? – https://theconversation.com/folded-diamond-has-been-discovered-in-a-rare-type-of-meteorite-how-is-this-possible-190134

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Sussex, Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

Vladmir Putin has a new problem. His invasion of Ukraine is not just bogged down. It’s going rapidly backwards.

Ukraine’s armed forces have launched two stunningly successful counteroffensives around Kharkov in the nation’s east, and in the south near the Russian-occupied city of Kherson. Kyiv is now claiming to have recaptured some 2,000 square kilometres of its territory, with the potential to cut off and trap a sizeable portion of the Russian invasion force.

By the Kremlin’s own standards, this is hardly winning. Realising Russia’s war aims – including regime change and the establishment of a “Crimean corridor” that denies Ukraine access to the Black Sea – would require nothing short of a dramatic reversal of its fortunes.

Putin now essentially has three options.

First, he can seek a political solution, hoping to hold onto the territory Kremlin proxies captured in the eight years prior to his 2022 invasion. That’s an unattractive choice, especially since a bullish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hardly in the mood to negotiate favourable terms for Moscow. Internationally, it would be a humiliating blow to Russian prestige: a smaller state defeating a top-tier nuclear power in a major land war.

Domestically, and more worrying for Putin, it would sharply call his leadership into question. Mounting signs of domestic discontent now even include St Petersburg regional deputies publicly calling for Putin to be tried for treason, another group from Moscow calling for him to step down, and even state media questioning the conflict.

Option two for Putin is to try to reimpose a long and grinding campaign. But even if his forces can blunt the Ukrainian advance, Russia can achieve only a stalemate if the war returns to static artillery duels. That would buy time. It would wear down Ukrainian forces and allow him to test whether using energy as a weapon fragments the European Union’s resolve over the winter.

However, at Russia’s current rate of losses its conventional forces will be exhausted beyond about 12 months. Both NATO and Ukraine would be well aware of that.

Putin’s third option is to escalate: to send a message to both the West and Ukraine that he means business. Given the dubious nature of his other choices, that may be increasingly likely. But where? And, of equal importance, how?

Invade Moldova

Numerous experts have claimed Moscow might seek to annexe Moldova’s breakaway region of Transdniestria, plus further chunks of Moldovan territory. And in early September, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned of armed conflict if Moldova threatened the 2,000 Russian troops guarding Transdniestria’s large ammunition dump at Cobasna.

An actual invasion would be difficult, because it would require Russian control over the Ukrainian city of Odesa for land access. But an airborne reinforcement of its Transdniestrian garrison might be tempting, or launching a hybrid warfare campaign to justify doing so.

In April 2022, there were several “terrorist incidents”, including the bombing of Transdniestria’s Ministry of State Security, as potential pretexts for such a move.

That said, invading would arguably be counterproductive, not least because it may prompt Moldova’s close partner Romania – a member of NATO – to become involved.

Send a ‘stabilisation force’ to Kazakhstan

Although unlikely, a Russian incursion into Northern Kazakhstan to “protect ethnic Russians” was commonly nominated by Russia-watchers playing grim games of “where does Putin invade next?”. Or, at least, they did before Ukraine.

Russian forces under the banner of the “Collective Security Treaty Organization” (CSTO), comprising some of the former Soviet states, actually intervened as recently as January 2022 at the request of Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

However, that was soon exposed as a ploy to help Tokayev defeat his enemies. Since then, he has drifted towards neutrality on the war in Ukraine.

A new Russian intervention would certainly reinforce to restive Central Asian states that the Kremlin sees the region as its privileged sphere of influence. Indeed, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently hinted that northern Kazakhstan was next on Russia’s invasion list. Yet, with many of its forces already tied up in Ukraine, it’s questionable whether doing so would really be worth the effort.

Full mobilisation

The significant losses suffered by Russian forces might be covered by putting the nation on a war footing. A general mobilisation would direct the economy towards military production, and provide an unending stream of personnel.

Putin has avoided this so far, choosing a shadow approach instead, which has called up an extra 137,000 Russians.

It does remain a live option, although it would mean admitting the conflict is a war (not a “Special Military Operation”), which would be domestically unpopular and result in untrained and ill-equipped conscripts flooding the front line.

Draw NATO in

Apart from the Moldovan scenario, Putin might elect to stage a “provocation” against a NATO state like Estonia. That would be a risky gambit indeed: given what we have seen of the performance of Russia’s conventional forces, even a limited war with NATO would hasten Russia’s defeat, and thus far Putin has assiduously avoided such provocations, apart from bluster and rhetoric.

Perversely, that might allow Putin to salvage some domestic pride by claiming he lost to NATO rather than Ukraine.

Yet his propaganda machine has already been falsely claiming NATO is directly involved in the fight against Russian forces.

And if Putin isn’t prepared to initiate a peace process, then really only one escalation pathway remains.

Read more:
Russia is fighting three undeclared wars. Its fourth – an internal struggle for Russia itself – might be looming

Arrange a radiological ‘accident’

The Kremlin has obliquely hinted at this for a while.

Russian forces have controlled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant near the city of Kherson since March, turning it into a military base. Rocket and artillery fire is actually not a huge concern, since the plant is heavily hardened.

But if the plant loses connection to the Ukrainian grid – which has already happened several times – the reactors are only controlled by their own power generation, with no fail safe.

Arranging a false flag “accident” blamed on Ukraine is certainly possible, raising the nightmare prospect of a new Chernobyl.

Use tactical nuclear weapons

Look, it’s unlikely. But it can’t be ruled out.

Realistically, using tactical nuclear weapons would be of dubious military value. There would be no guarantee NATO would back down, or that Ukraine would capitulate. It would be very difficult for Russia’s few remaining partners to continue supporting Putin, either tacitly (like China) or indirectly (like India).

Indeed, while much has been made of Russia’s supposed “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine, involving using nuclear weapons to force others to blink, there’s plenty of evidence it’s a myth designed to increase fear of nuclear war among Moscow’s adversaries.

In summary, Putin’s choices remain poor, both domestically and internationally. He may soon feel forced to pick between those that are unpalatable, and those that are risky.

Unfortunately, identifying what he will choose is guesswork: we simply don’t know enough about how Putin’s mind works, or how he prioritises information to make decisions.

But perhaps there’s one hint. Throughout his tenure, Putin has consistently invited NATO and its allies to blink. At this crucial time, the West owes it to Ukraine, and for the sake of its own credibility, to ensure it does not give the Russian president what he wants.

Matthew Sussex has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Lowy Institute, the Carnegie Foundation, and various Australian government agencies.

– ref. With his army on the back foot, is escalation over Ukraine Vladimir Putin’s only real option? – https://theconversation.com/with-his-army-on-the-back-foot-is-escalation-over-ukraine-vladimir-putins-only-real-option-190046

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Dearnaley, Associate Professor, University of Southern Queensland

Hay fever is a downside of springtime around the world. As temperatures increase, plant growth resumes and flowers start appearing.

But while native flowering plants such as wattle often get the blame when the seasonal sneezes strike, hay fever in Australia is typically caused by introduced plant species often pollinated by the wind.

A closer look at pollen

Pollen grains are the tiny reproductive structures that move genetic material between flower parts, individual flowers on the same plant or a nearby member of the same species. They are typically lightweight structures easily carried on wind currents or are sticky and picked up in clumps on the feathers of a honeyeater or the fur of a fruit bat or possum.

Hay fever is when the human immune system overreacts to allergens in the air. It is not only caused by pollen grains but fungal spores, non-flowering plant spores, mites and even pet hair.

The classic symptoms of hay fever are sneezing, runny noses, red, itchy, and watery eyes, swelling around the eyes and scratchy ears and throat.

The problem with pollen grains is when they land on the skin around our eyes, in our nose and mouth, the proteins found in the wall of these tiny structures leak out and are recognised as foreign by the body and trigger a reaction from the immune system.

Read more:
Do I have COVID or hay fever? Here’s how to tell

So what plants are the worst culprits for causing hay fever?

Grasses, trees, and herbaceous weeds such as plantain are the main problem species as their pollen is usually scattered by wind. In Australia, the main grass offenders are exotic species including rye grass and couch grass (a commonly used lawn species).

Weed species that cause hay fever problems include introduced ragweed, Paterson’s curse, parthenium weed and plantain. The problematic tree species are also exotic in origin and include liquid amber, Chinese elm, maple, cypress, ash, birch, poplar, and plane trees.

Although there are some native plants that have wind-spread pollen such as she-oaks and white cypress pine, and which can induce hay fever, these species are exceptional in the Australian flora. Many Australian plants are not wind pollinated and use animals to move their clumped pollen around.

For example, yellow-coloured flowers such as wattles and peas are pollinated by insect such as bees. Red- and orange-coloured flowers are usually visited by birds such as honeyeaters. Large, dull-coloured flowers with copious nectar (the reward for pollination) are visited by nocturnal mammals including bats and possums. Obviously Australian plant pollen can still potentially cause the immune system to overreact, but these structures are less likely to reach the mucous membranes of humans.

Read more:
Got allergies? You could be at lower risk of catching COVID

What can we do to prevent hay fever attacks at this time of the year?

With all of this in mind, here are some strategies to prevent the affects of hay fever:

1. stay inside and keep the house closed up on warm, windy days when more pollen is in the air
2. if you must go outside, wear sunglasses and a face mask
3. when you return indoors gently rinse (and don’t rub) your eyes with running water, change your clothes and shower to remove pollen grains from hair and skin
4. try to avoid mowing the lawn in spring particularly when grasses are in flower (the multi-pronged spiked flowers of couch grass are distinctive)
5. when working in the garden, wear gloves and facial coverings particularly when handling flowers
6. consider converting your garden to a native one. Grevilleas are a great alternative to rose bushes. Coastal rosemary are a fabulous native replacement for lavender. Why not replace your liquid amber tree with a fast growing, evergreen and low-allergenic lilly pilly tree?

If you do suffer a hay fever attack

Sometimes even with our best efforts, or if it’s not always possible to stay at home, hay fever can still creep up on us. If this happens:

• antihistamines will reduce sneezing and itching symptoms
• corticosteroid nasal sprays are very effective at reducing inflammation and clearing blocked noses
• decongestants provide quick and temporary relief by drying runny noses but should not be used by those with high blood pressure
• salt water is a good way to remove excessive mucous from the nasal passages.

Behavioural changes on warm, windy spring days are a good way of avoiding a hay fever attack.

An awareness of the plants around us and their basic reproductive biology is also useful in preventing our immune systems from overreacting to pollen proteins that they are not used to encountering.

John Dearnaley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Sneezing with hay fever? Native plants aren’t usually the culprit – https://theconversation.com/sneezing-with-hay-fever-native-plants-arent-usually-the-culprit-190336

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

Australia last week moved to tackle the climate crisis when federal parliament passed Labor’s climate bill. But the new law is just the first step. Over the next eight years to 2030, we must get on a steep trajectory of emissions reductions.

The law set a national target to cut emissions by 43% this decade, based on 2005 levels. While this brings Australia closer to the international consensus, we should be aiming to go much further, much faster.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese informed the United Nations of Australia’s new target, he wrote of his government’s aspiration for “even greater emission reductions in the coming decade”. But how will Australia go beyond a 43% cut to emissions? And what policies should the government implement and fund first?

A roadmap released today by the Climate Council charts the way forward. It sets out key goals Australia should be chasing this decade, and ten climate policy “game-changers” to help get us there.

100% renewables by 2030

Australia’s energy grid is responsible for 33% of our national emissions. Today, 59% of our electricity comes from coal-fired power plants.

Renewables are not just a clean form of energy – they are also the cheapest form of new energy. Our analysis suggests Australia should aim to achieve 100% renewables by 2030.

We must also increase overall power generation by around 40% this decade to make steep inroads into electrifying other sectors of the economy.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Enable transmission infrastructure: the federal government has promised A$20 billion for transmission infrastructure. This is crucial. To connect renewables to the grid, we need new transmission lines, and lots of them. The total length of transmission will need to be about 24 times what it is now.

2. Boost storage: to support grid security, we’ll need lots of electricity storage – think grid-scale batteries and pumped-hydro. To encourage greater investment the federal government should set a mandatory Renewable Energy Storage target, with specific goals for additional storage each year to 2030.

3. Upskill Australians: a new energy system will need skilled workers. The federal government must help workers upskill for clean trades through new investment in TAFE courses and electrical apprenticeships.

4. Establish a National Energy Transition Authority: this new organisation should set closure dates and develop transition plans for all coal-fired power stations by 2024, and support communities through the process.

Read more:
Labor’s 2030 climate target betters the Morrison government, but Australia must go much further, much faster

Clean up transport

Australia’s transport sector is responsible for 19% of national greenhouse gas emissions. By the end of this decade, transport emissions should be halved. Almost all new cars in Australia will need to be zero-emissions vehicles, and we’ll need major improvements in public and active transport infrastructure and use.

How do we get there?

5. Fuel efficiency: the federal government should implement mandatory fuel efficiency standards. Already common across the developed world, these standards encourage auto companies to supply more low and zero-emissions vehicles to the market.

The standards can be made more stringent over time, ensuring an orderly shift to zero-emissions vehicles. Without them, Australia risks becoming a dumping ground for polluting older-model cars – while the rest of the world charges ahead.

6. Ditch dirty diesel: Governments – both state and federal – need to invest in cleaner and more convenient public transport. A key first step is replacing diesel buses with a renewable electric fleet.

Read more:
Australia is failing on electric vehicles. California shows it’s possible to pick up the pace

Net-zero buildings

Some 20% of Australia’s emissions are created by the building sector. (It should be noted, this figure includes electricity consumed in buildings, which is also counted as emissions from the energy sector). To reach our climate goals we’ll need to change the way our homes, businesses and other buildings are constructed and run.

This should be done by:

7. Tightening building rules: The National Construction Code must be tightened so all new homes are net-zero emissions – through energy efficient design, rooftop solar and all-electric appliances.

By 2025 gas connections should be banned for new homes, and new gas appliances should be banned for established homes. This would ensure the move to cheaper and cleaner forms of heating and cooking.

Households will also need government support to refit their homes with electric appliances, through incentive programs and concessional finance. As Australians switch energy-efficient renewables-powered homes, they’ll save on bills.

Read more:
Will 7-star housing really cost more? It depends, but you can keep costs down in a few simple ways

Overhaul industry

Australia’s industrial sector creates 34% of our national emissions – and that’s excluding electricity use. These emissions must be halved, by increasing energy efficiency, electrifying processes where possible, switching fuels and phasing out fossil fuel extraction.

At the same time, we must seize new economic opportunities for industry in a future low-carbon world.

Reaching this goal will require:

8. Proper rules for big polluters: The federal government must reform what’s known as the “safeguard mechanism” to ensure big polluters do their fair share to cut emissions. This includes government incentives to drive the steepest emissions reduction possible.

Redirect public spending

Public spending must be aligned with the net-zero goal. That means:

9. No more handouts: federal and state governments spent an estimated $11.6 billion on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry last financial year, up $1.3 billion on the previous year. These handouts, such as fuel tax credits, must stop.

10. Create a climate and energy investment plan: the federal government should introduce climate budget statements outlining how taxpayer investment is aligned with the goal of rapidly reducing emissions.

Time to get started

Australia has already warmed by around 1.4℃ since pre-industrial times. We’re suffering significant losses from accelerating climate change, and worse is on the way.

The passing of the climate bill into law has set the floor for action. Now, we must immediately build our cleaner future – because waiting until the 2030s will be much too late.

Read more:
We pay billions to subsidise Australia’s fossil fuel industry. This makes absolutely no economic sense

Wesley Morgan is a Senior Researcher with the Climate Council

– ref. Now, we begin: 10 simple ways to make Australia’s climate game truly next-level – https://theconversation.com/now-we-begin-10-simple-ways-to-make-australias-climate-game-truly-next-level-190427

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Martin, Animal Ecology Lab, Western Sydney University

Bloody hell! That cockatoo just opened my bin, and it’s eating my leftover pizza. We can’t have that, I’ll put a rock on the lid to stop it opening the bin. Problem solved…?

And so began an arms race in the suburbs of southern Sydney: humans trying to deter sulphur-crested cockatoos from opening kerb-side bins, and cockatoos overcoming their deterrents to feast on our food waste.

The ability to open kerb-side bins is unique to cockatoos of southern Sydney, but this behaviour appears to be spreading. Last year, we published research revealing that this behaviour is a stunning display of “social learning”, as birds learn the bin-opening technique by observing its neighbour.

This had global significance – it meant we can add parrots to the list of animals capable of foraging culture, which also includes chimpanzees, humpback whales and New Caledonian crows.

Our new research, published today, documents 50 bin-protection methods. It provides another example of a global issue of human-wildlife conflict – indeed, it is rare to document a behavioural change of a species in response to the actions of another.

Cockatoos make a mess

While cockatoos opening bins is fascinating, it can also create a mess. The birds search through the rubbish to find food, occasionally throwing out items in the way. Needless to say, coming home to find your rubbish spread on the ground in front of your house is not appreciated.

Some people are also concerned that the food being eaten isn’t healthy for the cockies, such as pizza, bread or chicken.

This arms race is a unique story, as we show it not only involves social learning by cockatoos, but also by humans in response.

Read more:
Clever cockatoos in southern Sydney have learned to open kerb-side bins — and it has global significance

Through our community survey, participants reported how and when they protected their bins from cockatoos, that they changed their bin protection in response to the cockies solving a method, and that they learnt new protection methods from their neighbours.

Our research shows people have escalated their methods to deter cockatoos from opening bins over time, as cockies overcame their efforts. These appear to prevent or hamper cockatoos from opening the bin lid (at least for now), while allowing it to be emptied when the bin is inverted by the garbage truck.

From rubber snakes to custom locks

Our research made observations about the many innovative ways to stop cockatoos opening bins, but we plan to assess the success of different methods in more detail in the future.

We’ll start with the quick and easy method of placing a brick, wood, metal or bottle filled with water on top of the bin lid, making it too heavy for a cockatoo to lift. If the object is heavy enough, then it should work.

If it isn’t, a cockatoo can push it off, open the lid and have a feed, as the video below shows.

A more sophisticated solution is to bolt wood, metal or brick to the lid, or strapping the bottles to the top or underside of the lid. This method permanently makes the lid too heavy and appears to be an effective deterrent.

Another popular method is preventing the bin lid from flipping open via rope, bungee cord, metal spring, or a stick placed through the handle or hinge. These methods had only varying success.

Attaching a custom designed lock was also popular and, if working properly, appears to deter cockies. These locks allow the bin to open when tipped upside down by the garbage truck.

Some people placed metal or plastic spikes around the rim to prevent the birds landing, or they installed barriers to stop a bird getting their beak under the bin lid. These methods appeared to work.

Methods with poor outcomes include modifying the bin lid to deter the birds from landing or walking by making them uncomfortable, such as with netting. And aiming to scare the birds away by attaching a rubber snake is an interesting method but not a popular one, so perhaps it isn’t effective.

Still, the race continues, both in the suburbs where we’ve studied this novel behaviour and in new suburbs as this fast-food foraging behaviour spreads to neighbouring suburbs and, with time, beyond.

An example of human-wildlife conflict

We categorise cockatoo bin-opening as a “human-wildlife conflict”. Such conflicts are common, from possums in a household roof, to the official bin-chicken (the Australian white ibis) scavenging a free feed, to flying-foxes roosting in urban areas or foraging in orchards.

Conflicts can result from noise, smell, poo, damage to crops, gardens, or buildings, or threatening people, stock or pets.

Globally, human-wildlife conflict is common and diverse – think lions eating cattle, monkeys stealing tourists’ cameras, pigeons pooing and nesting in cities, seals sleeping on boats, sharks biting people, ducks eating crops, and snakes sharing homes.

Our attempts to deal with such conflicts can have tragic results for wildlife. One extreme example is shark nets, which kills sharks yet don’t prevent them from accessing the beach. They also kill or entangle non-target – and sometimes threatened – species, such as turtles, dolphins, grey-nurse sharks and whales.

We should learn to live alongside wildlife instead, especially as “conflict species” may be under threat, such as the grey-headed flying-foxes (an important pollinator) or great white sharks (an important predator).

In many instances of human-wildlife conflict, public education goes a long way to reducing conflict. Understanding wildlife behaviour and appreciating the fascinating features of native species often favourably shifts community attitudes – we can grow to love them, not fight them.

So whether it’s finding new and harmless ways to protect your bin from hungry cockatoos, or having shark-smart behaviour, there are positive actions we can take if we are informed.

To help our ongoing research, please take the 2022 Bin-Opening Survey and report if you “have” or “have not” seen cockatoos opening bins.

The authors gratefully thank the contributions of the survey participants and research volunteers; we acknowledge our co-authors of this research: Barbara, Lucy, Damien, and Richard.

John Martin receives funding from the ARC.

– ref. An arms race over food waste: Sydney cockatoos are still opening kerb-side bins, despite our best efforts to stop them – https://theconversation.com/an-arms-race-over-food-waste-sydney-cockatoos-are-still-opening-kerb-side-bins-despite-our-best-efforts-to-stop-them-189969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Scully, Associate Professor of Modern European History, University of New England

It sounds very familiar – a well-respected monarch dies, and a radical, left-leaning, Antipodean cartoonist struggles to find the right tone to commemorate the event.

He is torn between his distaste for what he sees as the archaic, pre-modern institution of monarchy, and the undoubted personal quality of the late incumbent.

More used to poking fun at the great and good, or attacking governments for their weak-willed or wrong-headed policies, changing tone to reverence and respect is difficult.

But in the end, he manages to strike a very good balance and produce a memorable cartoon.

The well-respected monarch was George VI; the radical, left-leaning, Antipodean cartoonist was David Low; and the year was 1952. With From One Man to Another, Low not only conveyed his own respects, man-to-man, but imagined also the British workman, his hat in his hand and sleeves rolled-up, casting a humble bunch of flowers towards a mighty tombstone labelled “The Gentlest of the Georges”.

This was an expression of democratic – even socialist – sensibility, in an age when monarchy seemed, to many, to be increasingly out-of-step with the advance of modernity and the inexorable march of post-war history.

Low was compelled to look back, not forward, conscious he had an historic role to fulfil in commemorating the passing of the king who had embodied so much of the stolid, British pluck and humility during the second world war.

He reflected in his 1956 autobiography that he hated the old-fashioned, “The Nation Mourns”-style of Victorian cartoon, but it was to that set of images and traditions that he turned.

Read more:
16 visits over 57 years: reflecting on Queen Elizabeth II’s long relationship with Australia

A long lineage

Cartoonists have had to do something similar in 2022, with the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

In the United Kingdom, the likes of Peter Brookes, Ben Jennings and Christian Adams have all been conscious of the need for solemnity, as well as celebration.

Across the world, cartoonists have had to struggle with much the same thing, and some favoured themes are already apparent: Elizabeth reunited with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, or troops of sad corgis; the Union Flag with an Elizabeth II-shaped hole at the centre; or a tube train with a sole occupant heading into a blaze of light at the end of the tunnel.

All of these images speak to the style and the visual language of today, but also share a lineage several centuries old.

Read more:
The New York Times ends daily political cartoons, but it’s not the death of the art form

A bereaved widow, again

Nobody would have thought to depict Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 with her travelling to heaven by tube, although the Underground seems emblematic of her age (London’s first underground railway was opened in January 1863, 26 years into Victoria’s reign).

There were no sad corgis (that breed only became associated with the Royal Family from the 1930s), but a downcast British Lion was imagined by Francis Carruthers Gould in Fun.

The theme of a bereaved widow finally reunited with her spouse is clearly a parallel (Albert, the Prince Consort had died in 1861). So too is the very idea that a cartoonist should commemorate the event – something unthinkable when William IV died in 1837, or so much so when George IV died in 1830 that a well-known cartoonist never published his draft sketch.

The sheer immensity of the loss of Victoria called for some pretty special treatment, at a time when cartooning was a lot more formal and respectable than it is today.

It preoccupied several days’ work for Linley Sambourne, chief cartoonist of London’s Punch (for a while, a magazine that was almost as much a British institution as the monarchy).

Requiescat was huge: a double-page spread in sombre black-and-white, depicting a gaggle of goddesses in mourning for their lost monarch.

Allegorical female figures representing countries were all the rage in Victorian and Edwardian cartooning (something David Low also hated and thought was “moth-eaten” by the time he was at his peak).

England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India were all included by Sambourne.

Just one goddess was enough for his junior colleague, Bernard Partridge, who imagined Clio – History herself – adding the name of Victoria to the roll of great monarchs.

It was the same when Victoria’s son and heir, Edward VII, died in May, 1910.

Bernard Partridge went with just two figures, rather than a whole host, imagining a weeping Britannia seated before the empty Coronation Chair, an angel of peace reaching out to touch her shoulder.

This was designed to express “an empire’s grief” in terms even more explicit than Sambourne had done with Victoria, but the imagery was very British; even domestic.

Minus the caption, it could almost be recycled in 2022 – crucially, the monarch does not actually appear. So too, Partridge’s offering in January 1936, when George V died (apparently by the hand of his doctor).

Britannia tolling a bell from a medieval bell-tower, with a fog-laden London skyline in the background. Clear the fog, add a Gherkin and a Shard, and the effect would be much the same.

While David Low struggled against the Victorian style of memorial cartoon, it is still very much with us. As so often, cartoons can encapsulate a whole host of feelings that mere words can’t express.

Richard Scully receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with the Political Cartoon Society, the Cartoon Museum (London), and the Australian Cartoonists’ Association.

– ref. Solemnity and celebration: how political cartoonists have handled the death of a monarch, from Victoria to Elizabeth II – https://theconversation.com/solemnity-and-celebration-how-political-cartoonists-have-handled-the-death-of-a-monarch-from-victoria-to-elizabeth-ii-190338

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jordan Peter Anthony Pitt, Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Adelaide

One of the harshest and most dynamic regions on Earth is the marginal ice zone – the place where ocean waves meet sea ice, which is formed by freezing of the ocean’s surface.

Published today, a themed issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A reviews the rapid progress researchers have made over the past decade in understanding and modelling this challenging environment.

This research is vital for us to better understand the complex interactions of Earth’s climate systems. That’s because the marginal ice zone plays a role in the seasonal freezing and thawing of the oceans.

A harsh place to study

In the Arctic and Antarctic, surface ocean temperatures are persistently below -2℃ – cold enough to freeze, forming a layer of sea ice.

At the highest latitudes closer to the poles, sea ice forms a solid, several-metre-thick lid on the ocean that reflects the Sun’s rays, cooling the region and driving cool water around the oceans. This makes sea ice a key component of the climate system.

Read more:
The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean on Earth, and the impacts will be felt for generations

But at lower latitudes, as the ice-covered ocean transitions to the open ocean, sea ice forms into smaller, much more mobile chunks called “floes” that are separated by water or a slurry of ice crystals.

This marginal ice zone interacts with the atmosphere above and ocean below in a very different way to ice cover closer to the poles.

It’s a challenging environment for scientists to work in, with a voyage into the marginal ice zone around Antarctica in 2017 experiencing winds over 90km/h and waves over 6.5m high.
It is also difficult to observe remotely because the floes are smaller than what most satellites can see.

Crushed by waves

The marginal ice zone also interacts with the open ocean via surface waves, which travel from the open waters into the zone, impacting the ice. The waves can have a destructive effect on the ice cover, by breaking up large floes and leaving them more susceptible to melt during summer.

By contrast, during winter, waves can promote the formation of “pancake” floes, so called because they are thin disks of sea ice (you can see them in the image above).

But wave energy itself is lost during interactions with floes, so that waves gradually become weaker as they travel deeper into the marginal ice zone. This produces wave–ice feedback mechanisms driving sea ice evolution in a changing climate.

For example, a trend for warmer temperatures will weaken the ice cover, allowing waves to travel deeper into ice-covered oceans and cause more breakup, which further weakens the ice cover – and so on.

Scientists studying marginal ice zone dynamics aim to improve our understanding of the zone’s role in the dramatic and often perplexing changes the world’s sea ice is undergoing in response to climate change.

For instance, in the Arctic Ocean, sea ice cover has “has dropped by roughly half since the 1980s”. In the Antarctic, the sea ice cover has recently had both one of its largest and smallest recorded extents, with the marginal ice zone being one source of year-to-year variability.

Our progress in better understanding these harsh regions has revolved around large international research programs, run by the United States’ Office of Naval Research and others. These programs involve earth scientists, geophysicists, oceanographers, engineers and even applied mathematicians (like us).

Recent efforts have produced innovative observation techniques, such as a method to 3D-image wave and floe dynamics in the marginal ice zone from onboard an icebreaker and capture waves-in-ice from satellite images.

They have also resulted in new models capable of simulating the interaction of waves and ice from the level of individual floes to the overall behaviour of entire oceans. The advances have motivated an Australian led multi-month experiment in the Antarctic marginal ice zone, on the new $500M icebreaker RSV Nuyina, which is expected next year.

The marginal ice zone will be an increasingly important component of the world’s sea ice cover in the future, as temperatures rise and waves become more extreme.

Despite the rapid progress, there is still some way to go before the understanding of feedback processes in the marginal ice zone translates into improved climate predictions used by, for example, the International Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.

Including the marginal ice zone in climate models has been described as the “holy grail” for the field by one of its leading figures, and the theme issue points to closer ties with the broader climate community as the next major direction for the field.

Read more:
Ice shelves hold back Antarctica’s glaciers from adding to sea levels – but they’re crumbling

Jordan Peter Anthony Pitt receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Luke Bennetts receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Antarctic Science Program.

– ref. Scientists are divining the future of Earth’s ice-covered oceans at their harsh fringes – https://theconversation.com/scientists-are-divining-the-future-of-earths-ice-covered-oceans-at-their-harsh-fringes-189393

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oliver Eklund, PhD Candidate in Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

Ads are coming to Netflix, perhaps even sooner than anticipated.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Netflix has moved up the launch of their ad-supported subscription tier to November. The Sydney Morning Herald, meanwhile, is reporting that Australia is amongst the first countries likely to experience ads on Netflix later this year.

Netflix first announced they would introduce a new, lower-priced, subscription tier to be supported by advertising in April. This was an about-face from a company that had built an advertising free, on-demand television empire. Indeed, it was only in 2020 that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings ruled out advertising on the platform, saying “you know, advertising looks easy until you get in it.”

The change of heart followed Netflix’s 2022 first quarter earnings report which saw a subscriber loss for the first time in over a decade. The addition of ads to the platform is a clear sign of the emerging period of experimentation across the streaming landscape.

Read more:
In a market swamped with streaming services, Netflix’s massive loss of subscribers is a big deal

How will it work?

It’s important to note that not every Netflix subscription tier will carry advertising. The current plan is there will be one newly introduced and cheaper subscription tier supported by advertising, targeting in the US market around USD $7-9 a month as the price point. This will represent a discount from the current cheapest plan of US $9.99 (AUD $10.99) a month. These prices will be adapted to the different currency markets Netflix operate across and the existing price points in those markets.

By bringing a hybrid advertising/subscription tier, Netflix is adopting a business model already present on other streamers like Hulu. Netflix is keeping this a hybrid tier, meaning while the new tier will be cheaper, it will not be free, like ad-supported streaming available on Peacock.

Advertising presents complex new technological and business challenges for Netflix, which has not worked in this market before. To enter this new market, Netflix announced advertising would be delivered through a partnership with Microsoft.

Partnering with Microsoft allayed some fears around Netflix entering a new media market and gives Netflix access to Microsoft’s extensive advertising delivery infrastructure.

Netflix has announced that original movie programming may stay free of ads for a limited period upon release, and that both original and some licensed childrens’ content will remain free of ads.

As well as staying away from children’s advertising, which in Australia is highly regulated by government and industry codes, Netflix is also avoiding any advertising buyers in cryptocurrency, political advertising, and gambling.

Advertising will run around 4 minutes per hour of content – for context Australian commercial free-to-air TV networks are limited on their primary channels to 13 minutes per hour and 15 minutes per hour on multi-channels between 6am and midnight.

Netflix will also have limits on the number of times a single ad can appear for a user and there is expectation that ads for movie content will be delivered in a pre-roll format, not interrupting the feature.

Read more:
Levelling up: why Netflix and TikTok are turning to gaming to secure their future

Advertising in the streaming sector

Netflix is not the only subscription service to announce advertising as part of new pricing strategies. Earlier this year Disney announced a highly successful quarter from a subscriber uptake perspective, growing by 15 million subscribers, however streaming-induced losses were $300 million greater than estimated.

Disney also announced that an ad-supported Disney+ subscription option will become available in December. The Wall Street Journal reported that the December timeline given by Disney is what drove Netflix to bring forward their ad plans.

TV consumers are historically well accustomed to advertising in television – in Australia, commercial free-to-air networks Seven, Nine, and Ten carry advertising, public broadcaster SBS carries a limited amount of advertising, and even pay-TV provider Foxtel is supported by both subscription fees and advertising. Advertising itself is not new to audiences, but it has not been present on a number of premium streaming platforms like Netflix before.

Streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ are seeking ways to both reach new audiences and to maximise their revenues from each user. There is a belief amongst top executives that providing a cheaper ad-supported tier will tap into the market of audiences who both do not mind advertising and see current subscription prices as too high.

There is also evidence from other streaming platforms, such as Hulu and Discovery+, that have offered ad-supported subscription tiers, that these tiers can generate greater average revenue per user (ARPU) than higher priced subscription-only tiers.

The ARPU is a metric used in the streaming industry that looks at how much money a company makes from each subscriber after deducting business costs. Having higher revenues from a subscriber can be driven by increasing subscription prices, driving subscribers to more expensive subscription tiers, reducing business costs, or by adding additional revenue streams like advertising.

In 2021, Discovery CEO David Zaslav noted that Discovery+ was generating more revenue per subscriber from their cheaper ad-supported tier than their more expensive subscription-only tier thanks to the advertising revenue. Zaslav commented that advertisers were keen to reach an audience that was largely not accessible through other television means.

With this in mind, Netflix and Disney are betting that their ad-supported tiers can perform similarly and increase the revenue they can generate per subscriber.

Experimentation across the streaming sector

Experimentation around established business strategies is ruling the current streaming landscape.

HBO Max, under newly merged corporate parent Warner Bros. Discovery, is now switching to licensing content in select markets rather than streaming on its own platform. With the airing of The Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power, Amazon Prime Video is discovering whether its experiment with the most expensive television production ever at US $715 million (AUD $1.05 billion) will pay off with audiences.

Read more:
The new Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, is set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth – here’s what that means

There is experimentation across the streaming industry in licensing strategies, spectacle television, pricing models and beyond. The results of this experimentation will take time. But what the arrival of advertising on Netflix signals is that established strategy no longer rules the streaming landscape.

Oliver Eklund owns shares in Apple, Disney, and Netflix.

– ref. Ads are coming to Netflix soon – here’s what we can expect and what that means for the streaming industry – https://theconversation.com/ads-are-coming-to-netflix-soon-heres-what-we-can-expect-and-what-that-means-for-the-streaming-industry-190236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scott Hardman, Professional Researcher, Electric Vehicle Research Center, University of California, Davis

Among the many similarities between California and Australia, both are impacted by bushfires and climate change, and both are home to larger cars and trucks than is the norm in developed countries. They are dissimilar, though, when it comes to electric vehicles and vehicle regulations. While California has been pursuing low-carbon and electric vehicles for decades, Australia has trailed most developed nations.

Plug-in electric vehicles accounted for 16% of new light-duty vehicle sales in California in the first half of 2022. In Australia, electric vehicle sales are only 2% of the market, and mostly from one carmaker, Tesla.

Australia, a country with no vehicle fuel economy or CO₂ emissions regulations, is debating how to move forward. The local auto industry suggests Australia needs a slow transition to electric vehicles and should lag the United States, Europe, China and neighbouring New Zealand. Compared to proposed European vehicle emission standards of 43 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre in 2030, the local industry proposes 98-143g CO₂/km (for light cars and SUVs).

Read more:
The road to new fuel efficiency rules is filled with potholes. Here’s how Australia can avoid them

The proposed Australian target would result in a slow transition, which new research suggests will have little or no effect on the transport sector’s CO₂ emissions.

The rationale for a slow transition is the same as was heard for decades in California: electric vehicle prices are too high, there isn’t enough infrastructure to support these vehicles, their driving ranges are too short, and certain models aren’t available (electric utes, for example).

Read more:
The surprising history of how electric vehicles have played the long game and won

These concerns have some validity, but are largely out of date. Australia in 2022 faces a very different situation from California when it started down the electric vehicle path.

Let’s deal with why each of these four concerns might now be overstated.

1. Limited range

Drivers in both Australia and California travel similar distances per year. In both regions, most trips are well within electric vehicle range.

Further, in both regions most households own two vehicles. This means buyers can, if needed, use another vehicle for longer trips.

Electric vehicle range has also improved: the average range of available electric vehicles in 2013 when electric vehicle sales in California reached Australia’s current level of 2% was 179 kilometres (111 miles). Now, it’s 443 kilometres.

2. Lack of charging infrastructure

In California and other markets like Norway, most early electric vehicle buyers charge at home on their driveway or in a garage. In Australia even more people live in a detached house than in California. Drivers in these households could charge their vehicle at home, which reduces the need for public charging stations.

Public charging may be needed to support occasional charging, to enable longer journeys and to support the smaller proportion of households without home charging. But public infrastructure is not a prerequisite for early market growth.

Australia already has as many charging stations per person as California had in 2016. In fact, Australia might be only a few years behind.

3. High prices

In Australia the average new car is AU$40,729 (US$28,000). Electric vehicles with ranges of around 400km could be made available at that price.

For example, the 2023 Chevrolet Bolt starts at US$25,600 (AU$37,000) in the US. And until 2020 the Renault ZOE was sold in Australia for AU$37,400. Both models have a range of about 400km.

Consumers have also been shown to be willing to pay more for an electric vehicle compared to a conventional vehicle. This might be partly due to the savings on fuel and maintenance costs.

Read more:
Why Labor’s new tax cut on electric vehicles won’t help you buy one anytime soon

4. Lack of models

In 2022, 316 electric and 162 plug-in hybrid models are on sale globally. These models include SUVs, utes and pick-up trucks.

The lack of choice and of lower-cost electric vehicles in Australia is because carmakers prefer to send these models to markets with supportive electric vehicle policies . Making these models available in Australia may be as simple as giving carmakers the motivation to sell them there.

Australia may be well positioned for a rapid transition to electric vehicles if it adopts more supportive policies. If Australia brings in policies such as ambitious fuel-economy standards or a zero-emission-vehicle sales mandate, the country could benefit in the same ways as California did.

Read more:
Making EVs without China’s supply chain is hard, but not impossible – 3 supply chain experts outline a strategy

All that’s needed now is supportive policy

Supportive policies like these help set the stage for the early electric vehicle market to grow. They do this by:

• giving carmakers the confidence to develop and supply electric vehicles at multiple price points, in multiple body styles and with long driving ranges

• giving providers confidence to roll out charging infrastructure

• giving consumers the supply of electric vehicles they are waiting for.

An electric vehicle mandate can also protect consumers from supply ebbs and flows that are common in import-only markets.

Read more:
Who’s holding back electric cars in Australia? We’ve long known the answer – and it’s time to clear the road

Other nations have been down this road

Australia is not the first nation to grapple with these challenges. South Korea, despite being a global producer of electric vehicles, was experiencing slow domestic market growth. Many Korean electric vehicles were exported to regions with policies more friendly to the technology.

The government responded with policies to support electric vehicles. Since then, domestic sales have tripled. South Korea is now the seventh-largest electric vehicle market in the world, up from 11th in 2019.

And as federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen noted at the EV Summit last month, with the right policy settings, Sweden increased its proportion of electric vehicle sales from 18% to 62% in just two years.

Similar approaches could yield similar results for Australia. While some nations may need a slower transition for a variety of reasons, Australia need not be one of them. Concerns about range, infrastructure and model availability can be readily overcome.

The country is well placed for early market growth. All states already offer incentives for electric vehicle buyers, including rebates, registration discounts and road tax exemptions.

All that may be needed is for the federal government to adopt policies that support electric vehicles. Based on the remarkable improvements in the technology and what has been learned in California and elsewhere, Australia is well placed for rapid market growth.

Scott Hardman receives funding from the California Air Resources Board, the California Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and CliamteWorks Foundation.

Daniel Sperling has a seat on the California Air Resources Board. The institutes he directs receive funding from foundations, automotive and energy companies, and local, state and national governments.

Gil Tal directs the Electric Vehicle Research Center, which receives funding from foundations, automakers, energy companies, and state and national policymakers.

– ref. Australia is failing on electric vehicles. California shows it’s possible to pick up the pace – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-failing-on-electric-vehicles-california-shows-its-possible-to-pick-up-the-pace-189871

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Carniel, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

On September 8 2022, King Charles III ascended to the throne. Like his mother Queen Elizabeth II before him, he has opted to keep his own name as his regnal name.

Traditionally, monarchs may choose their own regnal name, which can be different to the name they otherwise use. For example, Charles’s grandfather Albert became George VI (who reigned from 1936 to 1952). This strengthened the connection of his reign to that of his father George V (1910-36) after the abdication of his older brother, Edward VIII (Jan-Dec 1936). Although Edward was his first name, his family called him by the last of his given names, David.

King Charles III could have chosen one of his other names – Philip, Arthur or George – but has decided to remain Charles. Some have lauded this decision for keeping it simple, although given the history of the two previous King Charleses, one might have forgiven him if he had decided to sidestep it.

Read more:
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Charles I: the king who lost the monarchy

Charles I, born in 1600, was the second son of King James VI. He became heir apparent (first in line to the throne) after the death of his older brother, Henry. He ascended to the throne in 1625.

Charles I’s policies were frequently unpopular with both his subjects and the parliament. His religious policies were considered too sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, and he levied taxes without parliamentary consent.

Tensions between his supporters, known as Cavaliers, and parliamentary supporters, known as Roundheads, led to the English Civil War. He was defeated in 1645, imprisoned, convicted of high treason, and executed by beheading in 1649.

The Commonwealth of England was established as a republic, and the monarchy was abolished, albeit only for 11 years.

Charles II: the king without a parliament

Although initially proclaimed as king by the Scottish parliament after his father’s execution, Charles II (born in 1630) did not reign until 1660. He lived in exile in Europe until the monarchy was restored and he was invited to return to England.

Relations between the new monarch and the parliament were not smooth. Charles II dissolved parliament four times, and ruled without it altogether for the final four years of his reign before his death in 1685.

Political tensions notwithstanding, Charles II was a more popular king than his father. He was known as the “merry monarch” and presided over a lively and hedonistic court. He had at least 12 illegitimate children by mistresses, but left no legitimate heir. He was succeeded by his brother, James II of England (James VII of Scotland).

In recent days many people have remarked how it’s difficult to hear the phrase “King Charles” without wanting to add the word “spaniel”. So how did this breed of dog get its name?

Spaniels were as ubiquitous in King Charles II’s court as corgis in Queen Elizabeth II’s. The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, to give it its full name, was bred in the 20th century to resemble his favoured dogs, and named after his political supporters, the Cavaliers. The dogs’ ears also bear an uncanny resemblance to Charles II’s famous long wig.

What lies ahead for King Charles III?

Royal beheadings and exiles may be much rarer these days, but King Charles III faces his own more modern set of challenges. He became king just two days after a new British prime minister was sworn into office.

Conservative Liz Truss may have left her anti-monarchist days behind her, but the United Kingdom is facing a cost of living crisis that could potentially stoke public resentment about royal family expenses.

While the first two Charleses stood and fought for particular political ideologies, the contemporary British monarch is expected to be apolitical. Indeed, while still Prince of Wales, Charles had previously stated he wouldn’t “meddle” as king.

This was reaffirmed in his first public speech, in which he said, “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply.” His challenge here will be remaining silent on politicised issues that are known to be close to his heart, such as climate change.

Read more:
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King Charles III starts his reign less popular than both his predecessor and his heir, Prince William. Affection for Queen Elizabeth II is not the sole reason republican debates have faltered in the past, but an unpopular monarch could be leveraged to raise questions about the institution as a whole.

In a political and economic climate where the meaning and expense of the monarchy is subject to debate, taking on a regnal name with a legacy of abolished (and restored) monarchy might be tempting fate.

Read more:
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Jess Carniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Beheaded and exiled: the two previous King Charleses bookended the abolition of the monarchy – https://theconversation.com/beheaded-and-exiled-the-two-previous-king-charleses-bookended-the-abolition-of-the-monarchy-190410

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Browne, Research Fellow, Deakin University

First Nations children represent the future of the world’s oldest continuing culture. Of the 66,000 Victorians who identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in the 2021 Census, one-third were aged under 15 years.

First Nations children in Victoria are doing well in several health outcomes, our recent report has found. This report provides valuable insight into nutrition, physical activity and wellbeing among First Nations children living in regional Victoria.

Our survey found more than 300 First Nations primary school children were meeting guidelines for physical activity, healthy eating and screen time. Those who met these guidelines also had higher health-related quality of life.

However, our study is rare. Before our report, there was no information available about nutrition and physical activity among primary school-aged First Nations children in Victoria.

More evidence is needed about First Nations children’s health in Victoria. And it needs to be strengths-based, as opposed to highlighting deficits.

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A strengths-based approach

To examine First Nations childrens’ health, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers from Deakin University partnered with the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO). This organisation is the peak body representing Victoria’s Aboriginal community-controlled health sector.

VACCHO’s nutrition team works to improve food security and nutrition outcomes among Aboriginal communities across Victoria. Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations such as these provide culturally safe care, and support self-determination.

In our research, we found there is potential for health data to stigmatise First Nations peoples by focusing on negative outcomes instead of progress. To avoid this, when collating data, we focused on measuring positive health outcomes (such as healthy weight) rather than measuring “problems” (like obesity).

We were interested in identifying factors that contribute to positive wellbeing. This strengths-based approach acknowledges and celebrates the strength of First Nations children.

Read more:
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Many First Nations children are meeting the health guidelines

Our findings indicate that many of the children surveyed were meeting nutrition and physical activity guidelines.

For most of these measures, there was no significant difference between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in the survey.

Read more:
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population has increased, but the census lacks detail in other facets of Indigenous lives

There’s still work to do

Our survey found Aboriginal children were more likely to report meeting vegetable consumption guidelines than their non-Aboriginal classmates. However, only 21% of Aboriginal children who participated reported eating the recommended number of vegetables each day.

While 53% of Aboriginal children had a healthy body weight, just under half did not. Non-Aboriginal children were more likely to have a healthy weight and on average had a lower body mass index than Aboriginal children.

This could be addressed through the development of a national First Nations food and nutrition plan. This plan would need to address issues such as food security and workforce capacity while directing funding to First Nations community-controlled nutrition programs.

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Connecting physical health with social and emotional wellbeing

Our survey also evaluated perceived physical, social, emotional and school-related wellbeing. This was measured using the Paediatric Quality of Life Inventory.

We found non-Aboriginal children in our survey had significantly higher average health-related quality of life scores compared to Aboriginal children. This highlights this importance of promoting children’s mental health and social and emotional wellbeing alongside healthy eating and physical activity.

It’s important to recognise the connection between physical health (such as body weight) and health behaviours (diet, physical activity, screen time and sleep) with social and emotional wellbeing.

This view of health is defined by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation as “not just the physical wellbeing of an individual but the social, emotional and cultural wellbeing of the whole Community”. This is why culturally appropriate research undertaken in partnership with Aboriginal organisations is so important, and something we prioritised in our work.

It is our hope our findings can be used by health services to plan culturally appropriate health promotion programs for First Nations children in Victoria. Ideally governments can use these findings to better support Victorian Aboriginal community controlled health organisations to implement these programs.

Our strengths-based approach should be replicated in future surveys of First Nations childrens’ health. Importantly, Aboriginal health must be in Aboriginal hands.

Jennifer Browne receives funding from the Heart Foundation and VicHealth

Jill Gallagher, Joleen Ryan, Mark Lock (Ngiyampaa), and Troy Walker do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rather than focusing on the negative, we need a strength-based way to approach First Nations childrens’ health – https://theconversation.com/rather-than-focusing-on-the-negative-we-need-a-strength-based-way-to-approach-first-nations-childrens-health-187986

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lixin Jiang, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland

Former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch famously promoted the “20-70-10” system to increase labour productivity. Managers were asked to rank employees on a bell curve; the top 20% received rewards, while the bottom 10% were fired.

Yahoo, Amazon and IBM, among many others, later adopted this performance review approach, termed stack ranking, forced ranking or “rank-and-yank”. Similar practices – termed “up or out” – dominate law firms, accounting firms, the military and professional sports teams.

The goal of “rank-and-yank” is to stimulate subordinates’ work performance by creating the constant threat of job insecurity. It’s a fairly ruthless way to improve the bottom line, but some employers might find it justifiable if it worked. So does it?

Our research reveals the answer depends on the level of job insecurity and the performance criteria in question. But the overall answer might not please fans of the late Jack Welch.

Insecurity and performance outcomes

Researchers disagree about the effects of job insecurity on work performance. Some focus on the adverse consequences of job insecurity, while others spotlight its potential motivating function.

Researchers at the University of Auckland and the University of Texas at San Antonio theorised that the impacts of job insecurity depended on its level of severity and the specific types of work performance that were considered.

Given no single empirical study can adequately address this question, the best way to understand it is to conduct a meta-analysis.

Based on data from over a hundred studies into “rank-and-yank” we concluded that Welch was both right and wrong.

Insecurity as motivation?

We observed that when job insecurity is extremely high, employees do increase their performance and the types of behaviours that are explicitly recognised by the formal reward system.

Similarly, employees also take on tasks that are beyond their formal duties but are beneficial to organisational productivity and visible to mangers. Such tasks may include attending non-required meetings, sharing informed opinions to solve work problems, and volunteering for overtime work when needed.

This appears to be good news. But such “motivating” effects of job insecurity are very weak (albeit statistically significant), with very few practical implications in the real world.

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Thus, the job insecurity associated with a “20-70-10” approach is less of a motivating factor for workers than Welch might have hoped for. Additionally, as job insecurity increases, employee creativity declines – and then flattens out.

Employees’ creativity, or their ability to generate innovative and practical ideas or solutions, can contribute to an organisation’s success and is therefore highly valued by organisations.

Moreover, employees facing low to moderate levels of job insecurity decrease behaviours that may benefit their colleagues, such as lending a hand when needed.

Taken together, extremely high job insecurity does not contribute to employee creative performance or “good citizenship” in the workplace.

An unsafe work environment

The data also revealed a link between job insecurity and a decline in employee safety performance.

Safety performance includes wearing safety gear, following safety protocols and communicating safety concerns to managers. These measures are critical to prevent employee injuries and on-site accidents.

Job insecurity also consistently increases the likelihood that employees engage in destructive behaviours that harm the organisation, including calling in sick when not ill and destroying or stealing company property.

Overall, considering the overwhelmingly negative effects of job insecurity on employee attitudes, organisational commitment, health and wellbeing, the small, positive, motivating effect of increasing job insecurity may not be worth it.

Uncertainty and productivity

Considering New Zealand’s poor productivity output, it is worth managers considering how they can effectively motivate workers.

According to the Productivity Commission, New Zealanders worked 34.2 hours per week and produced NZ$68 of output per hour. Yet in other OECD countries, employees worked 31.9 hours per week and produced $85 of output per hour.

So, finding ways to increase employee performance is important. But, considering the data, using a “stick” of job insecurity is unlikely to achieve it.

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With the threat of job loss, employees are likely to engage in “quiet quitting”. Employees will also refuse to go the extra mile and instead are more likely to only do the minimum required.

Considering the current low unemployment rate (below 5%) and the “great resignation” trend that emerged after COVID-19, employers need to think twice before using job insecurity as a motivator. People may simply find an alternative employer that treats them with a “carrot”.

Retaining talent and increasing productivity requires offering employees better wages, opportunities for training and career advancement, greater control over their work, and more decision-making opportunities.

Essentially, employers should treat employees the way they want to be treated themselves. After all, as studies have shown, a happy employee is a productive employee.

Lixin Jiang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Is job insecurity really the great motivator some managers believe it is? We crunched the numbers to find out – https://theconversation.com/is-job-insecurity-really-the-great-motivator-some-managers-believe-it-is-we-crunched-the-numbers-to-find-out-189972

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Doubleday, Marine Ecologist and ARC Future Fellow, University of South Australia

Fake foods are invading our supermarkets, as foods we love are substituted or adulterated with lower value or unethical goods.

Food fraud threatens human health but is also bad news for industry and sustainable food production. Seafood is one of most traded food products in the world and reliant on convoluted supply chains that leave the the door wide open for seafood fraud.

Our new study, published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, showcases a new approach for determining the provenance or “origin” of many seafood species.

By identifying provenance, we can detect fraud and empower authorities and businesses to stop it. This makes it more likely that the food you buy is, in fact, the food you truly want to eat.

Read more:
How technology will help fight food fraud

Illegal fishing and seafood fraud

Wild-caught seafood is vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing can have a devastating impact on the marine environment because:

• it is a major cause of overfishing, constituting an estimated one-fifth of seafood

• it can destroy marine habitats, such coral reefs, through destructive fishing methods such as blast bombing and cyanide fishing

• it can significantly harm wildlife, such as albatross and turtles, which are caught as by-catch.

So how is illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing connected to seafood fraud?

Seafood fraud allows this kind of fishing to flourish as illegal products are laundered through legitimate supply chains.

A recent study in the United States found when seafood is mislabelled, it is more likely to be substituted for a product from less healthy fisheries with management policies that are less likely to reduce the environmental impacts of fishing.

One review of mislabelled seafood in the US found that out of 180 substituted species, 25 were considered threatened, endangered, or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

Illegal fishing and seafood fraud also has a human cost. It can:

• adversely affect the livelihoods of law-abiding fishers and seafood businesses

• threaten food security

• facilitate human rights abuses such as forced labour and piracy

• increase risk of exposure to pathogens, drugs, and other banned substances in seafood.

The chemical fingerprints in shells and bones

A vast range of marine animals are harvested for food every year, including fish, molluscs, crustaceans, and echinoderms.

However, traditional food provenance methods are typically designed to identify one species at a time.

That might benefit the species and industry in question, but it is expensive and time consuming. As such, current methods are restricted to a relatively small number of species.

In our study, we described a broader, universal method to identify provenance and detect fraud.

How? We harnessed natural chemical markers imprinted in the shells and bones of marine animals. These markers reflect an animal’s environment and can identify where they are from.

We focused on a chemical marker that is similar across many different marine animals. This specific chemical marker, known as “oxygen isotopes”, is determined by ocean composition and temperature rather than an animal’s biology.

Exploiting this commonality and how it relates to the local environment, we constructed a global ocean map of oxygen isotopes that helps researchers understand where a marine animal may be from (by matching the oxygen isotope value in shells and bones to the oxygen isotope value in the map).

After rigorous testing, we demonstrated this global map (or “isoscape”) can be used to correctly identify the origins of a wide range of marine animals living in different latitudes.

For example, we saw up to 90% success in classifying fish, cephalopods, and shellfish between the tropical waters of Southeast Asia and the cooler waters of southern Australia.

What next?

Oxygen isotopes, as a universal marker, worked well on a range of animals collected from different latitudes and across broad geographic areas.

Our next step is to integrate oxygen isotopes with other universal chemical markers to gives clues on longitude and refine our approach.

Working out the provenance of seafood is a large and complex challenge. No single approach is a silver bullet for all species, fisheries or industries.

But our approach represents a step towards a more inclusive, global system for validating seafood provenance and fighting seafood fraud.

Hopefully, this will mean ensure fewer marine species are left behind and more consumer confidence in the products we buy.

Dr Jasmin Martino, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, contributed to this research and article.

Zoe Doubleday receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, and the Australian Academy of Science.

– ref. Where is your seafood really from? We’re using ‘chemical fingerprinting’ to fight seafood fraud and illegal fishing – https://theconversation.com/where-is-your-seafood-really-from-were-using-chemical-fingerprinting-to-fight-seafood-fraud-and-illegal-fishing-189471

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Henderson, PhD Candidate in Literary Studies and Creative Writing, University of Canberra

Few settings invite drama, messy emotions and chaos like a high school.

The original 1990s Heartbreak High ran for seven seasons and was broadcast in over 70 countries including the UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, India and Indonesia. The show followed a cast of students at a multicultural Sydney high school and became an icon of Aussie TV. It stood out as an honest and gritty depiction of teen life, especially compared against the “squeaky clean” visions in other dramas of the time.

Now, a new reboot under showrunner Hannah Carroll Chapman revisits the fictional Hartley High in 2022, dealing with issues and themes relevant to a contemporary audience.

Heartbreak High will find its place alongside series like Netflix’s Sex Education and HBO’s Euphoria exploring the often grimy realities of modern adolescence with style and humour.

But here we have a uniquely Australian take on the current wave of teen dramas.

A new class

Amerie (Ayesha Madon) and Harper (Asher Yasbincek) have been ride-or-die best friends since childhood. Their greatest project is a map of all the hook-ups and romantic entanglements at Hartley High, drawn in a secret, out-of-bounds stairwell.

When the map is discovered, Amerie gets blamed, and an unlikely group of students find themselves stuck together in “Sexual Literacy Tutorials”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Harper turns up to school with a shaved head and a mysterious vendetta against Amerie.

With her social life turned upside down, Amerie falls in with class misfits Darren (James Majoos) and Quinni (Chloe Hayden). From here, she must repair her reputation, figure out what’s wrong with Harper, and navigate the rocky terrain of romance, sexuality and heartbreak.

The series is an echo of contemporary teen culture. Pop culture references and slang like “unalive” and “flop era” will date the episodes, but for now Heartbreak High is an effective mirror of modern life.

Much like the original series gave us a diverse set of characters, this series refreshingly reflects the diversity of today’s high schools.

Our heroine Amerie and her two love interests, long-time crush Dusty (Josh Heuston) and sweet new boy in town Malakai (Thomas Weatherall), are all characters of colour.

Darren is non-binary, out and proud but dealing with parents who complain Darren’s gender identity and singular they/them pronouns are “too confusing”.

Quinni is queer and autistic, with one episode sympathetically exploring her difficulties with dating and trying to mask and appear “normal”.

These teenagers all face their own unique issues, but also find themselves dealing with universal ups and downs every viewer will be able to relate to.

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Let’s talk about sex

As the Hartley High hook-up map would imply, teen sexuality is at the core of the story.

Heartbreak High uses this plot device not just for love triangles and drama, but as a chance to interrogate how we talk to teenagers about sex.

The Sexual Literacy Tutorials – or “SLTs”, which the students point out ironically sounds like “sluts” – provide some wonderfully awkward scenes.

The school’s sex education curriculum is full of outdated language and knowledge gaps, leaving the staff woefully (but amusingly) unprepared for nuanced discussions about sex with their students.

Long-suffering teacher Jojo (Chika Ikogwe) tries to mix up the curriculum by injecting some sex positivity, inclusive language and nuanced discussion of consent – to mixed results.

As the bright pink dildo stuck to the school’s basketball court proves, sex is very much present and unavoidable in the high school environment, whether the scandalised school board likes it or not.

The question is how to broach the topic in a nuanced way that keeps those vulnerable students safe.

Heartbreak High’s writing follows from Jojo’s example. When sex is depicted between the characters, the dialogue emphasises the importance (and joy) of consent. The framing makes the scenes intimate without sexualising the teenagers themselves.

The frank depiction of female sexuality and queer sexuality is also refreshing, whether it’s comedic scenes of Amerie being too horny to concentrate, or a matter-of-fact discussion of the average labia size.

Read more:
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Complicated, messy lives

This reboot is a bright new piece of Australian television, running on an engaging blend of comedy and drama.

It doesn’t shy away from serious topics such as drug use, youth crime or discrimination. But it also provides plenty of moments of levity, letting its characters joke around about everything from astrology, to erections, to bad haircuts.

Heartbreak High avoids cliche and shows its teen heroes as complicated, messy people the audience can root for – even when they make mistakes.

Heartbreak High is streaming on Netflix from September 14.

Alex Henderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Teenage misfits, messy emotions and joyous discussions on consent: Heartbreak High is a bright new piece of television – https://theconversation.com/teenage-misfits-messy-emotions-and-joyous-discussions-on-consent-heartbreak-high-is-a-bright-new-piece-of-television-188733

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University

Sometimes it seems like passwords have been with us forever, and yet every year we’re reminded how we still don’t use them properly!

The annual publication of the “worst passwords” list shows we haven’t become much more password savvy over the decade. And while several replacements for the humble password have been proposed, none have come close to the ease of using the traditional method.

But this changes today with the introduction of Passkeys – an update in Apple’s latest iOS 16 operating system. Passkeys could be the long-awaited solution to password malpractice, and the near-constant problem of compromised credentials.

Read more:
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What’s wrong with passwords?

The problem with passwords has been well documented. We choose weak ones, write them down (for others to see), share them, and re-use them on multiple websites.

The last of these is particularly problematic. Once your details are breached (and subsequently leaked), they’re vulnerable to “credential stuffing” – where cybercriminals take a set of login credentials and try them on multiple websites.

“But I use a password manager,” you might say.

Well, that’s good. The standard advice for years has been to use password managers such as 1Password or LastPass. These let you create unique passwords for each website or service you use. So even if a website is compromised, only one password is revealed.

But this approach requires the ability to synchronise across all your devices – a feature not all password managers provide.

And even with a password manager, our passwords are still stored on the remote website we’re accessing. Although most websites store passwords in a secure (hashed) format, they are still routinely compromised. It’s estimated more than two billion sets of credentials (including passwords) were leaked online in 2021.

Along come Passkeys

Apple devices using the newest operating system release (iOS 16 or MacOS Ventura) will integrate a new password mechanism called Passkeys. Unfortunately iPad users will need to wait a little longer for the feature.

It’s worth noting you won’t be forced to use Passkeys, but your Apple device will prompt you with the opportunity to do so. Also, most websites will continue to support password access for people without the latest devices.

You’ll also have the option to use Apple’s secure cloud storage, iCloud, to back up your keys and share them across your Apple devices.

How do they work?

The concept behind Passkeys is relatively simple. Every website you elect to use Passkeys on will securely generate a unique pair of secret codes (referred to as “keys”).

One of these is a public key, stored on the website you’re registered on. The other is a private key stored on your device. Both keys are related, but one can’t be used to get the other.

When you attempt to log in to the website, instead of entering a password, your device will ask you to verify your login using your device’s biometric unlocking mechanism. So you’ll either scan your face or your finger.

This deliberately limits Passkeys’ functionality to devices with biometric support (iPhones have offered Touch ID since 2013 and Face ID since 2017).

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Once your biometrics are verified, your device will use your private key to prove your identity to the website by tackling a complex mathematical “challenge” issued by the site. At no point is your private key sent across the internet to the website.

The response from your device can only be verified by the website, using the public key generated when you registered. And nobody can pretend to be you without your private key, which is safely stored on your device.

If a website is compromised, the public key alone is useless to cybercriminals.

Moreover, while biometric technology can be compromised, this is relatively difficult. To exploit a biometrics/PassKeys combination, a criminal would first need to obtain your device and then do a great job faking your face or fingerprint (or force one from you) – unlikely circumstances for most users.

Usability barriers

Passkeys will initially launch on Apple, but others are close behind. Microsoft will likely launch its own equivalent soon, although it may not initially be compatible with Apple’s implementation. This could be an issue for people wanting to use both an iPhone and Windows laptop.

Moving forward, it’s important Apple, Google and Microsoft work together to ensure maximum compatibility across devices.

Until then, there are some workarounds. If you need to access an Apple Passkeys-protected service on your Windows laptop (or any other device), you can scan a QR code with your iPhone and provide your biometric login verification that way.

This means users will always need to have their phone on them when they want to authenticate to a remote service – whereas currently they can just type out their password, or use a password manager synced across their devices.

For some users, needing to have their phone all the time could be enough to give Passkeys a pass altogether.

The long tail of adoption

The Passkeys approach has the potential to make passwords obsolete, but this will require organisations around the world to invest time, effort and money into it.

Big players like social media companies are well positioned to adopt Passkeys early on, but there will be millions of websites that may take years to do so – or may never.

Indeed, looking at the state of play today, many leading sites still fall short of applying existing good practice around passwords. So it’s hard to say exactly how quickly, and how widely, Passkeys will be implemented.

Read more:
Four ways to make sure your passwords are safe and easy to remember

Steven Furnell is affiliated with the Chartered Institute of Information Security.

Paul Haskell-Dowland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Apple’s PassKeys update could make traditional passwords obsolete – https://theconversation.com/apples-passkeys-update-could-make-traditional-passwords-obsolete-188300

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Australian National University

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has the potential to transform Australia’s republic debate.

While the debate should not be about personalities, the monarch’s identity clearly makes a difference. Former prime minister and republican Malcolm Turnbull once famously said many Australians were “Elizabethans” rather than monarchists.

However, as we mark the transition from one monarch to another, republic supporters still need to be patient, for a number of reasons.

Speaking on talk radio on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declined to address the republic question, saying: “Today is a day for one issue, and one issue only, which is to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and to give our thanks for her service to our country.”

But what can we expect in the longer term?

The Charles factor

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles has become King Charles III, not just of the United Kingdom, but of Australia and other dominions too. Camilla has become Queen Consort with Elizabeth’s blessing.

Read more:
There’s a strong case to be made for constitutional monarchies. But there’s no case for one in Australia

Opinion surveys have regularly shown the idea of Charles becoming king raises support for a republic. I believed in 1999, at the time of the constitutional referendum, the figure was about 5%. It was widely recognised Charles was not as popular among Australians as his mother. That is still the case.

After the first, failed referendum, influential republicans, like Turnbull, believed Australia should not consider a second referendum until the queen had passed away. The Australian Republic Movement disagreed – but that view became widespread.

This has prevented any official preparatory initiatives prior to the end of her time on the throne.

Back to the start

Much has changed over the past 23 years since we last seriously considered a republic. This means the public discussion must begin again almost from scratch and under new circumstances. For one thing, any Australian currently under 40 years of age did not vote in 1999.

Some lessons have also been learned from 1999, including problems with divisions between republicans about what model to adopt, but many issues remain unresolved. The central arguments for a republic have not changed markedly, but the situation is different.

One important development has been the increased urgency for constitution recognition of Indigenous rights. The republic movement and most republicans recognise the latter now has precedence over a second republic referendum.

Preferred models and public support

Experience and common sense dictate the move towards a republican constitution should not be rushed anyway. There needs to be time put aside for considered community discussion. While the initial discussion can be led by civil society groups, like the republic movement, ultimately the discussion must be led by the federal parliament and government if we are going to make genuine progress.

Read more:
The republic debate is back (again) but we need more than a model to capture Australians’ imagination

The republic movement has recently launched its preferred model for a republic, which is a starting point for public discussion. This follows years of stating the model should be decided by the community at a plebiscite prior to a referendum.

The new model proposes Australian parliaments nominate candidates for president before a popular vote to decide between them. It has been derided in some quarters for its complexity, but it is a creative attempt to resolve differences between direct election and parliamentary republicans. The model also reflects the realities of a federal system.

What are the mechanics?

The method of constitutional reform remains unchanged from 1999 (there has not been a referendum question put since then and the last successful referendum occurred in 1977). This recent history of our failure weighs heavily on any new referendum proposal.

Such proposals must effectively first win the support of the both houses of federal parliament. Then the specific proposal must be put to a yes/no referendum.

There is no other legitimate constitutional way, even though some people would prefer an “in principle” referendum to test the waters first. Realistically, the support of the federal government and opposition is also a necessary condition for a successful referendum.

Another decade away?

At any rate, any radical transformation of the republic/monarchy debate will not happen straight away. There needs to be time for the public to mourn the loss of Elizabeth.

That means a timetable for a second republican referendum, given King Charles has come to the throne in 2022, is at best five to ten years away (after the 2025 federal election at the earliest). By that stage Charles himself will be close to 80 years of age or even older.

John Warhurst is a former chair of The Australian Republican Movement.

– ref. What the Queen’s death means for an Australian republic – https://theconversation.com/what-the-queens-death-means-for-an-australian-republic-181610

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Ball, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow, Menzies Health Institute, Griffith University

The cost of groceries in Australia has sky-rocketed this year. So people may be tempted to switch to home-brand foods to save on their weekly food bill.

Home-brand foods are certainly cheaper. But are they healthy?

Here’s what we know about the nutrients they contain compared with the more expensive named brands.

Read more:
How to save $50 off your food bill and still eat tasty, nutritious meals

What are home-brand foods?

Home-brand foods have various names. You might hear them called supermarket own-brand foods, private label, in-house brands, store brands, or retailer brands.

These are foods made specifically for a supermarket (you cannot buy them at a competing store). They are advertised as low-priced alternatives to more expensive items.

Home-brand foods are widely available in Australia and other countries, making up to 30% of what you can buy at a supermarket.

Some people once viewed these as inferior products. But their nutrient content, and wide availability in supermarkets, may play a role in boosting population health. Some evidence shows home-brand foods increase availability and accessibility to more affordable food options, and contribute to improving food safety standards.

Read more:
Frozen, canned or fermented: when you can’t shop often for fresh vegetables, what are the best alternatives?

Why are they cheaper?

Cheaper prices associated with home-brand products are possible due to lower costs associated with research and development, marketing and packaging. This means we cannot assume lower prices mean cheaper or inferior ingredients.

In fact, supermarkets can influence the ingredients and processing of home-brand foods by benchmarking against named brands.

Before a home-brand product is made, stores will also specify to manufacturers what it should cost to consumers. Manufacturers often choose to use the same ingredients and processes as name-brand products to reduce costs through economies of scale.

This means not having to clean or reprogram equipment between making the different products. It also means most home-brand products are very similar to branded products, aside from the packaging.

However, for mixed foods, such as breakfast cereals and pre-made sauces, the manufacturer may change the ingredients, such as using cheaper or fewer ingredients, to help reduce costs.

Read more:
How Australians talk about tucker is a story that’ll make you want to eat the bum out of an elephant

How much can I save?

Home-brand products can be up to 40% cheaper than named brands. So yes, home-brand products can make a real difference to the total cost of groceries.

However, some products have bigger cost savings than others, as we show below.

Most labels on supermarket shelves show the cost per 100g (or equivalent) for an item, which can help shoppers choose the most cost-effective option, especially useful when items are on sale.

But are they healthy?

For simple, unprocessed products such as milk, eggs and pasta there is virtually no difference in nutritional quality between home-brand and named brand foods. There is very little the manufacturers can do to modify ingredients to reduce costs.

But sometimes cheaper ingredients are used in higher concentrations in home-brand products. For example, home-brand pre-made pasta sauces may have less of the vegetable ingredients, and greater amounts of sugar, sodium (salt), and additives (such as stabilisers, colours and flavours). This may change the quality and taste.

Very few studies have explored how home-brand products may differ in nutritional profile.

Overall, serving size, sodium and other nutrients appear similar across home-brand and named brand food. But there are some differences with certain food types.

Serving sizes

For instance, serving sizes are generally smaller in home-brand pizza, canned legumes, grains, biscuits and ready meals. In fact, edible oil is the only type of food where serving size is greater for home-brand foods.

Salt

Sodium levels of home-brand breakfast cereals, cheese and bread are higher than branded products. But sodium levels of cooking sauces, frozen potato products (such as oven-baked fries) and biscuits are lower in home-brand foods.

Other nutrients

For energy and fat intake, again it seems there are inconsistent differences between home-brand foods compared to branded foods.

How about sugar? Unfortunately, the studies didn’t look at this.

In fact, overall, Australian home-brand products are not consistently nutritionally different to branded products.

Health star ratings

On a related note, unhealthy home-brand products – such as juices, meat pies and muesli bars – are more likely to include a health star rating, compared to nutritious foods. This may incorrectly imply they are a healthy choice.

This means no matter which brand you choose, remember to check the food label to make sure you are getting the quality of food you like for the price you are comfortable with.

Lauren Ball receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, RACGP Foundation, VicHealth and Queensland Health. She is a Director of Dietitians Australia.

Katelyn Barnes is an executive member of the Australasian Association of Academic Primary Care.

– ref. Are home-brand foods healthy? If you read the label, you may be pleasantly surprised – https://theconversation.com/are-home-brand-foods-healthy-if-you-read-the-label-you-may-be-pleasantly-surprised-189445

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Noel Castree, Professor of Society & Environment, University of Technology Sydney

“Crisis” is an incredibly potent word, so it’s interesting to witness the way the phrase “climate crisis” has become part of the lingua franca.

Once associated only with a few “outspoken” scientists and activists, the phrase has now gone mainstream.

But what do people understand by the term “climate crisis”? And why does it matter?

The mainstreaming of crisis-talk

It’s not only activists or scientists sounding the alarm.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres now routinely employs dramatic phrases like “digging our own graves” when discussing climate. Bill Gates advises us to avoid “climate disaster”.

This linguistic mainstreaming marks redrawn battle lines in the “climate wars”.

Denialism is in retreat. The climate change debate now is about what is to be done and by whom?

Scientists, using the full authority of their profession, have been key to changing the discourse. The lead authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports now pull no punches, talking openly about mass starvation, extinctions and disasters.

Read more:
An official welcome to the Anthropocene epoch – but who gets to decide it’s here?

These public figures clearly hope to jolt citizens, businesses and governments into radical climate action.

But for many ordinary folks, climate change can seem remote from everyday life. It’s not a “crisis” in the immediate way the pandemic has been.

Of course, many believe climate experts have understated the problem for too long.

And yet the new ubiquity of siren terms like climate “crisis”, “emergency”, “disaster”, “breakdown” and “calamity” does not guarantee any shared, let alone credible, understanding of their possible meaning.

This matters because such terms tend to polarise.

Few now doubt the reality of climate change. But how we describe its implications can easily repeat earlier stand-offs between “believers” and “sceptics”; “realists’ and “scare-mongerers”. The result is yet more political inertia and gridlock.

We will need to do better.

Four ideas for a new way forward

Terms like “climate crisis” are here to stay. But scientists, teachers and politicians need to be savvy. A keen awareness of what other people may think when they hear us shout “crisis!” can lead to better communication.

Here are four ideas to keep in mind.

1. We must challenge dystopian and salvation narratives

A crisis is when things fall apart. We see news reports of crises daily – floods in Pakistan, economic collapse in Sri Lanka, famine in parts of Africa.

But “climate crisis” signifies something that feels beyond the range of ordinary experience, especially to the wealthy. People quickly reach for culturally available ideas to fill the vacuum.

One is the notion of an all-encompassing societal break down, where only a few survive. Cormac McCarthy’s bleak book The Road is one example.

Central to many apocalyptic narratives is the idea technology and a few brave people (usually men) can save the day in the nick of time, as in films like Interstellar.

The problem, of course, is these (often fanciful) depictions aren’t suitable ways to interpret what climate scientists have been warning people about. The world is far more complicated.

2. We must bring the climate crisis home and make it present now

Even if they’re willing to acknowledge it as a looming crisis, many think climate change impacts will be predominantly felt elsewhere or in the distant future.

The disappearance of Tuvalu as sea levels rise is an existential crisis for its citizens but may seem a remote, albeit tragic, problem to people in Chicago, Oslo or Cape Town.

But the recent floods in eastern Australia and the heatwave in Europe allow a powerful point to be made: no place is immune from extreme weather as the planet heats up.

There won’t be a one-size-fits-all global climate crisis as per many Hollywood movies. Instead, people must understand global warming will trigger myriad local-to-regional scale crises.

Many will be on the doorstep, many will last for years or decades. Most will be made worse if we don’t act now. Getting people to understand this is crucial.

3. We must explain: a crisis in relation to what?

The climate wars showed us value disputes get transposed into arguments about scientific evidence and its interpretation.

A crisis occurs when events are judged in light of certain values, such as people’s right to adequate food, healthcare and shelter.

Pronouncements of crisis need to explain the values that underpin judgements about unacceptable risk, harm and loss.

Historians, philosophers, legal scholars and others help us to think clearly about our values and what exactly we mean when we say “crisis”.

4. We must appreciate other crises and challenges matter more to many people

Some are tempted to occupy the moral high ground and imply the climate crisis is so grand as to eclipse all others. This is understandable but imprudent.

It’s important to respect other perspectives and negotiate a way forward. Consider, for example, the way author Bjørn Lomborg has questioned the climate emergency by arguing it’s not the main threat.

Lomborg was widely pilloried. But his arguments resonated with many. We may disagree with him, but his views are not irrational.

We must seek to understand how and why this kind of argument makes sense to so many people.

Words matter. It’s vital terms like “crisis” and “calamity” don’t become rhetorical devices devoid of real content as we argue about what climate action to take.

Read more:
Mass starvation, extinctions, disasters: the new IPCC report’s grim predictions, and why adaptation efforts are falling behind

Noel Castree does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The climate crisis is real – but overusing terms like ‘crisis’ and ’emergency’ comes with risk – https://theconversation.com/the-climate-crisis-is-real-but-overusing-terms-like-crisis-and-emergency-comes-with-risk-188750

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

A year ago, El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender – alongside the US dollar, which the Central American country adopted in 2001 to replace its own currency, the colón.

President Nayib Bukele, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, promoted the initiative as one that would deliver multiple economic benefits.

Making Bitcoin legal tender, he said, would attract foreign investment, generate jobs and help “push humanity at least a tiny bit into the right direction”.

His ambitions extended to building an entire “Bitcoin city” – a tax-free haven funded by issuing US$1 billion in government bonds. The plan was to spend half the bond revenue on the city, and the other half on buying Bitcoin, with assumed profits then being used to repay the bondholders.

Now, a year on, there’s more than enough evidence to conclude Bukele – who has also called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” in response to criticisms of his creeping authoritarianism – had no idea what he was doing.

This bold financial experiment has proven to be an almost complete failure.

Making Bitcoin legal tender

Making Bitcoin legal tender meant much more than allowing Bitcoin to be used for transactions. That was already possible, as it is in most (but far from all) countries.

If a Salvadoran wanted to pay for something in bitcoins, and the recipient was willing to accept them, they could.

But Bukele wanted more. Making bitcoins legal tender meant a payee had to accept them. As the 2021 legislation stated, “every economic agent must accept Bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service”.

Read more:
Can Bitcoin be a real currency? What’s wrong with El Salvador’s plan

To encourage Bitcoin uptake, the government created an app called “Chivo Wallet” (“chivo” is slang for “cool”) to trade bitcoins for dollars without transaction fees. It also came preloaded with US$30 as a bonus (the median weekly income is about US$360).

Yet despite the law and these incentives, Bitcoin has not been embraced.

Greeted with little enthusiasm

A nationally representative survey of 1,800 Salvadoran households in February indicated just 20% of the population was using Chivo Wallet for Bitcoin transactions. More than double that number downloaded the app, but only to claim the US$30.

Among respondents who identified as business owners, just 20% said they were accepting bitcoins as payment. These were typically large companies (among the top 10% of companies by size).

Business acceptance of Bitcoin in El Salvador

A survey for the El Salvador Chamber of Commerce in March found only 14% of businesses were transacting using Bitcoin.

Making huge losses

Fortunately for Salvadorans, nothing has come of the US$1 billion Bitcoin bonds scheme. But the Bukele government has still spent more than US$100 million buying bitcoins – which are now worth less than US$50 million.

When Bukele announced his plans in July 2021, Bitcoin’s value was about US$35,000. By the time the legislation came into effect, on September 7 2021, it was about US$45,000. Two months later, it peaked at US$64,400.

Now it is trading at around US$20,000.

Bukele has made self-congratulatory tweets about “buying the dip” but almost all the bitcoins bought by the government have been for more than US$30,000, at an average price of more than US$40,000.

A year ago, Bukele was urging his citizens to hold their money in bitcoins. For anyone who did, the losses would be devastating.

Flawed analyses

Bukele’s misunderstanding of Bitcoin – and economics more generally – has been demonstrated repeatedly.

In June 2021 he tweeted: “Bitcoin has a market cap of US$680 billion. If 1% of it is invested in El Salvador, that would increase our GDP by 25%.”

This suggests he seemed to think Bitcoin was some sort of investment fund. It also showed he did not understand GDP. Foreign investment is not a component of GDP. There has been no surge in foreign investment nor GDP.

In a January 2022 tweet he argued a “gigantic price increase is just a matter of time” because there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins while there are 50 million millionaires in the world. “Imagine when each one of them decides they should own at least ONE #Bitcoin,” he proclaimed. Bitcoin’s value has since halved.

The rest of the world is not impressed

The Bitcoin plan has adversely affected El Salvador’s credit rating and relations with the International Monetary Fund. With investors more wary of lending to the country, local borrowers have had to offer higher interest rates.

In January the IMF urged El Salvador to reverse Bitcoin’s legal lender status because of the “large risks for financial and market integrity, financial stability and consumer protection”. Bitcoin is notorious for its use in scams and other illegal activities, as well as its volatility.

Bukele tweeted a dismissive response involving a Simpsons-themed meme.

This seems particularly rash, given El Salvador has been seeking a loan of more than $1 billion from the IMF.

International credit rating agencies Fitch has downgraded El Salvador’s credit rating this year, citing concerns about its Bitcoin policies.

Read more:
Cryptocurrencies are great for gambling – but lousy at liberating our money from big central banks

No other country with its own currency, not even ones such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela with discredited currencies, has followed suit and made Bitcoin legal tender.

Given El Salvador’s record, it is is unikely any ever will.

John Hawkins was formerly a senior economist with the Bank for International Settlements.

– ref. One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a spectacular failure – https://theconversation.com/one-year-on-el-salvadors-bitcoin-experiment-has-proven-a-spectacular-failure-190229

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giselle Bastin, Associate Professor of English, Flinders University

Charles Philip Arthur George, Queen Elizabeth II’s eldest son, has finally ascended the throne as King Charles III.

As Prince of Wales, Charles has been there for as long as many of us can remember; every major moment in his life, from his birth through to his marriages and parenting of two sons, his public declarations about architecture, environmental sustainability and so on have been paraded before us in a regular drip feed of media
coverage.

And yet, many Australians feel as if they know little about Charles the man.

Read more:
Australia has a new head of state: what will Charles be like as king?

A sensitive, solemn boy

Born in 1948 to the then Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, Charles soon emerged as a solemn, sensitive young boy; he was loved but bullied by his father and loved but kept at arm’s length by an emotionally distant mother whose first duty in life was to the Crown.

The scene of his parents’ return from a 36-day royal tour of Canada in 1951 offers a poignant snapshot of Charles’s early life as a royal prince.

Prince Philip decided Charles would benefit from going to the same schools he had himself attended, and Charles was despatched to the prep school Cheam in Hampshire, and later to Gordonstoun in Scotland. Charles hated both of them.

After graduating with a 2:2 (lower second class honours) from Cambridge (the first British royal ever to earn a university
degree) and time spent in the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy between 1971 and 1976, Charles transitioned to civilian life and began to develop interests in the causes that would prove his enduring passion for the rest of his adult life: environmental sustainability, urban and rural conservation, architecture, spirituality, social reform and gardening.

He launched The Prince’s Trust and the Business in the Community (BITC) scheme and oversaw the management of the Duchy of Cornwall.

The search for an heir

Throughout the 1970s the pressure grew for Charles to find a wife and cement the line of succession. His bachelor days whizzed by with a series of relationships with beautiful women (who were almost always blondes) who each seemed to be treated to endless afternoons gazing on admiringly while Charles played polo.

But there was a problem: in 1970 Charles had already met the love of his life, Camilla Shand, who would go on to marry military veteran Andrew Parker-Bowles in 1973. The woman Charles most wanted to marry was not in the running.

An heir, however, was required, and subsequently in 1981 Charles married the young Lady Diana Spencer in one of the most famous weddings of the 20th century.

For 15 years the world looked on with fascination as the marriage produced two sons, William and Harry, before eventually ending in divorce in 1996.

One story that serves to sum up the Waleses’ marriage concerns the interior decoration of Charles and Diana’s apartments in Kensington Palace and country estate, Highgrove.

Before his wedding, Charles lived in an apartment in Buckingham Palace described by royal biographer Sally Bedell-Smith as possessing a “strong masculine flavour”. With Charles and Diana’s subsequent move to Kensington Palace:

came Diana’s pastels and chintzes to brighten the rooms made gloomy by limited sunlight […] Diana and Charles’s divergent personalities defined their respective offices. Hers, the one room where sunlight flooded through tall windows, had two pink sofas and was brimming with embroidered pillows, porcelain figures, enamel boxes, and her childhood collection of stuffed animals. Charles’s study was his man cave: small and dark, with stacks of books and papers, watercolour box, and sketch pads. From a portrait behind his desk, his mother gazed in silent judgment

Upon his separation from Diana, Charles moved his own interior designer, Robert Kime, into Highgrove and charged him with the task of expunging “all traces of Diana”.

The years after Diana’s death saw a recalibration of Charles’s public image. After a life spent in the shadows of the arc lamp of Diana’s fame and popularity, Charles brought in a public relations team to re-shape his reputation and to pave the way for Camilla’s gradual acceptance as his future Queen Consort.

Read more:
16 visits over 57 years: reflecting on Queen Elizabeth II’s long relationship with Australia

A man of contradictions

The Charles who is keen to stress that he is “just an ordinary person in an extraordinary position” and someone to be “treated like any other” person, is one whose identity is nonetheless anchored in his royal heritage.

This is the schism that besets his life.

For example, it has been reported he is someone who each day has a simple light breakfast such as a boiled egg, yet given his royal status, the egg must be cooked to perfection (four minutes exactly) and his cook boils several eggs in the event the one Charles is served does not meet his standards.

He has worn the same grey double-breasted suit for years as proof of his environmental credentials, yet he’s a person for whom his clothes are laid out each morning, his toothpaste (it has been noted, perhaps erroneously) is squeezed on to his toothbrush for him. A valet carries a special cushion Charles needs to have placed on nearly every chair he sits on.

His “Farmer George” image (inherited from his ancestor George III who earned the nickname because of his love for agriculture) rests alongside the reality that the gardens he tends belong to stately homes and palaces owned or managed by his own family.

As Bedell-Smith notes, Charles’s:

cunning in extracting money from eager benefactors was perilously entwined with a weakness for the company and perks of the superrich […] he took full advantage of free yachts, flights on private jets, and estates for private vacations. From time to time his patrons turned out to be shifty, and Charles would find himself tarred by the tabloids

Charles’s many internal contradictions reflect both aspects of his character but have also been shaped by the royal system into which he has been born.

With the death of his mother, Charles is confronted with perhaps the most searing contradiction of his life: the moment he became king was one that he has waited for — often impatiently — for decades, and yet it was also the “the moment he has most been dreading” for as long as he can remember.

Read more:
What are the legal and constitutional consequences for Australia of Queen Elizabeth II’s death?

Giselle Bastin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Charles has been proclaimed king. But who is Charles the man? – https://theconversation.com/charles-has-been-proclaimed-king-but-who-is-charles-the-man-190342

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

Anthony Albanese has said it would be appropriate for King Charles to continue his advocacy on the challenge of climate change.

“That’s a matter for him, of course,” Albanese said on Sunday. But “in my view that would be appropriate”.

“I think dealing with the challenge of climate change shouldn’t be seen as a political issue – it should be seen as an issue that is about humanity and about our very quality of life and survival as a world,” he told the ABC.

“This is a big threat and King Charles has identified that for a long period of time. I think engagement in issues is very different from engagement in party political matters.”

Albanese’s comment came as he declared a public holiday in Australia on Thursday September 22, which will be a “national day of mourning” and the day a national memorial service will be held for the late Queen.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, quizzed on whether King Charles should drop his public advocacy on issues such as climate change, expected him to become less outspoken. “As King, he is there now as an impartial person.”

“He will have very strong views on this issue and many others, I’m sure, but I think the point he made in his speech yesterday was that he now doesn’t express those views on a day-to-day basis,” Dutton said on the ABC.

Read more:
What are the legal and constitutional consequences for Australia of Queen Elizabeth II’s death?

He said Prince William, now Prince of Wales, was “very strong in relation to this issue and many others. He’s a patron of many organisations as well, and as the Prince of Wales he will have a greater ability to speak out on, and to support causes that are important to him.”

In his Friday (Saturday morning AEST) address to Britain and the Commonwealth King Charles said: “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply. But I know this important work will go on in the trusted hands of others.”

The King flagged he expected William to fill a similar role to the one he had filled. “With Catherine beside him, our new Prince and Princess of Wales will, I know, continue to inspire and lead our national conversations, helping to bring the marginal to the centre ground where vital help can be given.”

On Sunday Governor-General David Hurley, in a ceremony at parliament house, formally proclaimed King Charles king of Australia.

This week’s sitting of federal parliament has been cancelled, and politics essentially put on hold. But Albanese indicated the days missed would be made up later. Maintaining the cancellation was appropriate, he said: “It would be difficult to envisage parliament sitting and going through the sort of adversarial activity that occurs in our parliament, under our Westminster system”.

Read more:
Albanese to attend Queen’s funeral and meet King Charles, parliament cancelled

Albanese and Hurley leave on Thursday to attend the Queen’s funeral on Monday September 19.

Australian Medical Association president Steve Robson was critical of the Albanese announcement of a public holiday, tweeting it would mean cancellation of operations and lots of patient consultations “at a time when access is difficult”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. It would be appropriate for King Charles to remain strong on climate: Albanese – https://theconversation.com/it-would-be-appropriate-for-king-charles-to-remain-strong-on-climate-albanese-190416

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

Anthony Albanese has said it would be appropriate for King Charles to continue his advocacy on the challenge of climate change.

“That’s a matter for him, of course,” Albanese said on Sunday. But “in my view that would be appropriate”.

“I think dealing with the challenge of climate change shouldn’t be seen as a political issue – it should be seen as an issue that is about humanity and about our very quality of life and survival as a world,” he told the ABC.

“This is a big threat and King Charles has identified that for a long period of time. I think engagement in issues is very different from engagement in party political matters.”

Albanese’s comment came as he declared a public holiday in Australia on Thursday September 22, which will be a “national day of mourning” and the day a national memorial service will be held for the late Queen.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, quizzed on whether King Charles should drop his public advocacy on issues such as climate change, expected him to become less outspoken. “As King, he is there now as an impartial person.”

“He will have very strong views on this issue and many others, I’m sure, but I think the point he made in his speech yesterday was that he now doesn’t express those views on a day-to-day basis,” Dutton said on the ABC.

Read more:
What are the legal and constitutional consequences for Australia of Queen Elizabeth II’s death?

He said Prince William, now Prince of Wales, was “very strong in relation to this issue and many others. He’s a patron of many organisations as well, and as the Prince of Wales he will have a greater ability to speak out on, and to support causes that are important to him.”

In his Friday (Saturday morning AEST) address to Britain and the Commonwealth King Charles said: “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply. But I know this important work will go on in the trusted hands of others.”

The King flagged he expected William to fill a similar role to the one he had filled. “With Catherine beside him, our new Prince and Princess of Wales will, I know, continue to inspire and lead our national conversations, helping to bring the marginal to the centre ground where vital help can be given.”

On Sunday Governor-General David Hurley, in a ceremony at parliament house, formally proclaimed King Charles king of Australia.

This week’s sitting of federal parliament has been cancelled, and politics essentially put on hold. But Albanese indicated the days missed would be made up later. Maintaining the cancellation was appropriate, he said: “It would be difficult to envisage parliament sitting and going through the sort of adversarial activity that occurs in our parliament, under our Westminster system”.

Read more:
Albanese to attend Queen’s funeral and meet King Charles, parliament cancelled

Albanese and Hurley leave on Thursday to attend the Queen’s funeral on Monday September 19.

Australian Medical Association president Steve Robson was critical of the Albanese announcement of a public holiday, tweeting it would mean cancellation of operations and lots of patient consultations “at a time when access is difficult”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. It would be appropriate for King Charles to remain strong voice on climate change: Albanese – https://theconversation.com/it-would-be-appropriate-for-king-charles-to-remain-strong-voice-on-climate-change-albanese-190416

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

Anthony Albanese has said it would be appropriate for King Charles to continue his advocacy on the challenge of climate change.

“That’s a matter for him, of course,” Albanese said on Sunday. But “in my view that would be appropriate”.

“I think dealing with the challenge of climate change shouldn’t be seen as a political issue – it should be seen as an issue that is about humanity and about our very quality of life and survival as a world,” he told the ABC.

“This is a big threat and King Charles has identified that for a long period of time. I think engagement in issues is very different from engagement in party political matters.”

Albanese’s comment came as he declared a public holiday in Australia on Thursday September 22, which will be a “national day of mourning” and the day a national memorial service will be held for the late Queen.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, quizzed on whether King Charles should drop his public advocacy on issues such as climate change, expected him to become less outspoken. “As King, he is there now as an impartial person.”

“He will have very strong views on this issue and many others, I’m sure, but I think the point he made in his speech yesterday was that he now doesn’t express those views on a day-to-day basis,” Dutton said on the ABC.

Read more:
What are the legal and constitutional consequences for Australia of Queen Elizabeth II’s death?

He said Prince William, now Prince of Wales, was “very strong in relation to this issue and many others. He’s a patron of many organisations as well, and as the Prince of Wales he will have a greater ability to speak out on, and to support causes that are important to him.”

In his Friday (Saturday morning AEST) address to Britain and the Commonwealth King Charles said: “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply. But I know this important work will go on in the trusted hands of others.”

The King flagged he expected William to fill a similar role to the one he had filled. “With Catherine beside him, our new Prince and Princess of Wales will, I know, continue to inspire and lead our national conversations, helping to bring the marginal to the centre ground where vital help can be given.”

On Sunday Governor-General David Hurley, in a ceremony at parliament house, formally proclaimed King Charles king of Australia.

This week’s sitting of federal parliament has been cancelled, and politics essentially put on hold. But Albanese indicated the days missed would be made up later. Maintaining the cancellation was appropriate, he said: “It would be difficult to envisage parliament sitting and going through the sort of adversarial activity that occurs in our parliament, under our Westminster system”.

Read more:
Albanese to attend Queen’s funeral and meet King Charles, parliament cancelled

Albanese and Hurley leave on Thursday to attend the Queen’s funeral on Monday September 19.

Australian Medical Association president Steve Robson was critical of the Albanese announcement of a public holiday, tweeting it would mean cancellation of operations and lots of patient consultations “at a time when access is difficult”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Appropriate for King Charles to remain strong voice on climate change: Albanese – https://theconversation.com/appropriate-for-king-charles-to-remain-strong-voice-on-climate-change-albanese-190416

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University

From the very beginning, Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was deeply connected to Britain’s global empire and the long and bloody processes of decolonisation.

Indeed, she became Queen while on a royal visit to Kenya in 1952. After she left, the colony descended into one of the worst conflicts of the British colonial period. Declaring a state of emergency in October 1952, the British would go on to kill tens of thousands of Kenyans before it was over.

Is it possible to disentangle the personal attributes of a gentle and kindly woman from her role as the crowned head of a declining global empire that waged numerous wars and resisted those demanding independence across the globe?

Even though she was a constitutional monarch who generally followed the lead of her parliament, many of Britain’s ex-subjects don’t think so, and some historians agree, with one commenting that “Elizabeth II helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation whose legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged”.

Here in Australia, too, while some Australians remember with nostalgia the time they waved small flags along the route of royal tours as children, one Indigenous scholar has pointed out that the queen “wasn’t a bystander to the effects of colonisation and colonialism”.

À lire aussi :
The royal family can’t keep ignoring its colonialist past and racist present

It depends who’s remembering

How the queen and her reign is being remembered depends on where the remembering is taking place and by whom.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Unforgettable is the royal tour of the Caribbean in March 2022, when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were bluntly told by the prime minister of Jamaica the region was “moving on” from the British monarchy.

Others, too, noted the British monarchy was a constant reminder of the period of slavery, with a government committee in the Bahamas urging them to offer “a full and formal apology for their crimes against humanity”.

This ongoing process of national distancing from a British royal past is continuing today, even in the week of the queen’s death.

In India, for example, only days ago the once grand boulevard of empire, Rajpath (and before that Kingsway in honour of the British Emperor of India, George V) has been renamed Kartavya Path and headed with a giant statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, one of India’s most strident (and controversial) anti-British nationalists.

At the unveiling of this statue, India’s nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “another symbol of slavery has been removed today” and urged all Indians to visit the site.

Complicated histories

The theme of a “complicated historical relationship” with the monarchy is also prominent in South Africa, with one African news site declaring that “South Africa’s relationship with the British monarchy is as complicated as it gets”.

It was in South Africa that Elizabeth declared her intention to devote herself to Britain’s “imperial family” of colonies on her 21st birthday. But it was also on the question of South Africa’s apartheid regime that the queen showed a rare moment of dissent with one of her prime ministers, refusing to accept quietly Margaret Thatcher’s decision not to join other countries in placing economic sanctions on the regime.

Elsewhere, Iraq’s complicated history with the United Kingdom, which stretches back to the 1920s, has also been noted in local reports. More recently, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed during the war that Britain began alongside the United States, Australia and other nations in 2003.

In Malaysia, the role of the British in massacres and mass resettlement programs during the bloody Malayan Emergency (1948-60) and the period of decolonisation is also still clearly remembered. Not only did this conflict rumble on during the early years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, all attempts at an inquiry into events in Malaya have been stymied by British governments.

Even in neighbouring Ireland, which has sought to smooth relations with its nearest neighbour, President Michael D Higgins has spoken euphemistically of Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with “those with whom her country has experienced a complex, and often difficult, history”.

Newspapers there also ponder what her death might mean for Northern Ireland, the site of the Anglo-Irish conflict euphemistically known as the “Troubles” as well as recent strained relations.

The queen may have “charmed” some in Ireland with her commemoration of those who fought the British there. But few will have forgotten the role of the British army in Northern Ireland, including the now infamous “Bloody Sunday” Massacre of 1972, nor the queen’s statement on behalf of Boris Johnson’s government rejecting its victims’ demands for justice.

À lire aussi :
Five ways the monarchy has benefited from colonialism and slavery

Some might suggest the tortured history of the declining British Empire should be seen as separate from the reign and person of Elizabeth II. Certainly nothing suggests the queen was particularly bellicose in her demeanour.

But as Thomas Paine once remarked, while a monarch might personally be kind and generous, they remain the monarch, the head of the state which fights its wars and (on occasion) commits its crimes – all in the name of the Crown.

The role of Queen Elizabeth II in the history of British colonialism will continue to be debated well after her death.

Matt Fitzpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. The Queen has left her mark around the world. But not all see it as something to be celebrated – https://theconversation.com/the-queen-has-left-her-mark-around-the-world-but-not-all-see-it-as-something-to-be-celebrated-190343

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael P. Theophilos, Associate Professor, Australian Catholic University

Since the introduction of decimal coinage in 1966, about 15 billion Australian coins have been minted with an image of Queen Elizabeth II.

Many of us fondly associate her image with Australian coins, and for most of us it’s all we have ever known (on one side of our money, at least).

Of all the changes that lie ahead now the queen has died, one of the most conspicuous, and to some the most jarring, will be that our new coins will soon be adorned with a portrait of King Charles III.

What happens now?

Tradition holds that each British monarch’s portrait on coins should face in the opposite direction to their predecessor. George IV faced left, Elizabeth II faced right, and thus we expect Charles III will face left.

The design of Charles’ portrait (or “effigy”) is yet to be determined, but it will be supplied by the United Kingdom’s Royal Mint, and Australia’s new coins will be in circulation from 2023.

Traditionally, the reigning monarch is also portrayed on the smallest denomination banknote, but the Reserve Bank of Australia has indicated it will be some time before we see King Charles III on our $5 note. Until then, don’t worry, it will be business as usual. All Australian money bearing a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II remains legal tender, and is likely to circulate for many years to come.

Read more:
16 visits over 57 years: reflecting on Queen Elizabeth II’s long relationship with Australia

Ideologically speaking, the next chapter in Australian coinage is open. What message will the portrait and imagery of Charles III communicate? Will it be one of unity, diversity, leadership, strength, openness, or something else? How will the message be communicated?

Hopefully, we can anticipate a meaningful portrait of King Charles III circulating on our coinage, which captures something of our collective past traditions and future aspirations.

Six progressively ageing portraits

In total we have seen six progressively ageing portraits of Queen Elizabeth II on Australian coins.

Australians first saw Elizabeth on their coins in pre-decimal times: 1953, to be exact, the year of her coronation. At that time, our money was based on British pounds, shillings and pence.

Thirteen years later, on February 14 1966, Australians awoke to a new currency, the Australian dollar, featuring a decimal system.

Cue the collective sigh of relief and joyful cheers of primary school students who no longer had to suffer the complex mathematical calculations of 12 pence to the shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound.

The visual element that was unchanged in the transition from Australian pounds to Australia dollars in 1966 was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, which continued to adorn the “heads” side of the coin.

In preparation for the 1966 currency change, media outlets of the day broadcast this educational ditty, set to the tune of “Click go the Shears”:

In come the dollars and in come the cents

To replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence

Be prepared, folks, when the coins begin to mix

On the fourteenth of February, Nineteen Sixty-Six.

Why do we have leaders’ faces on our coins anyway?

The invention of coinage stretches back over 2,500 years. During the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, city states in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) began minting coins from gold and silver and using them as a means of economic exchange.

But coins were not only important as units of currency. They had (and have) the capacity to communicate ideas and stories graphically.

Initially, the design of coinage used symbols and depictions of gods and goddesses. It was only two centuries later, around 445-395 BCE, that a human face (Tissaphernes, a Persian soldier and statesman) first appeared on a coin, and even then it was a humanised deity.

In the ensuing centuries, rulers have celebrated and reinforced their rule through honorific portraiture on coinage. As one scholar has noted, “coins and statues allowed for the diffusion of the likeness of the ruler in the realm, rendering him omnipresent and his face familiar to his subjects”.

Julius Caesar was the first living Roman to depict a portrait of himself on a coin. Accompanied by the inscription “CAESAR DICT PERPETVO” (Caesar, dictator for life), the coin made a bold statement about the apparent length of his rule. Ironically, however, this coin was one of the catalysts for cutting short his life through assassination.

The Roman people had officially overthrown the monarchy of its founders in 509 BCE, but occasionally flirted with centralised power. Caesar’s kingly act of putting his portrait on coinage, along with other ways he concentrated his power, was deemed more than mere flirtation. It was seen as a direct threat to 500 years of Roman tradition.

As we consider the implications of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing for our own country, its governance and symbols that represent it, we should not neglect the significance of the symbols that define our culture. Or, at the very least the images that accompany us in our daily routines, even the apparently mundane.

Michael P. Theophilos does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What happens to Australia’s money now the Queen has died? And why are leaders’ faces on coins anyway? – https://theconversation.com/what-happens-to-australias-money-now-the-queen-has-died-and-why-are-leaders-faces-on-coins-anyway-190333

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kira Westaway, Associate Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

Did humans hunt and eat woolly mammoths or dinosaurs? – Jasmine, age 10, Central Coast NSW

Hi Jasmine,

Thanks for this great question!

Humans can be blamed for a lot of things: chopping down rainforests, worsening climate change, and driving precious species like the Tasmanian Tiger to extinction. But can we add hunting and eating woolly mammoths and dinosaurs to the list?

Well, we can safely assume dinosaurs never fell prey to humans – mainly because the two never even met (despite what the Jurassic Park films suggest). Dinosaurs had already been extinct for about 62 million years by the time modern humans started roaming the planet!

But what about woolly mammoths? In this case, the movie Ice Age was actually correct. Humans and woolly mammoths lived side by side for at least 15,000 years.

Mammoth findings in the fossil record

So did humans hunt woolly mammoths to extinction? To answer this question we must look at clues in the fossil record, which is made up of the preserved remains of ancient life.

In the case of the dodo, a large flightless bird that went extinct, documents from 1690 make it clear that over-hunting by humans was the cause.

But woolly mammoths were around long before we had paper to write on. They existed from about 300,000 years ago – a time when ice covered the northern parts of the world.

As for when they went extinct, a small number of dwarf mammmoths survived on a little isolated island in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago. But the full-sized species disappeared from an area called Beringia (located between Siberia and Alaska) some 12,000 years ago – after living alongside humans for at least 15,000 years.

Did humans kill them off?

Hunting for clues

When early humans hunted, they tended to kill many animals at the same time. This created “kill sites”, which are literally huge piles of animal bones. And when they pulled the meat off the bones to eat, they used stone tools that created cut marks or small notches in the bones.

These marks now provide vital clues. In Beringia, there is fossil evidence for mammoth kill sites, and cut marks on mammoth bones – so all the clues point to humans having hunted woolly mammoths.

But the strongest evidence was found in southern Poland in 2019. A small part of a stone tool, made into a spear blade by a human, was found in the rib bone of a woolly mammoth. If this was evidence presented in a murder trial, that human would be locked up straight away!

Even so, does that mean humans alone were responsible for wiping out all the full-sized woolly mammoths?

Some scientists suggest the climate also played a role.

It could be that climate conditions at the time shifted away from what woolly mammoths preferred and caused a large drop in their numbers.
This may have made the remaining mammoths more vulnerable to increasing hunting as the human population grew.

Australia’s own ‘mammoths’

Australia didn’t have woolly mammoths. They would have gotten very hot in those thick coats! But we did have giant animals known as megafauna, which went extinct between 5,000 and 17,000 years (depending on the species) after the First Peoples arrived.

Interestingly, we don’t find any reliable fossil evidence of these people hunting Australia’s ancient megafauna. There are no known kill sites, no cut marks on the animal bones, and no evidence of spear blades being lodged in ribs.

Was the megafauna’s disappearance related to human activity? Or did climate change play a part here as well?

The jury is still out on this one! But the more fossils we find, and the better we get at studying them, the closer we’ll come to understanding what happened all those years ago.

Read more:
Curious Kids: could dinosaurs evolve back into existence?

Kira Westaway receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. Curious Kids: did humans hunt and eat woolly mammoths or dinosaurs? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-did-humans-hunt-and-eat-woolly-mammoths-or-dinosaurs-190146