Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Crystal Abidin, Senior Research Fellow & ARC DECRA, Internet Studies, Curtin University, Curtin University

Memes might seem like they emerge “naturally”, circulated by like-minded social media users and independently generating momentum. But successful memes often don’t happen by accident.

I’ve spent the past two years studying the history and culture of “meme factories”, especially in Singapore and Malaysia.

Read more: Explainer: what are memes?

Meme factories are a coordinated network of creators or accounts who produce and host memes.

They can take the form of a single creator managing a network of accounts and platforms, or creators who collaborate informally in hobby groups, or groups working as a commercial business.

These factories will use strategic calculations to “go viral”, and at times seek to maximise commercial potential for sponsors.

Through this, they can have a huge influence in shaping social media. And – using the language of internet visual pop culture – meme factories can shift public opinion.

When meme factories were born

The first mention of meme factories seems to have been a slide in a 2010 TED talk by Christopher Poole, the founder of the controversial uncensored internet forum 4chan.

4chan, said Poole, was “completely raw, completely unfiltered”. He introduced his audience to the new internet phenomenon of “memes” coming out of the forum, including LOLcats and Rickrolling – the largest memes to have emerged in the 2000s.

Today, corporate meme factories systematically churn out posts to hundreds of millions of followers.

They commissioned artists to “live-GIF” the 2012 US Presidential Election debates in an assembly line of soft political content. They congregated on a closed Facebook group to decide who could “take credit” for a school shooting. They created sponsored political posts for Michael Bloomberg’s Presidential campaign.

On reddit’s gaming communities, activating a meme factory (sincerely or in jest) requires willing members to react with coordinated (and at times, inauthentic) action by flooding social media threads.

Amid K-pop fandoms on Twitter, meanwhile, K-pop idols who are prone to making awkward or funny expressions are also affectionately called meme factories, with their faces used as reaction images.

Three types of factories

In my research, I studied how memes can be weaponised to disseminate political and public service messages.

I have identified three types of factories:

Commercial meme factories are digital and news media companies whose core business is to incorporate advertising into original content.

For instance SGAG, owned by Singaporean parent company HEPMIL Media Group, has commissioned memes for various business partners, including promotions of radio stations, groceries and COVID-19 recovery initiatives.

Hobbyish niche meme factories, in contrast, are social media accounts curating content produced by a single person or small group of admins, based on specific vernaculars and aesthetics to interest their target group.

One example is the illustration collective highnunchicken, which creates original comics that are a critical — and at times cynical — commentary about social life in Singapore.

STcomments, meanwhile, collates screengrabs of “ridiculous” comments from the Facebook page of The Straits Times, calling out inane humour, racism, xenophobia and classism, and providing space for Singaporeans to push back against these sentiments.

The third type of meme factory is meme generator and aggregator chat groups – networks of volunteer members who collate, brainstorm and seed meme contents across platforms.

One of these is Memes n Dreams, where members use a Telegram chat group to share interesting memes, post their original memes, and brainstorm over “meme challenges” that call upon the group to create content to promote a specific message.

Factories during coronavirus

Meme factories work quickly to respond to the world around them, so it is no surprise in 2020 they have pivoted to providing relief or promoting public health messages around COVID-19.

Some factories launched new initiatives to harness their large follower base to promote and sustain small local businesses; others took to intentionally politicising their memes to challenge censorship laws in Singapore and Malaysia.

Factories turned memes into public service announcements to educate viewers on topics including hand hygiene and navigating misinformation.

They also focused on providing viewers with entertainment to lighten the mood during self-isolation.

Memes are highly contextual, and often require insider knowledge to decode.

Many memes that have gone viral during COVID-19 started out as satire and were shared by Millenials on Instagram or Facebook. As they spread, they evolved into misinformed folklore and misinformation, shared on WhatsApp by older generations who didn’t understand their satirical roots.

An early Facebook meme about how rubbing chilli fruits over your hands prevent COVID-19 (because the sting from the spice would burn and you would stop touching your face) very quickly evolved into a WhatsApp hoax saying the heat from chilli powder would kill COVID-19 viruses.

Memes can be orchestrated by savvy meme factories who operate behind the scenes; or by ordinary people engaging in democratic citizen feedback. Beyond the joy, laughs (and misinformation), memes are a crucial medium of public communication and persuasion.

– ref. Pivot to coronavirus: how meme factories are crafting public health messaging – https://theconversation.com/pivot-to-coronavirus-how-meme-factories-are-crafting-public-health-messaging-135557

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Virginia Barbour, Director, Australasian Open Access Strategy Group, Queensland University of Technology

Scientific publishing is not known for moving rapidly. In normal times, publishing new research can take months, if not years. Researchers prepare a first version of a paper on new findings and submit it to a journal, where it is often rejected, before being resubmitted to another journal, peer-reviewed, revised and, eventually, hopefully published.

All scientists are familiar with the process, but few love it or the time it takes. And even after all this effort – for which neither the authors, the peer reviewers, nor most journal editors, are paid – most research papers end up locked away behind expensive journal paywalls. They can only be read by those with access to funds or to institutions that can afford subscriptions.

What we can learn from SARS

The business-as-usual publishing process is poorly equipped to handle a fast-moving emergency. In the 2003 SARS outbreaks in Hong Kong and Toronto, for example, only 22% of the epidemiological studies on SARS were even submitted to journals during the outbreak. Worse, only 8% were accepted by journals and 7% published before the crisis was over.

Fortunately, SARS was contained in a few months, but perhaps it could have been contained even quicker with better sharing of research.

Fast-forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the situation could not be more different. A highly infectious virus spreading across the globe has made rapid sharing of research vital. In many ways, the publishing rulebook has been thrown out the window.

Read more: The hunt for a coronavirus cure is showing how science can change for the better

Preprints and journals

In this medical emergency, the first versions of papers (preprints) are being submitted onto preprint servers such as medRxiv and bioRxiv and made openly available within a day or two of submission. These preprints (now almost 7,000 papers on just these two sites) are being downloaded millions of times throughout the world.

However, exposing scientific content to the public before it has been peer-reviewed by experts increases the risk it will be misunderstood. Researchers need to engage with the public to improve understanding of how scientific knowledge evolves and to provide ways to question scientific information constructively.

Read more: Researchers use ‘pre-prints’ to share coronavirus results quickly. But that can backfire

Traditional journals have also changed their practices. Many have made research relating to the pandemic immediately available, although some have specified the content will be locked back up once the pandemic is over. For example, a website of freely available COVID-19 research set up by major publisher Elsevier states:

These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the Elsevier COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Publication at journals has also sped up, though it cannot compare with the phenomenal speed of preprint servers. Interestingly, it seems posting a preprint speeds up the peer-review process when the paper is ultimately submitted to a journal.

Open data

What else has changed in the pandemic? What has become clear is the power of aggregation of research. A notable initiative is the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a huge, freely available public dataset of research (now more than 130,000 articles) whose development was led by the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Researchers can not only read this research but also reuse it, which is essential to make the most of the research. The reuse is made possible by two specific technologies: permanent unique identifiers to keep track of research papers, and machine-readable conditions (licences) on the research papers, which specify how that research can be used and reused.

These are Creative Commons licences like those that cover projects such as Wikipedia and The Conversation, and they are vital for maximising reuse. Often the reading and reuse is done now at least in a first scan by machines, and research that is not marked as being available for use and reuse may not even be seen, let alone used.

What has also become important is the need to provide access to data behind the research papers. In a fast-moving field of research not every paper receives detailed scrutiny (especially of underlying data) before publication – but making the data available ensures claims can be validated.

If the data can’t be validated, the research should be treated with extreme caution – as happened to a swiftly retracted paper about the effects of hydroxychloroquine published by The Lancet in May.

Read more: Not just available, but also useful: we must keep pushing to improve open access to research

Overnight changes, decades in the making

While opening up research literature during the pandemic may seem to have happened virtually overnight, these changes have been decades in the making. There were systems and processes in place developed over many years that could be activated when the need arose.

The international licences were developed by the Creative Commons project, which began in 2001. Advocates have been challenging the dominance of commercial journal subscription models since the early 2000s, and open access journals and other publishing routes have been growing globally since then.

Even preprints are not new. Although more recently platforms for preprints have been growing across many disciplines, their origin is in physics back in 1991.

Lessons from the pandemic

So where does publishing go after the pandemic? As in many areas of our lives, there are some positives to take forward from what became a necessity in the pandemic.

The problem with publishing during the 2003 SARS emergency wasn’t the fault of the journals – the system was not in place then for mass, rapid open publishing. As an editor at The Lancet at the time, I vividly remember we simply could not publish or even meaningfully process every paper we received.

But now, almost 20 years later, the tools are in place and this pandemic has made a compelling case for open publishing. Though there are initiatives ongoing across the globe, there is still a lack of coordinated, long term, high-level commitment and investment, especially by governments, to support key open policies and infrastructure.

We are not out of this pandemic yet, and we know that there are even bigger challenges in the form of climate change around the corner. Making it the default that research is open so it can be built on is a crucial step to ensure we can address these problems collaboratively.

– ref. Science publishing has opened up during the coronavirus pandemic. It won’t be easy to keep it that way – https://theconversation.com/science-publishing-has-opened-up-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic-it-wont-be-easy-to-keep-it-that-way-142984

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thalia Anthony, Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney

The intensification of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US in recent months has led to radical reform and action.

The police officers responsible for the killing of George Floyd were all charged with serious offences, including one with second-degree murder. The city of Minneapolis voted to replace its police force with a “new system of public safety”, while other cities have slashed their police budgets.

Demands for judicial and police reform in Australia

The BLM and Stop First Nations Deaths in Custody protests across Australia since early June have similarly called for charges against police officers and prison guards responsible for deaths in custody, as well as an end to racialised police violence.

Another major protest is scheduled for today in Sydney amid warnings from Prime Minister Scott Morrison that demonstrators would be breaking the law by attending after organisers lost their appeal to overturn the Supreme Court ruling blocking it.

Organisers offered to call it off if Premier Gladys Berejiklian committed to an investigation into the 2015 death of Aboriginal prisoner David Dungay Jr.

The co-chair of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, Nerita Waight, said last month,

we cannot be silent while police violence is unchecked and continues to kill our people.

There has also been a push to implement the 339 recommendations of the almost 30-year-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which call for the use of arrest and imprisonment as a last resort, safer police and prison practices, independent investigations into deaths in custody and Aboriginal self-determination.

In recent decades, however, governments have defunded many First Nations organisations and programs that would enable successful implementation of these recommendations.

Read more: Can you socially distance at a Black Lives Matter rally in Australia and New Zealand? How to protest in a coronavirus pandemic

Small victories in recent months

While there has been no movement on these larger structural issues just yet, the BLM protests have resulted in smaller victories.

This month, the South Australian government committed to funding a custody notification service to ensure all Aboriginal people who enter police custody have access to a call to the Aboriginal Legal Services.

This service was recommended by the royal commission and has saved First Nations lives in other states and territories.

Another victory has been the initiation of a NSW parliamentary inquiry into how First Nations deaths in custody are investigated.

Ken Wyatt, the federal Indigenous affairs minister, has also met with Aboriginal peak organisations to discuss incorporating justice targets in the new Closing the Gap measures.

Yet, these targets have not yet reined in police powers and the discriminatory over-policing of First Nations adults and children.

Yet, violence against First Nations peoples continues

Overwhelmingly, the Commonwealth and state governments have responded to the BLM protests in Australia with condemnation.

Police commissioners and political leaders in several states have sought to block protests to prevent the spread of coronavirus, threatening arrests and issuing fines.

NSW Police Minister David Elliott said of the move to push ahead with today’s rally,

it’s actually arrogance and it’s probably the most dangerous act that anybody could do during a pandemic is organise a mass gathering.

Government leaders say they understand the “cause” and support the BLM movement, but not the means.

Yet, they still have not responded to the movement’s demands for mitigating police violence against First Nations people.

In fact, when police attacks on Aboriginal people have been captured on phone cameras and televised in recent months, they have been defended by the police, commissioners and ministers.

There have been at least five First Nations deaths in custody this year, with two in the last month alone.

There are also increasing concerns for the lives of First Nations people in prisons as COVID-19 has begun to spread in institutions and youth detention centres in Victoria.

Read more: ‘I can’t breathe!’ Australia must look in the mirror to see our own deaths in custody

What it will take to bring systemic change

Urgent and systemic change is required to claw back decades of extended police powers in NSW under the Law Enforcement Powers and Responsibilities Act and redress the lack of accountability for the 438 First Nations deaths in custody since 1991 and the 99 deaths investigated by the royal commission.

However, there are internal and external factors preventing this type of structural change.

On the one hand, the police have considerable power in Australia to influence decision-making at the parliamentary level and the way the tabloid media report on policing. The police unions also run active campaigns to defend officers charged in deaths in custody cases.

On the other hand, there has been a national silence about racialised police violence and deaths in custody of First Nations people. Gomeroi scholar Alison Whittaker describes this silence as embedded in “colonisation and white supremacy”.

The BLM movement has stimulated critical discussions in Australia on racial injustice and how First Nations people have challenged and resisted racialised policing and custodial practices.

It has also opened up conversations on the historic role of the police in the assimilation, enslavement and massacre of First Nations peoples. These practices have disrupted First Nations cultures, laws, families, connections to Country, languages, health and well-being.

This is precisely why a holistic, nationwide truth-telling process is so critical to hold the police to account for enforcing policies to eliminate First Nations people – in the past and today. We must decolonise our legal system to remove assumptions about the central role of the police in managing First Nations communities.

Read more: Despite 432 Indigenous deaths in custody since 1991, no one has ever been convicted. Racist silence and complicity are to blame

Truth-telling is not a one-off event, but a process of ongoing exchange. This requires reforming the education system: for instance, by emphasising diversity and cultural competency in the law and justice programs that produce the next generation of police and legal professionals. It also requires a commitment to independent investigations for deaths in custody and police violence.

Truth-telling can be a mechanism for structural change and reparations, as well. This requires resetting police strategies to reduce their disproportionate surveillance of First Nations people and ensuring police accountability.

Enacting policies, such as the NSW Police Aboriginal Strategic Direction 2018-2023 to improve relationships between officers and Aboriginal communities, is meaningless if Aboriginal people are still being disproportionately stopped and searched as part of police detection targets.

In the absence of truth-telling processes, police accountability and government commitments to de-centre the police from the lives of First Nations people, the BLM street protests will continue. It’s the only way for First Nations people and their allies to be heard, to educate and to elevate calls for justice.

– ref. Instead of demonising Black Lives Matter protesters, leaders must act on their calls for racial justice – https://theconversation.com/instead-of-demonising-black-lives-matter-protesters-leaders-must-act-on-their-calls-for-racial-justice-143269

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David King, Senior Lecturer in General Practice, The University of Queensland

We’re told to stay home if we feel unwell during the COVID-19 pandemic. But what if your sniffles, sore throat or cough aren’t infectious? What if they’re caused by hayfever or another allergic reaction? You may be doing a lot more isolating than you need to.

Although it can sometimes be challenging, there are ways to tell apart respiratory symptoms caused by a virus and those caused by an allergy. This approach may help prevent Australia’s COVID-19 testing capacity from being overwhelmed.

Read more: Health Check: what’s the right way to blow your nose?

What causes hayfever?

Around one in five (21%) of Australians suffer seasonal allergic rhinitis – more commonly known as hayfever. If each of these experiences a few episodes of hayfever annually, that would require between 10 million and 20 million COVID-19 tests to exclude infectious causes from allergies alone.

Hayfever has many of the same symptoms as viral respiratory infections, such as colds and mild flu-like illnesses, as well as COVID-19. This is because rhinitis refers to inflammation of the nose, which has many causes.

Hayfever is caused by your nose and/or eyes coming into contact with microscopic allergens in the environment, such as pollens (from grasses, weeds or trees), dust mites, moulds and animal hair.

Your immune system identifies these airborne substances as harmful and produces antibodies against them. The next time you come into contact with them, these antibodies signal your immune system to release chemicals such as histamine into your bloodstream, causing the inflammation that leads to hayfever symptoms.

Hayfever traditionally has a seasonal spike in late winter and spring, when pollen counts are highest from flowering trees and grass seeds.

But in many areas of Australia, there may be more hayfever in autumn, due to two common sources of allergies: moulds, and an autumn spike in indoor dust mites.

A warming climate has also been linked with increased levels of pollens and environmental allergens, and a rise in asthma and hayfever severity.

What are the symptoms?

Whether you have seasonal hayfever, longer-term perennial or vasomotor rhinitis), or a viral infection, you’re likely to have similar cold and flu-like symptoms.

You’ll have either a runny or stuffy nose. Other symptoms include sore throat; sneezing; cough; post-nasal drip – nasal mucus going down the back of your throat; and fatigue.

But there are two classic hayfever symptoms that can help you tell allergies and viruses apart. Hayfever can cause you to have an itchy nose or throat; and when it’s more severe it can cause swollen, blue-coloured skin under the eyes (called allergic shiners).

Can we tell them apart?

Fever, sore muscles or muscle weakness

Hayfever, despite its name, does not cause increased body temperature. Flu-like illnesses do cause fever, and sore muscles (myalgia), malaise and fatigue.

Allergies such as hayfever may cause a slight malaise without the other symptoms, probably due to a stuffy nose and poor sleep.

Snoring, dark circles under the eyes and sleep

The nasal congestion from hayfever and other types of rhinitis often increases the potential to snore during sleep. And if you have those dark circles under the eyes, that’s likely down to chronic poor-quality sleep, as nasal congestion and snoring worsen.

Itchy nose and eyes, plus sneezing

An itchy nose and eyes are classic hayfever symptoms, as is intense, prolonged sneezing.

You can sneeze with a cold or flu, but usually only in the first few days of the infection.

Longer-lasting symptoms

Allergic reactions tend to come and go from day to day, or even from hour to hour, particularly if some environments are the source of the offending allergens. Perennial rhinitis can be present for weeks or months, far longer than any viral cold or flu.

It is rare for a cold to last more than a week, as the body has fought off the virus by that time. Exceptions to this are the cough and sinus symptoms that were triggered by the virus but persist for other reasons.

Antihistamines

If your nasal symptoms improve with antihistamine medication, then you likely have an allergy or hayfever. Antihistamines do not alleviate symptoms of the common cold.

However, if your allergic reaction is more severe, antihistamines alone, even in larger doses than stated on the packet, may be insufficient to fully control symptoms, and a variety of nasal sprays may have to be added to the treatment.

Read more: Coronavirus or just a common cold? What to do when your child gets sick this winter

Why do we need to differentiate viral from allergic causes?

In “normal” times we usually treat the symptoms of viral infections. However, amid the COVID-19 outbreak we need a clearer picture of what might be causing our symptoms so we get tested when it matters, and not for undiagnosed hayfever.

But it’s not easy to tell viral and allergic rhinitis apart. People with hayfever also get viral colds and flus, further complicating the picture.

If you think your symptoms may be due to allergy, it is safe to try a double dose of non-sedating antihistamine. Sedating antihistamines should be avoided in young children, and taken with caution in adults. If your symptoms improve significantly within an hour, your symptoms are likely hayfever or another allergic reaction.

However, if your symptoms are different to previous hayfever episodes, or your symptoms don’t improve after taking an antihistamine, that’s another matter. Stay at home until you can get tested for COVID-19.

Anyone with only partially treated and controlled hayfever will need to realise that your sniffles and sneezes are going to be distressing to your fellow commuter, diner or shopper. So you may need some medical assistance to more fully manage your allergic condition.

– ref. Sniffles, sneezing and cough? How to tell if it’s a simple allergy rather than The Virus – https://theconversation.com/sniffles-sneezing-and-cough-how-to-tell-if-its-a-simple-allergy-rather-than-the-virus-139657

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John French, Atmospheric physicist, University of Tasmania

While greenhouse gases are warming Earth’s surface, they’re also causing rapid cooling far above us, at the edge of space. In fact, the upper atmosphere about 90km above Antarctica is cooling at a rate ten times faster than the average warming at the planet’s surface.

Our new research has precisely measured this cooling rate, and revealed an important discovery: a new four-year temperature cycle in the polar atmosphere. The results, based on 24 years of continuous measurements by Australian scientists in Antarctica, were published in two papers this month.

The findings show Earth’s upper atmosphere, in a region called the “mesosphere”, is extremely sensitive to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. This provides a new opportunity to monitor how well government interventions to reduce emissions are working.

Our project also monitors the spectacular natural phenomenon known as “noctilucent” or “night shining” clouds. While beautiful, the more frequent occurrence of these clouds is considered a bad sign for climate change.

Studying the ‘airglow’

Since the 1990s, scientists at Australia’s Davis research station have taken 600,000 measurements of the temperatures in the upper atmosphere above Antarctica. We’ve done this using sensitive optical instruments called spectrometers.

These instruments analyse the infrared glow radiating from so-called hydroxyl molecules, which exist in a thin layer about 87km above Earth’s surface. This “airglow” allows us to measure the temperature in this part of the atmosphere.

Our results show that in the high atmosphere above Antarctica, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases do not have the warming effect they do in the lower atmosphere (by colliding with other molecules). Instead the excess energy is radiated to space, causing a cooling effect.

Our new research more accurately determines this cooling rate. Over 24 years, the upper atmosphere temperature has cooled by about 3℃, or 1.2℃ per decade. That is about ten times greater than the average warming in the lower atmosphere – about 1.3℃ over the past century.

Untangling natural signals

Rising greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the temperature changes we recorded, but a number of other influences are also at play. These include the seasonal cycle (warmer in winter, colder in summer) and the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle (which involves quieter and more intense solar periods) in the mesosphere.

One challenge of the research was untangling all these merged “signals” to work out the extent to which each was driving the changes we observed.

Surprisingly in this process, we discovered a new natural cycle not previously identified in the polar upper atmosphere. This four-year cycle which we called the Quasi-Quadrennial Oscillation (QQO), saw temperatures vary by 3-4℃ in the upper atmosphere.

Discovering this cycle was like stumbling across a gold nugget in a well-worked claim. More work is needed to determine its origin and full importance.

But the finding has big implications for climate modelling. The physics that drive this cycle are unlikely to be included in global models currently used to predict climate change. But a variation of 3-4℃ every four years is a large signal to ignore.

We don’t yet know what’s driving the oscillation. But whatever the answer, it also seems to affect the winds, sea surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure and sea ice concentrations around Antarctica.

‘Night shining’ clouds

Our research also monitors how cooling temperatures are affecting the occurrence of noctilucent or “night shining” clouds.

Noctilucent clouds are very rare – from Australian Antarctic stations we’ve recorded about ten observations since 1998. They occur at an altitude of about 80km in the polar regions during summer. You can only see them from the ground when the sun is below the horizon during twilight, but still shining on the high atmosphere.

Read more: Humans are encroaching on Antarctica’s last wild places, threatening its fragile biodiversity

The clouds appear as thin, pale blue, wavy filaments. They are comprised of ice crystals and require temperatures around minus 130℃ to form. While impressive, noctilucent clouds are considered a “canary in the coalmine” of climate change. Further cooling of the upper atmosphere as a result of greenhouse gas emissions will likely lead to more frequent noctilucent clouds.

There is already some evidence the clouds are becoming brighter and more widespread in the Northern Hemisphere.

Measuring change

Human-induced climate change threatens to alter radically the conditions for life on our planet. Over the next several decades – less than one lifetime – the average global air temperature is expected to increase, bringing with it sea level rise, weather extremes and changes to ecosystems across the world.

Long term monitoring is important to measure change and test and calibrate ever more complex climate models. Our results contribute to a global network of observations coordinated by the Network for Detection of Mesospheric Change for this purpose.

The accuracy of these models is critical to determining whether government and other interventions to curb climate change are indeed effective.

Read more: Anatomy of a heatwave: how Antarctica recorded a 20.75°C day last month

– ref. Carbon emissions are chilling the atmosphere 90km above Antarctica, at the edge of space – https://theconversation.com/carbon-emissions-are-chilling-the-atmosphere-90km-above-antarctica-at-the-edge-of-space-143271

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marilyn Campbell, Professor Faculty of Education, School of Cultural and Professional Learning, Queensland University of Technology

How would you answer the following question?

At what age can a child be fined or imprisoned for their actions in Australia?

• Any age, if she/he can differentiate right from wrong

• ten years old

• 14 years old

• 16 years old

• I don’t know

Our survey found only 7.2% of teachers and 5.8% of students knew the right answer — that criminal sanctions could be imposed on a ten year old.

Australian state and federal attorney-generals will meet this week to discuss lifting the age of criminal responsibility from 10 years old.

There were reportedly almost 600 children aged 10 to 13 in detention in Australia last financial year. More than 60% were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander children.

As part of a larger study, we surveyed 250 Year 10 teachers and 533 Year 10 students (aged 15-16 years) in 2015 from three states in Australia (South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland). The students and teachers were from urban and regional areas in government and independent schools.

One issue we were interested in was student and teacher understanding about the age of criminal responsibility in their state.

Read more: Don Dale royal commission demands sweeping change – is there political will to make it happen?

A significant proportion of teachers (36.8%) believed 16 was the minimum age of criminal responsibility. And 32.8% said they did not know the answer.

Nearly 30% of Year 10 students (29.8%) said criminal responsibility was possible at any age when the child could differentiate right from wrong. And 22.7% answered it was at 16 years old. The survey relevant to this article has not yet been published.

The age of a criminal

Across all Australian states and territories, a child must be at least ten years old age before they can be held criminally responsible for their actions.

It is important to acknowledge that youth justice principles (enshrined in legislation) in different states and territories hold that detention in custody is a sanction of last resort.

If a child is aged between ten and 14, there is a presumption (that can be rebutted) that they will not be criminally responsible, unless the prosecution can prove the child had capacity to know they should not do the act.

Read more: Ten-year-olds do not belong in detention. Why Australia must raise the age of criminal responsibility

The rationale behind a minimum age of criminal responsibility is that children of a certain age have not developed a full appreciation of right and wrong behaviour, and the consequences that flow from it.

Introducing them to the criminal justice system and subjecting them to criminal sanction would be unfair in these circumstances.

Most teachers and students don’t know

Our survey showed both Year 10 teachers and students were largely ignorant about the age of criminal responsibility in their state.

These misunderstandings are happening at a time of strong calls to increase the minimum age of criminal responsibility. The Australian Lawyers Alliance, Law Council of Australia, Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of Physicians have all called for an increase to the minimum age of criminal responsibility in Australia.

Raising the minimum age of responsibility (as an irrebuttable presumption) from ten to 14 would be consistent with recommendations made by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

While the United Kingdom also has a minimum age of ten, most European nations have a minimum age of 14 years or higher.

Why does it matter?

Criminal law is designed to educate people about, and deter them from, committing crimes. Ignorance of the law is not a defence to a criminal charge, so school students over the age of ten have a vested interested in understanding how the criminal law (and possible sanctions) might apply to them.

School staff (in their pastoral role) also have a responsibility to teach students about criminal responsibility. The teacher-student relationship in formative years has the capacity to mould behaviour in social ways.

A teacher cannot impart knowledge about the criminal law that they themselves do not have.

Read more: A new bill keeping 10 year olds out of jail is a good start, but it needs to go further

Schools can be a site for criminal behaviour. Section 60e of The Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), for instance, specifically prohibits the assault, stalking, harassment or intimidation of any school staff or student.

Students engaged in cyberbullying could be charged under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 with using a telecommunication service to menace, threaten or cause offence.

Staff and students need to be aware of these laws, and their potential criminal liability pursuant to these laws.

While many organisations are calling for a change to the minimum age of criminal responsibility in Australia, the fact there is even a need for change will come as a surprise to many schoolteachers and students.

Pre-service teachers need to learn these basic facts about the legal system as it applies to their students during their university course. And professional development needs to be provided for practising teachers.

– ref. More than 90% of Year 10 teachers don’t know the age of criminal responsibility in Australia – https://theconversation.com/more-than-90-of-year-10-teachers-dont-know-the-age-of-criminal-responsibility-in-australia-132855

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warren Hogan, Industry Professor, University of Technology Sydney

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic surge in “mum and dad” retail investors playing stock exchanges across the world.

In Australia, retail investors were net buyers of A$9 billion of Australian stocks between late February and mid-May, according to corporate advisory firm Vesparum Capital. In contrast, the professional institutional investors – superannuation funds and the like – were net sellers of A$11 billion of stock.

The amateurs are therefore likely responsible for most of the market’s rebound since its March 23 low.

An Australian Securities and Investments Commission analysis of retail investor trading shows from February 24 (the day after the market peaked) to April 3, retail investors’ daily buying and selling of stocks was double that of the months before (A$3.3 billion to A$1.6 billion). More than 20% of that activity was from new or reactivated accounts.

The securities regulator has expressed concern this rush of amateurs into the stock market is a train wreck waiting to happen. Its report notes retail investors are, on average, “not proficient” at predicting short-term market movements.

While markets generally recover over the long run and tend to grow with economic fundamentals, short-term trading and poor market timing can be a major risk for investors in volatile markets. Therefore, retail investors should be wary of trying to “play the market” for short-term price movements by day trading.

COVID and risky behaviour

There are several possible explanations for why people are taking a risk on the stock market.

Some might see this as an opportunity to get into the market at a low point, with a view to long-term gains. Others might be out of work and looking to “day trade” – buying and selling shares on short time frames – as a source of income. Yet others may be taking the opportunity of working from home to watch the market through the day.

But another explanation is also worth considering. This is an alternative to gambling. So while it’s risky, it’s arguably no riskier than sports betting, casinos or poker machines.

Read more: Why stocks are soaring even as coronavirus cases surge, at least 20 million remain unemployed and the US sinks into recession

Risk tolerance

This theory (that this is gambling by another means) explains why the appetite for risk among retail investors has ballooned when the natural response to severe economic uncertainty would be to reduce trading.

The financial risk individuals are happy to tolerate – known as financial risk tolerance – is mostly determined by personality. A person’s risk appetite is unlikely to change substantially over their life, even with changing economic conditions.

Most people, however, are adept at making different risk decisions with money allocated to different “accounts”. In behavioural finance this is known as “mental accounting”.

How they think about and use their different accounts isn’t necessarily “rational”. For example, someone might be very prudent with money from their regular budget account while spending frivolously from a discretionary account.

So extreme risk-taking can occur when opportunities arise despite a person generally being risk-averse.

Gambling trends

In the first three months of the year, pollster Roy Morgan estimates about half of all Australians gambled in some form.

Its figures indicated 8.4 million adults spent about A$625 million on lottery tickets, 2.4 million spent about A$2.2 billion on poker machines, and 2.1 million spent about A$1 billion on betting – horses, sports etc.

Read more: With pokies shut down, coronavirus stress could drive more people to reckless online gambling

In Australia, the closure of pubs, clubs and casinos during periods of lockdown has severely curbed these forms of gambling. Between late March and late April, for example, the Alliance for Gambling Reform estimates gamblers saved more than $1 billion on poker machines. The cessation of many sporting events has also reduced betting opportunities.

Pros and cons for society

Does this imply people see the financial markets as just another form of gambling? If so, is this necessarily a bad thing?

If a significant number of people are seriously looking to “day trading” as a way to make money in the short term, the securities regulator’s concerns are valid. There is a good chance most will lose money.

But if these new investors are driven by their interest in gambling, substituting financial markets for poker machines and sports betting, then surely most must be prepared for losses. Very few gamblers are consistent winners from betting on games of chance or sports.

Read more: There’s another health crisis looming – what happens when the pokies switch back on?

In this context there may not be so much to worry about – albeit acknowledging a small percentage will be “problem investors”, losing more than they can afford.

Compared to the almost certain likelihood of losses on gambling, those rushing into the stock market might just find it more rewarding than casinos, sports betting or pokies.

– ref. Gambling on the stock market: are retail investors even playing to win? – https://theconversation.com/gambling-on-the-stock-market-are-retail-investors-even-playing-to-win-143248

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Peel, Professor of Environmental and Climate Law, University of Melbourne

As the world warms, the value of “safe” investments might be at risk from inadequate climate change policies. This prospect is raised by a world-first climate change case, filed in the federal court last week.

Katta O’Donnell – a 23-year-old law student from Melbourne – is suing the Australian government for failing to disclose climate change risks to investors in Australia’s sovereign bonds.

Read more: These young Queenslanders are taking on Clive Palmer’s coal company and making history for human rights

Sovereign bonds involve loans of money from investors to governments for a set period at a fixed interest rate. They’re usually thought to be the safest form of investment. For example, many Australians are invested in sovereign bonds through their superannuation funds.

But as climate change presents major risks to our economy as well as the environment, O’Donnell’s claim is a wake-up call to the government that it can no longer bury its head in the sand when it comes to this vulnerability.

O’Donnell’s arguments

O’Donnell argues Australia’s poor climate policies – ranked among the lowest in the industrialised world – put the economy at risk from climate change. She says climate-related risks should be properly disclosed in information documents to sovereign bond investors.

O’Donnell’s claim alleges that by failing to disclose this information, the federal government breaches its legal duty. It alleges the government has engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct, and government officials breached their duty of care and diligence.

This is a standard similar to that owed by Australian company directors. Analysis from leading barristers indicates that directors who fail to consider climate risks could be found liable for breaching their duty of care and diligence.

O’Donnell argues government officials providing information to investors in sovereign bonds should meet the same benchmark.

Climate change as a financial risk

Under climate change, the world is already experiencing physical impacts, such as intense droughts and unprecedented bushfires. But we’re also experiencing “transition impacts” from steps countries take to prevent further warming, such as transitioning away from coal.

Combined, these impacts of climate change create financial risks. For example, by damaging property, assets and operations, or by reducing demand for fossil fuels with the risk coal mines and reserves become stranded assets.

This thinking is becoming mainstream among Australian economists. As the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s Geoff Summerhayes put it:

When a central bank, a prudential regulator and a conduct regulator, with barely a hipster beard or hemp shirt between them, start warning that climate change is a financial risk, it’s clear that position is now orthodox economic thinking.

Why safe investments are under threat

Sovereign bonds are a long-term investment. Katta O’Donnell’s bonds, for example, will mature in 2050. These time-frames dovetail with scientific projections about when the world will see severe impacts and costs from climate change.

And climate change is likely to hit Australia particularly hard. We’ve seen the beginning of this in the summer’s ferocious bushfires, which cost the economy more than A$100 billion.

Read more: With costs approaching $100 billion, the fires are Australia’s costliest natural disaster

Over time, climate risks may impact sovereign bonds and affect Australia’s financial position in a number of ways. For example, by impacting GDP when the productive capacity of the economy is reduced by severe fires or floods.

Frequent climate-related disasters could also hit foreign exchange rates, causing fluctuations of the Australian dollar, as well as putting Australia’s AAA credit rating at risk. These risks would reduce if the government took climate change more seriously.

Already, some investors are voting with their feet. Last November, Sweden’s central bank announced it had sold Western Australian and Queensland bonds, stating Australia is “not known for good climate work”.

Unprecedented, but not novel

O’Donnell’s case against the federal government is an unprecedented climate case, even if its arguments are not novel.

Australia has been a “hotspot” for climate litigation in recent years, but the O’Donnell case is the first to sue the Australian government in an Australian court.

Previous cases suing governments have often raised human rights, such as the high-profile Urgenda case in 2015 against the Dutch government – the first case in the world establishing governments owe their citizens a legal duty to prevent climate change.

The O’Donnell case is also unique in its focus on sovereign bonds. But cases alleging misleading climate-related disclosures are themselves not new.

In Australia, shareholders sued the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in 2017 for failing to disclose climate change-related risks in its 2016 annual report. The case was settled after the bank agreed to improve disclosures in subsequent reports.

Read more: Climate change is a financial risk, according to a lawsuit against the CBA

In another headline-making case, 23-year-old council worker Mark McVeigh is taking his superannuation fund, Retail Employees Superannuation Trust, to court seeking similar disclosures.

The O’Donnell case builds on this line of precedent, extending it to disclosures in bond information documents. As such, courts will likely take it seriously.

What precedent might it set?

If the O’Donnell case is successful it could establish the need for disclosure of climate-related financial risks for a range of investments.

At a minimum, a ruling in O’Donnell’s favour may compel the Australian government to disclose climate-related risks in its information documents for investors. This might make people think twice about how they choose to invest their money, especially as investors seek to “green” their portfolios.

It could also give rise to litigation using the same legal theory in sovereign bond disclosure claims against other governments, much in the way that the Urgenda case has spawned copycat proceedings from Belgium to Canada.

Whether the case provides the impetus for further government action to improve the effectiveness of Australia’s climate policies remains to be seen.

Still, it’s clear climate-related financial risks have entered the corporate boardroom. With this case, they’ve now come knocking at the government’s door.

– ref. ‘A wake-up call’: why this student is suing the government over the financial risks of climate change – https://theconversation.com/a-wake-up-call-why-this-student-is-suing-the-government-over-the-financial-risks-of-climate-change-143359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Judith Armstrong, Honorary Fellow of the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne

In our Art for Trying Times series, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.

That we are all spending more time at home these days goes without saying; for those of us in Melbourne, our four walls feel restraining when most ways of leaving them are proscribed. So let me persuade you of a marvellously legitimate alternative to breaking the law, sorting your messy passwords, or rearranging your higgledy-piggledy books into some kind of order. It’s called vicarious escape.

Oddly enough, if my bookshelves had been in proper order I might have missed out on this experience. During the first lockdown I was looking for inspiration among the over-familiar titles when I discovered a book I had bought but not read, and then forgotten I owned. In triumph I carried it as far as the couch, stretched out (the sun was streaming through the windows), and turned to page one.

This was not a cop-out, you understand, for the book was Literary Criticism. It would be instructive, even demanding; it could almost count as work. It was a book born of impressive knowledge but written in a lively, deceptively simple style; it offered new and clever perceptions about a writer of whom you might think everything had long been said. It plunged me back into the beloved novels of Jane Austen, and I read it with delight.

Read more: Friday essay: the revolutionary vision of Jane Austen

By the time I had reluctantly reached the last page, the next lockdown was imminent, and I rejoiced that one effect of my excellent discovery was to know exactly what I must do next. I would reread one, two, or all of Jane Austen’s major works, beginning with Sense and Sensibility, the first of the six to enthral an unsuspecting 19th century English audience.

Published anonymously in 1811, its first run had sold out. What I did not anticipate was the light this book could throw on life under COVID-19.

The novel concerns two sisters, Elinor and Marianne. The contrasting natures of the two girls provides Austen’s title, but there is also a younger daughter, Margaret, and an older stepbrother by the mother’s first marriage whose new wife forces the mother and daughters out of the large family house into a cottage in a small village in another county.

It is this move that puts the sisters in a situation that has parallels with ours. The tiny village of Barton could offer no social life. A little like people obliged to work from home, the girls found themselves with no external stimuli, other than Nature, with which to fuel their inner thoughts and mutual exchanges.

Read more: Turning to the Code 46 soundtrack: bearing solitude in a time of sickness

Thrown back on their own resources then, the two older sisters work on their existing accomplishments. Elinor sketches and paints, Marianne practises her piano-playing; they walk daily, sew and read. Their every activity seems to the modern reader almost weirdly extended: a short stroll will occupy two hours; Marianne, at least in intention, will read for six.

Now that lack of time is no longer an excuse, we might even think of emulating them, but there is one great difference (at least for me). Each sister has in the other, on tap, a daily companion who provides companionship and stimulation. There is no mention of boredom or restlessness; depression results only from romantic mishaps. How? Their neighbour Sir John turns up, some social life takes off, and Marianne falls in love. Well, this is a novel.

Literary isolates

I briefly put aside the Dashwood sisters to consider darker examples of literary isolates. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man leapt to mind. He lives utterly alone in a basement; his first words announce that he is “a sick man… a spiteful man … an unattractive man” whose liver is diseased. As a solitary he qualifies, but he’s hardly an example to follow.

Back to Jane. But could even she help someone without a sister? Someone whose props, given the age we live in, are texts and emails, both of which seem determined to shorten our exchanges. “U?” is all we need say to seek an opinion by SMS.

The phone seems currently the only resource by which we Melburnians could copy the sisters’ ability to introduce, develop, and thoroughly draw out a conversation. But even that we can’t count on. Usually our life-saving story isn’t nearly finished before the friend we’ve rung rudely interrupts with what she wants to say.

No. The only escape must be vicarious, and preferably delivered by the divine Jane, with her potential Mr Rights completely taken in by her unscrupulous Miss Wrongs; where Incomes (salaries are for the middle classes, wages for the servants) can suddenly become desperately insufficient or dangerously excessive; where heart-stopping vicissitudes abound. All related in elegant prose that flashes with pointy wit and lashes with quiet disdain.

The lockdown does permit you to lose yourself in a beguiling other world – if you have a Jane Austen on hand.

– ref. Sense and Sensibility in a time of coronavirus: vicarious escape with Jane Austen – https://theconversation.com/sense-and-sensibility-in-a-time-of-coronavirus-vicarious-escape-with-jane-austen-142817

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Holly Seale, Senior Lecturer, UNSW

Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton said recently there were good reasons why some people can’t wear a mask:

A number […] are legitimately not able to wear masks so please don’t vilify individuals or don’t make the assumption they are simply stubborn. There will be people with medical, behavioural, psychological reasons […] certainly don’t make an assumption that they should be the subject of your ire.

He commented on the first day wearing a mask in public in Greater Melbourne and Mitchell Shire became mandatory, except for those without a valid reason.

Read more: Which mask works best? We filmed people coughing and sneezing to find out

It’s easy to jump to conclusions

As wearing a mask in public becomes more common in Australia, either because it’s mandatory where you live or because you choose to wear one, it might be tempting to assume people who don’t wear masks are irresponsible, misguided or selfish.

You might also question why you need to wear a mask when others don’t.

But some people find wearing a mask difficult or distressing. So, to reduce the risk of inflammatory or inappropriate comments being made, we need to understand some of the reasons why:

• autism — some people with autism spectrum disorders find covering the nose and mouth with fabric can cause sensory overload, feelings of panic, and extreme anxiety

• disability — some people with a disability can find wearing a mask difficult if they cannot remove one from their face without help. For example, someone with cerebral palsy may not be able to tie the strings or put the elastic loops of a face mask over the ears, due to limited mobility

• post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety or claustrophobia — people with these conditions can find wearing a mask terrifying and may not be able to stay calm or function while wearing one

• hearing impairment — people who are deaf or hard of hearing, or those who care for or interact with someone who is hearing-impaired, rely on lipreading to communicate. So wearing a face mask can be a challenge

• facial deformities or physical trauma — may be incompatible with wearing a mask.

There are legitimate safety concerns

This is not a list of exemptions. Nor should we assume all people who fall into these categories can’t wear masks.

In some situations, wearing a face covering may worsen a physical or mental health condition, lead to a medical emergency, or be a significant safety concern.

In the United States and United Kingdom there have been reports of people with disabilities being challenged, threatened with arrest, or excluded from retail and food outlets for not wearing a mask.

Conversely, there have been incidents in which anti-mask activists have feigned disability to avoid having to wear a mask in public. This could magnify scepticism and mistrust of people with legitimate, but potentially not obvious, reasons for not having to wear a mask.

While there are people who genuinely cannot wear masks, for others, it may just take extra time, resources, adaptions, alternatives and support to feel comfortable wearing one.

Read more: 13 insider tips on how to wear a mask without your glasses fogging up, getting short of breath or your ears hurting

That might involve a bit of trial and error before finding a mask that fits well or is made from a comfortable fabric. Others may be able to wear a mask, but for only a short time.

There are online resources with useful tips and strategies to reduce the stress and challenges associated with using a mask or face shield. However, governments also need to ensure these resources are accessible to the people who need them, their family and carers.

How about breathing problems?

The Victorian government includes people with breathing problems on its list of valid medical exemptions for not wearing a mask in public.

But this is a grey area. We don’t have evidence-based guidelines for judging these various medical exemptions. Each country is currently taking a slightly different approach in this area.

In any case, given the types of masks the public are wearing (cloth masks or surgical/face mask), some experts say it’s unlikely these masks will cause problems.

For instance, the chief medical officer of the American Lung Association said recently:

People with underlying chronic lung disease, such as [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] or asthma, should be able to wear a non-N95 facial covering without it affecting their oxygen or carbon dioxide levels.

The World Health Organisation also says face masks of breathable material, worn properly, will not lead to oxygen deficiency or carbon dioxide intoxication.

For most of us, wearing a mask is new

While we all adjust to wearing masks in public, it is important we try to assume as little as possible about others based on whether they’re wearing one.

Remember, the goal of the public wearing a mask when leaving the house is to reduce the risk of community transmission. If we can do that without vilifying people who genuinely can’t wear masks, or need a bit of extra support to do so, we all benefit.

Read more: Victorians, and anyone else at risk, should now be wearing face masks. Here’s how to make one

– ref. It’s easy to judge. But some people really can’t wear a mask – https://theconversation.com/its-easy-to-judge-but-some-people-really-cant-wear-a-mask-143258

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Javaan Chahl, DST Group Joint Chair of Sensor Systems, University of South Australia

We have developed four-winged bird-like robots, called ornithopters, that can take off and fly with the agility of swifts, hummingbirds and insects. We did this by reverse engineering the aerodynamics and biomechanics of these creatures.

Our ornithopters have the potential to outperform and outmanoeuvre existing drone configurations with static wings or propellers.

Read more: How modern technology is inspired by the natural world

What are ornithopters?

Ornithopters are flying machines based on the design of birds. Existing drone configurations rely on propellers and static wings. Ornithopters flap their wings to generate forward thrust. The complex relationship between aerodynamics and wing movements allows birds and insects to fly in ways that are impossible for conventional drones.

Why do we want ornithopters?

Ornithopters fly differently to conventional drones. They can glide, hover, and perform aerobatics. In different situations, they can either save energy by flying like a regular aeroplane or choose to hover. They can take off and land slowly in tight spaces, yet might quickly soar upwards to perch like a bird.

Current multirotor drones hover very nicely, but use even more energy in forward flight than in hover, so they can’t really travel far. Fixed wing drones can travel efficiently at high speeds, but hovering is not normally possible without compromising the entire design. There are hybrid concepts, usually with wings and rotors. Hybrid aircraft perform poorly when hovering and cruising when compared to other designs due to additional weight and drag from having more parts.

Flapping wings are nature’s original solution to the need to fly both quickly and slowly, as well as landing and taking off from anywhere. For a bird or insect, every part of the system is used for hovering and cruising flight, without carrying redundant thrusters or additional wings.

Existing fixed-wing and rotary-wing drones are so well understood that designs are now near the limits of how efficient they can be. Adding anything new comes at a cost to other aspects of performance.

In principle, ornithopters are capable of more complex missions than conventional aircraft, such as flying long distances, hovering at times, and manoeuvring in tight spaces. Ornithopters are less noisy and safer to use around humans, because of their large wing area and slow wing beats.

How do we make a working ornithopter?

An ornithopter is a highly complex system. Until now, flapping wing drones have been slow flying and not capable of achieving the speed and power required for vertical aerobatics or sustained hovering.

The few commercially available ornithopters are designed for forward flight. They climb slowly like an underpowered aeroplane, and can’t hover or climb vertically.

Our design is different in several ways.

One difference is that our ornithopters make use of the “clap and fling” effect. The two pairs of wings flap such that they meet, like hands clapping. This makes enough extra thrust to lift their body weight when hovering.

We improved efficiency by tuning the wing/body hinge to store and recover the energy of the moving wing when the wings change direction, like a spring. We also discovered that most of the energy loss happened because the gears flexed under the load of driving the wing. We resolved this with minute bearings and by rearranging shafts in the transmission to keep the gears spaced correctly.

The large tail, comprising a rudder and elevator, creates a lot of turning force. This allows aggressive aerobatic manoeuvres and switching fast from horizontal to vertical flight.

The system was designed to be able to pitch nose up, rapidly increasing its angle of attack to the point where the wing does not generate lift, a phenomenon called “dynamic stall”. Dynamic stall creates a lot of drag, turning the wing into a parachute to slow the aircraft. This would be undesirable in many drones, but the ability to enter this state and quickly recover adds to manoeuvrability. This is useful when operating in cluttered environments or landing on a perch.

Catching up with evolution

One of the major findings of our work was that a practical ornithopter might achieve similar efficiency to a propeller driven aircraft. Several behaviours became possible for the ornithopter once some additional power was liberated.

This really showed that optimising the flight apparatus is key to making these new aircraft designs viable. We are now working to use wing designs copied from nature. We hope for equally large improvements.

In some ways, such large efficiency gains from design changes in these new systems should not be surprising. Winged organisms have been optimised by evolution over hundreds of millions of years. We humans have been at it for less than 200 years.

– ref. Learning from nature: a new flapping drone can take off, hover and swoop like a bird – https://theconversation.com/learning-from-nature-a-new-flapping-drone-can-take-off-hover-and-swoop-like-a-bird-143343

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Wark, Conjoint Professor, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

We’re now all too familiar with the common symptoms of COVID-19: a fever, dry cough and fatigue. Some people also experience aches and pains, a sore throat, and loss of taste or smell.

Sufferers with mild illness might expect to get better after a few weeks. But there’s mounting evidence this isn’t the case, and COVID-19 may leave a long-lasting impression on its victims – not just the most severely affected or the elderly and frail.

It’s not just an infection of the lungs

On the surface, COVID-19 is a lung disease. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infects cells of the respiratory tract and can cause life-threatening pneumonia.

However, the full range of symptoms affects multiple parts of the body. An app that records daily symptoms developed at King’s College London has tracked the progress of more than 4 million COVID-19 patients in the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States.

Besides the well-described symptoms of fever, cough and loss of smell are other effects, including fatigue, rash, headache, abdominal pain and diarrhoea. People who develop more severe forms of the disease also report confusion, severe muscle pains, cough and shortness of breath.

About 20% of those infected with COVID-19 require hospitalisation to treat their pneumonia, and many need assistance with oxygen. In about 5% of cases the pneumonia becomes so severe patients are admitted to intensive care for breathing support.

It trips the immune system

People with severe COVID-19 seem to show an altered immune response even in the disease’s early stages. They have fewer circulating immune cells, which fail to efficiently control the virus, and instead suffer an exaggerated inflammatory response (the “cytokine storm”).

This is increasingly recognised as one of the main factors that makes the disease so serious in some patients. Suppressing this exaggerated response with the immunosuppressant dexamethasone remains the only treatment that reduces death rates in those who require oxygen support or intensive care.

Read more: Dexamethasone: the cheap, old and boring drug that’s a potential coronavirus treatment

Patients with severe COVID-19 describe a far more complex range of symptoms than would normally be seen with pneumonia alone. This can include brain inflammation (encephalitis), causing confusion and reduced consciousness. Up to 6% of severe sufferers may have a stroke.

Pathology studies and autopsies of patients who died from COVID-19 reveal the expected features of severe pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), with extensive inflammation and scarring. ARDS occurs when there’s sudden and widespread inflammation in the lungs, resulting in shortness of breath and blueish skin.

Uniquely, however, they also reveal the virus seems to directly cause inflammation of the small capillaries or blood vessels, not just in the lungs but in multiple organs, leading to blood clots and damage to the kidney and heart.

Persistent symptoms ‘deeply frustrating’

Anyone with a severe disease would be expected to suffer long-lasting consequences. But COVID-19 seems to have persistent symptoms even in those with milder forms of the illness.

Social media is replete with stories of survivors afflicted by ongoing symptoms. Support groups have emerged on Slack and Facebook hosting thousands of people, some still suffering more than 60 days after infection. They call themselves “long-termers” or “long-haulers”.

One of the most well-known sufferers is Paul Garner, an infectious disease specialist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK. He was infected in late March and his symptoms continue. In a blog post published by the British Medical Journal he describes having a:

…muggy head, upset stomach, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), pins and needles, breathlessness, dizziness and arthritis in the hands.

These symptoms have waxed and waned but not yet resolved. He says this is:

…deeply frustrating. A lot of people start doubting themselves… Their partners wonder if there is something psychologically wrong with them.

So far, only one peer-reviewed study has reported results on the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 infection: a single group of 143 survivors from Rome. Most of them did not need hospitalisation and all were assessed at least 60 days after infection. They reported a worsened quality of life in 44.1% of cases, including symptoms of persistent fatigue (53.1%), breathlessness (43.4%), joint pain (27.3%), and chest pain (21.7%).

While our experience with COVID-19 has only just begun, long-term symptoms following severe viral illness are not a new phenomenon. Influenza has long been linked to persistent symptoms such as fatigue and muscle pain, including after both the 1890 and 1918-19 pandemics.

Survival of a severe viral pneumonia or ARDS, particularly after intensive care, is known to have long-lasting implications. Some survivors suffer long-term breathlessness and fatigue as a result of the damage to their lungs or from other complications. Survivors can also suffer depression (26–33%), anxiety (38–44%), or post-traumatic stress disorder (22–24%).

Long-term symptoms a feature of other coronaviruses

Our experience with other coronaviruses should have forewarned us of these problems. The first SARS coronavirus and the Middle Eastern Respiratory virus (MERS) caused severe disease in a greater proportion of sufferers than COVID-19, with significant numbers of sufferers developing ARDS and needing intensive care.

Canadian researchers followed survivors of the first SARS outbreak in Toronto. They found sleep disturbance, chronic fatigue, depression and muscle pains were common. A third of survivors had to modify their work and lifestyle, and only 14% had no long-term symptoms. Similarly, in a Korean group of MERS survivors, 48% still experienced chronic fatigue after 12 months.

The COVID-19 pandemic is still in its early days. Survivors with persistent symptoms, the “long-haulers”, are clearly not uncommon and their symptoms and concerns need to be heard, studied and understood. Clinical trials in the UK, Europe and the US are now recruiting to do this.

As with many aspects of COVID-19, we have much to learn and there is much work still to do.

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. Here’s what we know so far about the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 – https://theconversation.com/heres-what-we-know-so-far-about-the-long-term-symptoms-of-covid-19-142722

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University

Taxonomy, or the naming of species, is the foundation of modern biology. It might sound like a fairly straightforward exercise, but in fact it’s complicated and often controversial.

Why? Because there’s no one agreed list of all the world’s species. Competing lists exist for organisms such as mammals and birds, while other less well-known groups have none. And there are more than 30 definitions of what constitutes a species. This can make life difficult for biodiversity researchers and those working in areas such as conservation, biosecurity and regulation of the wildlife trade.

In the past few years, a public debate erupted among global taxonomists, including those who authored and contributed to this article, about whether the rules of taxonomy should be changed. Strongly worded ripostes were exchanged. A comparison to Stalin was floated.

But eventually, we all came together to resolve the dispute amicably. In a paper published this month, we proposed a new set of principles to guide what one day, we hope, will be a single authoritative list of the world’s species. This would help manage and conserve them for future generations.

In the process, we’ve shown how a scientific stoush can be overcome when those involved try to find common ground.

How it all began

In May 2017 two of the authors, Stephen Garnett and Les Christidis, published an article in Nature. They argued taxonomy needed rules around what should be called a species, because currently there are none. They wrote:

for a discipline aiming to impose order on the natural world, taxonomy (the classification of complex organisms) is remarkably anarchic […] There is reasonable agreement among taxonomists that a species should represent a distinct evolutionary lineage. But there is none about how a lineage should be defined.

‘Species’ are often created or dismissed arbitrarily, according to the individual taxonomist’s adherence to one of at least 30 definitions. Crucially, there is no global oversight of taxonomic decisions — researchers can ‘split or lump’ species with no consideration of the consequences.

Garnett and Christidis proposed that any changes to the taxonomy of complex organisms be overseen by the highest body in the global governance of biology, the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), which would “restrict […] freedom of taxonomic action.”

Read more: Taxonomy, the science of naming things, is under threat

An animated response

Garnett and Christidis’ article raised hackles in some corners of the taxonomy world – including coauthors of this article.

These critics rejected the description of taxonomy as “anarchic”. In fact, they argued there are detailed rules around the naming of species administered by groups such as the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. For 125 years, the codes have been almost universally adopted by scientists.

So in March 2018, 183 researchers – led by Scott Thomson and Richard Pyle – wrote an animated response to the Nature article, published in PLoS Biology.

They wrote that Garnett and Christidis’ IUBS proposal was “flawed in terms of scientific integrity […] but is also untenable in practice”. They argued:

Through taxonomic research, our understanding of biodiversity and classifications of living organisms will continue to progress. Any system that restricts such progress runs counter to basic scientific principles, which rely on peer review and subsequent acceptance or rejection by the community, rather than third-party regulation.

In a separate paper, another group of taxonomists accused Garnett and Christidis of trying to suppress freedom of scientific thought, likening them to Stalin’s science advisor Trofim Lysenko.

Finding common ground

This might have been the end of it. But the editor at PLoS Biology, Roli Roberts, wanted to turn consternation into constructive debate, and invited a response from Garnett and Christidis. In the to and fro of articles, we all found common ground.

We recognised the powerful need for a global list of species – representing a consensus view of the world’s taxonomists at a particular time.

Read more: Summer bushfires: how are the plant and animal survivors 6 months on? We mapped their recovery

Such lists do exist. The Catalogue of Life, for example, has done a remarkable job in assembling lists of almost all the world’s species. But there are no rules on how to choose between competing lists of validly named species. What was needed, we agreed, was principles governing what can be included on lists.

As it stands now, anyone can name a species, or decide which to recognise as valid and which not. This creates chaos. It means international agreements on biodiversity conservation, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), take different taxonomic approaches to species they aim to protect.

We decided to work together. With funding from the IUBS, we held a workshop in February this year at Charles Darwin University to determine principles for devising a single, agreed global list of species.

Participants came from around the world. They included taxonomists, science governance experts, science philosophers, administrators of the nomenclatural (naming) codes, and taxonomic users such as the creators of national species lists.

The result is a draft set of ten principles that to us, represent the ideals of global science governance. They include that:

• the species list be based on science and free from “non-taxonomic” interference
• all decisions about composition of the list be transparent
• governance of the list aim for community support and use
• the listing process encompasses global diversity while accommodating local knowledge.

The principles will now be discussed at international workshops of taxonomists and the users of taxonomy. We’ve also formed a working group to discuss how a global list might come together and the type of institution needed to look after it.

We hope by 2030, a scientific debate that began with claims of anarchy might lead to a clear governance system – and finally, the world’s first endorsed global list of species.

The following people provided editorial comment for this article: Aaron M Lien, Frank Zachos, John Buckeridge, Kevin Thiele, Svetlana Nikolaeva, Zhi-Qiang Zhang, Donald Hobern, Olaf Banki, Peter Paul van Dijk, Saroj Kanta Barik and Stijn Conix.

– ref. How a scientific spat over how to name species turned into a big plus for nature – https://theconversation.com/how-a-scientific-spat-over-how-to-name-species-turned-into-a-big-plus-for-nature-138887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Fischetti, Professor, Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Education and Arts; Dean/Head of School of Education, University of Newcastle

By the end of Year 11 we know almost exactly how well New South Wales students will perform on the state’s senior school exams. We used predictive analytics to reliably predict a student’s HSC (Higher School Certificate) results in a study of more than 10,000 students.

Predictive analytics links multiple data sources about student progression through school. These sources synthesise different kinds of data to reveal current trends and predict future performance.

A recent report into pathways for senior secondary school students, by the Education Council, notes:

Academic achievement is important but not the sole reason for schooling. We need to focus more on preparing the whole person, no matter what career path they choose.

We believe predictive analytics gives us a way to replace the current Year 12 structure with one more personalised, and that will help prepare the whole student for their journey into the future.

Ten years of data

In our study – the results of which are yet to be published – we analysed ten years of data across 14 HSC subject areas, for about 10,000 students. We started by analysing 41 variables over a child’s educational career. These included a student’s gender, marks across the decade and number of siblings.

But we found we only needed 17 of the 41 variables to accurately predict Year 12 performance. These included a student’s demographic information (such as how long he or she has lived in Australia and the school’s socioeconomic index), Year 9 NAPLAN scores in all areas, their HSC subject choices at the beginning of Year 11 and Year 11 attendance.

Read more: Teachers could be called on to estimate year 12 student grades – this is fairer than it sounds

Using these variables, we could remarkably predict a student’s HSC scores. The predictions are 93% accurate (within an error margin of 3%).

For example, if a student chooses English Advanced in Year 12, he or she likely did well in the reading and writing areas of the Year 9 NAPLAN.

If the same student’s (who did well in Year 9 NAPLAN) attendance is above 90% and we factor in their demographic information, we can tell them their HSC mark in English Advanced before they take the course and the exam.

Likewise, if a student has low numeracy results on their Year 9 NAPLAN and plans to take Chemistry and Mathematics Advanced in Year 12, they aren’t going to do well on the HSC in those areas. The Year 9 NAPLAN numeracy criteria dominates the other variables.

Our research tells us we know enough about each student by the end of Year 11 to help direct them into the pathway that best aligns to their current strengths. It also tells us we need to provide a different kind of Year 12 experience — one that boosts students’ chances for success in areas they are passionate about or interested in.

Of course, the science of predictive analytics isn’t perfect. Our study shows some students do improve their academic achievements throughout Year 12 and score higher than expected on the HSC exams (no more than 7%). But for an increasing number of students, the HSC and the process leading towards it are barriers to active engagement in education at a pivotal transition period.

So, what does all this mean?

End of school exams and the resultant ATAR are often presented as make-or-break milestones. Students preparing for the exams suffer increased anxiety and stress beyond what is normal. The process is unnecessarily debilitating for many young people.

The purpose of the HSC is to use the cumulative exam results to convert to a tertiary admission ranking (ATAR) that is used to facilitate university entry. But our data reveal we don’t need the current Year 12 to determine the HSC results and therefore the ranking. And for those who do not have university aspirations, the HSC is already irrelevant.

There are now multiple ways to be accepted into university, including early offers, portfolios and principal recommendations. These make the HSC increasingly redundant.

Read more: Don’t stress, your ATAR isn’t the final call. There are many ways to get into university

A Productivity Commission report showed almost one fifth of Year 10 students in 2010 didn’t complete Year 12 by 2012. And the perpetuation and widening of equity gaps due to the realities of the senior years of high school are staggering. A 2015 Mitchell Institute report found about 40% of Australia’s poorest 19 year olds don’t finish Year 12, compared with about 10% of the wealthiest.

The challenge we face is to make the senior year more relevant in preparing students for their next steps.

A new Year 12 design

We propose to dramatically revise Year 12 with the help of predictive analytics.

Our proposal is to allow flexibility for each student to get ready for the next phase of their learning during Year 12. This includes opportunities to use Year 12 to engage in real-world projects, formal apprenticeships, TAFE or university certificates, study abroad (when that can occur again safely), going deeper into advanced courses of interest and providing new supports to promote success without dumbing things down.

Read more: Most young people who do VET after school are in full-time work by the age of 25

All of these are currently the exception rather than the rule. Through these experiences, Year 12 students can build unique evidence about their skills, knowledge and passions that take them into their futures.

Instead of using Year 12 to prepare for the exams, students can use it for broadening their experiences and honing in on life and career aspirations. This approach refocuses the final year to an individualised journey that better prepares young people for Year 13 — whatever that may be for them.

– ref. We know by Year 11 what mark students will get in Year 12. Do we still need a stressful exam? – https://theconversation.com/we-know-by-year-11-what-mark-students-will-get-in-year-12-do-we-still-need-a-stressful-exam-140746

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Adkins, Professor of Sociology and Head of School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney

HomeBuilder grants of A$25,000 are being offered to build or renovate a home as part of the Australian government’s emergency economic response to the coronavirus pandemic. Critics note that the program, framed as stimulus for residential construction, benefits already well-off households. It ignores the realities of the housing market, especially the affordability crisis, with housing stress affecting precarious renters, the homeless and those struggling with bloated mortgage payments.

Homebuilder appears to be a bewildering policy. It’s likely to support construction work that would have occurred anyway while failing to meet real housing needs.

However, to criticise HomeBuilder simply as bad policy made on the run is to miss a broader picture. HomeBuilder begins to make a lot more sense when understood as a response to the role of housing assets in shaping both economic inequality and electoral politics.

Read more: Scott Morrison’s HomeBuilder scheme is classic retail politics but lousy economics

The rise of the ‘asset economy’

We describe this dynamic as the “asset economy”: our socio-economic positions are defined less and less by employment income and more and more by our holdings of wealth-generating assets, especially housing.

The government has touted HomeBuilder as boosting construction jobs through a “tradie-led” recovery. House-price inflation has made the economy particularly dependent on construction jobs. Construction is the third-biggest employer in Australia and the only industry outside the services sector to have had significant job growth in recent years.

However, the government could have boosted construction jobs at least as much, if not more, by investing in social housing or energy-efficient housing. Why then did it choose to make the already well-off even better off by paying owners to add value to their homes?

Read more: Why the focus of stimulus plans has to be construction that puts social housing first

A long history of looking after home owners

It’s no coincidence that, beyond the initial emergency responses to support household and business incomes, the first substantive stimulus the Coalition government announced went to residential property owners.

The rise of the asset economy has occurred in parallel with a shift in voting patterns. The 2019 Australian Election Study observed a move “away from occupation-based voting and towards asset-based voting”. Voters who own housing – owner-occupiers and investors – strongly favour the Liberal and National parties.

Our research on the asset economy reveals the long-term drivers of Australia’s asset-based politics. HomeBuilder is the latest in a long line of Australian government policies over the past four decades to encourage, prop up and reward residential property ownership. These policies have included selling off public housing, tax incentives (especially negative gearing and capital gains tax exemption for the family home) and promoting home ownership as an alternative to welfare programs such as public pensions.

Read more: Fall in ageing Australians’ home-ownership rates looms as seismic shock for housing policy

These policies have not simply encouraged home ownership – they have transformed it. Nowadays the home is a financial asset, an investment financed by growing debt that is supposed to generate capital gains.

Property price increases, driven by the liberalisation of credit and low interest rates, came to be seen as a key route to economic security for households in an economy with stagnant wages and precarious employment. Credit-driven home ownership expanded and property prices grew. Many property-owning households saw major gains in their wealth portfolios.

Read more: HomeBuilder might be the most-complex least-equitable construction jobs program ever devised

Housing is now a driver of inequality

Credit-driven home purchases pushed prices to heights where it became increasingly difficult for people to enter the market. In Australia as well as in other Anglo-capitalist countries ― including the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada ― rates of home ownership show the same pattern from 1980 to 2020: increases followed by decreases.

In large cities such as Sydney and Melbourne price inflation over time has made it virtually impossible to buy a house on the basis of an average wage alone. As a result, private rental markets have expanded, rents have soared and new modes of occupancy have emerged, including multigenerational and shared living. These renters are not simply locked out of home ownership but also out of the wealth it generates.

These trends have opened up a rift between those with and without housing assets. This entails not just major differences in levels and patterns of wealth accumulation, but also in life chances. The asset economy has fundamentally reworked the social structure, or what sociologists study as patterns of “class” or “stratification”.

This means even when people have similar jobs or earn the same wages, deep inequalities can exist between those who own assets and those who do not.

These trends are particularly notable among younger generations, giving rise to stark new forms of inequality. Those who are set to inherit housing assets or whose access to parental wealth offers a route into home ownership have a distinct advantage. They can benefit from property-based asset inflation and capital gains.

Read more: The housing boom propelled inequality, but a coronavirus housing bust will skyrocket it

Shoring up the base in a crisis

HomeBuilder is a product of the electoral politics that emerged out of this asset economy. Asset owners vote with their feet and resist any changes that would jeopardise the long-lived advantages that asset ownership gives them. The result of the 2019 federal election, when Labor’s policy was to reduce the benefits available from negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, showed this.

The government knows as long as it keeps in place the advantages that flow to home owners, residential property investors and the “bank of mum and dad”, they form a powerful core of the Coalition’s electoral base. It’s offering a stimulus measure directed specifically at this constituency, adding yet more value to their assets at a time of economic uncertainty. HomeBuilder is an asset owner’s policy aimed at appeasing and shoring up the Liberal-National party’s electoral base.

As home ownership rates decline and asset-based inequalities increase, just how long such tactics can produce electoral success remains a critical question.

– ref. HomeBuilder only makes sense as a nod to Morrison’s home-owning voter base – https://theconversation.com/homebuilder-only-makes-sense-as-a-nod-to-morrisons-home-owning-voter-base-142169

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine de Fontenay, Honorary Fellow, Department of Economics, University of Melbourne

Our memories of the job market prior to COVID have become rosier: the last decade was a period of fairly low unemployment, even if wage growth was less than stellar.

But that perspective may not be shared by people under 35. For that age group, the past decade has been a period of intense competition for jobs, even before COVID, which will make things worse.

It is likely to have long-term effects, even were it not for the COVID crisis.

Read more: Low-paid, young women: the grim truth about who this recession is hitting hardest

In a new study published this morning, climbing the jobs ladder slower, myself and three colleagues at the Productivity Commission examine labour market scarring after the 2008 global financial crisis.

Scarring is a semi-technical term for what happens when wounds don’t properly heal. It was mentioned twice in last week’s economic statement.

Scars from the crisis

Specifically, we asked whether young people entering the labour market during and after the crisis had a more difficult transition to employment than those who entered before, and whether it had long term impacts on their careers.

The Australian Socioeconomic Index is an occupational status scale last updated by researchers at the Australian National University in the late 2000s. It is a method for scoring occupations on a ladder based on educational requirements and average earnings.

Using data from the HILDA Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey that began in 2001 we find that the average occupational score increased throughout the two decades that followed, but that after 2008 the likelihood that a university graduate would find a high-score job fell back.

Part of the reason is the big expansion in the number of university students and students in vocational education that followed the crisis.

Down several rungs

For many graduates that meant more competition to enter their chosen profession. They moved “down the ladder” of occupations.

Law graduates increasingly found themselves working as paralegals or in cafés. In turn, young people with vocational degrees were pushed further down.

At the bottom of the ladder, part-time and casual jobs garnered more takers. As a result average wages for workers under 35 fell between 2008 to 2018.

Outcomes varied a great deal. Some young workers found very high-scored jobs, while more were less lucky, obtaining jobs whose scores were well below what they would have expected in earlier years.

Hard to climb back

Were the lower rungs temporary? Were some of these unlucky young workers able to work their ways back to their desired occupations and pay levels over the years that followed? Not much.

We found that from 2008, if a recent graduate started in a less attractive job, it was harder to climb to a more attractive one than before.

Young people’s prospects and the growth in salaries were worse than those of young people prior to 2008.

Read more: Yes Ita, younger workers might actually be less resilient. But all workers should be thanked

The finding comes from studying transition probabilities: the probability that a young person can move from a lower quarter of the occupation score distribution to a higher quarter. It suggests that poor initial jobs for graduates have serious long-term consequences.

It pre-dates the COVID-19 recession, but it has heightened relevance for it.

More scars to come

Many young people pushed into unemployment by the recession and are likely to find it harder to get the jobs they could have once expected when jobs come back.

The scarring could last some time.

Some young people might choose to pursue further study in order to return to the job market later when conditions are better, but our report suggests that, even then, the competition for the jobs that follow study will be fierce.

A generation might be set to experience scarring once again – from unemployment, from low wages, from jobs that don’t fully use their skills, and from dashed hopes.

– ref. It really is different for young people: it’s harder to climb the jobs ladder – https://theconversation.com/it-really-is-different-for-young-people-its-harder-to-climb-the-jobs-ladder-143347

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Cothren, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

In our series Art for Trying Times, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.

In times of stress, it is only natural to seek out comforting art that reaffirms our faith in humanity. Why, then, am I back to binge-watching the utterly irredeemable It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

Sunny is a cult sitcom about five friends who own Paddy’s Pub, a South Philadelphia dive bar in which customers arrive about as frequently as Godot. A lack of clientele means “the Gang” is free to drink, scheme and bicker their lives away.

The US show’s home video aesthetic and overlapping, semi-improvised dialogue recalls the “mumblecore” film subgenre, although “shoutcore” would really be more appropriate here. Each episode, available to stream in Australia, is essentially a 20-minute squabble in which everyone is under informed and over opinionated.

Inside Out for adults

Although the show began during the George W. Bush era, I’ve come to see each character as a partial reflection of current US president Donald Trump. Frank (Danny DeVito) is a wealthy bigot; Charlie (Charlie Day) is an illiterate savage; Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is a needy narcissist; Dennis (Glenn Howerton) is a psychotic womanizer; and Mac (Rob McElhenney) is a love-deprived zealot.

Through the prism of these assorted neuroses, the show filters every contemporary issue imaginable: gun control, racism, #MeToo, climate change, and so on. Occasionally, the gang stumbles upon some crude solution to a topical problem.

In one episode, the question of how to gender bathrooms is solved by taping an all-inclusive Animal Shithouse sign to each door. More frequently, though, episode titles such as The Gang Solves the North Korea Situation or The Gang Solves Global Warming are just wishful thinking.

The global warming episode – from season 14, which aired late last year – provides the perfect example of Sunny’s satirise-everyone approach. Conservative Mac shrugs off the crisis with “if God wants to roast us like turkeys, there’s got to be a good reason for it”. While progressive Dee buys recyclable shoes just to shame others on Instagram.

The show is less disgusted by any particular partisan viewpoint than it is by the bad faith discussions that occur between corrupt parties.

Read more: Happy birthday, Mr Bean! Celebrating 30 years of a major comedy character

It offers, hands down, the best replication of that clanking feeling one gets when encountering immovable ignorance online. “I’m an American”, Mac proudly declares, “I won’t change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me.

Anything for a laugh

Admittedly, this doesn’t sound like much of a tonic for our leaking garbage bag of a year. The idiots are everywhere; why should we be wasting our screen time with them? Because Sunny, as long as you can stomach its distinctive brand of filth, is the funniest thing around.

Over its 14 (and counting) seasons, it has evolved from a grimy Seinfeld xerox into a Monty Pythonesque carnival of the surreal and grotesque. The actors here are willing to do, or expel, anything for a laugh. If you loved Terry Jones vomiting in a high-class restaurant, might I suggest Charlie Day vomiting blood all over his posh date?

Obviously, sensitive gaggers need not apply. Nor those who are repelled by dumpster babies, glue-huffing, rat-bashing, sewer-diving, bed-pooping, or (and this is a crucial Sunny litmus test) a naked and sweaty Danny DeVito bursting forth from a leather couch.

If nothing else, I cherish Sunny for the way it has unleashed DeVito. The former Taxi star is an incredible comedic performer, but he was in danger of forever being defined as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s improbable twin. As Frank, he snorts and grunts through scenes like a rabid truffle pig with a bloodlust for depravity.

Read more: Was that joke funny or offensive? Who’s telling it matters

While Frank is the show’s rotten core, Charlie is its heart. Intellectually stunted, possibly molested, and living in abject poverty, Charlie nonetheless radiates twisted joie de vivre. His helium voice and vacant gaze always kill me, whether he is torturing leprechauns, boiling milk steaks, or getting rich off “kitten mittens”.

All together now

Charlie is also responsible for The Nightman Cometh, a bizarre musical in season four that has since become a live singalong show.

The casts’ theatre backgrounds have provided a number of surprisingly catchy songs over the years. This is no Glee though. Only a Sunny musical would make hay out of the slipperiness between “boy’s soul” and “boy’s hole”.

So why am I back in Paddy’s Pub once again? We are spoilt for choice when it comes to intelligent sitcoms filled with witty, warm-hearted characters who learn and grow.

If it’s escapism you’re seeking right now, shows like Schitt’s Creek, One Day at a Time, and The Good Place are ready to shelter you from the storm. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia provides a different, yet equally important, service.

By the time I emerge blinking from yet another session in its dank and derelict hidey hole, I find that the real world almost looks bearable in comparison.

– ref. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the funniest, filthiest comfort TV around – https://theconversation.com/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-the-funniest-filthiest-comfort-tv-around-143171

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Russell, Principal research fellow, University of Melbourne

This week, most students in Melbourne and Mitchell Shire returned to remote learning for term 3.

Students whose parents can’t work from home are allowed to receive remote learning from school, as was the case during the first lockdown.

But this time, students in years 11 and 12, students in year 10 undertaking VCE or the applied learning equivalent, and specialist school students, are attending school for face-to-face learning.

This move recognises older students are more likely to be able to social distance than younger students, ensures senior students are supported during their VCE, and acknowledges the particular difficulties of remote learning for students with special needs.

In announcing this new model, the Victorian government also revealed daily temperature checks would be introduced for all students attending school face-to-face in term 3.

Read more: Students in Melbourne will go back to remote schooling. Here’s what we learnt last time and how to make it better

The details

The Victorian government pledged to supply schools in Melbourne, Mitchell Shire and surrounding areas with more than 14,000 non-contact infrared thermometers. These are the type of thermometer positioned from a distance, generally towards a person’s forehead, to take their temperature.

In the case a student records a temperature of 37.5℃ or above, the school will contact the student’s parent or guardian to take the child home, and encourage them get a COVID-19 test.

The temperature checks are designed to detect fever as an indicator of possible SARS-CoV-2 infection. But there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind when considering how useful temperature checks will be.

First, these types of thermometers won’t always reliably detect fever. And second, many children with COVID-19 won’t have a fever.

Sensitivity and specificity

A few key features are important when screening for disease. In the case of non-contact infrared thermometers, the “disease” we’re screening for is fever.

First, a tool should be able to correctly identify those with the disease (sensitivity). Second, a tool should correctly identify those without the disease (specificity). Third, a tool should have high probability that a person with a positive result does have the disease (positive predictive value, or PPV).

Testing of non-contact infrared thermometers has reported wide variation on each of these measures. One review found sensitivity ranged from 4%-89.6% and specificity from 75.4%-99.6%. Where one in 100 people had a fever, the PPV was between 3.55%-65.4%.

Read more: School is important, and so is staying safe from coronavirus. Here are some tips for returning seniors

Non-contact infrared thermometers measure skin (peripheral) temperature without physical contact, which offers a convenient option for temperature checking large numbers of children.

But their readings can be affected by factors such as outdoor temperature, where on the body you aim the thermometer, and distance from the subject.

We also need to remember fever reducing medications, such as paracetamol, can lower a child’s temperature.

Combined, these factors indicate non-contact infrared thermometers may not be very reliable in detecting a fever (regardless of whether or not the fever is related to COVID-19).

Do children with COVID-19 have fever?

A review of studies found fever was the most common symptom in children and young people under 21 with COVID-19, recorded in 47% of cases. Other symptoms include cough (37%) and diarrhoea (4%).

Two reviews explored asymptomatic infection in children, reporting 14% and 19% of children had no symptoms at all.

This means fever screening may miss more than half of infected children in schools, as they could either have no symptoms, have symptoms that don’t include fever, or have fever not detected by the non-contact infrared thermometers.

Do children transmit COVID-19 in schools?

Initial reports suggested children don’t transmit SARS-CoV-2 as much as adults, however evidence in this space is still evolving.

A NSW government report found no student-to-teacher transmission and very low student-to-student transmission.

Conversely, one of Victoria’s largest outbreaks to date occurred at a P-12 school; staff, students, and close contacts have tested positive. But it’s not yet clear how much transmission can be attributed to school activities as opposed to household and community transmission.

Read more: 8 tips on what to tell your kids about coronavirus

A recent study from South Korea found within the home, ten to 19-year-old children transmit the virus as much as adults, whereas children aged under ten transmit less than adults.

While this paper focused on household transmission, a recent study from Israel reported on an outbreak in a secondary school. It found overcrowded classrooms, lack of mask wearing and air conditioning use were likely to be contributing factors.

Schools around the world

Among countries that have now returned to school, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam have implemented fever screening.

France, Belgium, Germany and Israel have differing requirements for use of face masks among students and teachers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends parents check their child’s temperature before or upon arrival at school.

Read more: Yes, we’ve seen schools close. But the evidence still shows kids are unlikely to catch or spread coronavirus

The use of non-contact infrared thermometers to identify children who could have COVID-19 may not be reliable.

But at the very least, this tool provides a visible important reminder to parents, staff and students of the risk of COVID-19, and for children to remain at home if they’re unwell.

– ref. Will school temperature checks curb the spread of coronavirus? – https://theconversation.com/will-school-temperature-checks-curb-the-spread-of-coronavirus-142999

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter O’Connor, Professor, Business and Management, Queensland University of Technology

Young workers lack resilience and “need hugging”, according to eminent Australian Ita Buttrose.

This week the 78-year old ABC chair told a forum of the Australia-United Kingdom Chamber of Commerce:

They’re very keen on being thanked and they almost need hugging. That’s before COVID of course, we can’t hug any more. But they almost need hugging […] they seem to lack the resilience that I remember from my younger days.

Not surprisingly, many young people have been unimpressed by her comments. They’ve found older allies too, such as 80-year-old department store king Gerry Norman, who said every generation believed younger people weren’t as tough.

So are younger people really less resilient at work? Or is this simply an example of older people holding negative stereotypes about younger people?

Read more: Young workers expect their older colleagues to get out of the way

Fortunately we have decades of research on personality change, mental health and even COVID-19 to answer this question.

Most research does clearly indicate younger people are – on average – less resilient than older people. They are more prone to stress, less emotionally stable and less tolerant of ambiguity than older people.

What drives these age-related differences is less clear. It is partly to do with maturity. People become more resilient as they age. A baby-boomer is likely to be more resilient than a millennial by the sheer fact of being older.

The bigger question is whether young people now are also less resilient than previous generations at the same age. On this the jury is still out, though some evidence does support Buttrose’s imputations.

A correlation, but it’s weak

In previous published research I have found younger people cope less well with work ambiguity, and more easily experience stress in response.

Read more: As work gets more ambiguous, younger generations may be less equipped for it

In recent months I have been collecting data on how Australian workers are coping with COVID-19 work changes. Preliminary analysis indicates younger people are more stressed and less satisfied than older workers – and these results are not due to the extra pressures experienced by young people (financial strains, having young children, etc).

However, it is important to note that while numerous studies confirm a “statistically significant” relationship between age and resilience, it’s comparatively weak.

In my data the correlations range from 0.1 to 0.3 (0 being no correlation and 1 being a perfect correlation). This indicated that while younger workers, on average, were less resilient than older workers, there were many exceptions. Some of the most resilient workers were young, and some of the least resilient were above 60.

So a young person can still be highly resilient.

Comparisons to past generations

As noted, the jury is still out on whether young workers today are less resilient than young workers in the past.

This is in part due to the methodological challenge of disentangling maturation from cohort effects, along with reconciling findings from studies conducted in different countries.

There is emerging research, however, that seeks to disentangle the maturation and cohort effects and suggests younger workers now are less resilient than young people used to be.

US psychology researchers Kenneth Stewart and Paul Bernhardt, for example, compared 2004-08 university students with pre-1987 undergraduates. They found the 2000s cohort had lower psychological health and higher narcissism – traits associated with low resilience.

Cross-sectional studies from Australia have reported similar patterns. Neuroticism seems to be increasing in younger generations, as does the need for recognition, whereas optimism is falling.

Products of coddling?

One explanation for why resilience might be declining in young people is outlined in the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff. It argues good intentions from adults and three “great untruths” have hurt young people’s resilience. The untruths are:

1. what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
2. always trust your feelings
3. life is a battle between good and evil people.

Lukianoff and Haidt suggest these messages (from overprotective parents and others) have reduced children’s exposure to the challenges and stressors they need to develop and flourish. They have also increased the tendency to engage in black-and white thinking.

The authors make a well-reasoned case consistent with much of the existing evidence.

Read more: Is cancel culture silencing open debate? There are risks to shutting down opinions we disagree with

Improving workplaces

Buttrose noted younger workers “like more transparency” and “need more reassurance and they need to be thanked”.

But let’s distinguish these issues from the question of resilience. Employees of all ages appreciate recognition and psychological safety. Such expectations are not a sign a worker lacks resilience.

So yes, it appears younger people today are less resilient than previous generations. But generational differences in resilience are small and probably exist due to a range of factors young people have little control over.

We should take care not to write off a range of effective workplace practices as unnecessary actions to appease non-resilient young people.

– ref. Yes Ita, younger workers might actually be less resilient. But all workers should be thanked – https://theconversation.com/yes-ita-younger-workers-might-actually-be-less-resilient-but-all-workers-should-be-thanked-143277

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

The events of 2020 are reshaping the way we live, work, teach and learn. And while we have all been affected differently, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women has been particularly significant.

A recent report by the Rapid Research Information Forum found the pandemic has left women facing disproportionate increases in caring responsibilities and disruptions to working hours and job security.

Read more: Isaac Newton invented calculus in self-isolation during the Great Plague. He didn’t have kids to look after

The hard-won gains made by women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) are at risk, especially if employers of people with STEM skills do not closely monitor and mitigate the gender impact of their decisions.

The pre-pandemic impact of caring for children and the uptake of flexible working arrangements are just two of the issues considered in the second edition of the STEM Workforce Report, released this week by the Office of the Chief Scientist. Drawing on 2016 Australian Census data, this report provides a comprehensive analysis of the STEM workforce in Australia.

It analyses the nearly 1.2 million people with vocational STEM qualifications and the roughly 700,000 people with university STEM qualifications in the Australian labour force in 2016. As such, it will enable informed decision-making to help plan our future STEM workforce needs.

Slow pace of change

Our analysis found that people with STEM qualifications work in a wide range of occupations and industries. On average, they earn more than those with non-STEM qualifications, and these incomes increase with qualification level. In 2016, 34% of employed STEM university graduates earned A$104,000 or above, compared with 24% of non-STEM university graduates. Of STEM university graduates, 32% of those with a bachelor degree, 34% of those with a masters, and 45% of those with a doctoral degree earned A$104,000 or above.

However, the pace of change towards a fairer and more diverse STEM labour force is still slow. In 2006, 27% of STEM university graduates in the labour force were women. A decade later, this had only risen to 29%.

Just 3.3% of Australian-born women with a university STEM qualification were unemployed, as of census night in 2016. But the corresponding figure for similarly qualified overseas-born women who arrived in Australia between 2006 and 2016 was 14.1%.

Women in STEM also have lower average pay than similarly qualified men, in both part-time and full-time roles. For full-time workers with university STEM qualifications, 45% of men earned A$104,000 or above, compared with 26% of women.

How to keep women in STEM

Women who pause their careers to have children often end up leaving the labour force or returning on reduced hours. Flexible work arrangements – including working part-time and working from home – are crucial tools for keeping parents in the labour force. Initiatives such as childcare subsidies and incentives for fathers to take significant parental and carer’s leave have proven effective in supporting equitable outcomes in the workforce.

Read more: Father’s days: increasing the ‘daddy quota’ in parental leave makes everyone happier

The flow diagram below represents labour force data for women aged 15-35 who did not have a child and were working full-time in 2011. When we reviewed the status of these women five years later, we found that STEM-qualified women who had children were less likely to still be employed, and more likely to be working part-time. In contrast, the work status of STEM-qualified men was largely unaffected by having children, and men with children tended to earn more than those without.

Our report found that STEM-qualified women also do more hours of unpaid domestic work than STEM-qualified men. Women working full-time were more than twice as likely as men (19% vs 8%, respectively) to do more than 15 hours’ domestic work per week. The recently reported experiences of women taking on a higher share of child care during the COVID-19 pandemic appear to support these findings.

Beyond census data

The census data can only tell us part of the story. The Women in STEM Decadal Plan, developed by the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, presented information from numerous sources to explore the breadth of women’s experiences. It showed that negative stereotypes dissuade women from pursuing STEM careers and “a significant cultural shift in workplaces is necessary to create gender equity for women in STEM”.

These findings are supported by research from the Male Champions of Change STEM group, which found women in STEM jobs experience significantly more barriers than men, including sexism, workplace culture, exclusion and a lack of career progression. Two-thirds of women reported having their voices devalued at work. Listening to and acknowledging the experiences of women and other disadvantaged groups in STEM is necessary to develop and implement meaningful actions for change.

Read more: Girls score the same in maths and science as boys, but higher in arts – this may be why they are less likely to pick STEM careers

We mustn’t allow the upheaval from COVID-19 to wipe out the small gains we have made in STEM-qualified women’s representation and participation in the workforce.

The pandemic has rapidly changed the way we work, showing that workplace flexibility is just one way to keep all of us working productively. Other profound changes to workplace culture should follow, or we risk yet another decline in women’s workforce participation.

– ref. Chief Scientist: women in STEM are still far short of workplace equity. COVID-19 risks undoing even these modest gains – https://theconversation.com/chief-scientist-women-in-stem-are-still-far-short-of-workplace-equity-covid-19-risks-undoing-even-these-modest-gains-143092

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Audrey Courty, PhD candidate, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University

Twitter has announced it’s taking sweeping action to limit the reach of content associated with QAnon. Believers of this fringe far-right conspiracy theory claim there is a “deep state” plot against US President Donald Trump led by Satan-worshipping elites from within government, business and media.

Twitter has banned more than 7,000 accounts tweeting about QAnon, citing violations of its multi-account policy, coordinated abuse targeting individual victims, and attempts to evade previous account suspensions.

The platform also said it would stop circulating QAnon-related content, including material appearing in trending topics, recommendation lists and the search feature. It will also reportedly block web links associated with QAnon activity.

These actions, which could impact as many as 150,000 accounts globally, are part of Twitter’s wider crackdown on misinformation and “behaviour that has the potential to lead to offline harm”.

However, according to CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, many of the actions are not being extended to “candidates and elected officials”. Regardless, history suggests the threat of online conspiracists is a difficult one to tackle.

How it all began

QAnon began in October 2017 when an anonymous user or group of users going by “Q” began posting on the online message board 4chan. Q claimed to have access to classified information about the Trump administration and its opponents.

More than two years and 3,500 posts later, “Q” has generated a sprawling but unfounded conspiracy theory claiming the existence of a global network of political elites and celebrities who want to take down Trump. These people also supposedly run a child sex trafficking ring, among other crimes.

QAnon believers predict the secret war between the Trump administration and the “deep state” network will eventually lead to “The Storm” – a day of reckoning where Trump’s opponents will be arrested or executed.

Recently, QAnon believers have also pushed a range of baseless coronavirus conspiracies. These include claims the virus is a hoax, or a Chinese bioweapon designed to hurt Trump’s re-election chances.

Online actors, real-world consequences

Twitter’s designation of QAnon activity as potentially harmful is partly driven by reports of the movement’s ties to dangerous real-world activities.

QAnon believers have also been linked to armed standoffs, attempted kidnappings, harassment and at least one killing since the conspiracy picked up steam in 2017.

Last year, the FBI issued a report on “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” and identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorist threat.

Although extremism driven by conspiracy theories isn’t new, the report states the internet and social media are helping such theories reach wider audiences.

It also says online conversations help determine the targets of harassment and violence for the small subset of individuals whose beliefs translate into real-world action.

One such example came from the Pizzagate conspiracy (seen by some as a precursor to QAnon), which motivated an American man to gun down a pizza shop that was supposedly a front for a child sex trafficking ring.

QAnon likely to stay

While it’s hard to say exactly how many QAnon believers there are, the movement has thousands of followers on social media.

A recent investigation of QAnon-related pages and groups on Facebook found there are about three million followers and members in total. But there is likely significant overlap among these accounts.

According to a New York Times report citing anonymous sources, Facebook is planning to enforce similar measures to limit the reach of QAnon content on its platform. One of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon currently has more than 200,000 members.

Given QAnon’s reach, it will be difficult for Twitter to stamp it out altogether.

Social media bans are hard to maintain. Content can be shared under new accounts. New code words and hashtags can be adopted which artificial intelligence algorithms can’t detect.

For example, many QAnon believers have tried to operate unnoticed on Twitter by using the number 17 to reference “Q” (the 17th letter of the alphabet), or by writing “CueAnon” instead of “QAnon”.

Human moderators may be needed to identify such circumvention attempts. And it’s hard to say how much human resource Twitter is willing or able to devote to moderating this content.

Banned users can also enlist virtual private networks (VPNs) to change their IP addresses and bypass restrictions.

Furthermore, conspiracy theories such as QAnon are difficult to counter as they are “self-sealing”: any action against believers is interpreted as “evidence” of the theory’s validity.

This is because conspiracists often think agents of the conspiracy have unusual and extensive powers. Some QAnon believers are taking Twitter’s bans to be confirmation of a “deep state” plot against Trump.

That said, it’s possible Twitter’s measures will reduce QAnon’s visibility. A similar past crackdown by Reddit was effective in stemming QAnon activity. Before its ban in 2018, the largest QAnon subreddit had more than 70,000 members.

However, many of these users simply moved to other sites such as YouTube and Facebook – a common trend following bans.

Read more: Reddit removes millions of pro-Trump posts. But advertisers, not values, rule the day

All the stops

With QAnon followers expanding and folding new events into their narrative, the fringe movement has taken on a life of its own.

Numerous US Republican candidates for congress have promoted it. Trump himself has repeatedly retweeted QAnon accounts.

So if Twitter is serious about its newest tussle with misinformation, it will likely have to pull out all the stops.

Read more: QAnon conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic are a public health threat

– ref. QAnon believers will likely outlast and outsmart Twitter’s bans – https://theconversation.com/qanon-believers-will-likely-outlast-and-outsmart-twitters-bans-143192

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor | Program Director, Undergraduate Pharmacy, University of Sydney

What do multiple sclerosis (MS) and the novel coronavirus have in common? Until this week, not much, but a recent clinical trial has shown a reformulation of a drug used to treat MS can potentially also be used to help patients infected with COVID-19.

SNG001 is an inhaled form of a drug called interferon-beta under development by the UK pharmaceutical company Synairgen. Interferon is normally prescribed for the treatment of symptoms relating to relapsing-remitting MS.

But the clinical trial, Synairgen found that when SNG001 was given to patients with COVID-19, it stopped the development of more severe symptoms, accelerated their recovery, and allowed them to leave hospital earlier.

Read more: Vaccine progress report: the projects bidding to win the race for a COVID-19 vaccine

Like other clinical trials for COVID-19 treatments, the results still need to be thoroughly checked before SNG001 is included as a standard treatment for coronavirus. The drug’s key risks (potential for severe depression) also need to be weighed against the potential benefits.

How does it work?

MS is a condition of the central nervous system. The nerve impulses between the brain and spinal cord get blocked or mixed up. It happens because the body’s immune system attacks the protective layers around nerve fibres. The result is a loss of muscle control and balance.

In contrast, COVID-19 is a viral infection that affects a patient’s ability to breathe due to inflammation putting pressure on their lungs.

What both diseases have in common is the activation of the body’s immune response, so a drug that modulates the immune system for one can potentially work for the other.

Interferon-beta (interferon), a naturally occurring protein in the body, is used as an immunotherapy drug to combat relapsing-remitting MS by reducing inflammation and easing the symptoms of the disease.

Scientists at Synairgen hypothesised it could also treat COVID-19 through initiating the body’s antiviral response and potentially reducing inflammation on the lungs.

It is believed some at-risk patient groups cannot produce interferon as effectively as other people, reducing their ability to fight the virus and resulting in more severe symptoms.

So giving those patients interferon, in theory, should help them fight the virus, alleviate their symptoms, and improve survival rates.

Take a breath

For the treatment of MS, interferon is given as a weekly injection into muscle tissue.

The SNG001 drug developed by Synairgen contains the same interferon therapy used for MS, but formulated as an inhaled product.

Originally, the company was developing SNG001 as a treatment for a different type of lung condition called chronic obstructive pulomary diease (COPD), but it saw the direct potential for COVID-19 as well.

Instead of an injection, SNG001 is given to patients via a nebuliser, a machine that transforms a water solution of interferon into a fine mist that can be breathed in by patients through a face mask.

Promising results, so far

Between March and May this year, Synairgen sponsored a clinical trial at University Hospital Southampton to test SNG001 for COVID-19 patients. Those eligible for the trial only needed to have mild symptoms of COVID-19.

Other clinical trials conducted in the past for different drugs, such as remdesivir and dexamethasone, required patients to be hospitalised before they were eligible for drug treatment.

In total, 101 patients in a hospital setting were enrolled in the SNG001 trial and were given the drug daily for 14 days. Compared with a placebo, those given SNG001 had a 79% lower risk of developing severe disease.

Patients given the drug were also twice as likely to recover from their infection and were discharged earlier from hospital than those given the placebo.

Before SNG001 becomes standard care for COVID-19 treatment the results of the clinical trial need to be checked by independent scientists.

In the past, trial results for hydroxychloroquine did not stand up to scrutiny after they were announced and the results were subsequently retracted by the research team.

The risks and benefits

If the latest results are shown to be reliable, before doctors decide to make SNG001 a part of the standard treatment for hospitalised COVID-19 patients they will need to weigh its benefits against the potential risks.

One of the most important side effects of the drugs is that it can induce depression.

As a result, interferon is used with caution in patients with pre-existing depression or who have suicidal thoughts. These conditions may already be heightened by the pandemic if a potential patient for the drug has lost their job or they are not dealing well with the isolation of social distancing.

This means doctors would need to undertake a comprehensive mental health screen of all patients they consider for SNG001 treatment.

Read more: Immunity to COVID-19 may not last. This threatens a vaccine and herd immunity

Other side effects relevant to interferon are that it can worsen seizure disorders or heart failures. So again, it needs to be used with caution in these patient groups.

The results of the SNG001 trial are very promising and potentially give us a treatment to prevent those people mildly infected with COVID-19 from developing more severe symptoms and needing hospitalisation.

But the results need to be checked by independent scientists first, and the drug’s benefits need to be weighed against its risk, as the ability to induce severe depression could cause a wave of mental health problems that make matters worse rather than better.

– ref. Multiple sclerosis drug may help treat COVID-19 and lead to faster recovery – https://theconversation.com/multiple-sclerosis-drug-may-help-treat-covid-19-and-lead-to-faster-recovery-143090

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lana D. Hartwig, Research Fellow, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University

Water management in the Murray-Darling Basin has radically changed over the past 30 years. But none of the changes have addressed a glaring injustice: Aboriginal people’s share of water rights is minute, and in New South Wales it is diminishing.

In the 1990s, governments tried to restore the health of rivers in the basin by limiting how much water could be extracted. They also separated land and water titles to enable farmers to trade water.

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

This allowed the recovery of water for the environment and led to the world’s biggest water market, now worth billions of dollars. For a range of reasons, Aboriginal people have largely been shut out of this valuable water market.

Our research, the first of its kind, shows Aboriginal water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin are declining, and further losses are likely under current policies. This water injustice is an ongoing legacy of colonisation.

An unjust distribution of water

A water use right, also called a licence or entitlement, grants its holder a share of available water in a particular waterway. Governments allocate water against these entitlements periodically, depending on rainfall and water storage. Entitlement holders choose how to use this water. Typically, they extract it for purposes such as irrigation, or sell it on the temporary market.

We mapped Aboriginal water access and rights in NSW over more than 200 years, including the current scale of Aboriginal-held water entitlements.

Read more: Water in northern Australia: a history of Aboriginal exclusion

Across ten catchments in the NSW portion of the Murray-Darling Basin, Aboriginal people collectively hold just 12.1 gigalitres of water. This is a mere 0.2% of all available surface water (as of October 2018).

By comparison, Aboriginal people make up 9.3% of this area’s population.

The value of water held by Aboriginal organisations was A$16.5 million in 2015-16 terms, equating to just 0.1% of the value of the Murray-Darling Basin’s water market.

We wanted to understand how these limited water rights affect Aboriginal people today, and the challenges, if any, they face in holding onto these entitlements. This required examining Australia’s water history and its systems of water rights distribution.

Read more: No water, no leadership: new Murray Darling Basin report reveals states’ climate gamble

What we found were key moments when governments denied Aboriginal people water rights and, by extension, the benefits that now flow from water access. This includes the ability to use water for an agricultural enterprise, or to temporarily trade water as many other entitlement holders do. We describe these moments as waves of dispossession.

The first wave of dispossession

Under colonial water law, rights to use water, for example for farming, were granted to whoever owned the land where rivers flowed. This link between water use and land-holding remained in place until the end of the 20th century.

As a result, Aboriginal people, whose traditional ownership of land (native title) was only recognised by the Australian High Court in 1992, were largely denied legal rights to water.

The second wave

During the last quarter of the 20th century, governments introduced land restitution measures, such as the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1983), to redress or compensate Indigenous peoples for colonial acts of dispossession.

We found water entitlements were attached to some of the land parcels that were transferred to Aboriginal ownership under these processes – but this was the exception.

Read more: 5 ways the government can clean up the Murray-Darling Basin Plan

Land restitution processes intentionally restricted what land Aboriginal people could claim. They were biased against properties with agricultural potential and, therefore, very few of the properties that were returned to Aboriginal ownership came with water entitlements.

At this crucial juncture in land rights reform, federal and state governments entrenched the inequity of water rights distribution by increasing the security of the water rights of those who historically held entitlements. Governments have yet to pay serious attention to the claims of Aboriginal people who see a clear connection between the past and the present in the distribution of water entitlements.

The native title framework has not helped the situation either. Native title is the recognition that Indigenous peoples have rights to land and water according to their own laws and customs.

But it’s difficult for those making a native title claim to get substantial interests in land and waters. The Native Title Act 1993 defined native title to include rights to water for customary purposes and courts are yet to recognise a commercial right to water.

The third wave

We also identified a third wave of dispossession, now underway. From 2009 to 2018, the water rights held by Aboriginal people in the NSW portion of the Murray-Darling Basin shrunk by at least 17.2% (2.0 gigalitres of water per year). No new entitlements were acquired during this decade.

The decline is attributable to several factors, the most significant being forced permanent water (and land) sales arising from the liquidation of Aboriginal enterprises.

Read more: Australia’s inland rivers are the pulse of the outback. By 2070, they’ll be unrecognisable

With water rights held by Aboriginal people vulnerable to further decline, the options for Aboriginal communities to enjoy the wide-ranging benefits of water access may further diminish.

We expect rates of Aboriginal water ownership to be even smaller in other parts of the Murray-Darling Basin (and in jurisdictions beyond the Basin). Research is underway to explore this.

Australia urgently needs a fair national water policy

The Productivity Commission is now reviewing Australian water policy, and must urgently address the injustices faced by Aboriginal people.

In developing a just water policy, governments must work with First Nations towards the twin goals of redressing historical inequities in water access and stemming further loss of water rights. Treaty negotiations may offer another avenue for water reform.

Read more: While towns run dry, cotton extracts 5 Sydney Harbours’ worth of Murray Darling water a year. It’s time to reset the balance

Over recent decades, Australia has been coming to terms with its colonial history of land management, returning more than a third of the continent to some form of Indigenous control under a “land titling revolution”.

But a water titling revolution that reconnects water law and policy to the social justice agenda of land restitution is long overdue. Indigenous peoples must have the opportunity to care for their land and waters holistically, and share more equitably in the benefits of water use.

– ref. Australia has an ugly legacy of denying water rights to Aboriginal people. Not much has changed – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-an-ugly-legacy-of-denying-water-rights-to-aboriginal-people-not-much-has-changed-141743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Deakin University

Most Australians — aside from a few groups dedicated to reenacting American Civil War battles and history buffs including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley — were not familiar until recently with the charged history of the flag of the Confederate States of America.

Now the flag is in the Australian news with reports SAS military in Afghanistan in 2012 used the bold red, blue and white flag to guide in a US helicopter. Two SAS personnel also posed for a photograph with the flag.

Why do these images of Australian soldiers posing with a flag from another country’s long-ago war provoke such strong reactions? Because the flag has long symbolised defiance, rebellion, an ideal of whiteness and the social and political exclusion of non-white people — in a word, racism.

The Confederacy defeated, but not punished

The flag represents the Confederate States of America (CSA or Confederacy), created in 1861 when 11 states seceded from the 85-year-old nation. This rebellion was prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west. Southern enslavers feared slavery in their established states would be Lincoln’s next target.

The ensuing four-year Civil War between the CSA and US was resolved in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the near-abolition of enslavement.

In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For 155 years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.

Read more: The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurling

After a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction, the US military withdrew its forces. White Southerners, who had retained their land, implemented unjust legal and labour systems, underpinned by violence and racist ideas about black people’s inferiority.

Memorials of war

The reembrace of white Southerners into the nation showed a desire to “heal” the nation by downplaying the horrors of enslavement and the struggle to end it.

New narratives depicted the war as a righteous, though tragic, struggle over “states’ rights”. By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about — that is, enslavement — by the 1890s, they remade the meaning of the war.

Read more: From Louisiana to Queensland: how American slave owners started again in Australia

Confederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. In the 1915 box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation, for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon.

In the very next shot, however, the injured Cameron is rescued from the no-man’s land between trenches by his longtime family friend, Northerner and US Army commander, Phil Stoneman.

The movie’s second half cemented the theme of reconciling white Southerners and white Northerners. As it stated in an intertitle, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright”. It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan.

The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy.

Blowing in the wind

The Confederate flag featured prominently in Gone with the Wind (1939), another immensely popular film that again glorified the way of life of white Southerners during and immediately after slavery. In this case, however, Hollywood used the more visually striking Confederate Battle Flag, which General Robert E. Lee had flown during the war, rather than any of the CSA’s national flags.

As Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) arrives at a makeshift hospital, the camera pans back to a field of hundreds of wounded and dead soldiers. The scene shifts only once those soldiers are framed by a Confederate flag, blowing majestically in the breeze.

These two films buttressed a political economy that relied on a cheap labour force of disenfranchised Black Americans. But as African Americans began to make headway in the fight for civil rights, starting during World War II, symbols such as the Confederate flag became even more important to those who felt affronted by their gains.

Read more: I am not your nice ‘Mammy’: How racist stereotypes still impact women

Enter the ‘Dixiecrats’

In the late 1940s, a new political party of Southerners opposed Harry S. Truman and the Democratic Party’s relatively sympathetic stance on civil rights.

These “Dixiecrats” adopted the Confederate battle flag as their party’s emblem. From that point, the flag was clearly associated with racist opposition to civil rights and with umbrage at perceived government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

When civil rights activism was at its most visible, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white Southerners became firmly attached to the flag.

The state of Georgia, where resistance to desegregation was fierce, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag.

A few years later, in 1961, neighbouring state South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag above its state Capitol.

Banning the flag

In 2000, after years of protest, South Carolina legislators moved the Confederate flag to the State House’s grounds. Then, after white supremacist Dylann Roof endorsed the Confederate flag and murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, activist Bree Newsome shimmied up the pole and removed it in a galvanising act of civil disobedience.

Two weeks later, the flag in South Carolina’s house of government was finally removed for good. In the years since, hundreds of Confederate flags, statues and memorials have disappeared, including in the national Capitol.

In 2016, recognising the flag’s toxic history, major retailers announced they would no longer sell the flag.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the removal of Confederate symbols has accelerated. In recent months, Southern company Nascar has banned the flag and the Department of Defense has effectively done so, too.

In a polarised political and media environment, many white Southerners continue to defend their allegiance to the Confederate flag.

They claim the battle flag represents their Southern heritage, as if that heritage comprises an innocent history of mint juleps and church-going. The problem with that claim, as the history of the use of the flag demonstrates, is that the heritage it symbolises is also that of enslavement, inequality, violence and gross injustice.

– ref. Why is the Confederate flag so offensive? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-confederate-flag-so-offensive-143256

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Deakin University

Most Australians — aside from a few groups dedicated to reenacting American Civil War battles and history buffs including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley — were not familiar until recently with the charged history of the flag of the Confederate States of America.

Now the flag is in the Australian news with reports SAS military in Afghanistan in 2012 used the bold red, blue and white flag to guide in a US helicopter. Two SAS personnel also posed for a photograph with the flag.

Why do these images of Australian soldiers posing with a flag from another country’s long-ago war provoke such strong reactions? Because the flag has long symbolised defiance, rebellion, an ideal of whiteness and the social and political exclusion of non-white people — in a word, racism.

The Confederacy defeated, but not punished

The flag represents the Confederate States of America (CSA or Confederacy), created in 1861 when 11 states seceded from the 85-year-old nation. This rebellion was prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west. Southern enslavers feared slavery in their established states would be Lincoln’s next target.

The ensuing four-year Civil War between the CSA and US was resolved in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the near-abolition of enslavement.

In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For 155 years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.

Read more: The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurling

After a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction, the US military withdrew its forces. White Southerners, who had retained their land, implemented unjust legal and labour systems, underpinned by violence and racist ideas about black people’s inferiority.

Memorials of war

The reembrace of white Southerners into the nation showed a desire to “heal” the nation by downplaying the horrors of enslavement and the struggle to end it.

New narratives depicted the war as a righteous, though tragic, struggle over “states’ rights”. By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about — that is, enslavement — by the 1890s, they remade the meaning of the war.

Read more: From Louisiana to Queensland: how American slave owners started again in Australia

Confederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. In the 1915 box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation, for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon.

In the very next shot, however, the injured Cameron is rescued from the no-man’s land between trenches by his longtime family friend, Northerner and US Army commander, Phil Stoneman.

The movie’s second half cemented the theme of reconciling white Southerners and white Northerners. As it stated in an intertitle, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright”. It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan.

The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy.

Blowing in the wind

The Confederate flag featured prominently in Gone with the Wind (1939), another immensely popular film that again glorified the way of life of white Southerners during and immediately after slavery. In this case, however, Hollywood used the more visually striking Confederate Battle Flag, which General Robert E. Lee had flown during the war, rather than any of the CSA’s national flags.

As Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) arrives at a makeshift hospital, the camera pans back to a field of hundreds of wounded and dead soldiers. The scene shifts only once those soldiers are framed by a Confederate flag, blowing majestically in the breeze.

These two films buttressed a political economy that relied on a cheap labour force of disenfranchised Black Americans. But as African Americans began to make headway in the fight for civil rights, starting during World War II, symbols such as the Confederate flag became even more important to those who felt affronted by their gains.

Read more: I am not your nice ‘Mammy’: How racist stereotypes still impact women

Enter the ‘Dixiecrats’

In the late 1940s, a new political party of Southerners opposed Harry S. Truman and the Democratic Party’s relatively sympathetic stance on civil rights.

These “Dixiecrats” adopted the Confederate battle flag as their party’s emblem. From that point, the flag was clearly associated with racist opposition to civil rights and with umbrage at perceived government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

When civil rights activism was at its most visible, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white Southerners became firmly attached to the flag.

The state of Georgia, where resistance to desegregation was fierce, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag.

A few years later, in 1961, neighbouring state South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag above its state Capitol.

Banning the flag

In 2000, after years of protest, South Carolina legislators moved the Confederate flag to the State House’s grounds. Then, after white supremacist Dylann Roof endorsed the Confederate flag and murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, activist Bree Newsome shimmied up the pole and removed it in a galvanising act of civil disobedience.

Two weeks later, the flag in South Carolina’s house of government was finally removed for good. In the years since, hundreds of Confederate flags, statues and memorials have disappeared, including in the national Capitol.

In 2016, recognising the flag’s toxic history, major retailers announced they would no longer sell the flag.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the removal of Confederate symbols has accelerated. In recent months, Southern company Nascar has banned the flag and the Department of Defense has effectively done so, too.

In a polarised political and media environment, many white Southerners continue to defend their allegiance to the Confederate flag.

They claim the battle flag represents their Southern heritage, as if that heritage comprises an innocent history of mint juleps and church-going. The problem with that claim, as the history of the use of the flag demonstrates, is that the heritage it symbolises is also that of enslavement, inequality, violence and gross injustice.

– ref. Seeing red: the problematic history behind the Confederate flag – https://theconversation.com/seeing-red-the-problematic-history-behind-the-confederate-flag-143256