Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan University

With the festive season having come to a close, consumers the world over will be playing with a variety of new tech toys.

In recent years, the most popular gadgets sold on Amazon have included a variety of smartphones, wearable tech, tablets, laptops and digital assistants such as Amazon’s Echo Dot.

And it’s likely our gifting habits over Christmas reflected this. But any device connected to the internet (including almost all of the above) exposes our personal data to a host of threats.

Few of us stop to consider how our new devices may impact our digital footprint, or whether they could build new channels between ourselves and cyber criminals.

With this in mind, here are some simple tips to help you lock down your digital footprint this year.

Use more sophisticated credentials

First, when it comes to setting up a new device and/or account, you should always use a unique password — every single time.

While this task may sound painful, it’s made much easier by password managers. Should your password for a particular account be stolen, at least the others will remain secure.

It’s also worth checking the Have I Been Pwned? website, which can reveal whether your online credentials have already been leaked.

Read more: A computer can guess more than 100,000,000,000 passwords per second. Still think yours is secure?

And even if you’re using more sophisticated biometric-based approaches on a device (such as face or fingerprint login), you can still leave yourself exposed by having a weak password that can allow hackers to bypass the biometric.

Also, if you ever have to enter a credit card number or other financial details to set up an account, you may want to remove them through the service provider’s site or app.

Some services require ongoing payments, but deleting stored payment details where they are no longer needed will help protect your finances. Most services will provide an option to do this, although others may require you to get in touch directly.

You don’t always have to be transparent online

We constantly provide our personal information online in exchange for access to accounts and services.

Often this includes date of birth (to validate your age), postcode (to offer regionally locked services) or details such as your mother’s maiden name (to help restrict unauthorised access to your account).

Consider having a fake identity. That way, if your details are stolen, your real data will be safe.

You may want to set up a sacrificial email account, or even a temporary address (also called a “burner email”) to sign onto services that are likely to spam you in the future.

Apple device users may want to explore the “Sign in with Apple” feature. This restricts the amount of personal data shared with a service is being used.

It can also hide the user’s actual email address when registering — instead creating a site-specific alias that can later be blocked if necessary.

Read more: Your personal data is the currency of the digital age

What happens to our old devices?

When new gadgets enter our lives, the old ones are often passed on to friends and family, sold to strangers, traded in, or simply recycled.

But before we discard our old devices into this growing technology mountain, we should make sure they’re clear of our data. Otherwise, selling an old phone may also mean inadvertently selling your private information.

Many modern devices, particularly smartphones and tablets, have a factory reset option that removes all user data.

For devices without a distinct wipe or reset option, you can consult with the user manual or manufacturer’s website (which will often have a copy of the user manual). If in doubt, there’s plenty of online advice on how to reset devices.

You may need to remove or unlink the old device from your online identities, such as your Apple ID.

It may also be necessary to delete cloud-based accounts — such as Dropbox or Google Drive — set up specifically for that device. And don’t forget about data stored on devices being returned to the seller (perhaps after Boxing Day sales).

A 2019 UK study examining second-hand phones on eBay found only 52% had been properly wiped or reset.

Moreover, 19% contained some form of personal information, ranging from active social media logins to bank account details.

Parental responsibility

Children (especially those in primary school) who use devices should be educated on safe internet practices and cyber safety.

While younger people are becoming increasingly tech-savvy with time, they don’t necessarily know the risks associated with using internet-connected technologies.

It’s important for parents to first learn about appropriate safeguards, and then remind their children of them regularly.

Don’t panic

The good news is you don’t need special cyber security training for each new tech purchase. The lessons above are transferable, so the key is simply to remember to use them.

There are plenty of sources for further learning, including UK Cyber Aware, the Get Safe Online initiative, and the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s website.

To quote from the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “don’t panic”. Just think carefully about how you use (or get rid of) your devices from now on.

– ref. The Christmas gifts that keep giving (your data away) — and how to prevent this – https://theconversation.com/the-christmas-gifts-that-keep-giving-your-data-away-and-how-to-prevent-this-152242

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Starling, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Sydney

How do we know when animals who don’t have tails are happy? — Goldie Rose, aged 5.

Great question Goldie! Animals use their tails for steering, holding, balancing and swimming, but they also use them as a way to talk to each other. A dog wagging its tail is one example, and we usually read a waggy tail as a sign that a dog is happy.

But that’s not the only way dogs can show they’re happy, and there are lots of animals that don’t have tails or don’t use them to talk to each other.

So how can we tell if an animal is happy without a wagging tail?

Different animals have different ways of showing they’re happy, so it helps to know about the animal you’re interested in.

Read more: Is your dog happy? Ten common misconceptions about dog behaviour

For example, cats purr when they’re happy (although some cats also purr when they are in pain). Guinea pigs whistle when they are excited and purr when they are content. Rabbits twitch their noses when they are content and they also can make a purring sound by grinding their teeth. This usually means they are happy, but like cats, sometimes they do it loudly when they are in pain.

Ferrets chirp when they are happy and excited, horses will point their ears towards you and have a relaxed mouth, and parrots sing, whistle or make a grinding, purring sound with their beak when they are content.

So, there are a lot of different ways animals can show they are happy, but sometimes they do the same thing when they are in pain. How confusing!

Often we can get a good idea if they are happy or unhappy by looking at how they are behaving in general.

A cat that purrs because it’s happy may also be winding her body around your legs, or relaxed in your lap, have her tail high in the air, or roll over on her back. All this shows she is trusting and interested.

Read more: Don’t let them out: 15 ways to keep your indoor cat happy

Likewise, a rabbit grinding its teeth while relaxing will also likely be stretching its body out as well. You can tell how relaxed a rabbit is by how stretched out it is while resting. If a rabbit is in pain, it tends to hunch up and squeeze its eyes half shut like it is wincing. Animals that are relaxed and not tense are usually happy and content.

We can also get an idea of how happy an animal is by what they do. Play is one of the most reliable ways to tell if an animal is happy, as only happy animals play. Happy, playful animals will jump into the air, pounce, kick their feet up while they run, and generally be more energetic than they need to be.

Read more: 10 things we do that puzzle and scare horses

Lastly, we can see what animals like to do by what they choose to come back to over and over again. If your animal chooses to lie in the sun or look for tasty treats or dig holes, then you know when they are doing that, they are probably happy.

So, to know when an animal is happy, we need to look at more than what one body part is doing, and we might need to watch them to get to know them.

To be a good friend for our animals, we should give them the freedom to choose their own activities, and that will show us what they like. Happy animal-watching!

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

– ref. Curious Kids: how can we tell if an animal is happy without a wagging tail? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-can-we-tell-if-an-animal-is-happy-without-a-wagging-tail-150374

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

Spotify offered the promise that, in the age of digital downloads, all artists would get paid for their music, and some would get paid a lot.

Lorde and Billie Eilish showed what was possible.

Lorde was just 16 when, in 2012, she uploaded her debut EP to SoundCloud. A few months later, Sean Parker (of Napster and Facebook fame) put her first single — “Royals” — on his popular Spotify Hipster International playlist. The song has sold more than 10 million copies.

Eilish’s rags-to-riches story is a little murkier. But the approved narrative begins in 2015, when the 13-year-old uploaded “Ocean Eyes” (a song written by her older brother) to SoundCloud. She was “discovered”. Spotify enthusiastically promoted “Ocean Eyes” on its Today’s Top Hits playlist. She is now the youngest artist with a billion streams to her name, and Spotify’s most-streamed female artist for the past two years

The new hit squad

Streaming now accounts for more than half of recorded music revenue. Spotify has about a third of the subscribers paying for music streaming. Playlists overtook albums as the preferred way of listening to sequences of songs about five years ago.

Appearing on a prominent Spotify playlist is therefore a big deal.

Economists Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel calculated (in 2018) that a song appearing on Today’s Top Hits was worth about 20 million extra streams and US$116,000 to US$163,000 in royalty payments. That was when Today’s Top Hits had about 18.5 million subscribers. It now has more than 26 million.

With so much power, what will Spotify do next?

The answer, apparently, is to run a pay-to-play “experiment”, dropping Spotify’s “crystal clear” commitment in 2018 that “no one can pay to be added to one of Spotify’s editorial playlists”. But now there’s this:

In this new experiment, artists and labels can identify music that’s a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithm that determines personalised listening sessions.

The catch is musicians must accept a lower payment — a “promotional recording royalty rate” — on any song streamed as a result.

The prisoner’s dilemma

Spotify presents music uploaders with a conundrum known to economists as the “prisoner’s dilemma” — a classic paradox of game theory.

This is where an article typically references the 2001 biopic “A Beautiful Mind”, about mathematical genius John Nash, who won a Nobel economics prize for his contributions to game theory. In the movie Nash (played by Russell Crowe) talks about the prisoner’s dilemma in the context of chatting up women.

Read more: The legacy of John Nash and his equilibrium theory

One formulation of the prisoner’s dilemma involves two individuals arrested together for possessing stolen items. A conviction for possession carries a six-month jail term. The police suspect the pair might have stolen the items. Burglary carries a five-year sentence. Wthout evidence, however, to secure a burglary conviction needs one or both prisoners confessing and implicating the other.

The prisoners are separated. Each is offered a deal: immunity from prosecution on any charge if they confess and that confession leads to the other’s conviction on both charges.

Each prisoner understands they are better off collectively to both stay silent. But neither can be sure the other will.

• if both stay silent, both get six months for possession

• if only one confesses, they go free while the other gets five years

• if both confess, both get five years.

The most predictable outcome is that both decide to confess. This is the celebrated “Nash equilibrium”, in which both players, neither wanting to be the sucker, make uncooperative decisions leading to the worse outcome for both.

The musician’s dilemma

The musician’s dilemma is that the best cooperative outcome is all artists refusing Spotify’s offer. No one gains, but no one loses either.

But who’s going to organise that, given the understandable fear of repercussions for going against Spotify?

Best placed to resist are Spotify’s superstars — the likes of Eilish, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Drake and Bad Bunny, with billions of streams between them. They have diversified marketing and revenue sources, and are cash cows Spotify doesn’t want to lose.

The most likely outcome is many or most musicians accepting lower song payments from Spotify, putting the squeeze on struggling musicians who refuse while making little difference to the prominence super streamers get from Spotify’s algorithms.

Read more: John Nash and his contribution to Game Theory and Economics

Looking beyond Spotify

Spotify’s deal has no attraction for Melbourne guitarist Sheldon King. He has decided to quit Spotify.

Originally from the UK and an accomplished live performer, the classically trained guitarist split his time in 2020 between session work, teaching and writing and recording. He released his album Navigating by the Stars in November on BandCamp.

“I am removing most of my music from Spotify,” King says. He cites all the small costs of getting songs onto streaming sites — paying a distribution service such as Tunecore, for example. “They don’t seem like much, but they can add up. With Spotify’s already laughably small royalty per stream, it’s easy to spend more money than you make.”

Read more: Music collectors seek out rare albums not available on streaming

Power imbalance

After the most difficult year for many working musicians in memory, Spotify’s new strategy has been compared, imperfectly, to the days of radio stations and presenters seeking bribes from record companies to play their songs.

There’s a key difference. Now Spotify is the most influential radio programmer on Earth, deciding the new songs millions of listeners hear in any minute.

And instead of a handful of record companies, every aspiring musician is now able to record and upload a song. Spotify gets about 40,000 new uploads a day.

Spotify says it paid more than US$3.5 billion to rights holders in the first nine months of 2019. But surveys of musicians suggest very few can make a living from streaming. A British survey has found eight in 10 musicians earned less than £200 (A$355) a year from streaming, with 90% saying streaming accounted for less than 5% of their earnings.

Read more: Even famous musicians struggle to make a living from streaming – here’s how to change that

Music streaming has created a market power imbalance between corporate leviathans such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Tencent and the millions of individual performing artists. It is a challenge to shift the balance of power a bit towards the artists, without losing the benefits to the listening public of access to a wider range of music with far greater convenience than ever imaginable before.

– ref. Stream weavers: the musicians’ dilemma in Spotify’s pay-to-play plan – https://theconversation.com/stream-weavers-the-musicians-dilemma-in-spotifys-pay-to-play-plan-151479

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

If the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2017 Triennial broke attendance records with more than 1.2 million visitors, it is nothing short of a miracle the 2020 Triennial is taking place at all.

To bring together more than 100 artists, designers and collectives from more than 30 countries, featuring 86 projects, in the era of COVID, was always going to be a tall ask. It has happened and it has a huge “wow” factor with a mixture of major household names as well as completely unexpected, quirky discoveries.

The Triennial 2020 is built around four broad themes with porous borders: Illumination, Reflection, Conservation and Speculation. Even after wading through the voluminous catalogue — more like a piece of bulky furniture than a read-in-bed book — the themes are more like general conceptual props than clear categories.

The concern is with the ability for art to challenge assumptions about the status quo, alert us to impending disasters, suggest alternatives, dazzle us with unexpected inventions and inspire us with wondrous creations of undreamt of beauty.

A world guided by AI

The one work that had the greatest impact on me was by the young Turkish artist Refik Anadol, now based in Los Angeles. Titled Quantum memories, 2020, it is presented on a huge 10 by 10 metre LED display screen encountered as you enter the NGV building in St Kilda Road.

Commissioned by the gallery, it is a collaborative work between the artist and Google. Employing a dataset drawn from more than 200 million images linked to nature, Anadol uses a Google quantum computer (described as 1000 times more powerful than a conventional supercomputer) combined with machine learning algorithms enabled by AI.

Read more: Why are scientists so excited about a recently claimed quantum computing milestone?

The image processing algorithms ingest millions of photographs and generate new images with related statistical properties. We are exposed to images of fantastic, ever-changing landscapes that never existed — somewhat uncanny, as if remembering something not previously experienced but somehow convincing and real.

Enthralling, completely seductive and endlessly changing, this work brought to mind the words of the Sufi mystic Rumi, “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

Anadol presents us the world “in another form” guided by artificial intelligence (AI). Unlike a video installation presented on a loop, every moment is a state of flux, constantly reinventing itself and creating new images.

Moving from the high tech to the low tech, we encounter Porky Hefer’s Plastocene – Marine Mutants, 2020, from a disposable world. Hefer, based in Cape Town, South Africa, creates through his Southern Guild fabricators a series of handmade, large-scale environments consisting of imaginary sea creatures from a dystopian future he terms “Plastocene”.

They include a huge, octopus-like creature made from hand-felted cigarette butts. In Hefer’s worldview, the end of the Anthropocene era will be marked by a new species that will transmutate and absorb plastic bags, straws, coffee cups and other pollutants.

Although humans, as we know them, will struggle to survive in this polluted environment, these mutants will flourish.

Read more: How the term ‘Anthropocene’ jumped from geoscience to hashtags – before most of us knew what it meant

A selfie magnet

If Anadol and Hefer are relatively unknown to Australian audiences, Jeff Koons is one of the most high-profile and iconic contemporary American artists. His Venus, 2016-20, is a two-and-a-half metre, mirror-polished, stainless steel sculpture with colour coating that adds to the Baroque exuberance of the piece.

The source image is a relatively obscure 34-centimetre painted, porcelain figurine of the same name by Wilhelm Christian Meyer from 1769.

Koons has taken liberties with his model to heighten the latent eroticism of the forms. As he observes:

Venus represents the combination of understanding the needs of society and of something greater than self, while at the same time the desire for procreation and the continuation of the species. It involves the seductiveness of all the senses — the joys, pleasures and pains of life itself.

This acquisition will certainly become a selfie magnet for the NGV.

Radiating in its space

Another high profile participant in the Triennial is Korean artist Lee Ufan, who employs the Zen Buddhist practice of painting as a form of meditation revealing energy and realisation. His Dialogue, 2017, a major new acquisition for the gallery, is a sublime piece that seems to radiate in its space.

The artist recently observed: “What is light and what is darkness? I do not like the definition that sees existence in terms of light and nothingness in terms of darkness. There is darkness in all forms of light, and light penetrates all kinds of darkness. A concept of light or darkness considered in isolation cannot be valid.”

A meditative, hypnotic painting, it seems to vibrate in space and is in contrast to the loud, bombastic and attention grabbing forms populating the Triennial, which occupies all levels of the gallery building.

It is always difficult to summarise an exhibition like this one, conceived as a series of immersive spaces with superb moments such as the blue paintings and sculptures of Dhambit Mununggurr, the dialogue with the NGV collection by the Fallen Fruit or painting with neon light by the Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans.

The NGV Triennial is being held at a time when the success of exhibitions can no longer be measured by attendance numbers, but it seems to be hitting the right spot.

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, is allocating a record $1.46 billion for the building of a new NGV Contemporary and another $20 million is promised by the Ian Potter Foundation. The future looks bright for subsequent triennials.

Triennial 2020 is at the National Gallery of Victoria until 18 April 2021.

– ref. Enthralling, dystopian, sublime: NGV Triennial has a huge ‘wow’ factor – https://theconversation.com/enthralling-dystopian-sublime-ngv-triennial-has-a-huge-wow-factor-152607

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clive Williams, Campus visitor, ANU Centre for Military and Security Law, Australian National University

Tensions are running high in the Middle East in the waning days of the Trump administration.

Over the weekend, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, claimed Israeli agents were planning to attack US forces in Iraq to provide US President Donald Trump with a pretext for striking Iran.

Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the US assassination of Iran’s charismatic General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also warned his country would respond forcefully to any provocations.

Today, we have no problem, concern or apprehension toward encountering any powers. We will give our final words to our enemies on the battlefield.

Israeli military leaders are likewise preparing for potential Iranian retaliation over the November assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — an act Tehran blames on the Jewish state.

Both the US and Israel have reportedly deployed submarines to the Persian Gulf in recent days, while the US has flown nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to the region in a show of force.

And in another worrying sign, the acting US defence secretary, Christopher Miller, announced over the weekend the US would not withdraw the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group from the Middle East — a swift reversal from the Pentagon’s earlier decision to send the ship home.

Israel’s priorities under a new US administration

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like nothing more than action by Iran that would draw in US forces before Trump leaves office this month and President-elect Joe Biden takes over. It would not only give him the opportunity to become a tough wartime leader, but also help to distract the media from his corruption charges.

Any American military response against Iran would also make it much more difficult for Biden to establish a working relationship with Iran and potentially resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

It’s likely in any case the Biden administration will have less interest in getting much involved in the Middle East — this is not high on the list of priorities for the incoming administration. However, a restoration of the Iranian nuclear agreement in return for the lifting of US sanctions would be welcomed by Washington’s European allies.

Read more: Joe Biden’s approach to the Middle East will be very different from Trump’s, especially on Iran

This suggests Israel could be left to run its own agenda in the Middle East during the Biden administration.

Israel sees Iran as its major ongoing security threat because of its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian militants in Gaza.

One of Israel’s key strategic policies is also to prevent Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapon state. Israel is the only nuclear weapon power in the Middle East and is determined to keep it that way.

While Iran claims its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes, Tehran probably believes realistically (like North Korea) that its national security can only be safeguarded by possession of a nuclear weapon.

In recent days, Tehran announced it would begin enriching uranium to 20% as quickly as possible, exceeding the limits agreed to in the 2015 nuclear deal.

This is a significant step and could prompt an Israeli strike on Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear facility. Jerusalem contemplated doing so nearly a decade ago when Iran previously began enriching uranium to 20%.

How the Iran nuclear deal fell apart

Iran’s nuclear program began in the 1950s, ironically with US assistance as part of the “Atoms for Peace” program. Western cooperation continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution toppled the pro-Western shah of Iran. International nuclear cooperation with Iran was then suspended, but the Iranian program resumed in the 1980s.

After years of negotiations, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed in 2015 by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (known as the P5+1), together with the European Union.

The JCPOA tightly restricted Iran’s nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions. However, this breakthrough soon fell apart with Trump’s election.

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

In April 2018, Netanyahu revealed Iranian nuclear program documents obtained by Mossad, claiming Iran had been maintaining a covert weapons program. The following month, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the JCPOA and a re-imposition of American sanctions.

Iran initially said it would continue to abide by the nuclear deal, but after the Soleimani assassination last January, Tehran abandoned its commitments, including any restrictions on uranium enrichment.

Israel’s history of preventive strikes

Israel, meanwhile, has long sought to disrupt its adversaries’ nuclear programs through its “preventative strike” policy, also known as the “Begin Doctrine”.

In 1981, Israeli aircraft struck and destroyed Iraq’s atomic reactor at Osirak, believing it was being constructed for nuclear weapons purposes. And in 2007, Israeli aircraft struck the al-Kibar nuclear facility in Syria for the same reason.

Starting in 2007, Mossad also apparently conducted an assassination program to impede Iranian nuclear research. Between January 2010 and January 2012, Mossad is believed to have organised the assassinations of four nuclear scientists in Iran. Another scientist was wounded in an attempted killing.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the killings.

Iran is suspected to have responded to the assassinations with an unsuccessful bomb attack against Israeli diplomats in Bangkok in February 2012. The three Iranians convicted for that attack were the ones recently exchanged for the release of Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert from an Iranian prison.

The Mossad assassination program was reportedly suspended under pressure from the Obama administration to facilitate the Iran nuclear deal. But there seems little doubt the assassination of Fakhrizadeh was organised by Mossad as part of its ongoing efforts to undermine the Iranian nuclear program.

Fakhrizadeh is believed to have been the driving force behind covert elements of Iran’s nuclear program for many decades.

The timing of his killing was perfect from an Israeli perspective. It put the Iranian regime under domestic pressure to retaliate. If it did, however, it risked a military strike by the truculent outgoing Trump administration.

It’s fortunate Moore-Gilbert was whisked out of Iran just before the killing, as there’s little likelihood Iran would have released a prisoner accused of spying for Israel (even if such charges were baseless) after such a blatant assassination had taken place in Iran.

Read more: Kylie Moore-Gilbert has been released. But will a prisoner swap with Australia encourage more hostage-taking by Iran?

What’s likely to happen next?

Where does all this leave us now? Much will depend on Iran’s response to what it sees (with some justification) as Israeli and US provocation.

The best outcome would be for no obvious Iranian retaliation or military action despite strong domestic pressure for the leadership to act forcefully. This would leave the door open for Biden to resume the nuclear deal, with US sanctions lifted under strict safeguards to ensure Iran is not able to maintain a covert weapons program.

– ref. Are the US and Iran headed for a military showdown before Trump leaves office? – https://theconversation.com/are-the-us-and-iran-headed-for-a-military-showdown-before-trump-leaves-office-152606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Laufer, Associate Professor, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

In Australia, New Zealand and around the world, COVID has turned luxury and semi-luxury hotels into quarantine facilities.

Among the four and five-star hotels reported as having been used for temporary detention are Sydney’s Intercontinental, Marriott, Hyatt Regency, Sheraton Grand, Sofitel Wentworth and Novotel Darling Harbour; Auckland’s Rydges, Crowne Plaza, Grand Millennium, Four Points by Sheraton and Ramada; and Melbourne’s Stamford Plaza, Mercure, Park Royal and Rydges on Swanston.

Each has had a valuable brand name.

Governments prefer four and five-star hotels to small ones because they are large (200 rooms or more) and easier to run as quarantine facilities.

It’s hard to blame the big international hotels for taking part. Without income from international tourists, they’ve needed the money.

But by taking the money and becoming known as places where people are locked up, at times cross-infected, and fed food ranging from “nice” to “atrocious”, they run the risk of destroying brands that took decades to build.

‘Associative interference’

It would happen through a process known as associative interference, where it becomes difficult to focus on old and relevant information about something because new and less-relevant information gets attached to it and gets in the way.

A recent memory of something much less glamorous can contaminate a lifetime of memories associating a brand or an experience with luxury.

This can happen both at the general level (hotels are no longer a place I am particularly keen to spend time in, even five-star ones) and at a specific level (this particular brand that I always associated with quality I now associate with something less savoury).

In New Zealand the names of hotels designated as COVID-19 facilities are announced in press conferences, published on an official website and reported in the media.

In Australia, it’s more hit and miss. Word spreads about the hotels being used, especially when things go wrong, even though some seem reluctant to confirm their status.

How damaging could it be?

Brands such as Intercontinental, Sheraton, Hyatt, Rydges and Ramada might be tempted to take comfort from the experience of Corona, the brand of beer.

It ended the year with its sales intact, despite initial concerns. But its only association with coronavirus was a name.

Hotels have been linked to COVID and detention in real life.

Some have been likened to prisons.

Read more: Another day, another hotel quarantine fail. So what can Australia learn from other countries?

One way for COVID hotels to lessen the COVID taint would be to flood people’s memories with something else – their original positioning as places of luxury.

A massive advertising and public relations campaign reinforcing the earlier themes of opulence and quality might, in time, overwhelm the association with quarantine and restore the image the brands once had.

If all else fails, change the name

If the new taint still sticks, there’s an alternative. It’s to abandon the name.

It’s a manoeuvre with an impressive history.

After years of trying to live down Britain’s worst nuclear disaster, the Windscale power plant and reprocessing facility changed its name to Sellafield in 1981.

The tobacco giant Philip Morris became Altria Group in 2003, and this year Adani Mining became Bravus Mining in a victory of sorts for opponents of its Queensland coal mine. Australia’s much-criticised Newstart unemployment benefit became JobSeeker.

A new name with no lineage might be better than a familiar one that calls forth memories of 2020.

– ref. After COVID we may never think about hotels in the same way again – https://theconversation.com/after-covid-we-may-never-think-about-hotels-in-the-same-way-again-151373

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Laurenceson, Director and Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI), University of Technology Sydney

Great power competition in the Asia-Pacific region has been building for years. But COVID-19 has turbo-charged the shifts taking place and China is finishing 2020 in a significantly stronger position compared with the US than when the year started.

Meanwhile, Canberra’s relations with Beijing continue to deteriorate and there’s little reason to be optimistic that a sudden, positive turnaround will be seen in 2021.

As competition rather than cooperation has become the dominant frame through which both Beijing and Washington view their bilateral relationship, each is increasingly sensitive to evidence that other countries in the Asia-Pacific region are supporting their opponent.

The fundamental driver of China’s hostility towards Australia in 2020 stems from its assessment that Australia’s leaders have reneged on earlier commitments to never direct the country’s security alliance with the US against China.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has appealed for Australia and other middle and smaller powers to be granted “greater latitude” in how they manoeuvre between the US and China in the future.

But the University of Sydney’s James Curran cautions against unrealistic expectations:

Great powers simply don’t dole out strategic space to others.

China’s power on an upwards trajectory

At the end of 2019, China’s GDP stood at US$14.3 trillion. This was two-thirds that of the US GDP of $21.3 trillion.

The fallout from COVID-19 has accelerated the trend in China’s favour. The International Monetary Fund’s latest growth forecasts suggest China’s economy will jump from two-thirds to three-quarters the size of the US by the end of 2021.

And when cost differences are accounted for and the two economies are measured in terms of their respective purchasing power, China’s GDP is actually already 10% larger than the US.

According to the Lowy Institute’s “Asia Power Index”, which tracks power in the economic, military, diplomatic and cultural domains, the US still comes out on top, but its lead over China has been cut in half since 2018. This mainly reflected losses by the US rather than gains by China.

And even before COVID-19 hit, a survey of business, media and civil society leaders in Southeast Asia showed that Beijing was considered vastly more influential than Washington in the region, though this increasing power was viewed with apprehension.

Nearly half said they had little to no confidence in the US as a strategic partner or provider of regional security.

And when asked if the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) was forced to align itself with either the US or China, a majority in seven of the 10 ASEAN member countries chose China.

The past year has also delivered dividends for China’s leaders domestically, with most citizens giving them high marks for their handling of the public health crisis, despite some initial anger of the government’s early attempts to cover up the severity of the pandemic.

This reinforces already high levels of overall trust in the central government.

The contrast with the US in this regard is stark. In May, a cross-country survey revealed that 95% of Chinese respondents had trust in their government, compared with just 48% in the US.

Read more: US-China relations were already heated. Then coronavirus threw fuel on the flames

Yet, China’s leaders still seem insecure

All of these “wins” would naturally provide impetus for China’s international behaviour to become more confident and assertive.

But President Xi Jinping’s worldview is another factor. In September, Xi exhorted Communist Party cadres to “maintain a fighting spirit and strengthen their ability to struggle”. The word “struggle” appeared more than another 50 times in the same speech.

The Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor says this reflects Xi’s view that China is in an

existential struggle against an implacable enemy dead-set on destroying China.

China’s diplomats had already been primed to embrace a “fighting spirit” in a speech delivered by Foreign Minister Wang Yi last November.

Read more: What’s behind China’s bullying of Australia? It sees a soft target — and an essential one

All of this has meant that rather than projecting a self-assured poise, China’s international behaviour has frequently veered in the direction of bullying fuelled by insecurity.

Australia has been on the front lines of this treatment — dialogue on the leader and ministerial level has been refused, exports have been targeted and propaganda campaigns have been deployed.

Beijing’s intransigence has predictably led to the strengthening of coalitions like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (comprised of the US, Australia, Japan and India), as well as deeper conversations among Japan, India and Australia about how to build greater resilience into supply chains that are currently heavily exposed to China.

Greater use of carrots than sticks

There is some evidence China is beginning to recognise its over-the-top behaviour is counterproductive, at least towards some countries, and make greater use of carrots rather than sticks.

Its “vaccine diplomacy” in Southeast Asia is a case in point.

Read more: China wants to be a friend to the Pacific, but so far, it has failed to match Australia’s COVID-19 response

COVID-19 has hit Indonesia particularly hard, hit with more than 600,000 total cases so far. But just last week, Jakarta received 1.2 million doses of a vaccine manufactured by a Chinese pharmaceutical company, Sinovac.

China is touting this effort a “Health Silk Road”, with pledges to provide billions in aid and loans to mostly developing countries to help them recover from the pandemic.

Australia won’t have much latitude with a stronger China

In the case of Australia, however, China is unlikely to put the stick down any time soon.

As Dirk van der Klay, a research fellow at ANU, explains, painting a stark contrast between Southeast Asia and Australia serves the purpose of reminding the region of the benefits of staying in Beijing’s good books — as well as the costs of crossing it.

While countries like the US, Britain and France have at least offered Australia some rhetorical support in its China predicament, Australia’s most significant Southeast Asian neighbours have been notably quiet.

With China’s relative power set to grow further in 2021, Canberra might feel even more uncomfortable. But as former senior Singaporean diplomat, Bilahari Kausikan, remarked in October, Australia is “not in a unique position” as “almost everybody” in the region faces the same challenge of managing relations with China and the US to maximise their economic and security interests.

Australia’s unfortunate distinction is that because its relations with China have already sunk to such depths, it has less ability to negotiate a path between the two great powers.

Elevating partnerships with countries like Japan, India and Indonesia offers one way forward, but alongside this needs to be a pragmatic strategy for getting the China relationship at least back on an even keel.

Tokyo, New Delhi and Jakarta have all had serious challenges with Beijing, but their relations never fell to the depths of the current China-Australia tensions. These countries might offer some useful advice here, too.

Read more: Timeline of a broken relationship: how China and Australia went from chilly to barely speaking

– ref. China enters 2021 a stronger, more influential power — and Australia may feel the squeeze even more – https://theconversation.com/china-enters-2021-a-stronger-more-influential-power-and-australia-may-feel-the-squeeze-even-more-150943

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elke Hacker, Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology

Despite decades of public health campaigns, skin cancer remains a major threat to health in Australia, with more cases diagnosed each year than all other cancers combined.

Skin cancer rates remain high and sunburn is all too common in Australia.

Our research looks at how best to inform people about the hazards of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, including by evaluating and testing shade, as well as the development of wearable UV indicators including stickers and wristbands. While this technology can help to improve people’s sun protection habits, we continue to come up against some common myths about sunburn.

As we’re in the middle of summer, it seems a good time to debunk some of these.

Myth 1: “You can’t get burnt in the shade”

Effective shade can provide protection from the Sun’s UV rays, but we can still get burnt in the shade.

Shade materials with holes or gaps can allow penetration by UV radiation.

The same rule applies for tree shade, with denser foliage and wider canopies providing better protection than trees with sparse foliage and dappled sunlight.

Similarly, solid roof structures with wide overhangs and little sky view provide greater UV radiation protection than smaller structures.

Reflected UV radiation is another factor that means you’re not always safe in the shade. The Sun’s rays reflect from light-coloured surfaces and can bounce back under shade.

Light surfaces, such as concrete, light-coloured paint or metallic surfaces, reflect more than dark ones. Sand can reflect as much as 25% of UV radiation. This means if you’re sitting under a beach umbrella, UV radiation can still damage your skin, even though you feel like you’re covered in the shade.

Myth 2: “You’re safe from the sun when in water”

Up to 40% of total UV radiation hits the body even half a metre below the surface of the water, according to SunSmart.

Ordinarily, you would have to dive at least 2.5m inshore and 4.5m in offshore coastal waters to avoid harmful UV radiation. This is because offshore waters tend to be clearer, so UV can penetrate further, whereas inshore waters tend to have sediment and nutrients that can cause a rapid decline in UV.

When swimming, you may not notice when your skin is burning due to the cooling effect of water. Reflective surfaces around water environments can also amplify UV, such as concrete or other hard surfaces around a swimming pool.

The importance of adequate sun protection when participating in water-based activities is highlighted by the rate of sunburn in Queenslanders, with 45% of children sunburnt in the previous 12 months and 69% of these sunburns acquired during a water-based activity.

Myth 3: “Exercise makes my skin red hot, not the sun”

You might often hear people say, when they return from exercise, that they’re red only because they’ve been running. While this does occur, redness from exercise usually dissipates quickly — so if you’re still red in the 24 hours after exercise, it’s sunburn.

When you exercise, your body temperature increases and your body’s natural mechanism is to cool down by carrying blood towards the skin’s surface, causing one to sweat and cool off.

Sweat washes sunscreen away and towelling down wipes off sunscreen.

Regular reapplication of a water-resistant sunscreen is vital. Work-out tan lines are signs of skin damage. Each time our skin gets damaged we greatly increase our risk for skin cancer.

Myth 4: “That’s not sunburn, it’s windburn”

Windburn can make your skin red, but in Australia, windburn is pretty rare. It’s more likely to occur in instances like skiing, by very windy, cold and dry conditions, with dense mountain clouds and minimal or no sunlight. In Australia, it’s much more likely to be sunburn.

What’s more, high winds can actually increase the likelihood of getting sunburn. Wind dries out and weakens the outer layer of skin. Wind force can make these dead skin cells fall off.

When you apply sunscreen, it coats this outer layer of skin. As wind brushes these skin cells away your sunscreen goes with it, leaving unprotected skin to be burnt by the sun.

Using sun-protective clothing and reapplying sunscreen are the best ways to avoid skin damage when it’s windy.

Myth 5: “You can’t get burnt in the car through a window”

Often, glass used in car side windows is untinted. It reduces UV radiation but doesn’t completely block transmission.

This means you can still get skin damage if you spend a long time in the car next to an untinted side window. Tinted windows can help reduce the amount of UV that hits your skin, and the rule of thumb is that the darker the tint, the more it protects — it’s worth noting, though, that legally you can’t tint your whole front window in Australia, which is obviously the biggest window in the car.

More commonly, however, people are sunburnt in cars when they have the side windows down and are exposed to a short period of high levels of UV radiation.

Simple solutions are the five sun-safe measures — slip, slop, slap, seek, slide:

• slip on a long-sleeved shirt. If you’re in water, this might include a rashie or wetsuit.

• slop on an SPF 30 or higher sunscreen, and reapply at least every two hours, or sooner after swimming or sweating

• slap on a broad-brimmed hat

• seek shade

• slide on sunnies.

– ref. I can’t get sunburnt through glass, shade or in water, right? 5 common sunburn myths busted – https://theconversation.com/i-cant-get-sunburnt-through-glass-shade-or-in-water-right-5-common-sunburn-myths-busted-150640

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin JD Smith, Associate Professor in Sociology, Australian National University

Sun, sea … snakes: all three are synonymous with the Australian summer, but only the first two are broadly welcomed. And of all Australia’s snake species, brown snakes are among the most feared.

To some degree, this is understandable. Brown snakes are alert, nervy and lightning-fast over short distances. When threatened, they put on a spectacular (and intimidating) defensive display, lifting the front half of their body vertically, ready to strike.

They are also fairly common, and well adapted to suburban life – especially the eastern brown species. And of course, certain species have a highly toxic venom designed to immobilise the mammals they prey on.

Besides my work as a sociologist, I’m also a professional snake catcher and handle scores of venomous snakes during the warmer months. I don’t expect people to love snakes, but I believe greater knowledge about them will help with their being respected more as keystone ecological creatures.

Not just wicked serpents

Around two Australians die each year from snake bites, and the brown snake family causes the most human – and likely pet – fatalities. But compare that figure with the annual road toll (1,188 deaths in 2019) or the 77 people killed by horses and cows in Australia between 2008 and 2017. You can see why many herpetologists – or snake experts – feel our fear of snakes is somewhat misplaced.

Where does this fear come from, then? It partly arises from the representation of snakes throughout human history as menacing. The fact snakes are cold-blooded, with an unblinking stare, means humans have often depicted them as callous and cold-hearted. Examples include the serpent who corrupts Eve in the Book of Genesis, and monstrous mythological characters such as Medusa.

Partly because of these and other depictions, snakes are often considered something to be feared. When they slither into our manicured back yards, they are seen as a “problem” that has transgressed our sanitised domestic lives. And this fear is often transferred down the generations.

Read more: Does Australia really have the deadliest snakes? We debunk 6 common myths

In my snake-catching work, I have extricated snakes from backyards and homes, a shopping centre, parks and school classrooms. I’ve even removed snakes from a woman’s boot, under a soccer team’s kit bag and inside a weapons bunker! About 85% of the snakes I work with on callouts are eastern browns.

Many callers wanting a snake removed experience intense emotions, from shock and hostility to awe and reverence. Most want the snake taken as far away from their property as possible.

After catching a snake, I release it into a suitable non-residential environment. I always wonder what happens to it next. The threats snakes face are numerous. They can be harmed or killed by humans, pets, feral animals or predators. They are also threatened by habitat loss, climate events and contaminated prey items.

I release each with the departing words: “Good luck fella, stay safe, stay out of trouble.”

Tracking snake movements

Eastern brown snakes are timid and reluctant to strike unless provoked. They are generally solitary animals except during breeding periods. They perform a crucial ecological role by eating vermin such as mice and rats, controlling the numbers of other native species and providing a food source for various animals.

Information on how brown snakes move through and use urban space is limited. We urgently need more understanding of their daily habits, especially as urban development encroaches on their natural habitat, increasing the chances of conflict with humans or pets. More insight is also needed on whether it’s damaging to relocate hundreds of snakes each year.

A study in Canberra funded by the Ginninderry Conservation Trust aims to answer these issues. A team of researchers, including myself, will track the movements of 12 eastern brown snakes in the urban environment. We will do this using telemetry – tracking technologies fitted to the snakes. Some devices will be implanted into the snake under the skin, and others attached externally above the tail.

Read more: I’ve always wondered: who would win in a fight between the Black Mamba and the Inland Taipan?

We will examine:

• movements of adult male and female eastern browns

• how far they travel

• the times of day and temperatures when they are active

• where they go dormant in the cooler months

• the refuges they use to navigate the hostile environment they live in.

Our team will also explore the effects of catching a snake and releasing it into new habitat within a designated range (5km in the ACT, and 20km in NSW). We will examine how the snake responds to the stress of being captured and moved, the risks it might confront in an unfamiliar landscape, and whether it survives. We will also explore the implications for other snakes in the release habitat and the genetic consequences of interbreeding between geographically distinct populations.

Knowledge breeds greater tolerance

We anticipate the study’s findings will help educate the public about how snakes operate in suburbia. It will also inform translocation policies and conservation efforts.

We also hope to show how eastern browns are vital – not superfluous or undesirable – parts of thriving ecosystems. The better we understand snakes, the less we might fear them. This may also mean we are less disposed to relocating or harming them.

– ref. ‘Good luck fella, stay safe’: a snake catcher explains why our fear of brown snakes is misplaced – https://theconversation.com/good-luck-fella-stay-safe-a-snake-catcher-explains-why-our-fear-of-brown-snakes-is-misplaced-150783

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Gannaway, Lecturer, University of Melbourne

This article is part of three-part series on summer reads for young people after a very unique year.

US teenager Trayvon Martin was shot dead in 2012 by a neighbourhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman who was later acquitted of the murder. This saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The racist social and political issues in the US saw the deaths and violence on Black bodies brought front and centre through acts of protest.

The arguments against the alleged police brutality in the US were easily translatable to the Australian context.

The Black Lives Matters movement was renewed following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May this year. And together with US counterparts, tens of thousands of Australians marched across our cities to draw attention to racial profiling, police brutality and the more than 400 Indigenous people who have died in police custody since a royal commission into the problem was held in 1991.

The global movement brought unprecedented sales of books about race and anti-racism. This turn toward texts is indicative of the role they play in helping us make sense of major social issues.

Angie Thomas, author of the 2017 bestseller “The Hate U Give”, has spoken about the role of literature in igniting awareness, resistance and change.

I think books […] play a huge role in opening people’s eyes and they’re a form of activism in their own right, in the fact that they do empower people and show others the lives of people who may not be like themselves.

Research has long shown a link between the books we read and our development of empathy. But more recent research has highlighted it is important we don’t see books as immediate fixes to complex social issues, especially when we import these books from other locations and times.

Our reading must be accompanied by close attention to the ways racism and prejudice unfold in our own location.

Read more: 5 Australian books that can help young people understand their place in the world

Coming to understand the impact and complexity of racism in this way is referred to as “racial literacy”. Here are five books that can help young people build racial literacy around the varied forms of racism and discrimination.

by Nic Stone

Dear Martin explores issues of race through the eyes of conscientious 17 year old, Justyce McAllister.

Built around the central question, “What would Martin (Luther King) do?”, this novel brings to light the litany of decisions and ethical conundrums thrust into Justyce’s lap daily, as he navigates a world affected by racism and prejudice.

by Ibi Zobai and Yusuf Salaam

In 1989, five young men were falsely accused of the assault and murder of a jogger in New York’s Central Park. Now documented in Ava Duvernay’s Neflix miniseries When They See Us, the Five were exonerated 12 years later.

But the story stands as a haunting reminder of the inequalities experienced by Black men and the life-altering consequences this can wreak on innocent lives.

One of these young men, Yusuf Salaam, collaborates with award-winning author and prison reform activist Ibi Zobai, to craft a story that examines these themes through a narrative of a wrongfully incarcerated young man navigating his teenage years in prison.

edited by Anita Heiss

This anthology of 50 chapters provides an opportunity to deeply listen and understand the lived experiences of Indigenous Australians and the ways racism takes all manner of overt, subtle and systemic forms.

Particularly noteworthy are the chapters by Ambelin Kwaymullina and Celeste Liddle, in which the authors describe both the nature of racism experienced by them from the schoolyard, and the broader historical context on which this racism is based.

by Brittney Morris

This novel centres on 17-year-old Kiera, a talented young developer who creates a multiplayer role-playing game. The game is a “mecca of black excellence” and an escape from the racism often experienced by those “game-playing while black”.

When an offline murder is traced back to the game, Kiera grapples with the complexity of both the implications of her creation and the conversations it triggers.

Slay weaves social commentary into the dialogue between characters from all walks of life, covering everything from cultural appropriation, to whether racism can ever be “reversed”.

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

Many books here centre around the kind of racial stereotyping and violence that put the Black Lives Matter movement on the map. But understanding racism in the Australian context also involves examining colonialism and the racist underpinnings of our history.

Living on Stolen Land centres Indigenous sovereignty in the conversation about race. Using prose verses such as those titled “Bias” and “Listening”, it leads readers through examining unconscious beliefs and moving toward being a genuine ally of Indigenous people.

Author and educator Layla F Saad has suggested when we read texts about social issues like racism, we read for transformation, not merely information.

A range of texts have been developed to support families in having these transformative discussions together. Maxine Beneba Clarkes’ “When We Say Black Lives Matter”, for instance, is a beautifully illustrated picture book that focuses on the strength and resilience of black children and communities. While texts like Our Home our Heartbeat by Adam Briggs centres on key Indigenous figures to be celebrated.

Read more: Teen summer reads: 5 novels to help cope with adversity and alienation

– ref. Teen summer reads: 5 books to help young people understand racism – https://theconversation.com/teen-summer-reads-5-books-to-help-young-people-understand-racism-150072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucy Montgomery, Program Lead, Innovation in Knowledge Communication, Curtin University

For all its faults, 2020 appears to have locked in momentum for the open access movement. But it is time to ask whether providing free access to published research is enough – and whether equitable access to not just reading but also making knowledge should be the global goal.

In Australia the first challenge is to overcome the apathy about open access issues. The term “open access” has been too easy to ignore. Many consider it a low priority compared to achievements in research, obtaining grant funding, or university rankings glory.

But if you have a child with a rare disease and want access to the latest research on that condition, you get it. If you want to see new solutions to climate change identified and implemented, you get it. If you have ever searched for information and run into a paywall requiring you to pay more than your wallet holds to read a single journal article that you might not even find useful, you will get it. And if you are watching dire international headlines and want to see a rapid solution to the pandemic, you will probably get it.

Many publishing houses temporarily threw open their paywall doors during the year. Suddenly, there was free access to research papers and data for scholars researching pandemic-related issues, and also for students seeking to pursue their studies online across a range of disciplines.

Read more: Science publishing has opened up during the coronavirus pandemic. It won’t be easy to keep it that way

In October 2020, UNESCO made the case for open access to enhance research and information on COIVD-19. It also joined the World Health Organisation and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in calling for open science to be implemented at all stages of the scientific process by all member states.

There is clearly an appetite for freely available information. Since it was established earlier this year, the CORD-19 website has built up a repository of more than 280,000 articles related to COVID-19. These have attracted tens of millions of views.

Europe has led the way

Europe was already ahead of the curve on open access and 2020 has accelerated the change. Plan S is an initiative for open access launched in Europe in 2018. It requires all projects funded by the European Commission and the European Research Council to be published open access.

Read more: All publicly funded research could soon be free for you, the taxpayer, to read

A 2018 report commissioned by the European Commission found the cost to Europeans of not having access to FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) research data was €10 billion ($A16.1 billion) a year.

In 2019, open access publications accounted for 63% of publications in the UK, 61% in Sweden and 54% in France, compared to 43% of Australian publications.

Australia is lagging behind

Australia’s flagship Australian Research Council has required all research outputs to be open access since 2013. But researchers can choose not to publish open access if legal or contractual obligations require otherwise. This caveat has led to a relatively low rate of open access in Australia.

Read more: Universities spend millions on accessing results of publicly funded research

The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) and the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) have long carried the torch for open access in Australia. But, without levers to drive change, they have struggled to change entrenched publishing practices of Australian academics.

Our Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) project has examined open access across the world. We have analysed open access performance of individuals, individual institutions, groups of universities and nations in recent decades. The COKI Open Access Dashboard offers a glimpse into a subset of this international data, providing insights into national open access performance.

This analysis shows a steady global shift towards open access publications.

For example, in November 2020, Springer Nature announced it would allow authors to publish open access in Nature and associated journals at a price of up to €9,500 (A$15,300) per paper from January 2021. This was a signal change for the publishing industry. One of the world’s most prestigious journals is overturning decades of closed-access tradition to throw open the doors, and committing to increasing its open access publications over time.

At the moment, the pricing of this model enables only a select group to publish open access. The publication cost is equivalent to the value of some Australian research grants. Pricing is expected to become more affordable over time.

Read more: Increasing open access publications serves publishers’ commercial interests

It’s not just about access to facts

This international trend is a positive step for fans of freely available facts. However, we should not lose sight of other potentially larger issues at play in relation to open knowledge – that is, a level playing field for access to both published research and participation in research production.

Put another way, we need to pursue not only equity among knowledge takers but also among knowledge makers if we are to enable the world’s best thinkers to collaborate on the planet’s signature challenges.

All of this is good news for people who love to access information – but the bigger overall question for the higher education sector is about the conventions, traditions and trends that determine who gets to be considered for a job in a lab or a library or a lecture theatre. There is much more to be done to make our universities open for all – a future of equity in knowledge making as well as taking.

– ref. 2020 locked in shift to open access publishing, but Australia is lagging – https://theconversation.com/2020-locked-in-shift-to-open-access-publishing-but-australia-is-lagging-150284

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christina Ergler, Senior Lecturer, University of Otago

In an age of climate crisis, unaffordable housing and increasing disparities of wealth, the livability and functionality of our cities are more important than ever. And yet, important voices are missing from urban planning debates — the voices of those who will one day inherit those cities.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UNICEF child-friendly cities initiative, children of any age or ability have the right to use, create, transform and develop their urban environments.

Despite this, the commonly held view is that preschool children lack the competency to reflect on environments beyond their playgrounds or kindergartens. Young, pre-literate children are denied meaningful participation in city design.

But our work — the Dunedin preschooler study — shows we need to include the voices of these intuitive city planners who think holistically about what a city needs to function well and be safe, healthy and fun.

Considerate and thoughtful planners

The project involved 27 children aged between two and five from three kindergartens in Dunedin. The children engaged in a variety of exercises, including mapping their ideal city using picture tiles, and group discussions with researchers.

The children also took us around their neighbourhoods to provide firsthand insights into what they liked and didn’t like about their local area. A very clear picture soon emerged: young children were considerate and future-oriented planners.

The mapping exercise showed children thought about their own needs but also those of other city dwellers and family members. They expected cities to have at least the basic amenities of a child-friendly city.

Read more: How to teach saving and spending to kids as young as 3 years old

The children wanted health services and facilities that stimulate mind and body, such as libraries, natural environments and gathering places — 78% of children listed playgrounds as important.

While 66% included a supermarket in their design, 59% included a hospital, 48% a fire engine and 41% a coffee shop — as one child observed, their grandma and grandad would use it.

Safety and fun for all

Children also viewed a safe city as important, with 56% placing police cars on their map to symbolise being protected from burglars, “naughty” and drunken people and speeding drivers. They regarded lampposts, pedestrian crossings and traffic lights as essential safety infrastructure.

On neighbourhood walks the children frequently pointed out aesthetically pleasing places — areas with colourful flowers or playful spaces with kōwhai seeds that can be turned into pretend helicopters.

Read more: World Children’s Day: Young people deserve to be heard during COVID-19

The children also warned us about toadstools, prickly bushes, glass on footpaths or other rubbish they were concerned could hurt animals. One child revealed she “hated the pile of rubbish […] because it can go into the water and kill all the animals when they eat”.

By including the often overlooked needs of non-human things, such as sea creatures and plants, the children demonstrated an awareness of the links between environmental protection, conservation and livability.

Cities as happy places

The children not only created child-friendly cities, but care-full ones that work for all people, animals and plants. Their model cities were safe, socially and physically connected, with destinations, services and amenities available which people of all ages and abilities could get to safely.

More importantly perhaps, they created cities with physical and social elements designed to make people happy.

In creating these worlds for our research, the children showed deep, inclusive and emotional connections. We saw they cared for their local environment and felt a responsibility to all living and non-living things.

Read more: How gardening at school can tackle child obesity

But children’s voices are still just a whisper in urban and policy debates. This is a shame, because how young people are treated by their city inevitably influences their life chances. Their well-being as young children has obvious implications for being and feeling well later in life.

Our research identifies the need for communities, planners and urban policymakers to ensure young children can participate and help make the most of their cities in a safe, inclusive way.

The challenge for all of us is to develop the right tools for integrating young children’s views, experiences and suggestions. We can then move towards designing more intuitive, care-full cities — ones we would all benefit from living in.

– ref. Young children are intuitive urban planners — we would all benefit from living in their ‘care-full’ cities – https://theconversation.com/young-children-are-intuitive-urban-planners-we-would-all-benefit-from-living-in-their-care-full-cities-151365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Aotearoa New Zealand likes to think it punches above its weight internationally, but there is one area where we are conspicuously falling behind — the number of sites recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention.

Globally, there are 1,121 recognised World Heritage Sites, both cultural and natural. Each has had to satisfy at least one of ten possible selection criteria, adjudicated by the World Heritage Committee, meaning it possesses “outstanding universal value”.

With each such listing comes global recognition, cultural pride and economic rewards. But despite Aotearoa New Zealand’s rich and celebrated natural and cultural wonders, we have contributed only three to the international list: Te Wahipounamu in the South Island, Tongariro National Park in the North Island, and New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands.

While there is a good tentative list of potential submissions, we believe it is now out of date and the country needs to go further. Mostly, we need to be thinking in much broader terms about the reasons we value our heritage.

Valuing our early human history

First, some context. It’s a given that people are amazed when they see the best of humanity’s Neolithic sites, such as Stonehenge in England or Newgrange in Ireland. We are mesmerised by the ancient rock art of Australia, Africa and Europe. As cultural sites, they meet one or various world heritage selection criteria:

• they are masterpieces of human creative genius

• they exhibit an important interchange of human values in landscape design or type of landscape that illustrates a significant stage in human history

• they bear a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition that is living or has disappeared

• they are an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land use or sea use, representative of human interaction with the environment.

There is no doubt the existing World Heritage Sites fulfil these criteria — but we believe a number of sites in New Zealand would too, and be of outstanding universal value to all humanity.

Read more: The forgotten environmental crisis: how 20th century settler writers foreshadowed the Anthropocene

In particular, those areas where humans first touched these lands and left some mark or record of their presence deserve world heritage status. For example, sites such as Te Pokohiwi (Wairau Bar) and Moturua Island, as well as some of the early sites of Māori rock art, potentially meet the criteria.

A Pacific-wide campaign

To pursue this would require a lot of expert analysis (traditional and academic), as well as consent to ensure the proper engagement and involvement of local communities.

But if that happens, such sites could form the basis of a national nomination. In turn, this could be built into a Pacific-wide nomination recognising the astonishing feats of those early Polynesian navigators.

Read more: We’ve developed a framework to help World Heritage Sites manage invasive species

The Pacific covers roughly 30% of the Earth’s surface. It is the biggest and deepest of the planet’s ocean basins. Using an extraordinary understanding of ocean patterns, air currents and astronomy, Indigenous peoples successfully navigated this vast body of water in ways that could not be replicated for nearly 500 years.

Their remarkable exploration spread humanity throughout the Pacific. Aotearoa New Zealand became the last landmass on the planet to be inhabited. It also cemented a Māori world view and cosmology as a crucial source of identity, interconnectedness and custom.

Not easy, but possible

We would argue Aotearoa New Zealand fulfils both sides of the World Heritage site equation: the idea and practice of one of humanity’s most spectacular achievements, and the physical locations where the feet of those early navigators first trod.

The country should now be focusing its efforts on building the case for recognising the unique human achievements contained within the heritage of this land. We do not pretend such a nomination would be easy, but we do think it is possible.

Nor are we saying this should push the other heritage we value to one side. Rather, this would add to it, helping us think more deeply about what we value and why. Such a project would promote traditional knowledge and intercultural dialogue, pride and understanding at local, national and global levels.

Most of all, it would be the right thing to do.

– ref. Why Aotearoa New Zealand’s early Polynesian settlement should be recognised with World Heritage Site status – https://theconversation.com/why-aotearoa-new-zealands-early-polynesian-settlement-should-be-recognised-with-world-heritage-site-status-149981

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, Associate Professor, 50/50 By 2030 Foundation, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra

Australian Cabinet papers from 2000, released today, reflect a relatively quiescent Australia where Islamic militancy and offshore detention were barely glimpses on the horizon, and climate science denialism was not a factor in cabinet considerations at all.

It was the year before the “year that changed everything”: 2001, when Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, and the Howard government created its “Pacific Solution” asylum-seeker deterrent. They would both become prisms through which Australian politics would be refracted for many years to come.

In contrast, in 2000, John Howard (prime minister 1996-2007) later mused, “we had no conception of the challenges which would engulf the world in the next few years”.

The government’s concerns half-way through its second term, with a 14-seat majority, were overwhelmingly domestic. The approach to global issues mostly prioritised local implications over international obligations.

Minchin throws a stick in the wheel of an ETS

On climate change, the papers reveal a working consensus among cabinet ministers, with one exception, that an emissions trading scheme (ETS) was not only a possible but a likely route by which Australia would eventually fulfil its international environmental obligations.

The market-based nature and sectoral neutrality of an ETS made it the quality choice, cabinet submissions and departmental co-ordination comments make clear. The papers show early work being done on an ETS within the government.

Industry and Resources Minister Nick Minchin stood out against the ETS consensus. Advocating a massive expansion of the gas industry, Minchin pushed for compensation for carbon-intensive industries so large and across so many sectors that it would have massively blunted an ETS’s impact. This drew sharp adverse comments from across the key departments.

Treasurer Peter Costello and his department supported expansion of the gas industry, but drew the line at Minchin’s proposed emasculation of a future ETS. Costello would unsuccessfully bring an ETS proposal to cabinet three years later, in 2003. Howard announced one in the lead-up the 2007 election.

So the 2000 papers contain foundational documents at the heart of this policy arc. They show Minchin as central in swerving cabinet from its consensus ETS support in 2000, to hostility by the time he helped install Tony Abbott as Liberal opposition leader in 2009.

Read more: Bushfires won’t change climate policy overnight. But Morrison can shift the Coalition without losing face

The GST takes flight

Costello’s implementation of the goods and services tax (GST) was the centre of heavy cabinet deliberations ahead of its implementation on July 1 2000.

It was the culmination of a textbook exercise in conceiving, publicly advocating for and then successfully implementing a major, complex public policy – an object lesson for governments today.

It begs the question whether, had the Coalition won the 2007 election, an ETS might now be an unremarked-upon aspect of public finance in Australia too, just like the once controversial GST.

Rural and regional Australia was a major focus, with cabinet submissions generally including rural impact statements.

Howard benefited from a congenial relationship with the National Party leader and deputy prime minister, John Anderson.

Anderson was the best-educated Nationals leader since Earle Page. He was aligned with the National Farmers Federation (NFF) push for market-oriented policy over the old Country Party “deal-making” policy style, to which the Nationals later reverted.

Howard could count on Anderson’s support in cabinet. In exchange, Anderson ran a massive infrastructure program bringing concrete benefits to the bush and regions and kept its voters welded to the Coalition.

Read more: Cabinet papers 1998-99: how the GST became unstoppable

On many issues, little has changed in 20 years

Women are barely mentioned in the papers and were almost non-existent in Howard government decision-making. There was only one woman in the 17 strong cabinet: the family and community services minister, Senator Jocelyn Newman.

In the outer ministry, the aged care minister, Bronwyn Bishop, came under pressure when it emerged residents at Riverside Home in Melbourne were being subjected to kerosene baths, with lethal consequences. Problems in other aged care homes quickly emerged.

Bishop’s cabinet submission in the wake of the crisis trumpeted the government’s Aged Care Act 1997 as “the basis for a sound and sustainable aged care system” and “the most significant change for the industry in its history”.

There was no need to restore nursing ratios, she argued. A “return to ratios would return the industry to detailed input regulation and reduce its efficiency” the submission, which cabinet backed, said.

Indigenous Australians are little mentioned other than in relation to workforce disadvantage and the Northern Territory’s move to mandatory detention for minors.

Cabinet supported only a fraction of the assistance requested by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Minister John Herron to address deep and worsening Indigenous unemployment.

The government decided not to override the NT government’s mandatory detention move. Instead, it asked Attorney-General Daryl Williams to write to his NT counterpart about its concerns. A week later, cabinet was outraged when it found a United Nations committee investigating potential human rights breaches in Australia against Indigenous citizens, without consultation.

What the 2000 cabinet papers reveal concerning the growing issue of unauthorised boat arrivals in Australia, and in particular the “deterrent” approach Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Minister Philip Ruddock recommended, and cabinet adopted, is historically significant.

They show a government under increasing pressure and moving quickly down a particular path. Departmental comments show this rang increasingly loud alarm bells in the major departments, even as they broadly supported the “deterrent” approach.

There are, and likely always will be, different opinions about the deterrent strategy, and public discussion usually turns on the binary question of whether it was right or wrong.

The 2000 papers are important, not least because they open up critical additional questions, even for its supporters, about whether this strategy could have been implemented differently and better.

Anglosphere politics had begun to make a particular kind of shift to the right, and the Howard government was in the vanguard. It was still relatively early days in that shift, as the fact the government had a cabinet position that included “multicultural affairs” in its title attests.

To put this shift into international context, media mogul Rupert Murdoch would not appoint Roger Ailes CEO of his Fox News channel in the United States until the following year.

Australia’s insurgency of explicitly nativist politics was marked by the arrival in Canberra in 1996 of One Nation’s Pauline Hanson as the member for Oxley. Internationally, this wave may have peaked in the election of another nativist redhead, US President Donald Trump, 20 years later.

The fierce conduct of the “history wars” in Australia from the 1990s, the prominent role of conservative think tanks in it, and the early challenge and ongoing political consequences of unauthorised boat arrivals in Australia – which has only relatively recently emerged as an issue in Europe – make Australia an early example of a phenomenon that shifted mainstream conservative politics to a distinctly different place from that occupied before.

In 2000, elements of it were evident but not yet fully activated. The following year, from September 11, they would be supercharged.

Read more: Pauline Hanson built a political career on white victimhood and brought far-right rhetoric to the mainstream

Chris Wallace is the official historian for the 2000-2001 cabinet papers release from the National Archives of Australia. You can read her full essay on the 2000 papers here.

– ref. Cabinet papers 2000: the Coalition before climate denialism, but on the path to offshore detention – https://theconversation.com/cabinet-papers-2000-the-coalition-before-climate-denialism-but-on-the-path-to-offshore-detention-151576

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Swann, Associate Professor in Psychology, Southern Cross University

It’s that time of year when many of us are setting goals for the year ahead. The most common New Year’s resolution – set by 59% of us – is to exercise more.

But our research suggests the way we typically set goals in exercise often doesn’t work. So, what should we do instead?

Our research interviewing elite athletes suggests one possibility is to set open goals instead.

Read more: Can trying to meet specific exercise goals put us off being active altogether?

Specific goals can actually put us off

Generally we’re advised to set specific, or SMART, goals (where SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound). Aiming to walk 10,000 steps per day is a common example.

This advice is typically based on goal-setting theory from the 1990s. However, that theory has now evolved, with research now suggesting specific goals in some cases can actually put us off.

One problem is specific goals are all-or-nothing: you either achieve the goal or you fail.

That’s why you might feel you’ve failed after “only” recording 9,000 steps when your goal was 10,000. In reality, 9,000 steps might actually be an achievement (especially on a busy day) — but because you didn’t reach your specific target, it can feel disappointing.

When you stop making progress towards your goal, or start to feel like you’re failing, it’s easy to give up — just like many of us do with New Year’s resolutions.

Used incorrectly, specific goals even cause unethical behaviour (like using devices to artificially increase our step counts and benefit from lower insurance premiums!).

One alternative is to set what’s known as an open goal.

What are open goals?

Open goals are non-specific and exploratory, often phrased as aiming to “see how well I can do”. For example, professional golfers in one study described performing at their best when aiming to “see how many under par I can get”.

When colleagues and I interviewed elite athletes about exceptional performances, a Mount Everest climber described how:

I was just thinking, ‘Oh I’ll just see how it goes and take it as it comes.’ I climbed higher and higher and the climb had got more and more engrossing and difficult and all-encompassing really […] until I discovered that I’d climbed like 40 metres without consciously knowing what I was doing.

Open goals don’t just work for elite athletes – they work well in exercise too. One study found insufficiently active people performed better (in this study that meant they walked further) when pursuing open goals than they did with SMART goals.

The fitness industry is already starting to use open goals. For example, the Les Mills fitness brand now recommends open goals (“to see how active you can be”), and the Apple Watch now incorporates open goals as a workout option.

Psychological benefits of open goals

Open goals aren’t just good for performance — they’re also much more psychologically beneficial than SMART goals.

Indeed, the elite athletes who first reported open goals described how they were an important part of experiencing flow – the enjoyable, rewarding state when everything just seems to click into place and we perform well without even needing to think about it.

Follow-up studies found open goals – compared to SMART goals — make walking more enjoyable, make people more confident and make them feel they performed better. That boosts motivation and suggests open goals can help people stick with exercise routines longer.

One participant said open goals “took away the trauma of failing”.

Why do open goals work differently to SMART goals?

There’s another important difference between open and SMART goals. When you set a SMART goal, you’re identifying something in the future you want to achieve (“I want to be able to walk 10,000 steps every day”).

So pursuing SMART goals is about reducing the gap between where you are now and where you want to get to – you’re always lagging behind where you want to be. That can make it feel like your progress is slow, and slow progress doesn’t feel good.

When you set an open goal, your focus is on your starting point. If your goal is to “see how many steps I can reach today”, then as your step count rises, it will feel like you’re making progress. You may start to think, “Oh, I’m already on 2,000 steps… Now it’s 3,000 steps… Let’s see how many I can get to.”

Rather than comparing against where you should be, you’re constantly building on your starting point.

That makes the process much more positive – and the more positive we feel during exercise, the more we’ll want to do it again and again.

To set your own open goals, think first about what you want to improve (for example “being more active”). Then identify what you want to measure, such as your daily average step count.

Phrase your goal in an open-ended, exploratory way: “I want to see how high I can get my average daily step count by the end of the year.”

And then get started! With an open goal, you’re more likely to see progress, enjoy the experience, and stick with it until you’re ready to set — and achieve — more specific goals.

– ref. Want to exercise more? Try setting an open goal for your New Year’s resolution – https://theconversation.com/want-to-exercise-more-try-setting-an-open-goal-for-your-new-years-resolution-149172

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Lee, Research assistant, The University of Queensland

So you’re one of the 21% of Australians who got sunburnt last weekend.

While we should be avoiding sunburn, it’s sometimes easier said than done in the Australian sun.

What can you do once you realise you’re turning into a temporary lobster?

First, the bad news

Once you’re sunburnt, you can’t undo the damage to your DNA and skin structures, and you can’t speed up skin healing. You can only treat the symptoms.

Sunburn is a radiation burn caused by too much exposure to ultraviolet (UV) rays, causing extensive damage to the DNA in your skin. When your skin’s DNA monitoring and repair system judges there’s too much damage to fix, it flags the cells for destruction and calls in the immune system to finish the job.

The immune cells and extra fluid squeezing into the skin cause the swelling, redness, heat and pain we know as sunburn. Blisters develop when whole sheets of cells die and lift away, and fluid fills in the space below. Later, dry peeling results when large sheets of dead cells peel off to make way for fresh ones.

Read more: Explainer: what happens to your skin when you get sunburnt?

However, while your skin does its thing, you can manage the symptoms and make yourself more comfortable.

Step 1: Prevent further damage and assess your burn

First, get out of the sun until the redness and pain have subsided, even if this takes several days. The full effects of a sunburn can take up to three days to develop, and further UV exposure will only compound the damage.

Next, assess whether to seek medical help. Severe cases can involve second-degree burns, which disrupt the lower layer of skin, the dermis, and stop the skin from regulating fluid loss effectively. If you have a second-degree burn across a large area of you body, complications can include electrolyte imbalances due to large amounts of fluid loss, or shock, also due to extreme fluid loss. Secondary infections are also possible since the upper layer of skin is no longer acting as a tough barrier to germs. You should definitely see a doctor if you:

• have large areas of blistered skin, especially on the face

• have severe swelling

• can’t manage the pain with over-the-counter painkillers

• experience fevers, chills, nausea, dizziness or confusion.

Blistered sunburn in children needs immediate attention from your GP.

Step 2: Ease the suffering

As with a thermal burn, water is your friend. Drink plenty to correct any dehydration from being in the sun too long and replenish the fluid being drawn into your skin. Cool baths, showers or damp cloths ease the sensation of heat and can be used as often as you like throughout the day. Avoid putting ice on a sunburn, as this can make matters worse by causing intense vasoconstriction, where blood vessels narrow sharply and cut off local blood supply to already damaged skin.

Moisturising lotions can also help soothe by keeping moisture in, but avoid skin-numbing creams unless prescribed by your doctor. Any water-based moisturiser should do, including aloe vera gel.

Despite its popularity as a home remedy, there’s surprisingly little research on aloe vera for sunburn specifically. There’s promising data for its use in wound healing, but many studies investigated aloe extracts taken orally, rather than gel on the skin. In any case, a commercial aloe vera gel won’t do you any harm if you find it soothing. However, gel straight from the plant in your garden comes with a risk of soil-borne infections in skin that’s already damaged (warning: gruesome pictures in that link).

Over-the-counter painkillers like ibuprofen or paracetamol can take the sting out of your sunburn and help you rest more comfortably. If your skin is very itchy, try an antihistamine. US guidelines also often suggest low-dose (0.5-1%) hydrocortisone cream; there’s not much evidence for its effectiveness, but it also won’t hurt you to try it for a few days.

If you have blisters, try not to pop them as that exposes the damaged skin underneath to infection; cover them up with a wound dressing if you’re tempted.

While none of these remedies will fix the damage in the way antibiotics fix an infection, they will make you more comfortable while your skin gets on with healing itself.

Read more: Monday’s medical myth: we’re not getting enough sun

Step 3: Make a plan

While you’re stuck inside, pinpoint how you got burnt and how you might prevent it next time. Most sunburn happens when you did not expect to be outdoors for long, or when you thought sunburn was unlikely because the weather was cool, windy or cloudy. UV radiation is still present in these conditions, but you don’t have the benefit of feeling hot to remind you to get out of the sun.

Here are a few familiar scenarios:

• got burnt when you unexpectedly had to park 10 minutes’ walk away? Apply sunscreen as part of your daily routine whenever the UV index will be 3 or over. This will protect you from these sneaky sunburns and also from sub-sunburn levels of UV damage. Don’t worry — there’s no evidence wearing sunscreen every day will make you vitamin D deficient or cause a toxic build-up of chemicals in your body

• arrived at the cricket and realised you left your hat or sunscreen at home? Many venues offer free sunscreen, so ask at the check-in or the health and safety officer

• coming in from the beach, garden or bike ride just a bit too late? Sunscreen won’t protect you all day, so make sun-protective clothes part of your regular attire — a rashie, long-sleeved shirt, or UV-protective armguards and leggings

• got to the park BBQ when all the shady spots were taken? Arrange your next outing to avoid the most UV-intense middle of the day. The SunSmart app or Bureau of Meteorology weather report will tell you the UV forecast and when you need sun protection

• forgot to reapply sunscreen? Set an alarm on your phone next time to remind you.

The more you practise this kind of thinking, the easier it will become.

– ref. How to treat sunburn pain, according to skin experts – https://theconversation.com/how-to-treat-sunburn-pain-according-to-skin-experts-150070

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Norman Day, Lecturer in Architecture, Practice and Design, Swinburne University of Technology

Throughout the world architects are designing green buildings, whether it’s in their sustainable construction, environmentally friendly operation or actually green by style.

It’s broadly titled biophilia, connecting people with nature, and it can lead to some creative and innovative designs.

But now we are finding that literally greening the world — by covering building walls and roofs with vegetation — can also come with some unexpected problems.

Read more: Greening our grey cities: here’s how green roofs and walls can flourish in Australia

A bug’s high life

In the Chinese city of Chengdu, a vast green experimental housing estate of 826 apartments was constructed where people can live in a vertical forest with every open space and balcony containing live vegetation.

Trouble is they must share the plants with a scourge of mosquitoes and other bugs. Most apartments in the Qiyi City Forest Gardens development were sold by April 2020, but six months later only a handful of families had reportedly moved in.

The towers were built in 2018 and plants were provided to reduce noise and clean up pollution. But the plants thrived, while sales moved slowly, and no one was clipping the greenery to keep it in control.

Read more: Unbuilding cities as high-rises reach their use-by date

Now mostly empty balconies have cascading branches of plants overtaking space, blocking windows.

It might not help that Chengdu and its population of 16.3 million people are located in Sichuan, central China, which is humid and semi-tropical, a perfect environment for fast-breeding mossies.

But a slow uptake, with tenants slow to move in, made the problem worse as the plants subsumed their buildings.

Some vertical vegetation living success

Other green projects across the globe have avoided this particular problem, so far.

Milan’s Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) was designed by Stefano Boeri and botanist Laura Gatti.

They reportedly spent long hours selecting suitable vegetation, a variety of 800 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 15,000 plants, which would suit their location and the Milanese climate.

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

Their plan was to improve air quality in the city via the green facades, and residents have embraced the concept, which appears to be where Qiyi City Forest has gone wrong.

In Chengdu, maintenance and care of the plantings is almost non-existent, so no truly symbiotic relationship between accommodation and human occupier has formed as part of biophilic living. As is nature’s way, the non-human occupiers (the bugs) are winning.

Gardens need a gardener

US landscape architect Daryl Beyers, from the New York Botanical Garden, says the Chengdu setup didn’t work partly as a result of bad design.

In Chengdu’s humid climate and clammy monsoons, stagnant water collects in planters which are not properly drained, and mosquitoes breed in these.

Beyers adds:

They [the developers] didn’t think about the maintenance […] You can’t have a garden without a gardener.

They were touting it as a manicured garden outside on your deck. If it’s manicured, someone has to do the manicuring.

The idea of fully manicured vegetation on balconies only works if the plants are cared for regularly. Apparently, gardeners attend Qiyi City just four times a year to maintain the plants, but they require weekly care.

Sydney’s green space on the up

One Central Park apartments in Sydney, by French architect Jean Nouvel, takes on a green mantle with plants covering most of its walls and balconies.

French botanist Patrick Blanc selected the plants on the building for their capacity for healthy growth and suitability to the Sydney habitat.

By using acacias (wattles) and poa (grasses) on upper levels and goodenia (hop bush) and viola (native violet) lower down, the vegetation is attuned to its place and growing successfully.

More than 1,100 square metres of walls support many species of plants, most of them native to Sydney. They are at home with the local climate and seasons. The plants can withstand hot, dry and windy Australian summers and have survived since 2014.

How to green your buildings

Green buildings are necessary for the environment. We need to redress the loss of our natural resources and their benefits, and green buildings can do that by adopting appropriate design, energy efficiencies, renewable materials and green technologies.

Read more: A third of our waste comes from buildings. This one’s designed for reuse and cuts emissions by 88%

Central Park’s success could be emulated at Chengdu, by tracing back the original design intent and adopting a workable maintenance and management plan.

The lessons from both projects indicate that proper planning and appropriate selection of vegetation, which is then fed and watered by applicable technology, will yield a proficient green building.

People feel comfort living with nature, and a vertical garden gives those in high-rise towers a chance to share that comfort. But with the benefits come responsibilities.

The clue here is that a faithfully biophilic building must be appropriate for use. That means appropriate in terms of the place, natural resources, local climate and the people who must manage and occupy the natural surroundings.

– ref. Green buildings can bring fresh air to design, but they can also bring pests – https://theconversation.com/green-buildings-can-bring-fresh-air-to-design-but-they-can-also-bring-pests-147838

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Pickles, Professor of History, University of Canterbury

What’s with those jandals, hokey pokey ice-creams, buzzy bees, Swanndris and gumboots? Far from being random and unrelated objects, these icons of so-called Kiwiana tell a story of late 20th-century nostalgia at a moment of rapid social transformation.

Definitions of Kiwiana vary and the term is widely applied to objects, expressions and pastimes that evoke a sense of national identity. But, as sociologist Claudia Bell has argued, it’s an identity where Pākehā culture is dominant.

When including Indigenous content, Kiwiana has occupied a largely aesthetic and apolitical place. The focus has been on flora and fauna, such as the kiwi itself, the silver fern, koru and pāua shell. Māori incorporation within Kiwiana involves myth-making, traditional costumes and objects such as kete, poi and tiki.

In the 2020s, then, Kiwiana is arguably no longer fit for purpose in a diverse, decolonising nation. Yet these relic symbols persist, part of art and culture in schools and still selling products.

Comfort in times of anxiety

When Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, New Zealand lost its major trading partner and status as “Britain’s farm”. Global oil shocks dealt a further blow, ending the post-war economic “golden weather”. Decolonisation spread from the economy to the social, cultural and political worlds.

As author Richard Wolfe put it, Kiwiana objects emerged as “reminders of who we are”, which served as anchors in a world of change. It was sentimental and looked backwards, nestled in nostalgia.

Read more: How the Australian Women’s Weekly spoke to ’50s housewives about the Cold War

This all happened in the context of a wider popular “heritage moment” in the late 20th century. The British historian Raphael Samuel said these “historical fictions” were affectionately conjured up, often in reaction to change, with Americana, Canadiana and Australiana all part of the same phenomenon.

In the 1980s, however, economic deregulation meant cheap imports began to flood the local market. Iconic brands were subject to buyouts and takeovers, fuelling nostalgia for a post-war rural idyll.

Symbols out of time

In a sense, Kiwiana was about evoking the uniformity of a post-war closed economy. The farmed bounty of the land, in particular from the traditional meat and dairy industries, was the mainstay of New Zealand’s economy.

Comforting Kiwiana clothing revived a settler farming and rural mythology, such as the Swanndri, a New Zealand-made woollen bush shirt popular in the 1950s and ’60s with rugged outdoor men including farmers, deer cullers and timber workers.

Read more: Born to be wild — revelling in the design and desire of the motorcycle

Along with lamb chops and full-cream milk, nothing captured this quite as much as the breakfast cereal Weetbix. According to legend, Weetbix fuelled Edmund Hillary in his successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. By the 1980s it had captured an estimated 40% of the breakfast cereal market.

Similarly, Tip Top commanded the domestic ice-cream market. Its hokey pokey flavour, a local adaptation involving toffee nuggets in vanilla, became popular in the post-war years. From the 1980s it qualified as Kiwiana, promoted as an example of Kiwi ingenuity, originality and playfulness.

When local supermodel Rachel Hunter become the advertising face of Tip Top, she embodied the connections between the land, produce and consumption. Commercial interests were central in the construction of Kiwiana.

An expression of uniqueness

As cheap imports began to replace locally made objects, Kiwiana came to represent a strange kind of authenticity. The humble jandal is a case in point. Auckland businessman Morris Yock started making these “Japanese sandals” in his garage in 1957. Touted as an example of Kiwi ingenuity and adaptation, they were sucked up into the Kiwiana vortex.

The buzzy bee re-emerged in response to the plethora of plastic toys from overseas. Manufactured from 1948 by the Ramsey brothers, the local variation of the wooden pull-along toy was lodged in the infant memories of baby boomers.

Read more: Confronting colonial legacies in London’s ‘Little India’

Objects such as the buzzy bee and Crown Lynn crockery became valued for their manufactured localness — a response, as Claudia Bell put it, to “the risk of annihilation of difference through the impacts of globalisation”.

In the late 20th century, trade with China, Australia, the United States and Japan had overtaken Britain, and tourism had become a major industry. Ironically, kitsch Kiwiana souvenirs made overseas filled a new demand for symbols of an invented national story of Kiwi culture.

Meanwhile, massive social, socioeconomic and political change was challenging the post-war Kiwi consensus. Race and gender relations were shifting. The Waitangi Tribunal’s powers were extended in 1985 and te reo Māori became an official language in 1987. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1986, paving the way for civil unions and same-sex marriage in the early 21st century.

The past isn’t what it used to be

Post-war family values gave way to a greater acceptance of divorce, blended families, and solo and gay parenting. Traditional Kiwiana was effectively out of step in this new world.

At the same time, migration from Asia and the Pacific was creating an ethnically diverse population with no cultural memory of Kiwiana or its origins in the fuzzy sameness of a New Zealand that no longer existed. The professional transformation of the once predominantly rural and amateur “national game” of rugby embodied the shift.

Read more: Friday essay: the singlet — a short history of an Australian icon

And yet, Kiwiana has been carried along in the visual, digital age by a wave of marketing and souvenir commerce. The symbols may have been past their expiry date, but there was still profit to be made in Kiwiana.

It might even be that Kiwiana filled a void left by the decline of religion and its icons in an increasingly secular age. As a kind of national symbolism it is broad, accepting and appealing.

But a closer examination reveals a narrow and nostalgic set of symbols that mirrored colonial settler narratives at a time of economic, social and cultural change. Comforting nostalgia on one level, it’s nonetheless the assertion of an imagined world that was fading away.

With international tourism paused for the time being, maybe now is the perfect opportunity to gently draw the curtains on our Kiwiana past and re-imagine the symbols of our national identity.

– ref. Kiwiana is past its use-by date. Is it time to re-imagine our symbols of national identity? – https://theconversation.com/kiwiana-is-past-its-use-by-date-is-it-time-to-re-imagine-our-symbols-of-national-identity-149967

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warwick Smith, Research economist, University of Melbourne

Before the recession we were on a collision course with environmental disaster.

The recovery provides a rare opportunity to do things differently; to rebuild a better economy that can support living standards without irretrievably damaging the environment.

The closer we get to irreversible climate change, the harder that will become.

Doughnut economics, a concept principally developed by UK economist Kate Raworth, provides an intuitive way of thinking about it.

The ideas outlined in her book, subtitled Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, are increasingly being used around the world, including by a new collaboration Regen Melbourne, that’s looking at ways to making Melbourne a better, more socially-just and environmentally-responsible city.

The image to keep in mind is that of a doughnut, on the inside of which is economic and social freefall.

We need a certain amount of economic and social/political development to ensure everybody can live a good, healthy life with full social and political participation.

On the outside of the doughnut is an unsustainable impact on the environment.

The sweet spot, the “safe and just space for humanity” is, of course, in the doughnut itself. Mmm… doughnuts.

Conceptually it’s pretty straightforward. Practically, it is challenging.

Economics is traditionally defined as the study of the way societies allocate scarce resources. But in the modern world the reality is that, for rich countries such as Australia, there is no overall scarcity.

The challenge is to remain within the doughnut

Such countries have homeless and hungry people, for sure. But the also have enough resources, homes and food to provide for them. That they don’t is a question of distribution rather than scarcity.

In terms of the diagram, we already use enough resources to ensure nobody need be left in the hole on the inside of the doughnut. The danger is that we use too many resources and move beyond the outer edge of the doughnut into climate and ecological breakdown.

Read more: Next phase of a pared-down JobKeeper will last until end of March

Here’s another diagram.

For quite some time amongst economists there’s been faith in what’s called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, where increasing consumption is said to lead to increased environmental degradation up to a point.

Beyond that point, as a society becomes post-industrial, extra consumption is said to lead to less environmental degradation as people become more environmentally conscious and use their wealth to buy different things – more services (such as yoga classes) and fewer goods (such as hamburgers).

While the Environmental Kuznets Curve does indeed appear to be real, there is every indication that the global peak in environmental impact is far higher than the biosphere can withstand, which means a diagram like this:

We will need to bring the peak down, and that will be difficult for precisely the same reasons that people remain poor amid extraordinary wealth.

One is the capacity of deep-pocketed interests to influence regulators and governments to maximise profits. The other is the extent to which neoliberal economic thinking permeates social and political structures.

The modern neoliberal thinking tells us the best outcomes are achieved when markets are “free” without government “interference”.

Read more: Carbon pricing works: the largest-ever study puts it beyond doubt

Government attempts to tax, fine or charge for environmental damage are portrayed as interference, rather than protecting the environment.

This is easy because each individual hectare of vegetation that’s cleared doesn’t, by itself, do much damage to the environment, just as each tonne of carbon dioxide that’s released doesn’t do much damage to the climate.

It’s possible to introduce a carbon price or a carbon tax, but its easy to lobby against. Australia’s lasted two years, and governments are frightened to have another go.

The pandemic has expanded what’s possible

The pandemic has shown us that it’s possible to overcome that fear.

Environmental campaigner George Monbiot points out that for 10 years the number of people living – and dying – on Britain’s streets had climbed year by year. There wasn’t enough money to house them.

Then suddenly when the pandemic hit, and they were seen as potential carriers, the money could be found.

He says for decades government and industry had claimed that people would never give up international holidays and business flights. When humanity’s future was seen to be on the line, they did.

It was possible to embrace shift to “private sufficiency and public luxury”.

This is a challenge not only to economics but also to individual economists.

For better or worse, our discipline has a lot of power in the modern world and our views carry disproportionate weight.

We need the best of our economic minds helping us to build frameworks that will keep us in the doughnut. The future of our species depends on it.

– ref. Stay in the doughnut, not the hole: how to get out of the crisis with both our economy and environment intact – https://theconversation.com/stay-in-the-doughnut-not-the-hole-how-to-get-out-of-the-crisis-with-both-our-economy-and-environment-intact-151917

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hugh Breakey, President, Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics. Senior Research Fellow, Moral philosophy, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Law Futures Centre., Griffith University

2020 has been a challenging year. For some challenges, such as the coronavirus, a light is appearing at the end of the tunnel. But for others, the true consequences may be only beginning to appear.

This is perhaps no more true than in the assault on political legitimacy. In 2020, this was threatened by forces on opposite sides of politics: cancel culture on the left and conspiracy theories on the right.

Each poses a serious threat, as a collapse in political legitimacy means people think the normal rules don’t apply anymore, making the world a more difficult and even dangerous place for all of us.

What is political legitimacy?

What exactly is political legitimacy and why is it important?

Let’s start with a definition of legitimacy. Legitimacy, in this context, refers to whether we should accept a decision, rule or institution.

It doesn’t require wholehearted agreement. For example, we might think a workplace decision is misguided, but decide that as an employee we should go along with it anyway.

Political legitimacy refers to the legitimacy of laws and authorities in the eyes of the people. It allows rules and public institutions to function effectively.

We will never all agree on exactly what the law should be — particularly in pluralistic societies. However, we can all agree that democratic decision-making is an appropriate way to make laws.

Of course, legitimacy has limits. If a democracy votes to enslave an ethnic minority, this wouldn’t be acceptable. Legitimacy only works when the outcomes are tolerable.

Read more: To combat conspiracy theories teach critical thinking – and community values

The perils of cancel and call-out culture

The terms “cancel culture” and “call-out culture” — which became ubiquitous in 2020, particularly on the political left — refer to practices of shutting down, shaming or deterring those who are perceived to speak in offensive or harmful ways.

Examples abound, but one notable case occurred during the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in the US in May.

Political analyst David Shor tweeted a summary of a Black Princeton professor’s research about the historical impact of violent protests on Democratic voting. When called out for perceived anti-Blackness, Shor apologised, but was nevertheless fired.

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

More recently, employees at Penguin Random House in Canada lodged an official protest at the news that a sequel to Jordan Peterson’s bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, would be published. It echoed an earlier employee-led revolt against the publication of J.K. Rowling’s new children’s book.

Stifling and shutting down controversial voices, such as Peterson and Rowling, presents two challenges to political legitimacy.

First, it prevents inclusive dialogue. Those in the minority on any issue can no longer console themselves with the fact that at least they had the opportunity to say their piece and have their views considered. Instead, they are silenced and excluded.

Second, the idea that voters on the right have not just wrong, but harmful views poses a further threat to legitimacy.

Why should progressives respect democratic outcomes — such as the victories of Republican legislators in the 2020 US elections, or Trump’s win in 2016 — if these outcomes simply reflect what they perceive as the manifestly intolerable views of millions of conservative voters?

How conspiracy theories undermine democratic legitimacy

From the opposite side of politics comes another threat: conspiracy theories.

To be sure, conspiracies do occur, but they are usually confined to close-knit groups at single organisations that excel at secrecy (for example, intelligence agencies).

Many currently popular conspiracy theories require strikingly poor reasoning practices.

Even setting aside QAnon’s wacky beliefs, the idea peddled by outgoing President Donald Trump that the US election was stolen is far-fetched. No tangible evidence has been presented for this claim.

In fact, many of the institutions certifying the result were run by Republican officials, while Republican-appointed judges have thrown out many Trump campaign cases brought to court. And though Joe Biden won the presidential contest, Democrats had an unexpectedly poor showing in other races.

If Trump’s claim was true, such a conspiracy would have to be far-reaching (including both Republicans and Democrats) and powerful (leaving no evidence), while at the same time being stunningly incompetent (having forgotten to ensure Democratic victories in Congress).

Yet, this theory is extraordinarily popular, with the vast majority of the president’s 74 million voters believing fraud changed the election outcome.

Read more: Conspiracy theories may seem irrational – but they fulfill a basic human need

This impacts political legitimacy because a stubborn lack of respect for evidence undermines public deliberative practices. It is impossible to find points of agreement when large-scale conspiracies throw so much into question.

Conspiracies about election results also threaten democratic legitimacy. If everything is controlled by a sinister cabal, then elections are a farce.

Worse, if one’s political opponents are seen as utterly evil — for example, cannibalistic Satanic child traffickers — then not even authentic elections could legitimise their rule.

Striking similarities

So, both conspiracy thinking and cancel culture can challenge the legitimacy of democratic decision-making.

But this is not all they have in common. Both are longstanding practices whose recent rise has been fuelled by social media. Both are personally rewarding, as they allow believers to position themselves as manifestly superior to others (the “deplorables” or “sheeple”).

Both views are also “self-sealing” insofar as adherents shield themselves from contrary ideas and evidence (allowing groupthink to flourish).

Cancel culture advocates never need face uncomfortable critique because opponents can simply be cancelled or called out, derailing further discussion.

And conspiracy theorists can simply dismiss critique as part of the conspiracy, or based on falsities spread by the conspiracy.

What can be done?

Even in Australia, commentators have observed the woeful state of political deliberation and its impact on trust in institutions. In the wake of the Banking Royal Commission, for example, Commissioner Kenneth Haynes lamented

political rhetoric now resorts to the language of war, seeking to portray opposing views as presenting existential threats to society as we now know it.

Unfortunately, because these views are self-sealing, and because they attach to people’s chosen identities, there are no easy responses to them.

Still, these movements are not monolithic. Many from the left have spoken out against political intolerance, and some Republican officials in the US have stood up against Trump’s conspiracy theories.

Perhaps the best message as we enter a new year is to remain respectful and empathetic to others.

At a base level, keep in mind that others may have legitimate concerns: conspiracies do happen and everyone has limits to what they will tolerate.

Rather than reacting with anger or mockery, or directly challenging someone’s position, it’s often best to enquire carefully into their views.

And if you disagree with them, rather than aiming to change their mind, instead try to sow a few seeds of doubt that may lead to reasonable discussion and encourage later reflection.

– ref. Conspiracy theories on the right, cancel culture on the left: how political legitimacy came under threat in 2020 – https://theconversation.com/conspiracy-theories-on-the-right-cancel-culture-on-the-left-how-political-legitimacy-came-under-threat-in-2020-150844

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Olive, ARC DECRA Fellow, The University of Queensland

Summer is the season when we like to cool off with a plunge into water. For some it’s in the local or backyard swimming pool, but others prefer the salt water of the ocean.

Sometimes referred to as “wild swimming”, it is happening at many of the beaches, coves, bays or estuaries in Australia.

Read more: Why should my child take swimming lessons? And what do they need to know?

But wild swimming is not only good for our health, it can also be good for ocean and beach ecologies too.

A healthy ocean plunge

Annual competitive ocean swims, such as the Byron Bay Winter Whales and the Bondi to Bronte, are a mainstay of many Australian coastal towns and city suburbs. Daily and weekly recreational swimming groups are also well established at many of our beaches.

In European cultures, immersion in salt water has long been believed to be good for human health and seaside resorts there remain popular.

Ocean swimmers often wax lyrical about the health and wellbeing benefits they get from their regular ocean swims. And research from both the humanities and sciences backs up these claims.

It’s common to hear swimmers describe their troubles and anxieties washing away in the water. Like a daily cleansing, they emerge from their swim feeling energised, calm and ready to face their days.

Journalist and broadcaster Julia Baird has written about how her daily swims in Sydney inspire a sense of awe that shifts how she navigates other challenges in her life.

Other research talks about swimming as a process of “therapeutic accretion” whereby the pleasures of our regular short dips and longer swims in the ocean layer onto us and “build to develop a resilient wellbeing”.

In the UK, online movements such as #risefierce and Mental Health Swims promote regular swimming as a positive practice for our health and wellbeing.

Part of this is accepting that ocean conditions can change day to day. Some days are calm and clear, others are wild with waves and winds. If we want to swim, we have to learn to navigate the conditions we are dealt.

This capacity for decision-making in the face of challenge is helpful for a sense of confidence and resilience – something that has been clear during COVID-19 lockdowns around the world.

Encounters with the wild

For swimmers, the water offers other rewards.

Swimming, like other ocean sports like surfing and diving, is a way of immersing us in ecologies and bringing us into contact with animals, plants, weather, waves and rocks in a way that we cannot control.

We may encounter fish, birds, rays, turtles, cephalopods and other animals. All are reported to help with a sense of wellbeing. This highlights how we are part of these ecologies too.

The recent film My Octopus Teacher resonated with many people who swim and who regularly encounter the same animals.

Some swimmers even relate the effect of swimming to animals that live in oceans. In a study on swimming in the UK, one swimmer explained how they “went in like a cranky sea lion and came out like a smiling dolphin”.

Care for the oceans

Being part of an ecology means we have responsibilities too. In Australia, we need to take a lead from Indigenous Australian people to care for the sea country we swim in.

Ocean plastics, sewage and the antibiotics in agricultural run-off are a potential problem for our health as we swim in polluted oceans.

Our encounters with animals that live close to shore can impact their health too, so we need to remember to respect their space.

Many cultures are aware of the interconnections between people and the environments they live in. For example, Native Hawaiian and Māori researchers write about their links to oceans, and the Ama women in Japan connect with underwater soundscapes as they dive for abalone.

Read more: Swimming with whales: you must know the risks and when it’s best to keep your distance

In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are deeply aware of the connections between the health of people and the land, sea and sky countries they live on.

People cannot be healthy if Country is not healthy, nor can Country be healthy if people are not.

And that’s why wild swimming could be good for ocean and beach ecologies too. The more we learn about the health and wellbeing impacts of ocean and coastal ecologies, the more we should feel invested in taking care of them.

Let’s swim together

The lack of control we have over conditions in ocean waters can be frightening, and the same encounters that thrill some people are terrifying for others.

Even for experienced swimmers, drowning is a very real risk. Between July 2019 and June 2020, 248 people drowned in Australia, with 125 of those coastal drowning deaths.

Read more: Shark nets are destructive and don’t keep you safe – let’s invest in lifeguards

For others their fear of shark attacks and encounters is enough to keep them out of ocean water.

So if you want to give the ocean a try this summer, many people find comfort and safety by wild swimming with others. This is reflected in the growth of swimming groups.

Websites such as oceanswims.com and Swim Sisters list ocean swimming groups and competition swims around Australia. It’s easy to find information through your local community too.

Swimming in the sea can be as simple as taking that first plunge in knee-deep water, or as challenging as an hours-long marathon along the coast. Whatever you prefer, take the time to enjoy being immersed in a watery world.

– ref. Why going for a swim in the ocean can be good for you, and for nature – https://theconversation.com/why-going-for-a-swim-in-the-ocean-can-be-good-for-you-and-for-nature-150281

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Mitchell Lee, PhD Candidate, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Australia built a number of coastal defences to help protect the country from any enemy attack during the second world war. Now, almost 80 years later, some of the physical remnants of those historic facilities lie forgotten and decaying.

These monuments to the nation’s home defence are in desperate need of preservation. While their condition varies greatly, too many have faded into obscurity.

Read more: What happens now we’ve found the site of the lost Australian freighter SS Iron Crown, sunk in WWII

In defence of Wollongong

For example, if you take a drive through the city of Wollongong today you could be forgiven for thinking the city played no role in the war. There is little indication this city was once heavily defended against a much-feared Axis attack.

If you take a 15-minute drive south of the city centre you’ll find some remnants of the city’s home defences. The well-developed Port Kembla Heritage Park, with its cluster of tank traps and ruined gun instalments, alludes to the history of a city that was once extremely important to Australia’s war effort.

This site, known as Breakwater Battery, was the first, smallest and weakest of three interconnected strongpoints designed to defend the industry of the Illawarra region of New South Wales from attack.

But this raises the question: where are the other two stronger points of Wollongong’s defensive network?

Our hidden defences

These sites still exist but are hidden. If you head to the leafy suburb of Mount Saint Thomas or Hill 60 Park in Port Kembla, you will find the more impressive remnants of the city’s defences.

Mount Saint Thomas and Hill 60 Park once hosted the military centres of Fort Drummond and the Illowra Battery respectively.

Dug into the hillside in both locations are impressive concrete casemates that once housed powerful naval guns. Hundreds of men and huge amounts of Australia’s limited wartime resources were dedicated to building and staffing these sites in the wartime period from 1941-1942.

The Illowra Battery, sitting right on the coast, was designed to replace Breakwater Battery as the pivot of local defences. It was strengthened over time with barbed wire, radar and tunnels deep in the hillside.

In the case of Fort Drummond, the 9.2-inch coastal guns were originally slated to be installed in Darwin in the Northern Territory, but were diverted south to strengthen the defences of Wollongong.

The prioritisation of the defence of Wollongong over Darwin, which was bombed, shows just how important protecting this southern region was.

The three strong points were designed to operate in concert to defend the region from an attack on Australia’s manufacturing core.

The industrial Illawarra was an economic behemoth for wartime Australia, producing everything from bullets to aircraft parts. It exported the materials of war across the British Empire, as far away as England and Singapore, and alongside Newcastle (in NSW) was the heart of Australian industry.

Yet, despite their important role in the war, these monuments are now overgrown, slowly being reclaimed by nature.

Read more: Lest we forget our other heroes of war, fighting for freedom at home

Kept in the dark

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the dark tunnels of Fort Drummond were converted to mushroom farms, not military history attractions.

As for Hill 60, instead of being developed as a tourist attraction the place has appeared on lists of the most haunted places in the Illawarra.

Reports five years ago that Hill 60 would be redeveloped, opening the tunnels, adding signage and highlighting the area’s Aboriginal history, have come to nothing.

Such stories of neglect are repeated at other defence sites across Australia.

Significant sites in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Newcastle are dilapidated and eroding.

Even in areas of historical significance to Australia, where the country’s colonial history has been well preserved, such as the Sydney suburb of La Perouse, the nearby second world war artillery battery sites and lookout posts are neglected.

Considering these sites are often in idyllic locations and — by necessity at the time they were built — boast impressive ocean views, it is odd their value, even as tourist sites, remains unrealised.

There are other sites across Australia that have received investment in preservation, such as Fort Lytton in Brisbane and Fort Scratchley in Newcastle. These are now tourist destinations.

Read more: The Cowra breakout: remembering and reflecting on Australia’s biggest prison escape 75 years on

With relatively small investments the neglected sites could be made more accessible. The public would then be able to learn and understand their history and significance.

Signposting, basic repairs and publicising these important relics of our wartime history would be easy first steps to revive public interest in these locations.

The educational and touristic values of Australia’s second world war defences are readily apparent. All they require is a little bit of attention after so many decades of neglect.

– ref. Left to ruin: we must preserve our forgotten wartime defences – https://theconversation.com/left-to-ruin-we-must-preserve-our-forgotten-wartime-defences-149435

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

The Deficit Myth: How to Build a Better Economy

Stephanie Kelton, Hachette Australia

No book prepared ahead of time better targeted the year in economics.

Just as governments including Australia’s were embracing debt (A$800 billion and counting) and creating money out of nowhere ($200 billion scheduled) came a treatise explaining that at times like these (actually, at any time when the resources of the economy aren’t fully employed) that’s entirely responsible.

Stephanie Kelton’s book has rightly been displayed on Alan Kohler’s desk, and Kohler himself has become a convert to modern monetary theory which the book outlines in the clearest of terms.

Kelton explains that in an economy such as Australia’s the purpose of tax isn’t to raise money but to slow spending, and something else: demanding the payment of tax in Australian dollars forces Australians to use them.

The example of teenagers not cleaning up around the house that she used in her talk at Adelaide University in January is priceless. You can watch the video here.

Economics in the Age of COVID-19

Joshua Gans, MIT Press

Written as we were coming to grips with what to do, and posted online chapter by chapter to get real-time feedback, the Australian author’s flash of inspiration was that we have experience in shutting down an economy and then restarting it.

We do it every Christmas writes Joshua Gans, and “no-one screams depression”.

That his way of seeing things now dominates talk about the pandemic doesn’t make it less radical. It’s partly because of his insights, published in April, that most governments no longer think that in this crisis they can trade off health against wealth.

He persuades by analogy. Fans of Mission Impossible II, the computer game Plague Inc and the came of chess will appreciate the references.

Radical Uncertainty

Mervyn King, John Kay, Hachette Australia

The idea that every possibility can be reduced to a number, to a probability, is what makes simple mathematical economics work. It’s what makes insurance and credit ratings and assessments of the risk of getting coronavirus work. And it’s wrong, as became clear in the devastation caused by the global financial crisis.

By itself, that’s not a particularly useful observation, but what is useful is the author’s discovery of where the idea that probability could be reduced to a simple number came from. The Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman shares much of the blame. He insisted that every uncertainty could be reduced a number that a rational utility-maximising human being could use to make decisions.

Before Friedman and contemporaries, there used to be two numbers, one representing risk, and the other representing uncertainty, which are quite different things and can’t be thrown together.

If you’re too busy for the book, try the London School of Economics podcast.

Fully Grown: Why A Stagnant Economy Is A Sign Of Success

Dietrich Vollrath, University of Chicago Press

Advanced economies may or may not roar out of the recession, but they are unlikely to boom as they did before. For decade after decade throughout the 1900s annual economic growth has been strong, averaging 2% per capita in the US.

In the first two decades of the 2000’s that growth has been weak, averaging 1% – only half of what it did.

Dietrich Vollrath, who blogs on growth and had no preconceptions, approached the puzzle as a mystery and found that the usual suspects (rising inequality, slower innovation, competition from China) didn’t explain enough.

The extra comes from success. The populations of the US and kindred nations have become so rich and (on average) old that having more children and striving for even higher incomes no longer makes sense.

The technical stuff is at the back. The message from the front is that we’ve arrived at our destination, which needn’t be a bad thing.

Economics in Two Lessons

John Quiggin, Princeton University Press

I’ve slipped this one in from 2019 for a reason. John Quiggin is about to publish a sequel, The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic.

Economics in One Lesson, published in 1946 financial journalist Henry Hazlitt, was a homage to the power of prices in a free market.

In lesson one (the first half of the book) Quiggin teases out Hazlitt’s thinking, and in lesson two shows how it follows from it that in many circumstances the market has to be contained.

Central to both lessons is opportunity cost, “what you give up in order to get something”, the most important concept in economics.

Polluters will make the wrong decisions if the cost of their pollution (largely borne by others) isn’t charged for. It’s a persuasive and increasingly-pressing argument.

– ref. (Economics) books to read over summer – https://theconversation.com/economics-books-to-read-over-summer-152088

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siobhan McHugh, Honorary Associate Professor, Journalism, University of Wollongong

A friend listened to her first podcast last month – an investigative journalism narrative – and binged the whole series over a long Friday evening. Now she’s avid for more. It was a reminder that, despite the vaunted podcast boom, 70% of Australians surveyed last year still hadn’t listened to one.

So to get you started, here are some of the best to listen to on these long summer days.

I’ve avoided heavy true crime, and while audio fiction is on the rise, I’ve opted for mostly true stories because to me that’s what podcasting does best: taking us inside another person’s head and heart.

Scintillating and surprising, this series examines notions of morality, home, politics, inclusion and the American psyche, with classic country songs and brilliant production by Shima Oliaee and host Jad Abumrad.

Premised on the question “how did the queen of the boob joke become a feminist icon?”, the podcast interviews Parton to document her life story, alongside commentary from academics who parse pro-woman lyrics written by someone who despises the word “feminism”.

Parton defies pigeonholing. One story explored is her friendship with Abumrad’s father, Naji, a doctor at Vanderbilt University. They met when he treated her after a car accident, and the episode traces the unlikely connection between his Lebanese village and the two-room Appalachian cabin where she grew up.

From this friendship, last month it was revealed Parton had donated US$1 million (A$1.37 million) towards COVID-19 research at Vanderbilt.

Read more: And I will always love you: how marketers measure Dolly Parton’s magic

A quirky Kiwi take on the “I-was-scammed” genre, in Snowball, three brothers track down the Californian con-woman who made their parents homeless.

Host Ollie Wards’ wry, affectionate approach blends serious sleuthing with domestic detail – such as informing us of his father’s burning ambition to make it on to an episode of Dr Phil.

The most likeable family in podcast land.

A woman recounting her husband’s death from lung cancer doesn’t sound like standard holiday fare, but this is a precious, tender offering from veteran ABC Radio National producer Sophie Townsend and acclaimed UK producer Eleanor McDowall.

Townsend’s writing is achingly honest, moving from well-observed trivia of family life to the surreal horror of watching your partner die. McDowall has a real feel for personal storytelling and the production avoids mawkishness.

You will smile and cry.

A compelling British variation on the con artist genre started by Dirty John and given an Australian twist by Who The Hell is Hamish, this centres on a charismatic Bulgarian purveyor of bogus currency, Dr Ruja Ignatova.

Host Jamie Bartlett and producer Georgia Catt uncouple themselves from their BBC background to include podcasty, meta-stories about their process as they hunt Ignatova across Europe while the FBI close in.

A soaring Bulgarian choir adds class and the bonus episode provides a satisfying close-up of the elusive Ignatova.

The payoff doesn’t deliver, but the journey is so delicious you forgive host Patrick Radden Keefe.

Keefe is exploring a fascinating theory: that the CIA tried to gain “soft power” in the disintegrating Soviet Union of the early 1990s by writing the song “Wind of Change” for a popular German heavy metal band The Scorpions.

Throw in cocaine dealers, intelligence agents and former Panama dictator General Noriega and you’re still only halfway there.

Read more: Michelle Obama, podcast host: how podcasting became a multi-billion dollar industry

A strangely touching exploration by New York Times journalist Ellen Barry of a family caught in a time warp in the fallout of the India-Pakistan partition.

Barry comes across a man professing to be part of a displaced Muslim royal family, who lives in a crumbling palace in the jungle, in the middle of New Delhi.

The Jungle Prince is a study of Barry’s own obsessive urge to investigate, as she gets caught up with the tragic prince and heads to the UK to sort out an intertwined history of colonialism, sectarianism and madness.

A clever idea from the Metropolitan Opera and New York radio station WQXR, this podcast explores one famous aria each episode, featuring a celebrated opera singer and guests who relate to the opera’s theme.

A Song Exploder for opera, the podcast links compelling contemporary personal stories, whetting the appetite for the conclusion where the guest singer delivers the aria in full.

Aria Code is an engaging way to get acquainted with the canon, or a satisfying extension of the relevance of the aria for those already in the zone.

Resistance tells stories of black activism around the world in a warm, personal style.

In one episode, host Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr introduces us to a 22-year-old black New Yorker who, in a few months, goes from attending his first street protest to deciding to run for city council.

In another, Tejan-Thomas tries to understand how the only black man in a mid-Western town hangs onto his “blackness” in such a cultural void.

A timely show that chimes with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

An effortlessly seductive podcast in which a Great Writer selects a short story by another Great Writer, tells fiction editor Deborah Treisman why they like it — and reads it aloud.

Sometimes the pairing seems obvious: Margaret Atwood selects fellow Canadian Alice Munro; Dave Eggers picks another American former wunderkind Sam Shepard.

Sometimes it is more intriguing: Salman Rushdie goes for Italo Calvino; Orhan Pamuk for Jorge Luis Borges.

Apart from the sheer pleasure of having great stories read aloud, the podcast provides an intimate insight into writers’ literary passions.

Yes it’s been around since 2017, but this is the apotheosis of audio storytelling.

Set aside seven hours for this Southern Gothic ode to the mordant genius that is John B. McLemore, a disgruntled resident of “Shit-town”, Alabama.

Produced by the team who broke the internet with Serial, this is literary journalism for your ears. It starts a bit slowly, but episode two is a massive gut punch and it gets more and more mesmerising from there.

If Truman Capote had had a podcast, this would be it.

– ref. 10 summer podcasts perfect for strolls along the beach – https://theconversation.com/10-summer-podcasts-perfect-for-strolls-along-the-beach-150528