Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carla Pascoe Leahy, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne

It would be easy to believe, if you pay attention to the media, that Australian children are in poor shape.

Kids, we are told, have too much screen time, too little exercise, too many scheduled activities and not enough risk and freedom. Earnest commentators constantly critique “helicopter parenting”, “tiger mothers”, “intensive mothering” and “bubble-wrapped children”.

There is certainly some basis to these fears. But it’s also instructive to take an historical perspective, because while childhood has changed in important respects since the second world war, there are surprising continuities.

Every generation of elders has worried about “young people of today”, from the 1950s to the 2010s. Some of the changes to childhood and parenthood could even be characterised as positive. So how has the idea of childhood, and the relationship between children and parents, changed since the 1950s?

The boomers’ parents worried about them too

From its earliest days, a baby of the 1950s usually had a single maternal figure as primary caregiver. Women were expected to become mothers and homemakers, whereas men were expected to be breadwinners and less involved in childcare.

Some valued this gendered division of labour, while some mothers felt restricted by cultural expectations, and some fathers possibly regretted their limited role in their children’s upbringing.

The women’s liberation movement overturned such assumptions, stimulating increased maternal workforce participation. By the 21st century, expectations reversed, from a presumption that mothers didn’t work to an expectation that they did. In addition to their paid workload, contemporary women’s caring and domestic work increases dramatically after having children. The domestic division of labour is still far from equal.

Read more: Women aren’t better multitaskers than men – they’re just doing more work

Many fathers today want to be more involved in their children’s lives but feel constrained by cultural expectations and financial pressures. Australian families have also diversified, embracing new structures including single parents by choice, same-sex parents, blended families and more.

Child-rearing philosophies have certainly changed. Parents of the 1950s relied on informal advice from relatives and friends, whereas today parents can feel overwhelmed by the volume and contradictions of child-raising advice, delivered by health professionals and “experts” of more dubious qualifications.

In parallel to the women’s liberation movement, children’s rights began to be taken more seriously in Australia from the 1970s and were given international legal status under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1989. Such shifts led to a greater interest in children’s perspectives and emotions. For example, corporal punishment is now widely frowned on and has been banned in schools.

Whereas post-war child-rearing emphasised discipline and routine, parent-child relationships in 2020 are more emotionally expressive, relational and intense.

With the popularisation of psychology, childhood became viewed as the critical phase for emotional growth. Parents, particularly mothers, continue to bear a weighty responsibility for healthy child development.

Despite changes in child-rearing approaches, every generation of Australian parents has tried to do their best for their children. Parental love is constant.

We also expect more emotionally from children. Many post-war children rarely left their mother’s care until kindergarten, whereas today many Australian preschoolers experience some non-maternal care. In 2011, three-quarters of Australian mothers returned to paid work by the time their child was 13 months old, on average resuming when their child was 6.5 months old.

From being a rarity in the 1950s, childcare centres have multiplied. Shifts in caregivers represent rising emotional expectations of preschool children: that they should be able to tolerate separation from their primary caregiver and behave appropriately in a social and learning setting.

As children have gradually spent more time in childcare, preschool, primary school and secondary school, adults outside the family have a greater influence in a child’s life.

Childhood freedom shrinks?

Remembering their postwar childhoods, baby boomers emphasise their freedom to roam as long as they were “home by dark”. Children’s independent roaming has shrunk in urbanised societies across the world since the mid-20th century. But there is plenty of evidence that post-war adults still feared for children’s safety, worrying about poisonous chemicals around the home, and teachers were concerned about “stranger danger”, traffic accidents and dangerous toys.

Baby boomers also recall “making their own fun” without elaborate toys or adult-organised activities. They remember playing scratch footy with a paper ball, swimming in ponds and creeks, and exploring wilder areas. But, simultaneously, store-bought toys became more affordable to less-privileged families in the 1950s, as new materials and mass production reduced prices. And while kids today doubtless have more “stuff”, they still enjoy constructing sandcastles, climbing trees and creating cubbies with sticks and leaves.

The dangers of screen time for young children and the risks of online bullying or abuse generate enormous anxiety in parents today. Yet every generation of parent has worried about children’s “downtime”. In the late 19th century, reading novels was feared to encourage precocious sexuality in young women. In the 1980s, parents warned their children that watching television would lead to “square eyes”.

Concern about tablet or smartphone use among preschoolers follows a long tradition of parental anxiety about the impact of new technologies. While social media can certainly host antisocial behaviour, digital communications can also connect young people across geographic distance and overcome social barriers like mobility issues or vision impairment.

Read more: Stop worrying about screen ‘time’. It’s your child’s screen experience that matters

While more instances of anxiety and depression are being identified in children and teenagers, this does not mean mental illness is actually increasing.

These days, parents are more likely to initiate dialogues about painful emotions and challenging relationships. Conversations between parents and children have become franker around many topics, including sexuality, puberty, body safety and dealing with difficult feelings. The emotional lexicon of the parent-child relationship has become more open and complex.

Not all Australians experience happy childhoods or loving families. A series of government inquiries have exposed shocking mistreatment of children, including those forcibly removed from their families, such as the Stolen Generations, and children abused while in the “care” of welfare institutions and religious organisations.

While the revelations of such abuse have been distressing, they indicate an important cultural shift in Australia. No longer will we allow abused children to repress their stories in secrecy and shame. Let’s hope these painful testimonies of past childhoods will help prevent the traumatising of future childhoods.

Australian childhood is in good shape

Concern about childhoods in the present is often a disguise for nostalgia about childhoods past. We nurture highly emotive associations with our memories of growing up, by virtue of the privileged place that childhood is seen to hold in the formation of adult identity.

While the details of childhood and parent-child relationships shift in different historical contexts, the fundamentals remain the same. Childhood is a time of learning, exploring, growing – and the appropriate way to grow is dependent on the cultural circumstances into which each generation is born.

Parents will always strive to do their best for their children. Constant collective concern and criticism only increase parental anxiety and hyper-vigilance, exacerbating the “lawnmower parenting” and “hothouse children” that stimulated the concern in the first place.

– ref. ‘Helicopter parenting’ and ‘tiger mothers’? Relax, Australian kids are alright – http://theconversation.com/helicopter-parenting-and-tiger-mothers-relax-australian-kids-are-alright-128057

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arnagretta Hunter, Physician & Cardiologist, The Canberra Hospital; Clinical Senior Lecturer, Australian National University

Australian summer temperatures have risen by 1.66℃ over the past 20 years. In the past century we’ve seen a significant increase in the number, intensity and duration of heatwaves during our summers.

Heat is the natural hazard associated with the highest mortality in Australia. When heatwaves occur, the death toll routinely reaches into the hundreds. For example, the 2009 heatwave across southeast Australia resulted in close to 500 deaths.

Heat is more likely to endanger the health of people with pre-existing conditions, people who are socially isolated, and people who have limited access to air conditioning. These are often older members of the community.

Read more: How rising temperatures affect our health

Heat affects people of different ages in different ways

Human body temperature is set at 36.8℃, although our normal temperature can vary slightly and may marginally decrease as we age.

Ambient temperatures well below this prompt us to keep ourselves warm, and as the temperature rises we look for ways to keep ourselves cool.

An important mechanism of cooling is perspiration. As sweat evaporates, it cools our skin. However, humid weather impedes our capacity to cool ourselves in this way.

Heat stress occurs when the body can’t cool itself and maintain a healthy temperature. Heat stress can begin at temperatures around 30℃ when the humidity is high, and at temperatures closer to 40℃ in dry heat.

Read more: Extreme heat in sport: why using a fixed temperature cut-off isn’t as simple as it seems

Babies and young children are highly vulnerable to the heat because of their small size. They can become dehydrated and develop heat stress more quickly than adults.

This is because they absorb heat faster, and often cannot remove themselves from hot environments. So little ones need to be kept cool and well hydrated (with milk for babies and water for small children) during hot periods.

While young people and adults face lower health risks from the heat, extended periods of hot weather can adversely affect our mood. One recent study pointed to increased intimate partner violence during heatwaves.

This effect appears to be exacerbated when night time temperatures are also high. High overnight temperatures are associated with increased crime rates, decreased productivity and poorer academic results.

But generally, it’s people over 65 who are at highest risk from the heat.

How does heat affect older people’s health?

The ageing body doesn’t cope with sudden stresses as quickly or effectively as a younger body. For example, an elderly person’s skin does not produce sweat and cool the body as efficiently as a younger person’s skin.

Importantly, heat stress can exacerbate existing health conditions common in older people, such as diabetes, kidney disease, and heart disease. Many heat deaths are recorded as heart attacks.

In short, this is because heat requires our hearts to work harder. In very hot conditions, our blood vessels dilate, increasing our heart rate. For people with abnormal heart function, these hot periods can lead to worsening of their heart failure.

With severe, prolonged heat stroke, heart failure can even develop in people without pre-existing heart disease.

Read more: To keep heatwaves at bay, aged care residents deserve better quality homes

For people with pre-existing kidney disease, dehydration during hot periods can impact their kidney function. So people with kidney disease need to take extra care to stay hydrated during hot periods.

Dehydration can also affect older people’s blood pressure, making falls more likely.

Further, hot weather can affect blood sugar control for people with diabetes. Heat stress can increase blood sugar levels even in people without diabetes, but is most concerning in those with the condition. Poor blood sugar control is associated with many different diabetes complications including increased risk of infections.

Older people with chronic medical problems usually take regular medications. Some medications can hinder the body’s ability to regulate temperature and make people more susceptible to heat stress.

For example, people with heart failure often take diuretic medications to manage symptoms like swelling and shortness of breath. But increasing diuretic medications in hot weather can cause dehydration, worsening heart failure and often affecting the kidneys.

Added to this, heat stress may cause disorientation, confusion and delirium. This risk is more pronounced for older people with cognitive conditions and dementia.

Social factors and exercise

Socioeconomic factors and isolation can magnify the risk of heat exposure among older people. For example, some pensioners may not be able to afford air conditioning at home.

Being part of social networks can help. One person may recognise if another is unwell, increasing the likelihood of their friend getting medical attention.

Read more: Health Check: how to exercise safely in the heat

Further, extended periods of hot weather can interrupt our exercise routines. This can be particularly problematic for older people who may be using exercise to manage chronic health conditions.

Regular exercise correlates with improved quality of life in many conditions, including heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, diabetes, cognitive impairment and osteoporosis.

When our activity is disrupted for weeks at a time it can be hard to regain previous fitness. This can be especially true for older people, as muscle mass is commonly lost as we age. Periods of inactivity accelerate muscle loss, and regaining strength and endurance is often more difficult in this context.

Read more: A hot and dry Australian summer means heatwaves and fire risk ahead

Australia’s climate is changing. We’re likely to experience longer periods of hot temperatures, with hotter summers and some extraordinarily high temperatures. This will test our health and our health-care systems. Understanding the challenge ahead can help to reduce the risks.

On a practical level, be aware of spending too much time in hot temperatures, stay hydrated, and know where you can access air conditioning – particularly if power fails. Consider vulnerable relatives, friends and neighbours, especially those of advanced age.

– ref. Hot and bothered: heat affects all of us, but older people face the highest health risks – http://theconversation.com/hot-and-bothered-heat-affects-all-of-us-but-older-people-face-the-highest-health-risks-123769

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Manu Saunders, Research fellow, University of New England

Bees get a lot of good press. They pollinate our crops and in some cases, make delicious honey. But bees around the world face serious threats, and the public can help protect them.

Of more than 20,400 known bee species in the world, about 1,650 are native to Australia. But not all bees found in Australia are native. A few species have been introduced: some on purpose and others secretly hitchhiking, usually through international trade routes.

As bee researchers, we’ve all experienced seeing a beautiful, fuzzy striped bee buzzing about our gardens, only to realise it’s an exotic species far from home.

Read more: The farmer wants a hive: inside the world of renting bees

We need the public’s help to identify the bees in Australian backyards. There’s a good chance some are not native, but are unwanted exotic species. Identifying new intruders before they become established will help protect our native species.

Exotic bees in Australia

The European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the best-known introduced species, first brought to Australia in the early 1800s. It is now well-established throughout the country, with profitable industries built around managed populations.

Other invasive species in Australia are less well known (or loved). The European bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) is present in high numbers in Tasmania, but isn’t thought to be established on mainland Australia.

This bumblebee has caused major harm to native bees in South America, competing for resources and spreading disease.

In northern Queensland, the Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) is established around Cairns and Mareeba, from a single incursion in 2007. The original founding colony is thought to have been a stowaway on a boat that sailed to Cairns from somewhere in southeast Asia or the Pacific, where this bee is widespread.

New Asian honey bee incursions at Australian ports occur almost annually, most recently in Townsville and Melbourne. But swift biosecurity responses have so far stopped them becoming established.

Why should we care?

Most insects can spread and establish breeding populations before anyone notices them, so it’s important we pay attention to these small intruders.

Introduced species can bring new parasites or diseases into the country that may harm native insects – including our stingless bees that are so vital to crop pollination – or affect the valuable European honey bee industry.

While bumblebees may help commercial pollination in a handful of Australian crops, they and other introduced species can also compete with native species for resources, or spread weeds.

Most resources go to monitoring invasive species with a more dramatic and understood effect on agriculture and the environment. Bees sneak under the radar – but we’re still curious.

Take the African carder bee (Pseudoanthidium repetitum), which arrived in Australia in the early 2000s. Thanks to citizen scientists, we know they are spreading rapidly. In 2014, they were the third most common bee species found in a survey of Sydney community gardens.

Just recently, we found two invasive African carder bees in a backyard in Armidale in northern New South Wales while testing out a new insect monitoring method. There are no confirmed records of this invasive bee in Armidale, although we have seen a few around town since 2017.

Read more: Bees: how important are they and what would happen if they went extinct?

Although it’s usually exciting to find a new record for a native species, finding an exotic bee where it’s not supposed to be is worrying. How long have they been there, and how many others are there?

The European bumble bee was recently sighted to global biodiversity.

Will you help us keep track?

Anyone can help keep track of potential new invasive species, simply by learning more about the insects in your local area and sharing observations on citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist, or through targeted projects like the African carder bee monitoring project.

You don’t need to be sure exactly what species you’ve seen. Uploading some clear, high-resolution photos, along with the date and location of your observation, will help naturalists and researchers identify it.

Read more: Wasps, aphids and ants: the other honey makers

You can also participate in events such as the twice-yearly Wild Pollinator Count or local Bioblitzes.

Your efforts can help us detect emerging threats, and add to our records of both native and non-native bees (and other species). Plus it’s a great excuse to get outdoors and learn more about the insect life in your area.

This article was co-written with Karen Retra.

– ref. Aussie scientists need your help keeping track of bees (please) – http://theconversation.com/aussie-scientists-need-your-help-keeping-track-of-bees-please-128932

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kit MacFarlane, Lecturer, University of South Australia

Broadcasting fireworks on TV was a ratings success for the ABC as 2018 turned into 2019, with 1.95 million viewers. But 60 years ago, a New Year’s Eve in front of the TV was a very different experience.

I study historical television and popular culture to develop a small sense of shared experience with the people who watched those same broadcasts.

Television was still quite new in Australia in 1959, introduced to Melbourne and Sydney in 1956 and to Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth three years later. Everywhere else was still waiting.

If you were one of the Australians who happened to have a TV set in 1959, what were you watching?

Imported content

Television content varied from region to region, but looking at Melbourne’s TV Times listings can give us an interesting insight.

One key part of the evening’s viewing still resonates: international content far outweighed locally produced shows. But unlike the fare on streaming services today, the series Australians watched then weren’t exactly current.

In the afternoon, viewers could catch up with shows that had long ceased production. At 4:15 on Nine, you could watch Follow That Man, an early New York city detective series filmed from 1949 to 1954.

At 4:30pm on Seven was Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans, a historical action series set in regional New York in the 1750s, which originally aired in 1957.

On the ABC at 6pm, Ivanhoe, a British children’s series staring Roger Moore, was followed by an American sitcom featuring “America’s queen of comedy” Joan Stevens, I Married Joan.

After the news, the schedules started to resemble prime-time US schedules, where Westerns were at a peak of popularity.

At 7pm on the ABC, you could watch Tales of Wells Fargo; at 8:30 on Nine Wagon Train; and 8pm on Seven was Rawhide, starring a young Clint Eastwood.

Australian variety shows

As midnight approached, Australian content began to air on all three TV stations in Melbourne.

From 9:30pm, viewers could watch In Melbourne Tonight on Nine; from 10:30 Club Seven on Seven; and from 11:10, Top Pops of 1959 on the ABC.

Club Seven and In Melbourne Tonight were both variety shows. Club Seven aired from 1959 to 1961 on Thursday nights at 10pm, on a set replicating a nightclub. It was outlasted by In Melbourne Tonight, which aired for 13 years until 1970 and is still viewed as a high point for live Australian television.

On 24 December, The Age reported the exciting news that Evie Hayes was “breaking a holiday in Queensland” to host Top Pops, a one-off broadcast celebrating the year in music.

On December 31, it reported In Melbourne Tonight would have two hosts: young Australian television staples Bert Newton and Graham Kennedy. The article spruiked, “One of the biggest lineups of artists ever assembled for I.M.T.”

A particular highlight would be Kennedy “featured in a vocal interpretation of 76 Trombones”, the signature song from the musical The Music Man, which was opening soon in Melbourne.

Despite Hayes’ cancelled holiday and Kennedy’s 76 Trombones, New Year’s Eve 1959 wasn’t (on television, at least) a party that carried on into the wee hours.

The ABC went off air at 12:05 and Seven at 12:30. Nine stuck around a bit longer, fitting in an episode of I Led 3 Lives (a drama about an FBI spy who infiltrated the Communist party), to outlast the rest, calling it a night at 12:50am.

Mind you, the following Thursday, the ABC’s close was scheduled for 10:55pm, Seven’s at 11, and Nine’s at 11:45.

Indeed the ABC wouldn’t start broadcasting through the night, every night, until 1993.

Lost pieces of Australian history

There’s very little of this Australian content left for us to rewatch. Many live broadcasts were not preserved at all and video was often wiped for re-use: television shows were seen as having limited commercial or historical value and junked.

Read more: Natural history on TV: how the ABC took Australian animals to the people

Even those episodes from Australia’s TV history that have survived and have been catalogued in archives can be difficult to find and access.

It’s a shame that Australia’s television history isn’t more accessible. Pop culture, like television, can be used to gain an inkling of a society’s interests and lived experiences in a way that isn’t always possible through more formal documents. It can also show how people were marginalised or excluded in Australia’s pop culture landscape.

The cultural history of television is still largely defined by what’s not available.

– ref. What Australia watched on TV on New Year’s Eve, 1959 – http://theconversation.com/what-australia-watched-on-tv-on-new-years-eve-1959-128230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer Sport Management, Western Sydney University

Not long ago, a mother-of-three was refused entry to a Sydney pool because of its policy of one adult for every child aged under six.

Reminding parents of their obligations, Royal Life Saving Australia chief executive officer Justin Scarr said, “life guards are not babysitters and swimming pools are not daycares.”

It’s true drownings can and do happen at public pools. Active supervision means focusing all of your attention on your children all of the time, when they are in, on or around the water.

But with a bit of policy and institutional support, we can make it easier for solo parents to go to the local pool with kids in tow.

Our research in progress suggests a group called Surfing Mums, a social network administered by and for women, may provide an instructive example.

Read more: Community pool projects show how citizens are helping to build cities

Pools are not just for swimming

In Australia, public swimming pools are significant community assets. Their importance as community anchors are often obscured until we hear of plans to close them or reduce their funding.

The average Australian visits a local pool more than four times a year – that figure is equal to more than 100 million visits annually.

For women and children, swimming remains one of the most popular forms of physical activity.

And public pools are not just for swimming laps. Many also feature spas, river rides, water slides, wave pools, hydrotherapy pools and water spray grounds. Little wonder, then, swimming and other water activities are growing more popular for sport, fitness, rehabilitation and fun.

Publicly funded pools are also important sites for social connection and belonging. For people who live alone or spend long periods at home with kids, without adult conversation, the pool is a crucial part of social and physical life.

For women with children, physical activity is important, especially post-partum. Swimming after giving birth may help restore muscle tone. It also boosts strength and energy, which may be sapped after pregnancy and childbirth.

But just how public is the public pool?

Historically, woman’s admission to and freedoms in these public spaces were closely regulated and mediated by segregation and notions of modesty. For example, woman’s aquatic dress was highly regulated to ensure decorum and propriety. Significant restrictions were placed on when and where women could bathe.

While formal restrictions of this kind no longer exist, access and usage for some women to these important public spaces can be limited.

We need to find new ways to make it easier for mums and dads to get to the pool, and ensure they can have a swim too.

So, in light of the clear need for active supervision, how can swimming pools foster the joys of childhood swimming, regarded by many as an Australian birthright?

‘Surfing mums’ at the pool

Perhaps local governments and commercial pool operators can learn a thing or two from Surfing Mums, a social network developed by two mothers who met up regularly to mind each other’s children while the other surfed.

Surfing Mums is like a playgroup, but with benefits like full public liability insurance and affiliation with the national body, Surfing Australia.

The “surf swap” system sees mums in the group partner up with one another. While one supervises the kids, the other goes for a surf and then they swap.

If used in a pool environment this swap system would ensure children are actively supervised at all times, thereby meeting Royal Lifesaving and state government policies and guidelines.

The adult supervising children would be identified by a hat and brightly coloured shirt and would not enter the water with children while the swap was in progress.

This approach means miscommunications regarding supervision, identified as a contributing factor to drowning fatalities, can be redressed.

Read more: From segregation to celebration: the public pool in Australian culture

Creative strategies can boost access

The result? Active supervision of children, safe pool access and enjoyment for women and their families, all while parents reap the physical benefits swimming offers.

While primary supervision through this network is a focus, there may also be opportunities to provide mothers with important skills and knowledge relevant to secondary drowning prevention through learning resuscitation and lifesaving skills.

For governments at all levels this kind of initiative would have far-reaching benefits, particularly in linguistically and culturally diverse populations where swim safety skills are often less developed.

A pool-swap style system might not be the only or final answer. But creative strategies which enable supervision, connection and friendships just might keep us afloat.

– ref. For many, a pool swim is an Australian birthright. Let’s make it easier for solo parents to claim it – http://theconversation.com/for-many-a-pool-swim-is-an-australian-birthright-lets-make-it-easier-for-solo-parents-to-claim-it-128305

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Lee, Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne), Curtin University

With the holiday season well underway and New Year’s Eve approaching, you might find yourself drinking more alcohol than usual.

So what actually happens to our body as we drink alcohol and wake up with a hangover?

What about memory blackouts and “hangxiety”, when you can’t remember what happened the night before or wake up with an awful feeling of anxiety?

Let’s look at what the science says – and bust some long-standing myths.

What happens when you drink alcohol?

It doesn’t matter what type of alcohol you drink – or even whether you mix drinks – the effects are basically the same with the same amount of alcohol.

Read more: Do different drinks make you different drunk?

When you drink alcohol it goes into the stomach and passes into the small intestine where it’s quickly absorbed into the bloodstream.

If you have eaten something, it slows the absorption of alcohol so you don’t get drunk so quickly. That’s why it’s a good idea to eat before and during drinking.

It takes your body about an hour to metabolise 10g, or one standard drink, of alcohol.

(There are calculators that help you estimate your blood alcohol level but everybody breaks down alcohol at a different rate. So these calculators should only be used as a guide.)

What causes memory blackouts?

We all have that friend who has woken up after a big night out and not been able to remember half the night. That’s a “blackout”.

It’s different to “passing out” – you’re still conscious and able to carry out conversation, you just can’t remember it later.

The more alcohol you drink and the faster you drink it, the more likely you are to experience blackouts.

Once alcohol in your blood reaches a certain level, your brain simply stops forming new memories. If you think of your brain like a filing cabinet, files are going straight to the bin, so when you later try to look for them they are lost.

How do I sober up?

If you’ve had too much, there’s no way to sober up quickly. The only thing that can sober you up is time, so that the alcohol can be eliminated from your body.

The caffeine in coffee may make you feel more awake, but it doesn’t help break down alcohol. You will be just as intoxicated and impaired, even if you feel a little less drunk.

The same goes for cold showers, exercise, sweating it out, drinking water, and getting fresh air. These things might help you feel more alert, but they have no impact on your blood alcohol concentration or on the effects of alcohol.

What causes hangovers?

Researchers haven’t identified one single cause of hangovers, but there are a few possible culprits.

Alcohol is a diuretic, so it makes you urinate more often, which can lead to dehydration. This is especially the case if you’re in a hot, sweaty venue or dancing a lot. Dehydration can make you feel dizzy, sleepy and lethargic.

Alcohol can irritate your stomach lining, causing vomiting and diarrhoea, and electrolyte imbalance.

An imbalance of electrolytes (the minerals our body need to function properly) can make you feel tired, nauseated, and cause muscle weakness and cramps.

Too much alcohol can cause your blood vessels to dilate (expand), causing a headache. Electrolyte imbalance and dehydration can also contribute to that thumping head the next morning.

Alcohol also interferes with glucose production, resulting in low blood sugar. Not producing enough glucose can leave you feeling sluggish and weak.

Alcohol also disrupts sleep. It can make you feel sleepy at first but it interrupts the circadian cycle, sleep rhythms and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, so later in the night you might wake up.

It can stop you from getting the quality of sleep you need to wake feeling refreshed.

Why ‘hair of the dog’ doesn’t work

There’s no way to cure a hangover, even with “hair of the dog” (having a drink the morning after). But drinking the next morning might delay the onset of symptoms, and therefore make you feel better temporarily.

Read more: Monday’s medical myth: you can cure a hangover

Your body needs time to rest, metabolise the alcohol you have already had, and repair any damage from a heavy night of drinking. So it’s not a good idea.

If you drink regularly and you find yourself needing a drink the next morning, this may be a sign of alcohol dependence and you should talk with your GP.

Suffering from hangxiety?

Alcohol has many effects on the brain, including that warm, relaxed feeling after a couple of drinks. But if you’ve ever felt unusually anxious after a big night out you might have experienced “hangxiety”.

Over a night of drinking, alcohol stimulates the production of a chemical in the brain called GABA, which calms the brain, and blocks the production of glutamate, a chemical associated with anxiety. This combination is why you feel cheerful and relaxed on a night out.

Your brain likes to be in balance, so in response to drinking it produces more glutamate and blocks GABA. Cue that shaky feeling of anxious dread the next morning.

What can you do if you wake up with hangxiety?

To ease some of the symptoms, try some breathing exercises, some mindfulness practices and be gentle with yourself.

There are also effective treatments for anxiety available that can help. Talk to your GP or check out some resources online.

If you’re already an anxious person, drinking alcohol may help you feel more relaxed in a social situation, but there is an even greater risk that you will feel anxiety the next day.

Prevention is better than a cure

If you choose to drink this holiday season, the best way to avoid hangovers, hangxiety, and blackouts is to stick within recommended limits.

The new draft Australian alcohol guidelines recommend no more than ten standard drinks a week and no more than four standard drinks on any one day.

(If you want to check what a standard drink looks like, use this handy reference.)

Read more: Cap your alcohol at 10 drinks a week: new draft guidelines

As well as eating to slow the absorption of alcohol, and drinking water in between alcoholic drinks to reduce the negative effects, you can also:

• set your limits early. Decide before you start the night how much you want to drink, then stick to it

• count your drinks and avoid shouts

• slow down, take sips rather than gulps and avoid having shots.

If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s drinking, call the National Alcohol and other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015 to talk through options or check out resources online.

– ref. What causes hangovers, blackouts and ‘hangxiety’? Everything you need to know about alcohol these holidays – http://theconversation.com/what-causes-hangovers-blackouts-and-hangxiety-everything-you-need-to-know-about-alcohol-these-holidays-127995

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Dawson, PhD Student in Anthrozoology, La Trobe University

In pet-loving nations such as Australia, nobody likes the idea of dogs churning out litters in squalid conditions or sitting homeless in a shelter.

Responsible dog owners are therefore strongly encouraged to desex their pets, through programs such as national desexing month and low-cost surgery schemes. In some places in Australia, it is even compulsory.

But as we try to limit unwanted dogs, experts estimate there is demand in Australia for nearly half a million new puppies every year.

Read more: Managing mutations of a species: the evolution of dog breeding

Many desexed family pets are the ideal parents of the next generation of family companions, having demonstrated their ability to fit in with family life. Yet by desexing as early as possible, we are removing the best source of happy healthy pets from the doggy gene pool.

We argue there’s room for responsible pet owners and breeders to work together, breeding ideal companion animals and reducing the number of unwanted or unsafe dogs left in shelters.

Read more: Why decisions to desex male dogs just got more complicated

We want happy, loyal pups

People want their dogs to suit their family’s needs: tall or short, short-coated or non-shedding, couch potato or running buddy. We have created hundreds of breeds to meet these preferences. However, Australian pet-owners most value dogs that are affectionate, friendly, obedient and safe with children.

Such dogs are a combination of nature and nurture. Most temperament traits in dogs, including aggression, have a genetic basis. Dogs bred for working roles, such as police work, have physical and behavioural assessments to make sure they can do their jobs well.

If we treat being a happy and safe companion as a job, we need to select breeding dogs with the right characteristics to succeed. This begins with carefully selecting parents who also have these traits. Many dogs who would breed perfect family pets are themselves family pets, and owners have years of observation to rely on.

A puppy’s early life is also extremely important for creating a suitable pet. Raising them in rich environments, with plenty of affection, equips puppies with important life-skills. For those destined for companionship, this experience includes regular playtime with humans and exposure to life in a modern household. These requirements highlight the need to consider where dogs come from.

Professionals, hobbyists or irresponsible owners

While we don’t have firm data on where Australians get their pets, we can safely assume there are three main sources: commercial breeders, recreational or hobby breeders, and members of the general public who fail to desex their pet dogs.

While new legislation in Victoria targets the worst puppy mills, even the best large-scale commercial operations may struggle to give puppies the attention they need early in life.

Read more: Victoria’s puppy farms and pet shop laws a world first – but questions about ‘ethical’ breeding remain

Meanwhile, recreational breeders, who are often strongly motivated to provide the best upbringing possible, may not select their breeding dogs on the basis of their performance as pets.

Instead, they may focus on success in the show ring or pedigree bloodlines, potentially producing very expensive dogs ill-equipped to be great pets.

And what of the traditional source of the family dog – pet owners who fail to desex their pets? If high rates of desexing exclude from the gene pool those really wonderful pet dogs owned by “responsible” owners, and only irresponsible owners allow their dogs to breed, the resulting puppies are far less likely to possess the traits so desired by prospective homes.

One has only to visit a local shelter to see the unfortunate results of accidental matings among the many wonderful dogs seeking a new home. Thousands of dogs are surrendered in Australia shelters every year.

To secure future generations of successful companion dogs, a new approach to breeding is needed. Restricting who can breed, and issuing penalties to those who break the rules, is one strategy that must of course be developed and enforced.

All breeders must be educated about careful selection of parents, and suitable early experiences in breeding puppies that will excel as pets.

But the final piece in the puzzle should be collaboration between responsible breeders and pet owners in the breeding process.

If more responsible dog owners were encouraged not to desex their dogs at an early age, but to wait until their dogs’ physical and behavioural health has been thoroughly demonstrated, the very best companion dogs could be permitted to contribute their genes to the next generation.

Read more: How serious is inbreeding in show dogs?

This more nuanced approach, where owners and breeders work together to identify dogs of exemplary health and temperament, could enrich the companion dog gene pool and result in happier owners, happier dogs, and emptier shelters. Although not desexing companion dogs does carry risks – from behavioural issues to unwanted puppies – we believe this is worth considering. Always discuss your concerns with your veterinarian. Not snipping in haste may be a better option than snipping everything.

– ref. Let it breed: why desexing dogs isn’t always the best thing to do – http://theconversation.com/let-it-breed-why-desexing-dogs-isnt-always-the-best-thing-to-do-123013

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Florence Monique Boulard, Associate Dean Teaching & Learning and Senior lecturer, James Cook University

The school year is over and holidays are upon us. But that doesn’t mean your children’s learning experiences can’t continue.

If you’re planning an overseas trip with your family, you’re in for many benefits. Research shows travel has a positive impact on mental and physical health, and family relationships.

Travel is also an educational opportunity. It’s a rich experience seeing different parts of the world and understanding other cultures. And there are several things you can do to support your children’s learning.

How travel educates

The way children learn while travelling is in many respects comparable to what educational researchers call play-based learning. Play-based learning and travel stimulate children’s minds by boosting their creativity and imagination. Both can also help develop social and emotional skills and encourage language development.

Read more: Let them play! Kids need freedom from play restrictions to develop

Travelling exposes children to new scenarios and problems to solve – such as following a certain route on a map. They explore new food, encounter people communicating in a different language, notice cars driving on the opposite side of the road and billboards showcasing products they have not seen before.

All of their senses are challenged as they go through these new experiences.

New experiences can provoke some anxiety, which is what sociologist and education professor Jack Mezirow refers to as disorientating dilemmas. He argues such dilemmas are the first step to transformative learning, where the learner’s existing assumptions are challenged and beliefs transformed.

Although Mezirow often associates transformation with elements of life crises, others suggest transformative learning can happen in different contexts, most notably travel.

But transformative learning usually comes at an emotional cost, such as a change of routine which can lead to mixed emotions, especially for children. This is why travelling as a family provides a buffer, as it often promotes a safe environment.

Read more: Five ways parents can help their kids take risks – and why it’s good for them

What you can do

Some of the richest learning, for a child, can be disguised as exploration and adventure. Parents can maximise such learning during travel by subtly incorporating intentional teaching to the experience, just as educators do in play-based learning scenarios.

Here are some ways to do this.

1. Do some pre-reading about the destination

This will help you identify where and how learning might occur. You might also engage your children in this. Say you’re going on a cruise to the South Pacific. Prior to departing you might look at a map of the Pacific with your children to identify the various islands located in this part of the world.

You could also encourage your children to discover the special landmarks of different places using Google Earth. Such activities will support the development of your children’s prediction skills. This helps children anticipate future experiences which increases their intellectual involvement with them.

Educational research has shown the act of predicting strengthens connections between children’s new knowledge and their existing understanding of the world.

2. Learn some of the language together

Learning even a little of the local language will open up aspects of the culture you may not have otherwise experienced.

Together with your children, you can start learning the basics of the new language by downloading some interactive language apps. Another fun way to expand your vocabulary and improve your pronunciation is by singing songs in the target language.

Knowing a bit of the local language is a demonstration of respect which means people are more likely to open up to you, further supporting learning opportunities.

3. Model an inquiring mind

By asking and responding to questions with your children, you’re encouraging new knowledge and helping them engage in critical and creative thinking.

For example, when you are walking down the street of the city you are visiting, encourage your children to take notice of what is going on around them and engage in open-ended questions such as:

• “How does this supermarket compare to the one we normally go to back home?”

• “Why do you think the houses are built that way?”

4. Throw in a little reflection at the end of each day

Travel will provide so many learning experiences, you will need to allow time for your child to pause and make sense of them. Any teacher will tell you reflecting is often when the deep connections are made between new experiences and existing world views.

Read more: Knowledge is a process of discovery: how constructivism changed education

Some children will reflect of their own accord, but establishing a routine of doing this together will make sure it happens. The traditional travel diary is still a great tool to engage in self-reflection. Others might enjoy looking at photos taken and reflect on the day through family conversations.

Learning is a life-long journey that extends well beyond the walls of the traditional classroom. By planning for just a little intentional teaching, you can help your children learn to critically think about and appreciate the world around them.

– ref. New cultures, new experiences: 4 ways to keep kids learning while travelling – http://theconversation.com/new-cultures-new-experiences-4-ways-to-keep-kids-learning-while-travelling-126202

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan Stronach, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.

Aboriginal women and girls in lutruwita (Tasmania or Van Diemen’s Land) were superb swimmers and divers.

For eons, the palawa women of lutruwita had productive relationships with the sea and were expert hunters. Scant knowledge remains of these women, yet we can find fleeting glimpses of their aquatic skills.

Wauba Debar of Oyster Bay’s Paredarerme tribe was stolen as a teenager to become, according to Edward Cotton (a Quaker who settled on Tasmania’s East Coast), “a sealer’s slave and paramour”.

Servitude and rescue

Foreign sealers arrived on the Tasmanian coastlines in the late 18th century. The ensuing fur trade nearly destroyed the seal populations of Tasmania in a matter of two decades.

At the same time, life became extremely difficult for the female palawa population.

Slavery was still legal in the British Empire, and so the profitability of the sealing industry was underpinned by the servitude of palawa women.

Sporadic raids known as “gin-raiding” by sealers rendered the coastlines a place of constant danger for female palawa.

Read more: Noted works: The Black War

Little is known of Wauba Debar other than tales of a daring rescue at sea. Though variations to her story can be found, it most frequently details her long swim and lifesaving efforts in stormy conditions. As one version tells it:

The boat went under; the two men were poor swimmers, and looked set to drown beneath the mountainous grey waves. Wauba could have left them to drown, and swim ashore on her own. But she didn’t.

First, she pulled her husband under her arm — the man who had first captured her — and dragged him back to shore, more than a kilometre away. Wauba next swam back out to the other man, and brought him in as well. The two sealers coughed and spluttered on the Bicheno beach, but they did not die. Wauba had saved them.

Death at sea

Sadly, no one was there to rescue Wauba when she needed it. Her demise during a sealing trip, was at the hands of Europeans.

According to a sailor’s account to Cotton, Wauba was one of the “gins” captured to take along on a whaleboat sailing from Hobart to the Straits Islands (Furneaux Group) as “expert hunters, fishers, and divers, as in most barbarous tribes, the slaves of the men”.

The sailing party camped at Wineglass Bay but woke to find the women and dogs had vanished. A group set off to pursue those who’d taken them. In his 1893 account, Cotton speculated in The Mercury newspaper on the likely cause of her death:

Wauba Debar had, I suppose, been captured in like manner … and possibly died of injuries sustained in the capture, which no doubt was not done very tenderly.

The crew interred Wauba at Bicheno, and marked her grave by a slab of wood with details inscribed.

Accounts differ as to when this actually took place. In 1893, elderly Bicheno residents said Wauba was buried 10 years before the date on the headstone, placing her death around 1822.

However, in his diary entry on 24 January 1816, Captain James Kelly described how he hauled up in Waub’s Boat Harbour due to the heavy afternoon swell. Considering the area was already named after her, it can be concluded that Wauba was likely buried before 1816.

Cotton’s report imagined her burial:

Wauba Debar did not live to be a mother of the tribe of half-bred sealers of the Straits, which became a sort of city or refuge of for bushrangers in aftertime … But she, poor soul was buried decently, perchance reverently, and I suppose other of the captured sisters would be present by the graveside on the shores of that silent nook near the beached boat.

Here lies Wauba

Wauba’s reputation was such that in 1855 the public of Bicheno decided to commemorate her by erecting a railing, headstone, and footstone (paid for by public subscription) at her grave, with “Waub” carved into it.

John Allen, who had been granted land nearby, donated ten shillings towards the cost of the gravestone – notwithstanding his involvement in a massacre at Milton Farm, Great Swanport, 30 years earlier.

The inscription reads:

Here lies Wauba Debar. A Female Aborigine of Van Diemen’s Land. Died June 1832. Aged 40 Years. This Stone is Erected by a few of her white friends.

Whether prompted by a sense of loss, guilt, or admiration, the community memorialised Wauba, and by extension, the original inhabitants of the land.

Yet by the late 1800s, European demand for Aboriginal physical remains for “scientific investigation” was high. In 1893, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery was determined to procure the remains of Wauba.

The prevailing ethnological theories believed that the study of Australian Aboriginal people, and particularly Indigenous Tasmanians, would reveal much about the earliest stages of human development and its progress.

Wauba’s grave was exhumed, put into a box, labelled “Native Currants”, and dispatched to Hobart.

The locals were outraged. An editorial in the Tasmanian Mail newspaper condemned the act as “a pure case of body snatching for the purposes of gain, and nothing else” that “the name of Science is outraged at being connected with”.

Snowdrops bloom

Wauba’s memorial is the only known gravestone erected to a Tasmanian Aboriginal person during the 19th century, and she is the only palawa woman known to have been buried and commemorated by non-Indigenous locals.

In 2014, Olympic swimmer and Bicheno resident Shane Gould dedicated a fundraising swim to Wauba Debar’s swimming abilities and memory.

The European styled memorial serves as a reminder of the more turbulent interactions between the two peoples that shaped Tasmania’s history from the 1800s onwards.

Wauba’s empty grave is Tasmania’s smallest State Reserve. Her remains were returned to the Tasmanian Indigenous community in 1985. Snowdrops are said to bloom around the grave every spring.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Wauba Debar, an Indigenous swimmer from Tasmania who saved her captors – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-wauba-debar-an-indigenous-swimmer-from-tasmania-who-saved-her-captors-126487

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Federico Volpin, PhD Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

To mark the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements we’re taking a look at some of the elements used by researchers in their work.

Today’s focus is phosphorus, an element that is vital for life but of limited supply. But we can recover phosphorus from a source that we all give away freely, every day, our urine.

Phosphorus, number 15 on the periodic table, can be highly toxic and flammable and has been used in warfare as an incendiary device, yet it is also essential for life.

As the famous science writer Isaac Asimov said in his 1974 book, Asimov on Chemistry:

Life can multiply until all the phosphorus has gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent.

Read more: Titanium is the perfect metal to make replacement human body parts

That’s because phosphorous is essential to all living organisms. It forms the backbone of our DNA as well as the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) that is found in cells and captures chemical energy from the food we eat.

We have yet to find a single living being that does not require phosphorous to survive. But we don’t have an endless supply of phosphorus, and that’s where my research comes in.

Demand grows for phosphorus

Demand for phosphorus and nitrogen increased dramatically in the 20th century as it was found to play a crucial role in fertiliser used for growing crops.

In just over 50 years (between 1961 and 2014) fertiliser production increased tenfold due to the so-called green revolution.

This allowed for a worldwide increase in the agricultural production, particularly in the developing world, which was used to feed an ever-growing global population.

The high demand for nitrogen was met by ramping up a process that captures nitrogen and hydrogen from fresh air and uses it to synthesise ammonia (the major nitrogen-based fertiliser). As the air in Earth’s atmosphere is made of 78% nitrogen, synthetic ammonia production was only limited by its cost.

But phosphorous is generally stored in solid or liquid form, and the cheapest way to cope with the high demand for phosphorous fertiliser was to extract if from phosphate rocks.

Phosphate rocks are a resource that is both limited and not equally distributed. The top five phosphate rocks holders – Morocco and Western Sahara, China, Algeria, Syria, and Brazil – account for 84% of the world reserves. Australia holds just 1.6%.

As phosphate rocks are a finite and non-renewable resource, the continuous extraction is causing uncertainties in our future supplies.

The wee supplies of phosphorus

One solution is to look for other supplies of phosphorus, and that’s where you and I can play a role. Our urine is an excellent source of raw material for phosphorous.

Each one of us excretes up to half a kilogram of phosphorous per year, just through our urine. This makes urine the single largest source of phosphorous from urban areas.

Back in the 17th century, the German chemist Hennig Brandt chose urine to isolate elemental phosphorous. In his experiment, he boiled hundreds of litres of urine down to a thick syrup until a red oil distilled up from it.

He collected the oil and cooled down the urine. After discarding the salts formed at the bottom of the mixture, he added back the red oil. By heating back the mixture for 16 hours, a white fume would come out, then oil, and finally phosphorous.

He was actually searching for the legendary Philosopher’s Stone that would supposedly turn any metal into gold. He might have failed in that, but he showed how easy it was to isolate phosphorous from urine with unsophisticated tools.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Today’s approaches to recycling of phosphorous from our wastes are way more practical and economical compared to Brandt’s method.

An increasing number of companies are looking to recover phosphorus from waste water, including from urine.

New urine-derived fertilisers have entered the market and the race is on to find the optimal technology to convert smelly urine into a safe, non-odorous commercial fertiliser.

In Australia, researchers from the University of Technology Sydney have developed a process that uses urine as a raw material to produce fertiliser and freshwater. Selected microorganisms are used to oxidise the (smelly) compounds in raw urine and convert volatile ammonia into more stable nitrates.

The treated urine is then filtered through a membrane, which retains the microorganisms allowing for their re-use, while allowing the soluble phosphorus and nitrogen to pass through. Treated and filtered urine is concentrated to reach nutrients concentration similar to commercial fertilisers.

Read more: Silver makes beautiful bling but it’s also good for keeping the bacterial bugs away

At present, this fertiliser – named UrVal short for “You are Valuable” – is being tested at the Royal Botanical Garden in growing parsley.

Clearly, these new innovations in nutrients recovery from wastes allow us to reduce the dependence on a finite resource (phosphorous).

But they could also enable us to explore the possibility of one day producing food outside of planet Earth where we need fertiliser. Phosphate rocks may not be available in such places, but we’d have plenty of urine.

– ref. That’s a relief! We have a way to recover phosphorus from our urine – http://theconversation.com/thats-a-relief-we-have-a-way-to-recover-phosphorus-from-our-urine-117751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Bird, Lecturer, University of New England

Screens are everywhere, including in the palms of our hands. Children see how much time we adults spend on our smartphones, and therefore how much we seem to value these devices – and they want to be a part of it.

Children see us constantly looking up information we need to know, and being continuously connected. It’s only natural that they should want to copy this behaviour in their play, and “practise being an adult”.

Read more: Imitation and imagination: child’s play is central to human success

Most people have an opinion about children and technology, and the media regularly present stories of their potential for learning, or horror stories of the damage they can cause. My research takes a slightly different tack.

Rather than studying children’s screen use per se, I looked at how they play with old and discarded devices, such as a hand-me-down phone handset or an old and defunct laptop that has otherwise outlived its usefulness.

Many early childhood education centres contain play spaces set up to mimic situations in everyday adult life. Examples include “home corner” containing kitchen equipment, of other situations such as offices, hairdressing salons, doctors’ surgeries, and restaurants. These spaces might also let children play at using mobile phones, computers, iPads, EFTPOS machines, or other electronic devices.

I observed classes of 4 and 5-year-olds at two early education centres as they played imaginatively using technologies, to find out how they use devices in their play.

Facebook aficionados

Some of the children’s behaviours were fascinating and eye-opening.

Four-year-old Maddie, for example, “videoed” her educator dancing, and then said she was going to post it to Facebook. She knew the process involved, even though she had only ever watched her mother post, and had never done it herself.

Four-year-old Jack made a “video camera” from cardboard boxes and pretended to film other children. It even had a screen where you could watch the footage he had shot.

Another educator told me her two-year-old child knows the difference between her work phone and her personal phone, and uses a different voice while pretending to talk on each.

In my research, children put phones in pockets or handbags before they went off and played, one child stated “I can’t go out without my phone!”

Practise and pretend

During pretend play, children are often acting at a higher level to practise new skills.

The children in my study had seen grown-ups doing “grown-up” things with their devices, and wanted to recreate them in their play situations.

Early childhood educators can use this kind of play to help children understand complex concepts and situations. For example, I have observed preschool children acting out tsunamis in the sandpit, discussing X-rays and broken bones, and showing a child how to care for a doll to practise interacting with a new sibling.

Technologies are no different. Parents and educators can use pretend play with technologies to teach children useful life lessons, such as how to behave appropriately with mobile phones, and when it is appropriate to use them.

Read more: One man’s trash: how using everyday items for play benefits kids

In the Facebook example above, the educator could have had a conversation with Maddie about asking permission before taking a video of someone else and posting it to Facebook. They could ask questions like “how would you feel if someone took a video of you dancing and then posted it to Facebook?”

When the children were playing restaurants, one child declared: “no screens at the table!” The children then negotiated that it was okay when the call was very important, or if they needed to look something up to help with whatever the group was discussing. In this way, the children displayed their understanding of the importance of social interactions.

Read more: Play-based learning can set your child up for success at school and beyond

Not only can educators teach children through play, they can also model appropriate behaviour with technologies. By asking children if it is alright to take a photo or video of them, showing the child their image before it is shared with others, and being present and not looking at a screen when a child is speaking, we can show children we respect them and behave ethically towards them.

So before you throw away your broken laptop or your old mobile, consider donating it to your local early childhood centre or, if you have children in your own home, give it to them to use as a toy. You might be surprised at what they will teach you.

– ref. Playing with old phones teaches children good habits, and reflects our bad ones back at us – http://theconversation.com/playing-with-old-phones-teaches-children-good-habits-and-reflects-our-bad-ones-back-at-us-127727

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Olds, Professor of Health Sciences, University of South Australia

The sun’s shining and there’s a trampoline in the backyard. Yet your kids want to spend their summer holidays lying on the couch playing computer games all day.

So what can you do to help your school-aged kids stay active and healthy this summer?

Read more: More than one in four Aussie kids are overweight or obese: we’re failing them, and we need a plan

Kids put on weight over the holidays

In 2016, a US study found that all the increase in fatness of school-aged children occurred over the summer holidays. During term time, kids get leaner and leaner, only to put it all back on, and then some, during the holidays.

Their fitness also declines during holiday time. To make matters worse, changes are greater in kids from poorer, less educated backgrounds, and the gap between rich and poor widens over multiple summer holidays. The work of the school is undone at home.

What’s going on, and what can parents do about it?

Holidays are different

Kids spend their time differently on holidays, as we showed in a study published earlier this year.

On holidays, Australian kids get 58 minutes a day more screen time than during term time, including spending 16 minutes a day more playing video games. They get 16 minutes less sport and vigorous exercise each day.

Read more: Explainer: why does the teenage brain need more sleep?

They also get 40 minutes more sleep, staying up about 40 minutes later, and sleeping in 80 minutes more.

All this adds up: their overall energy expenditure is more than 5% lower. Over six weeks of school holidays, that amounts to an extra half kilogram of fat in a typical 11-year old, and that’s without counting changes in diet.

Kids eat differently on holidays, too.

On school days, kids can only eat during recess and lunch. Their options are limited by school-based healthy eating initiatives such as “fruit time”, healthy canteen menus, and the curriculum about healthy lunchboxes.

All that goes out the window on holidays. Kids fall victim to the gravitational pull of the big white box in the kitchen.

On weekends and school holidays, kids have greater choice of how much, what and when they eat. Most (knowingly) choose less healthy options.

Later bedtimes mean more screen time and more snacking. Longer lie-ins often mean kids skip breakfast.

The importance of structure

US researchers coined the idea of “structured days”. School days, they argue, are characterised by consistency and structure, which regulate how kids use their time, and when and what they eat.

On school days, for example, two-thirds of kids get up within an hour of each other (roughly between 6:30 and 7:30 am); on non-school days, it is over three hours (between 6:45 and 10:05 am).

Their review of 190 studies compared children’s sleep, physical activity, sedentary behaviours and diet on school days and weekends. They found that in 80% of studies, weekends were associated with unfavourable activity and dietary patterns.

During school term, the unhealthy impacts of unstructured weekend days are diluted. In contrast, the school holidays, and particularly the summer holidays, involve a long string of unstructured days and unfavourable activity and dietary behaviours. This leads to a decline in fitness and accelerated weight gain.

The “filled-time perspective” describes the sensible idea that when children’s time is filled with favourable activities, the time cannot be filled with unfavourable ones.

This suggests it is helpful to fill children’s time with favourable activities, like physical activity and excursions, to reduce the time available for unfavourable activities, such as snacking and screen time.

So what can parents do to keep kids healthy and active on school holidays? Here are four ways, with a proven track record.

1. Get kids outside

Studies consistently show time spent outside is strongly associated with both physical and mental health. That effect is likely due to kids being more physically active outdoors.

2. Try summer camps

Summer camps are popular in Europe and North America, and also run in Australia.

An estimated 1.3 million French school children go off to their “colonies de vacances” each summer. In the US, over 14 million kids attend summer camps.

Children who spend more time in summer camp are more active than those who spend more time at home over the summer holiday.

Some 80% of boys and 73% of girls who attended a summer day camp met the daily physical activity recommendations of 60 minutes per day — about four times as many as those reaching that target during the year.

3. Activity before screen time

Only allow screen time when the kids have been physically active, even if that only means doing household chores. On holidays, kids spend 35 minutes more each day doing chores, so this may be your chance to get your kids to pitch in.

4. Plan the day

Organise time for physical activity with your child. Have a game of beach cricket or a mini-Olympics in the backyard. Take the dog for a walk. Organise excursions to the museum, or even shopping, where they get to walk around. Have regular times for meals and relaxation.

Good luck.

Read more: Why suburban parks offer an antidote to helicopter parenting

– ref. 4 ways to get your kids off the couch these summer holidays – http://theconversation.com/4-ways-to-get-your-kids-off-the-couch-these-summer-holidays-123918

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Associate Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

2019 might well be remembered as the year the world caught fire. Some 2.9 million hectares of eastern Australia have been incinerated in the past few months, an area roughly the same size as Belgium. Fires in the Amazon, the Arctic, and California captured global attention.

As climate change continues, large, intense, and severe fires will become more common. But what does this mean for the animals living in fire-prone environments?

Read more: Drought and climate change were the kindling, and now the east coast is ablaze

Our new research, published recently in the Journal of Animal Ecology, looked at studies from around the world to identify how predators respond to fire.

We found some species seem to benefit from fires, others appear to be vulnerable, and some seem indifferent. In a changing climate, it’s urgent we understand how fires affect predators – and hence potentially their prey –in order to keep ecosystems healthy.

Predators: the good and the bad

Large predators, like wolves and lions, often play important roles in ecosystems, regulating food webs by reducing the numbers or changing the behaviour of herbivores and smaller predators. Many large predators are in dire straits within their native range, while introduced predators, such as feral cats and red foxes, have spread to new regions, where they have devastated native wildlife .

Fires can offer new opportunities as well as problems to predators. Some predators take advantage of charred, more open landscapes to hunt vulnerable prey; others rely on thick vegetation to launch an ambush.

But until now, we have not known which predators are drawn to fire, which are repelled by it, and which don’t care either way. Synthesising information on how different kinds of predators (for example, large or small, pursuit or ambush) respond to fire is vital for both the conservation of top predators and to help protect native prey from introduced predators.

Some like it hot

Our research reviewed studies from around the world to identify how different vertebrate predators (birds, mammals and reptiles) respond to fire in different ecosystems.

We found 160 studies on the response of 188 predator species to fire, including wolves, coyotes, foxes, cats, hawks, owls, goannas and snakes, amongst others. The studies came from 20 different countries, although most were from North America or Australia, and focused on canine and feline species.

Some predators seem to like fire: they are more abundant, or spend more time in, recently burnt areas than areas that escape fire. Our review found red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) mostly responded positively to fire and become more active in burned areas.

Raptors have even been observed in Northern Australia carrying burning sticks, helping to spread fire and targeting prey as they flee the fire.

For other predators, fire is bad news. Following Californian wildfires, numbers of eastern racer snakes fell in burnt areas. Likewise, lions avoid recently burned areas, because they rely on dense vegetation from which to ambush prey.

The authors of the papers we reviewed thought food availability, vegetation cover, and competition with other predators were the most important things affecting species’ responses to fire.

But perhaps more surprising was that most species, including bobcats and the striped skunk, appeared largely unaffected by fire. Of the affected species, some (such as spotted owls) responded differently to fire in different places.

Overall, we found it is difficult to predict how a predator species will respond to fire.

We still have a lot to learn

Our results show while many predators appear to adapt to the changes that fires bring about, some species are impacted by fire, both negatively and positively. The problem is that, with a few exceptions, we will struggle to know how a given fire will affect a predator species without local knowledge. This means environmental managers need to monitor the local outcomes of fire management, such as fuel reduction burns.

There may be situations in which predator management needs to be coupled with fire management to help prevent native wildlife becoming fox food after fire. There has even been trials to see if artificial shelters can help protect native wildlife from introduced predators after fire.

Getting our knowledge base right

One thing that has hampered our research is the lack of contextual information in many studies. No two fires are the same – they differ in size, intensity, severity, and season – but these details are often absent. The literature is also biased towards dog-like and cat species, and there are few studies on the response of predators to fire in Africa, Asia, and South America.

It is important to note that some predator responses to fire may be overlooked due to the way experiments were carried out, or because monitoring happened too long after the fire.

Unifying how fire, predator numbers and environmental features are recorded would help future studies predict how predators might react to different types of fires in various situations.

Read more: Bushfires are pushing species towards extinction

As wildfires become more frequent and severe under climate change, understanding how fire intensity and frequency shapes predator populations and their prey will be critical for effective and informed ecosystem management and conservation.

– ref. Hunter, hunted: when the world catches on fire, how do predators respond? – http://theconversation.com/hunter-hunted-when-the-world-catches-on-fire-how-do-predators-respond-126280

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael James Walsh, Assistant Professor Social Science, University of Canberra

In the years since selfie sticks went global, it has become clear that the mobile phone has changed the way we travel. The ubiquity of social media means tourists can now produce content on the move for their networked audiences to view in close to real time.

Where once we shared slideshows post trip and saved prints and postcards as keepsakes, we now share holiday images and selfies from the road, sea or air — expanding the “tourist gaze” from the traveller to include remote audiences back home.

Read more: #MeTourism: the hidden costs of selfie tourism

Instagram-worthy

Travelling has gone from a solitary quest to a “social occasion”. As such, gazing is becoming inseparably linked with photography. Taking photos has become habitual, rendering the camera as a way of seeing and experiencing new places.

Travellers take selfies that present both locations and people in aesthetically pleasing and positive ways.

Indeed, the “instagrammability” of a destination is a key motivation for younger people to travel there – even if filters and mirrors have been used to create a less than realistic image.

This transforms the relationship between travellers and their social networks in three important ways: between tourists and destination hosts; between fellow tourists; and lastly, between tourists and those that stay home.

The urge to share travel imagery is not without risk. An Australian couple were released from detention in Iran in October, following their arrest for ostensibly flying a drone without a permit.

Other tourists earned derision for scrambling to post selfies at Uluru before it was closed to climbers.

Meanwhile, there is a sad story behind the newly popular travelgram destination Rainbow Mountain in the Peruvian Andes. It has reportedly only recently emerged due to climate change melting its once snowy peaks.

Testing the effects

To understand the way social media photography impacts travelling, we undertook an exploratory study of overnight visitors at zoological accommodation in lavish surrounds.

We divided 12 participants into two groups. One group was directed to abstain from posting on social media but were still able to take photos. The second group had no restrictions on sharing photos. Though the numbers were small, we gathered qualitative information about engagement and attitudes.

Participants were invited to book at Jamala Wildlife Lodge in Canberra. The visit was funded by the researchers — Jamala Wildlife Lodge did not sponsor the research and the interviewees’ stay at the Lodge was a standard visit. We then conducted interviews immediately after their departure from the zoo, critically exploring the full experience of their stay.

The study confirmed that the desire to share travel pictures in close to real time is strongly scripted into the role of the tourist; altering the way travellers engage with sites they are visiting, but also their sense of urgency to communicate this with remote audiences.

Pics or it didn’t happen

Participants Mandy and Amy were among those instructed to refrain from posting pictures to social media while at the zoo. They described having to refrain from social media use as a disappointment, even though it seemed to further their engagement.

Interviewer: Did you look at your social media throughout your stay or did you refrain?

Mandy: A bit yeah. But even then, probably not reading it as much as I often would. I don’t think I commented on anything yeah.

Amy: Even today when we put something up [after staying at the Zoo] about the things we’d done today and only a few people had liked it, there was that little bit of disappointment that ‘Oh more people haven’t liked my post.’ Where we didn’t have that for the previous 24 hours [because of the experiment] … because nobody knew about it.

The desire for social media recognition resumed after leaving the zoo. For Michelle, posting after the experience presented new concerns:

Interviewer: How did you feel about not being able to post?

Michelle: Spanner in the works! For me personally not being able to post was a negative experience because I wanted to show people what we’re doing, when we’re doing it.

And I also feel, like a couple of people knew we were going to the zoo, right, and knew that we couldn’t use social media. So, when I eventually post it, they’re going to go, ‘She’s been hanging on to those and now she’s posting them and that’s just a bit weird.’ Like, to post it after the event. Everyone normally posts it in real time.

Later, Michelle commented that withholding content from posting to social media also diminished a part of the experience itself:

I sort of feel like if we don’t share the photos it’s like a tree fell down in the forest and no one heard it, like, we’ve had this amazing experience and if I don’t share them, then no one’s going to know that we had this experience, you know, apart from us.

Centre Stage

Digital photography and social media transform the relationship between the travelling self and its audience, as individuals have an expanded — and potentially diversified — audience.

Selfies in tourist contexts reflect the tourist gaze back at the tourist, rather than outward.

The perfect digital postcard now incorporates the self centrestage. As one participant suggested:

Shannon: It almost feels like it’s kind of an expected behaviour when you are doing something touristy … We’ve actually had tour guides before … kind of a bit disappointed if you don’t take a photograph.

The purpose of photography has shifted from a memory aid to a way of sharing experience in the moment. There is tension now between the need to capture tourist experiences for digital sharing and individual engagement in the tourist activity. Decrying the desire to use photography as a way of communicating experience will not constructively address this tension.

To ensure tourism sustainability, and engagement with their target market, tourism providers need to explore better ways to manage travellers’ face-to-face and digital engagement.

Digital engagements have become a defining part of travel, and organisations should be encouraged to promote online sharing of experiences — phone charging stations and photo competitions were two suggestions offered by our interviewees.

In contrast, device-free days or activities could be another way to encourage face-to-face engagement and prompt tourists to be more considered with their online sharing.

– ref. #travelgram: live tourist snaps have turned solo adventures into social occasions – http://theconversation.com/travelgram-live-tourist-snaps-have-turned-solo-adventures-into-social-occasions-124583

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Hill, Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria

A partial solar eclipse will occur across northern Australia on December 26. During the afternoon, the Moon will pass in front of the Sun, partially blocking the Sun’s bright light.

The eclipse will take place north of Geraldton (WA), Alice Springs (NT) and Townsville (QLD). These towns will barely witness the eclipse, as from their vantage point the Moon just skims past the Sun’s outer limb.

Further north, the Moon will hide more of the Sun. For Australia, Darwin will experience the greatest eclipse, with up to 31% of the Sun’s area blocked by the Moon.

However, there won’t be any noticeable effects to let you know that the eclipse is occurring. The daylight will appear just as bright – it doesn’t begin to dim until around 80% or more of the Sun is blocked out.

To view the eclipse, be sure to take the necessary precautions to see it safely, without risking your eyesight. Most importantly, never look directly at the Sun. The timings and appearance of the eclipse for other locations can be found at timeanddate.com.

Ring of fire

Australia’s experience of the eclipse is relatively modest because we lie on its outskirts. The main event is happening further north, in a narrow band stretching from Saudi Arabia, through southern India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and out to the island of Guam.

View the eclipse from within that band (including the city of Singapore), and you will see a special type of solar eclipse known as an annular solar eclipse.

During an annular solar eclipse the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun – as it does during a total solar eclipse – but in this instance, the Moon is too small to fully obscure the Sun from view.

Instead of eclipsing or hiding the Sun, the Moon turns the Sun into a spectacular ‘ring of fire’ that encircles the dark Moon.

It’s a quirk of nature that Earth has a moon that is the right size (about 400 times smaller than the Sun) and is at the right distance (about 400 times closer to Earth than the Sun is) for a total solar eclipse to occur.

But since the Moon follows an elliptical orbit around the Earth, its distance varies slightly throughout its monthly orbit. If the Moon happens to be at or near the most distant part of its orbit during a solar eclipse, then the Moon will appear slightly smaller in the sky leading to an annular solar eclipse.

How to see the eclipse

A way to see the eclipse – while protecting your eyesight – is to project an image of the Sun onto another surface. This also works as a great way to share the moment with others and to enable younger children to share in the experience.

Make a small hole in the bottom of a plastic cup (or piece of cardboard) and with your back towards the Sun, hold the cup so that sunlight passes through the hole and onto a flat surface such as a piece of paper or a wall.

The image of the Sun will be small and faint. But it is generally enough to show that the Sun is no longer a complete circle. It works especially well if you track the changing shape as the eclipse slowly progresses.

Specially designed eclipse glasses can be used to look at the Sun directly as they block out most of the light. Make sure they fit well and there are no scratches or other signs of wear or tear. Also it’s important to remember (especially for children) to look away from the Sun before putting on or taking off the glasses.

Eclipse glasses can also be used to look for large sunspots – dark spots or blemishes on the Sun’s surface that are slightly cooler than their surroundings because of strong magnetism. These spots appear quite small but are typically larger than the Earth – an incredible reminder of just how big the Sun truly is.

However, don’t be surprised if you see a blank Sun with no spots at all. We are currently in a deep solar minimum. As I write, the Sun has had no sunspots for over a month. In fact, 2019 has broken the known sunspot record – more than 270 days this year have featured a blank Sun, without any spots. That’s more than any other year since the Space Age began. You can follow spaceweather.com to track the daily sunspot count.

Save the date

This is the third solar eclipse for the year. But while they happen fairly regularly, you must be in the right location to have the full experience. For any specific location, it can be years between partial solar eclipses or centuries can pass between total solar eclipses.

Some may remember the total solar eclipse that occurred over Melbourne in 1976 or the more recent one over northern Queensland in 2012.

Australia’s last annular eclipse was seen in Western Australia in 2013.

The next total solar eclipse for Australia will occur in April 2023. The band of totality will just clip Australia near Exmouth at the tip of the North West Cape in Western Australia.

However, the eclipse worth waiting for will occur on July 22, 2028. Totality will stretch across Australia, from the top of Western Australia down through New South Wales, passing directly over Sydney. That will be an amazing sight to see.

– ref. Watch the Moon hide the Sun from northern Australia – http://theconversation.com/watch-the-moon-hide-the-sun-from-northern-australia-127819

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

There’s an enourmous variety of sunscreens to choose from. Major supermarkets each sell more than 60 options. And one large pharmacy chain sells more than 100.

So how do you choose sunscreen that’s right for you?

Read more: Inducing choice paralysis: how retailers bury customers in an avalanche of options

The big 4 must haves

Sunscreens need to tick these four major boxes:

1. The sun protection factor, or SPF, should be at least 30, preferably 50. SPF describes how much UV gets to the skin. SPF50 allows just 1/50th (2%) of the UV to reach the skin

2. Go for broad spectrum protection, which filters the full UV light spectrum. UVB rays (290-320nm wavelengths) are responsible for most sunburn and DNA damage, but UVA rays (320-400nm) also cause DNA damage and accelerate skin ageing

3. Aim for water resistant formulations, which stay on longer in sweaty conditions, and when exercising or swimming. But no sunscreen is completely waterproof

4. Make sure the sunscreen is approved in Australia. Approval from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is the final must-have. All sunscreens for sale in Australia must meet the TGA’s requirements and will carry an AUST number on the packaging. They can only contain ingredients from an approved list that have been tested for safety and efficacy. And the SPF, water resistance and broad spectrum action must be established by testing on human skin. Sunscreens bought overseas don’t necessarily have these safeguards, so proceed with caution.

Once you’ve ticked off the big four, you can limit your options by how the sunscreen is delivered, its ingredients, and other factors.

Pump pack, roll-on or spray?

The sunscreen delivery system is more important than you might think. Sunscreen works best when you use lots — a teaspoon for each limb, a teaspoon each for your front and back, and a teaspoon for your face and neck.

This is easiest to achieve with pump packs or squeeze tubes. People apply far less sunscreen when they use a roll-on. Spray-on sunscreen is even worse; the TGA recommends you apply one-third of a whole can for proper coverage.

Look and feel, sensitive skin and kids

Now we get down to the finer choices in sunscreen, and they depend on your personal concerns and preferences. Here are a few common choices.

How to avoiding looking greasy

Greasiness is the most off-putting thing about sunscreen for many Australians.

But there are non-greasy formulations, often marketed as “dry-touch” or “matte finish”. These can be comparatively expensive, but worth it if greasiness is your main barrier to using sunscreen.

Your skin may still look shiny immediately after applying it. But it should return to a matte finish within 10-20 minutes as the sunscreen settles into the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin.

How about sunscreen for sensitive or acne-prone skin?

Sensitive skin is irritated by a wide variety of cosmetics, lotions and fragrances. So, you can use ones marketed as kids’ sunscreen because these tend to be fragrance-free.

You can also choose sunscreens with ingredients such as zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, which partially reflect and also absorb UV rays.

Those so-called physical blockers are very unlikely to cause allergic or irritant rashes. But they appear white on the skin, unless you chose an option with nano-sized particles, which are invisible to the eye.

If your skin is prone to acne, good options are lotions or gels, rather than creams, and products marked oil-free or non-comedogenic.

Sensitive and acne-prone skin is often limited to the face and neck, so it can be cheaper to have a specialist sunscreen for those parts and a cheaper one for the rest of your body.

Sunscreen allergies are rarer but do affect up to 3% of people. They’re generally caused by a single sunscreen component, usually preservatives or fragrances. A dermatologist can patch test individual ingredients, which you can then avoid by checking labels.

What’s the best sunscreen for my kids?

Parents worry about the effects of both UV exposure and chemical exposure. And of course, small children can be pretty anti-sunscreen.

All Australian sunscreen chemicals are approved by the TGA and are recommended for daily use, even on kids. Plus, many kids’ sunscreens are made with sensitive skin in mind, because skin sensitivity is more common in young children. If your child doesn’t have sensitive skin (skin that reacts with itching or burning sensations to a wide range of body care products), adult sunscreens are fine too.

However, babies under six months old need a physical blocker sunscreen.

What not to do

The Cancer Council and the TGA strongly recommend against homemade sunscreens.

Natural oils and other ingredients promoted in recipes found online generally have a low SPF. And, as they have not been tested for causing irritation, can react unpredictably with the skin.

Cosmetics that contain sunscreen, such as lipstick or foundation with an SPF rating, are not regulated as tightly as regular sunscreens in Australia.

Cosmetics with an SPF 30 or higher can have good protection when you first apply them. But like regular sunscreens, they need to be reapplied throughout the day. That’s not something we usually do, unless you’re going for the caked-on look.

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

– ref. How to pick the right sunscreen when you’re blinded by choice – http://theconversation.com/how-to-pick-the-right-sunscreen-when-youre-blinded-by-choice-125881

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gisela Kaplan, Emeritus Professor in Animal Behaviour, University of New England

How do magpies detect worms and other food sources underground? I often see them look or listen, then rapidly hop across the ground and start digging with their beak and extract a worm or bug from the earth – Catherine, age 10, Perth.

You have posed a very good question.

Foraging for food can involve sight, hearing and even smell. In almost all cases learning is involved. Magpies are ground foragers, setting one foot before the other looking for food while walking, called walk-foraging. It looks like this:

Finding food on the ground, such as beetles and other insects, is not as easy as it may sound. The ground can be uneven and covered with leaves, grasses and rocks. Insects may be hiding, camouflaged, or staying so still it is hard for a magpie to notice them.

Read more: Curious Kids: why is a magpie’s poo black and white?

Detecting a small object on the ground requires keen vision and experience, to discriminate between the parts that are important and those that are not.

Magpie eyes, as for most birds, are on the side of the head (humans and other birds of prey, by contrast, have eyes that face forward).

To see a small area in front of them, close to the ground, birds use both eyes together (scientists call this binocular vision). But birds mostly see via the eyes looking out to the side (which is called monocular vision).

This picture gives you an idea of what a magpie can see with its left eye, what it can see with its right eye and what area it can see with both eyes working together (binocular vision).

You asked about underground foraging. Some of that foraging can also be done by sight. Worms, for instance, may leave a small mound (called a cast) on the surface and, to the experienced bird, this indicates that a worm is just below.

Magpies can also go a huge step further. They can identify big scarab larvae underground without any visual help at all.

Scarab larvae look like grubs. They munch on grassroots and can kill entire grazing fields. Once they transform into beetles (commonly called Christmas beetles) they can do even more damage by eating all the leaves off eucalyptus trees.

Here is the secret: magpies have such good hearing, they can hear the very faint sound of grass roots being chewed.

We know this from experiments using small speakers under the soil playing back recorded sounds of scarab beetle larvae. Magpies located the speaker every time and dug it up.

So how do they do it? Several movements are involved.

To make certain that a jab with its beak will hit the exact spot where the juicy grub is, the magpie first walks slowly and scans the ground. It then stops and looks closely at the ground – seemingly with both eyes working together.

Then, holding absolutely still, the magpie turns its head so the left side of the head and ear is close to the ground for a final confirming listen.

Finally, the bird straightens up, then executes a powerful jab into the ground before retrieving the grub.

That is very clever of the magpies. Very few animals can extract food they can’t see. Only great apes and humans were thought to have this ability. Clever magpies indeed. And farmers love them for keeping a major pest under control.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do birds sing?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got 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 do magpies detect worms and other food underground? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-magpies-detect-worms-and-other-food-underground-125713

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annie Yuan Cih Wu, PhD Candidate in Geography, University of Sydney

A wedding is one of the biggest expenses in Timor.

The bulk of the cost comes from the “barlake”, a Tetum word which can be translated as “dowry”, or “bride price”, even though the exchanges are usually two-way between the bride and groom families.

The gifts take the form of cash, goats, pigs, buffalo, old coins, gold or silver discs, swords, statues of Catholic saints, coral necklaces, spices, wardrobes, beds, mattresses, and even houses.

Each has different purposes and are exchanged at recognised exchange rates.

Read more: East Timor, war, coffee and Australia’s debt of honour

The total expenditure on a traditional wedding, including the barlake, can reach $US5,000 to $US20,000, depending on the socioeconomic background of the couple’s families.

Timor’s minimum wage is US$5,152.

Much of the population is not in formal employment.

For most Timorese, going without a traditional wedding is unthinkable. It consolidates one of the most important social relationships and is the platform used to manage social debts.

A husband who married a bride from Los Palos in Southeast Timor described the obligations to me in this way:

My father-in-law gave me a “price list” that I would have to pay before marrying my wife, such as my wife’s education costs at university, which were 10 buffaloes.

We lived together for a few months before we were officially married, and that was 6 buffaloes, my boarding in their family house is 2 buffaloes, and others I could not remember.

Many Timorese postpone marriage, despite having children.

Seasonal work lifts status

Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program has played host to more than 2,000 workers from East Timor (and many more from other Pacific nations) since it began 2014.

Working in Australia for only six months, most send back to Timor between US$4,000 and US$8,000.

A study of seasonal workers who had returned to Timor found half rated “customary obligations” as one of the top five uses of the funds they sent back, along with starting a business, buying a vehicle, buying land and home improvements.

A worker who who had just completed a season told me:

I would like to get married, but the price is unaffordable. I could have worked for my father-in-law in the rice field for many years if I was not given the chance to get into Seasonal Worker Program. We have one three year old child already, it is just the wedding has not yet happened.

Funding a big wedding with remittances from Australia demonstrates financial capacity and status.

Remittances push up marriage rates among those who return and also allow them to marry partners who would normally be unattainable. Timorese parents ask more for high status marriages.

Read more: Why yet another visa for farm work makes no sense

Australian remittances enable participants to get the emotional bonds, security and business connections inherent in marriage they might otherwise miss out on.

And they enable them to “marry up”, at least personally breaking free from the confines of a class-ridden society.

– ref. Dili wedding. How Australian farm work nudges up Timor’s marriage rate – http://theconversation.com/dili-wedding-how-australian-farm-work-nudges-up-timors-marriage-rate-126771

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Hunn, Lecturer, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University

Traditionally, Boxing Day is a great day to go to the cinema in Australia. This year’s offerings include Hitler comedy Jojo Rabbit, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You and Cannes Film Festival hit Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Perhaps the strangest offering is Cats, the big screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, itself based on T.S. Eliot’s cycle of poems.

From the trailer, glimpses of a creepily transformed all-star cast (a sinisterly sibilant Judy Dench, Idris Elba and Taylor Swift to name but a few) and a darkly glamorous cat-fight vibe raised more than a few hackles – so much so, elements have been “subtly” reanimated. Reviews of the film have been overwhelmingly negative.

It remains to be seen whether Cats will land as deftly with film goers as it did in the theatre. But if nothing else, its release provides a timely reminder of how the big screen has gifted us many memorable feline performances.

Here are five of the very best.

Keanu (2016)

“That’s the cutest cat I’ve ever seen!”

No, it’s not a Disney movie or an internet meme; it’s a line that speaks for every adult male who crosses paths with the adorable tortoiseshell tabby kitten Keanu.

We first meet this eponymous feline amid the corpse-strewn detritus of a meth lab that has been shot up by two hefty gangster assassins.

Keanu’s escape to suburbia and subsequent kidnapping from his newly adopted human, the nerdy Rell (Jordan Peele) provides the catalyst for this delightfully idiotic buddy/action movie spoof.

Director Peter Alencio and writers Peele and Alex Rubens milk full comedic value from vicious killers turned into cooing, kitten kissing softies – and bumbling middle-class cowards Rell and Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) into badass, kitten rescuing heroes.

Viewers familiar with Peele’s directorial work will know he is no respecter of cuteness. Rest assured, a walk on the wild side only sees Keanu’s adorable qualities further enhanced by rocking a wicked black bandanna.

In a dream sequence, his voice is provided by some actor called Reeves.

Alien (1979); Aliens (1986)

Those with an attentive eye for cats on screen and/or for what makes feminist icon Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) tick won’t be surprised to see the trouble-making ginger Jonesy from the first two films in the Alien franchise on this list.

This (space) ship cat is no mere piece of fluff: he serves a significant plot function, raises tensions at key moments and importantly provides the first film’s only love interest.

Rescuing the moggy complicates Ripley’s escape and reveals a tender, protective side to her steely nature. This is even more powerfully highlighted in the sequel Aliens, even if Jonesy himself only makes a brief early appearance: “and you, you little shithead, you’re staying here”.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1962)

This iconic adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel frequently tops cat movie lists, but while I am more than happy to include Holly Golightly’s flatmate Cat, “poor slob without a name”, near the top of my list I must confess I’m no great fan of the film overall – a ham-fisted, sanitised Hollywood do-over.

Capote, as is well known, was not keen on the casting of Audrey Hepburn as drifter-turned-grifter Holly Golightly, apparently preferring Marilyn Monroe.

Little is known of his view of the casting of Orangey – an award-winning performer – as Cat, but for mine this handsome fellow is a far better actor than George Peppard, the film’s wooden, (Hollywood confected) male lead.

You don’t have to be a cat lover to know who Holly’s true soul mate is.

A Street Cat Named Bob (2016)

This adaptation of a best-selling book tells the true story of a homeless, heroin addict, James Bowen, (Luke Treadaway) who finds love and redemption when he meets Bob, a doughy but lovable ginger who chooses him as his human.

While James is busking or selling The Big Issue, Bob is perched on his shoulder and proves a magnet for punters. When Bob is injured in a fight, James takes on new responsibilities as provider and carer.

After a young friend dies from an overdose, James decides to get clean and is helped by the presence of the watchful, patient Bob.

Sure, it’s no Trainspotting, but there’s enough grit, vomit and despair to avoid the overly sentimental and Bob – played by none other than the real Bob himself – is a delight, exuding an aura of streetwise empathy to a kindred spirit, and adding a dash of mischief, too.

Kedi (2016)

Turkish director Ceyda Torun’s sublimely shot documentary focuses on Istanbul’s many thousands of street cats and the humans whose turf they share, who tend them and take solace in their company without seeking to constrain their freedom.

Torun skilfully intertwines the stories of several cats into the fabric of the places in which they (and, in some instances, their young) survive.

She captures them wandering through street markets, cafés, artists’ studios, workshops and patches of wasteland. We watch them hunting, scavenging and charming their way around fishing boats, riverbanks, tips, kitchens and jetties. They nip in and out of the windows of cramped, ageing flats, through backyards, shops and crowded alleys.

Kedi’s central message is that the centuries-long interdependence of human and feline – marked by easy tolerance, respect and not a little folklore and superstition – is a distinctive marker of Istanbul’s culture, one potentially under threat by the inexorable creep of high rise, urban redevelopment.

It should be cherished and preserved as a civilised and civilising point of pride.

– ref. The 5 best films for cat lovers (that aren’t the movie Cats) – http://theconversation.com/the-5-best-films-for-cat-lovers-that-arent-the-movie-cats-128128

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

There are so many stories flying around about the horrors already being wrought by climate change, you’re probably struggling to keep up.

The warnings have been there for decades but still there are those who deny it. So perhaps it’s timely to look at how climate change is affecting you, by wrecking some of the things you love.

1. Not the holiday you hoped for

We often choose holiday destinations with weather in mind. Sadly, climate change may see your usual destinations become less inviting, and maybe even disappear entirely.

Read more: Climate change will make fire storms more likely in southeastern Australia

But there’s more to think about than your favourite beach retreat being drowned, or the Great Barrier Reef decaying before you see it.

Now we have to worry that “extreme weather events pose significant risks to travellers”. The warnings here range from travel disruption, such as delayed flights due to storms, through to severe danger from getting caught in cyclones, floods or snowstorms.

Simply getting where you need to go could become an adventure holiday itself, but not a fun one.

2. Last chance to see some wildlife

There are more and more examples of animals falling victim to climate-change induced extreme weather events, such as the horror of mass “cremations” of koalas in the path of recent Australian bush fires or bats dropping dead during heatwaves.

On top of that, news of the latest climate-related animal extinctions are becoming as common as reports of politicians doing nothing about it.

3. History and heritage at risk

The Italian city of Venice recently experienced its worst flooding since the mid 1960s, and the local mayor clearly connected this with climate change.

Aside from the human calamity unfolding there, we are seeing one of Europe’s most amazing and unique cities and a World Heritage site devastated before our eyes.

Read more: Ignoring young people’s climate change fears is a recipe for anxiety

Climate change threatens more than 13,000 archaeological sites in North America alone if sea levels rise by 1m. That goes up to more than 30,000 sites if sea levels rise by 5m.

UNESCO is worried that climate change also threatens underwater heritage sites, such as ruins and shipwrecks. For example, rising salinity and warming waters increases ship-worm populations that consume wooden shipwrecks in the Baltic sea.

4. Taking the piste

Warming temperatures have already had negative impacts on the US snow sports industry since at least 2001.

In Australia, ski resorts are expected to see significant drops in snow fall by 2040 and, as temperatures warm, they will be unable to compensate for this by snow-making, because it doesn’t work if ambient temperatures are too high.

Perhaps recent efforts to make artificial snow will give us a few more years on the slopes, but I’m not holding my breath.

5. Too hot for sport and exercise

It’s not just snow sports that will be affected. As temperatures warm, simply being outside in some parts of the world will not only be less pleasant, but more harmful, causing greater risk of heat stress doing any sport or exercise.

Read more: What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now?

That also means lower incentives for – and greater difficult in undertaking – incidental exercise, such as walking to the bus stop.

6. Pay more for your coffee

As the climate changes, your coffee hits will probably become rarer and more expensive, too.

A report by the Climate Institute in 2016 suggested coffee production could drop by 50% by 2050.

Given how rapidly negative climate predictions have been updated in the three years since, this might now be considered optimistic. Yikes.

7. You and your family’s health

As the climate changes, the health of your children, your parents and your grandparents will be at greater risk through increases in air pollution, heatwaves and other factors.

It can be heartening to see the strong, intelligent and positive action being taken by the world’s youth in response to the lack of climate action by many governments.

But the fact this is a result of literal, existential crises becoming a normal part of every day life for young people is utterly horrifying.

8. Home, sweet home

The recent bush fires in Australia and the United States reveal how dramatic and destructive the effects climate change can be to where you live. Hundreds of houses have already burned down in Australia this fire season.

Fires are getting more frequent and more ferocious. The seasonal windows where we safely used controlled burning to clear bushfire fuel are shrinking. It’s not only harder to fight fires when they happen, it’s becoming harder to prevent them as well.

Fires aren’t the only threat to homes. All around the planet, more and more houses are being destroyed by rising seas and increasingly wild storms, all thanks to climate change.

9. Not the wine, please!

Still not convinced climate change is wrecking things you love? What if I told you it’s even coming for your wine.

Less water, soil degradation and higher temperatures earlier in the season all lead to dramatic negative effects on grapes and wine-making.

One small upside is that disruption to traditional wine growing regions is creating opportunities to develop new wine growing areas. But there is no reason to believe these areas will maintain stable grape growing conditions as climate change progresses.

So, what now?

It’s easy to be sad. But to change our trajectory, it’s better to be mad. In the words of that great English singer songwriter John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), “anger is an energy”.

Read more: 3 ways cities can prepare for climate emergencies

So maybe use this list as motivation to think, talk and act. Use it as fuel to make small, large or a combinationof changes.

Share your concerns, share your solutions, and do this relentlessly.

What’s happening right now is huge, overwhelming, and also inevitable without concerted action. There’s no sugar-coating it: climate change is wrecking the things we love. Time to step it up a notch.

– ref. Nine things you love that are being wrecked by climate change – http://theconversation.com/nine-things-you-love-that-are-being-wrecked-by-climate-change-127099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Reese, Research Assistant, University of Melbourne

The 1927 Tariff Board inquiry into the import duty on gramophone records coming into Australia was about more than industry protection.

In fact the piano roll industry, which might be expected to be the one most concerned about the impact of imported records, wasn’t particularly worried.

But others were.

In the 1927 Tariff Board inquiry, a small group of wealthy white men laid bare their prejudices regarding the gender, class and aesthetic tastes of the Australian public.

The bottom line: the Australian consumer, typically regarded as female, could not be trusted with mass culture.

American jazz music was an agent of cultural and musical decline. It certainly didn’t live up to the standards of the musical establishment. It belonged to the modern department store, that emerging site of consumerism and commercialisation.

Australia was awash with recorded music

By 1925, mechanically-reproduced music was ubiquitous.

The local trade estimated that more than one million gramophones had been sold in Australia. That’s roughly one for every three households.

To walk down the street was to navigate a diverse and complex soundscape, completely different to a generation earlier.

Soldier-settlers doing it tough on the land, glitzy bohemians in city dancehalls, working families flocking to the expanding suburbs, Aboriginal people resisting colonialism on missions and reserves — the gramophone was ubiquitous.

A common sight on the streets of Melbourne was Amy Williams, a widowed mother who busked with her gramophone on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

She became a cause celebre in 1927. I told her story in a recent podcast.

Australia was host to a bustling and nationally-integrated recording trade.

By 1927, the country boasted four state-of-the-art record factories. They were owned by the biggest players in the global industry: the multinationals HMV, Columbia, Brunswick and Vocalion.

Their products were sold by a nationwide network of record dealers. Some 70% of the records sold in Australia were manufactured in Australia.

‘Men, money and markets’

Politically, those years were defined by conservative government and a focus on national reinvigoration after the horrors of war. The catchcry was “men, money and markets”.

“Men” referred to the need for increased migration to provide workers, “money” to the funds that would be needed to finance development, and “markets” to the countries that would have to be persuaded to buy Australia’s exports, especially minerals, wool and wheat.

It was an environment in which business elites took on the role of tastemakers.

Australia’s 1920s were anything but cocktails and the Charleston — our jazz age was muted. The depression lay around the corner. It was an anxious and uncertain time, and society was deeply riven along lines of gender, race and class.

And developments overseas were worrying Australian gramophone executives.

The new process of electrical recording had led to an explosion in variety.

A cacophony of new voices entered the global recording trade, selling modern music for seriously cheap prices.

In response, the major manufacturers successfully petitioned the Tariff Board for an increase in the import tariff on gramophone records. The entire gramophone fraternity gathered to stress its national importance.

The transcripts of the Tariff Board inquiry read like a courtroom drama.

The Board was made up of prominent businessmen tasked with advising on industry protection.

In reading the transcripts I discovered they had strong aesthetic opinions too.

Protecting morals through music

Board member Herbert Brookes asked the manufacturers:

Are you afraid that to allow these cheap records in is going to deprave the musical taste of the people?

Brookes wanted records to be expensive enough not to lower musical taste, but not so expensive that they might “put up the price of classical music, such as Beethoven symphonies”.

A record retailer presented him with this deeply sexist scenario:

A woman goes into a shop to buy dish clothes or towels, and she sees these records, and sees that they are cheap, and wastes her husband’s money by buying them although she really does not want them. That is how half of these cheap American records are sold.

Brookes interjected:

For the sake of the husbands, wouldn’t it be better if these records were kept out’ of Australia?

The implication was that the typical (female) consumer had only a shallow and passive relationship to music. She needed guidance from elites.

A music seller at the flashy Myer Emporium on Melbourne’s Bourke Street claimed there were “two distinct classes of people buying records” at his store:

One is the regular record buyer at four shillings and better prices … the better class of music, and the other class is the one who wants and will buy only a cheap record.

In case the distinctions weren’t clear enough, he said the two “classes” of records at Myer were physically segregated by a glass partition, so that genteel shoppers wouldn’t be corrupted by rambunctious jazz lovers.

Read more: Explainer: the history of jazz

Ultimately, the Tariff Board inquiry was a foregone conclusion. The tariff increase was carried into law in early 1928, and imports of records plummeted. The big four manufacturers further entrenched their hold on the Australian market.

But people still listened to jazz in their thousands.

The Tariff Board became the Industries Assistance Commission, which became the Industry Commission, which became the Productivity Commission. Its inquiries and the work of other official agencies might also reflect cultural assumptions. They’re easier to see from a distance.

– ref. Protecting Australian women from American jazz: the hidden aim of the 1927 tariff inquiry – http://theconversation.com/protecting-australian-women-from-american-jazz-the-hidden-aim-of-the-1927-tariff-inquiry-127522

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Rossiter, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University

From the smell of chlorine to water bombing and a mixing of cultures – just some of reminiscences of 28 Australians in the book, The Memory Pool: Australian stories of summer, sun and swimming compiled by Therese Spruhan.

Contributors include star swimmers (Shane Gould, Priya Cooper, Daniel Kowalski), actors and comedians (Leah Purcell, Bryan Brown and Merrick Watts), and many others who, though less well known, have cracking stories to tell about their ocean, bay or inland “memory pools”.

Collections like this fly or falter on the quality and originality of the stories. Although some of these are rather matter of fact in the telling, there are some compelling stories here and some wonderfully evocative writing.

Spruhan’s own piece (Embracing the Glorious Kingtide) is lovely, and Watts (Disneyland in Broken Hill), Brown’s (Bumping into Life at Bankstown Baths) and Purcell’s (Dancing in the Water at Murgon) contributions are stand-outs: funny, place-rich and poignant.

Read more: What lies beneath: the bugs lurking in your swimming pool

The outdoor municipal pool is often seen by wild swimming enthusiasts as an impoverished experience. They might be taken aback by Purcell’s joy in the magical combination of “chlorine and hot chips!” or Brown’s declaration that “one of the greatest things about the Bankstown baths was the smell of chlorine”.

But they would likely find familiar Brown’s observation the pool was “a place of enormous life” where “you worked things out yourself and learned about friendship and loyalty”.

Similarly, Trent Dalton remembers growing up with Sandgate pool:

[…] a massive dugout filled with chlorinated water but what made it magical was you could do so much within it.

He recalls bombing competitions, stunts, parading, mingling, escaping parental scrutiny and, as he says, “getting into deeper water” with girls, cigarettes, booze and wagging school.

Some clouded memories

Despite the different environments, from ocean to paddock, as these adults look back on their experiences, there are common threads in their remembrances. An often-repeated claim is that pools are a democratic, egalitarian space of inclusion in which all comers are welcome.

It’s pretty easy to demonstrate this is not historically true. The 1965 Freedom Ride that exposed the exclusion of Aboriginal children from the Moree Pool is just the most famous example.

Body shaming, racism, other forms of bullying, prohibitive entry charges, and limits imposed by physical design have compromised the access to pools and the pleasure of some people and groups. What this collection shows, though, is that it is not a simple either/or.

One of the unexpected and really interesting aspects of some recollections in The Memory Pool is demonstration of how fluid the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at pools can be.

Purcell recalls:

[…] a few glances from some of the white mothers thinking, We’re in the same water as them, but looking back, the pool was the only place in town that it seemed okay for everyone to be just doing their stuff.

In a similar vein, there is nuance in Watts’ memories of South Broken Hill pool where he first met Aboriginal kids:

At the pool they just played like the rest of us and we played with them, and we didn’t give it any thought. I do remember a sense of separation though, but […] in that space people couldn’t afford to be bigoted or cruel for a minute, it was simply too hot.

In these lively fragments of swimming pool histories readers can glimpse the ways that “bumping into life” through pools can be abrasive and tough but also spiritedly expansive and hopeful.

Yusra Metwally is founder of Swim Sisters, a swimming support and training group for mainly, but not only, Muslim women. She shares fond memories of the “very lively and inclusive” Greenacre pool.

But then there’s a bad experience at Homebush Olympic Park where a lifeguard told her off for wearing a non-lycra top that gave her the “feeling of not being welcome at public pools”.

And now we read of her enjoyment in, among other swimming experiences, the freedom afforded by Auburn Ruth Everuss Aquatic Centre’s women-only swim sessions. Mick Thomas also nicely captures the sharing-space vibe of ethnic diversity of Geelong’s Eastern beach.

The community spirit

Whether they are in oceans, towns or paddocks, pools take up much more space than an area map would suggest. As Ellen O’Connor’s account of Saving Fitzroy Pool demonstrates, faced with pool closures, communities resist a lot more than the loss of facilities. Pools are not only for the community, but also of the community.

Many pools have been fund-raised and even physically built by local communities. Lily Sisa’s delightful narration of Dreaming Big in Lightning Ridge describes the community campaign for a pool and the initiative of the “committee of five girls aged between nine and 12”.

It’s a fabulous story of cake-stalls, raffles, donated labuor, media campaigns, a button-holed prime minister, of Gary Stone a local opal miner with big machines who dug the hole, and “Lightning Les who made things of foam and steel”.

Putting environmental questions to one side, I was completely captive to the explosive imagination of Kim Mettam’s grandfather who, near Trigg Island Beach in Perth saw an “extensive limestone reef”.

But he also saw the possibility of an enclosed swimming area safely holding sea creatures and humans and a “soft sandy beach” (the latter involving summers of grandkids moving rocks).

Mettam’s Pool involved 35 years of work and quite a lot of explosives. Now, it gets 4½ stars on Trip Advisor.

Read more: Community pool projects show how citizens are helping to build cities

Another piece that is simultaneously a story of building a pool and building community, is that of Lee Fontanini’s about her grandfather Archimedes Fontanini.

After clearing a swamp, Archie built a dam. Then, pressed by locals, and with his wife Lucy, he converted the dam into a public pool with diving board, flowers, refreshments, and trout.

It’s another reminder that ethnic diversity is not just a policy goal for contemporary pools, it’s also a poorly recognised component of Australian pool histories and cultures.

Fans of outdoor swimming, in both wild places and public pools, will enjoy The Memory Pool. But there is also something here for non-swimming readers interested in the small stories of ordinary people, about community, migration, class, family, making a life, and how we have and might live together in multicultural Australia.

– ref. Take a plunge into the memories of Australia’s favourite swimming pools – http://theconversation.com/take-a-plunge-into-the-memories-of-australias-favourite-swimming-pools-128928

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rheanna Mainzer, Melbourne Early Career Academic Fellow (Statistics Tutor), University of Melbourne

Last Christmas, my family gathered to organise our Kris Kringle. My sister drew her husband, but they were already buying presents for each other, so we decided to draw again. No one in my family (except me) is particularly interested in mathematics or statistics, but my brother fatefully asked:

What are the chances that all the partners draw each other?

At the time, my family consisted of eight people: my mother and her partner, my older sister and her husband, my younger brother and his new girlfriend, my grandpa (widowed and never remarried), and me (I was single). So there were three sets of partners and two singles.

I started thinking out loud about how to answer my brother’s question. One way to find a probability is to calculate the fraction

The “event of interest” here is that all three partners draw each other’s names and, because there are no other possibilities, my grandpa and I draw each other. This can only happen in one way, so the top line of the fraction above must be 1.

What’s the bottom line?

Unfortunately, the bottom line is much trickier to calculate. You want to count the total number of ways that eight people can draw names from a hat, without drawing themselves. For example, one possible event outcome is: I draw my mum, who draws my brother, who draws my sister, who draws her husband, who draws my brother’s new girlfriend, who draws mum’s partner, who draws my grandpa, who draws me.

My brother’s new girlfriend interrupted my thinking by asking whether the answer isn’t simply eight factorial (which is written in mathematical notation as “8!”).

For those who aren’t familiar,

My family let out a collective “ooooooh!” at what they perceived as a challenge to my mathematical prowess from my brother’s new girlfriend.

Her guess was sensible but not quite right, because it included the outcomes in which someone draws their own name.

Without pen or paper handy I decided to file the problem away in the back of my mind and rejoin the conversation, which had swiftly moved on.

When in doubt, bring in the experts

I found the perfect place to resurrect this problem, at a recent MathsCraft event, which brought mathematicians, teachers and students together to explore problems like a research mathematician.

My University of Melbourne colleagues TriThang Tran, Sam Povall and Rhys Bowden are all experts in different mathematics research fields. I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified to count things than these three – surely they must be able to answer my Christmas conundrum.

However, a short brainstorm session revealed that the Kris Kringle question is harder than initially expected.

But lo, a possible saviour was delivered unto us in the form of Professor Nigel Bean, an expert in applied probability. Like the star guiding the Three Wise Men, hopefully Nigel would be able to guide us puzzled mathematicians to the solution.

“That’s easy!” Nigel confidently announced. But seconds later, his face fell as he too came to the realisation that this problem is deceptively difficult.

We threw ideas around the table, our voices rising in excitement. This captured the attention of two secondary school maths teachers, Amy Xue and Callum Johnson, who came over to investigate. While Sam brought Amy and Callum up to speed, Nigel and Rhys worked on the whiteboard, drawing tables and defining notation to help them. TriThang took a different approach, working at the table and using pictures to illustrate different outcomes.

The solution

It took an hour and a half – and a coffee break – but Nigel, Rhys and (independently) TriThang finally arrived at the same solution. The chance that each of the couples in my family draw each other’s names in our annual Secret Santa is 1 in 14,833, or about 0.007%.

However, it was Callum who came up with the answer the fastest. Recalling the topic of derangements that he learned nine years ago at university and encountered again in the final question of the 2016 year 12 NSW Extension 2 maths paper, he produced his solution:

where the bottom line of this equation is just a particularly unusual way of writing 14,833 (the e refers to Euler’s number).

I was proud to finally reveal the solution to my brother: it was incredibly unlikely that all three partners would have drawn each other that night at dinner – about as unlikely as tossing a coin 14 times and coming up with 14 heads. However, he wasn’t quite as excited about knowing the answer as I was. (I told you my family aren’t particularly interested in maths.)

A Christmas twist

Here’s the thing, though: the Kris Kringle question is a known problem, related to the old hats problem. Why didn’t we just Google it?

Well, we all really enjoyed working on the problem. And Christmas is supposed to be fun. So I have to agree with Nigel when he asked: “Where is the fun in that?”

Thanks to all the mathematicians who worked on this problem, ACEMS for hosting the event that brought us together, and my family for coming up with the question.

– ref. Merry Christmaths: the statistics of Secret Santa – http://theconversation.com/merry-christmaths-the-statistics-of-secret-santa-127730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Jarden, Associate Professor, Centre for Positive Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

Christmas can be a stressful time of year. You will blow your budget, your relatives will annoy you, and you’ll receive gifts that go straight to Vinnies, all in 40℃ heat.

Meanwhile, your friends post pictures on social media of their idyllic vacations, yearly accomplishments, and super happy toddlers and cats. You may feel extra stress from not accomplishing all the goals you set at the start of the year. You feel this stress in the face of other people’s overt jolliness.

So how can the science of gratitude help you not only cope with, but enjoy, the ups and downs of the festive season?

Read more: Ten tips to make your holidays less fraught and more festive

Remind me again, what is gratitude?

Gratitude, in short, is a strong feeling of appreciation towards someone who’s helped you. You can also feel gratitude when you make a habit of noticing and appreciating the positives in life. This might be feeling grateful for a cooling breeze on a hot day, appreciating your abilities in the kitchen or as a good friend.

Over the past 20 years or so, there has been quite a bit of research on gratitude.

Some of our own research shows older people are more grateful than younger people; suggests gratitude serves an evolutionary purpose by helping humans bond; and shows it’s possible to become more grateful with practice.

How can gratitude help me?

Practising gratitude often can have many positive impacts, including: an increased sense of well-being and life satisfaction; positive emotional functioning such as more pleasurable emotions and thoughts that life is going well; increased optimism; a sense of connectedness; improved relationships; and more and better quality sleep.

So all in all, researchers really get quite excited about all the positive things gratitude is related to.

Read more: Explainer: what is positive psychology and how can you use it for yourself?

There is also research indicating gratitude can help increase resilience and cope with everyday life stress, as well as with more major adversities.

Gratitude can help mental health – for instance, a depressed mood or post-traumatic stress disorder – and with coping well from loss after trauma.

Sign me up. How can I use it this Christmas?

So, if you want to buffer against those annoying relatives, blown budgets and be more resilient to life’s stressors, developing a greater sense of gratitude can help.

Among the many ways researchers have tested, you can:

• write a thank you note for a gift or behaviour you’ve appreciated. It doesn’t have to be a hand written letter. You can express gratitude via text, email or social media

• visit someone and thank them in person

• keep a daily journal of things you feel grateful for, such as noting down three things at the end of the day as well as your role in bringing about the three things

• spend time contemplating being grateful for certain activities, such as having a family or friends to spend Christmas with or opening presents with children. In other words, thinking about being grateful is also helpful, not just the act of being grateful.

Read more: More than words: saying ‘thank you’ does make a difference

Hang on a minute. Surely it’s not that simple

However, there are also a few tricks, twists and turns to be aware of:

• consider cultural nuances: someone’s culture can influence how they perceive and react to gratitude. For example, in East Asian and Indian cultures, receiving gratitude can be accompanied by feelings of indebtedness or guilt. This can put pressure on people to reciprocate. This can also be true, but not to the same extent, in Western cultures

• gratitude is not for everything: gratitude is not the panacea to all stresses of life; it helps, but it does not cure. It should also not be used to distract from real issues and problems, especially in interpersonal relationships

• think about when you use it: be purposeful and strategic about expressing gratitude and don’t overdose on it. Start with the people who help you the most and are the most meaningful to you

• don’t forget yourself: show gratitude towards yourself as well as others, such as being grateful for some of your strengths and capabilities.

If you can’t be grateful …

With all the best will in the world, it can be difficult to be grateful faced with the same present from Aunt Betty three years in a row. In this case, our only advice is to smile, and grin and bear it, rather than to pretend to be grateful. You will feel better and so will she.

Matthew Higgins, who has been admitted to the PhD program at Claremont Graduate University in the United States, co-authored this article.

– ref. Being grateful this Christmas benefits you even when your family’s driving you bananas – http://theconversation.com/being-grateful-this-christmas-benefits-you-even-when-your-familys-driving-you-bananas-124168

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake Whitehead, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

In recent years, false claims have circulated that electric vehicles are “breaking our roads” because they don’t use fuel and so their drivers don’t pay fuel excise.

Heeding such concerns, both the Victorian and New South Wales governments are reportedly considering a new tax for electric vehicles. It follows a report by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia which recommended a per-kilometre tax for electric vehicles.

Read more: Don’t trust the environmental hype about electric vehicles? The economic benefits might convince you

But this shortsighted approach risks killing the golden goose of our transport system. Such a tax would limit the economic, health and environmental benefits promised by electric vehicles which, together, far exceed any loss in fuel excise.

Instead, Australia needs a mature public discussion about holistic road tax reform to find a fair and sensible way forward.

The problem is structural

Fuel excise is built into petrol and diesel prices, charged at around 40 cents per litre. For more than 20 years – well before the introduction of electric vehicles – net fuel tax revenue has been declining, largely due to improvements in vehicle efficiency, meaning engines use less fuel.

But if we take into account fuel tax credits – subsidies for fuel used in machinery, heavy vehicles and light vehicles on private roads – gross fuel tax revenue has actually increased in recent years.

This suggests the tax suffers from a structural problem. Simply applying a new tax to electric vehicles won’t fix it.

Read more: Australians could have saved over $1 billion in fuel if car emissions standards were introduced 3 years ago

It’s also worth remembering that while electric vehicle owners don’t pay fuel excise, they generally pay more in purchase taxes such as GST, because their vehicles tend to be more expensive to buy.

Benefits of electric vehicles

Electric vehicles help reduce our dependency on foreign oil and save owners over 70% in fuel costs by swapping petrol for electricity. Electric vehicles also lead to cleaner air, resulting in significant savings in health costs. They create new local jobs in mining and local energy, and importantly, are key to meeting global climate change targets.

Read more: Clean, green machines: the truth about electric vehicle emissions

An electric vehicle tax would increase costs for motorists, curb sales and may even encourage the purchase of cheap, fuel-efficient vehicles, driving fuel tax revenue down even further.

Congestion is the bigger problem

The proposed taxes will do nothing to tackle the biggest problem with Australia’s transport system: road congestion.

Sweden, where I lived for several years, offers a possible way forward. In 2006, the city of Stockholm introduced a congestion pricing scheme which charged vehicles for driving in and out of the city centre at peak times.

Read more: Traffic congestion: is there a miracle cure? (Hint: it’s not roads)

The scheme meant normal weekday traffic was considerably lighter. Low-emission vehicles were also temporarily exempted from the charge to encourage sales.

Unfortunately, despite the proven benefits, Australia is unlikely to introduce such a scheme due to a lack of public and political support.

Towards a sustainable road tax

The transport sector faces massive disruption in the near future, from electrified vehicles, automated vehicles, and the shift to shared vehicles.

Focusing solely on electric vehicles misses the broader point: we need to proactively prepare for the transition to a new transport system. This means ditching our unfair, outdated and unsustainable road tax model while reducing congestion.

Read more: Utopia or nightmare? The answer lies in how we embrace self-driving, electric and shared vehicles

Instead of simply penalising electric vehicle owners, I suggest an approach where electric vehicle owners could voluntarily opt-in to a new road tax model. Here’s how it would work:

• the tax would include a low per-kilometre fee for all travel, and an additional fee for inner-city travel during peak weekday periods

• in exchange for opting in, owners would be exempted from the old road tax system, that is: vehicle registration, stamp duty, import tax, luxury car tax, fringe benefits tax, fuel excise, and road tolls.

• to ensure a true financial incentive to opt-in to the new road tax model, a significant discount would initially apply. This discount would gradually be phased out as electric vehicle uptake increases, as has occurred with similar overseas schemes

• the new road tax model could easily be extended in the future to apply to automated vehicles, and to more accurately reflect the burden transport poses in terms of congestion and pollution.

Read more: Here’s why electric cars have plenty of grunt, oomph and torque

This is just one example of a balanced approach that would encourage both local adoption of electric vehicles, and public support for fairer road taxes.

Such holistic reform would enable a future transport system with less road congestion, quicker travel times, cleaner air, lower costs and a sustainable road revenue stream.

Let’s be smart and not miss this golden opportunity.

– ref. Wrong way, go back: a proposed new tax on electric vehicles is a bad idea – http://theconversation.com/wrong-way-go-back-a-proposed-new-tax-on-electric-vehicles-is-a-bad-idea-127608

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marg Rogers, Lecturer, Early Childhood Education, University of New England

It’s not always possible for families to be together during the Christmas holidays if one parent is working away for several days. They could be on a tour of duty for the Australian Defence Force or in a fly-in, fly-out mining position.

Other jobs, such as those in long-distance transport, firefighting, seasonal agriculture and other occupations, can also regularly take a parent away from home.

Such types of work can be challenging for those seeking a good work-life balance. The parent who works away misses out on time with family, which can be especially difficult with younger children.

Read more: Five ways parents can help their kids take risks – and why it’s good for them

But there are things families can do to support children when one parent is away.

Home alone

Previous research has found young children in military families repond in various ways to prolonged separation from a parent.

Physical responses include disturbed sleep (nightmares, unable to self-settle, taking longer to fall asleep) and regressions in toileting and feeding.

Read more: Having problems with your kid’s tantrums, bed-wetting or withdrawal? Here’s when to get help

Emotional responses can be an increase in tears, anger, outbursts and withdrawing to avoid further hurt.

Social responses include children struggling with daily routines. They might be less likely to cope with the normal frustrations that happen when playing with friends and siblings. Clingy behaviour with adults may also occur, which isolates children from their friends.

The good news is parents can support their young children in a number of ways to build resilience. Families shared these ideas in my research.

The power of narratives

Some programs recommend developing a family narrative. These narratives might be a simple sentence children can use when asked about their absent parent.

For example:

Mum went away on a plane. She is coming home on a plane three sleeps after Easter.

Here is a family narrative a 2.5-year-old child told me:

I miss my daddy. He in Afghanistan. I not go Afghanistan. Mummy not go Afghanistan. Only Daddy go Afghanistan.

Positive activities that nurture a child’s emotional connection with a parent who is away are also important.

This includes encouraging children to draw a picture of an activity they are looking forward to doing with their parent when they return, such as going swimming or visiting the local park.

The parent at home can help by writing down what the picture represents. This can be put in a parcel to send to the parent who is away. Keeping a copy of the drawing can help with communication between the child and the returned parent on reunion. They can discuss and plan family activities together.

With help, children can also write emails and postcards, even record voice or video messages about what they miss, how they feel and what they’re looking forward to doing when the parent gets back.

The parent who works away can also pre-prepare some short video stories about what they liked doing as a child, something they enjoy now and what they hope to do when they return. These can then be played at home when contact is not possible.

Homemade resources children can use to self-soothe when they are missing their parent are useful. These could include a small photo album of the parent and child, a recordable story book with their parent’s voice, or a video of the parent reading them some stories.

Make a time-line sticker chart children can personalise to count off the days. It could start with when the parent left, then include holidays and birthdays, and end when they will return.

Getting support

My research, which explored the experiences of children aged two to five in 11 Australian Defence Force families, found parents left at at home caring for children can feel unsupported.

There is a lack of available resources to help them have conversations with their young children about the parent working away.

One parent said:

Look, you are just on your own when the kids are young, before they go to school. There is nothing out there.

Read more: 5 reasons I always get children picture books for Christmas

To address this gap, I’ve created two free ebooks, based on the experiences of defence families: Waiting for Daddy and Now that I am big. Although defence-focused, they should be useful to any family that has a parent frequently away from home.

Social media support groups organised informally by parents and other organisations can help support families working in various industries. These include Mining Family Matters, Australian Mining, Defence Community Organisation, Defence Families Australia and Department of Defence.

Research shows good early intervention programs make a big difference to children’s healthy development and their ability to thrive.

– ref. How to support children whose parent works away for long periods – http://theconversation.com/how-to-support-children-whose-parent-works-away-for-long-periods-125641

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela McCarthy, Senior Lecturer in Theology, University of Notre Dame Australia

A 900kg baby Jesus statue in Mexico that looks remarkably like musician Phil Collins recently became a social media phenomenon. But in considering art history, we can gain some interesting insights into how we have come to this man-like baby.

The appearance of baby Jesus in art, along with his mother Mary, began after the Council of Ephesus in 431, which emphasised Mary was the Mother of God. We mostly see them together in paintings, although there are some famous images of Mary without her son.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, from around the sixth century until the present, the child Jesus looks like a little man. The idea behind this depiction is to take away one’s emotional response to the baby. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the more important understanding of the action of God in becoming human.

Part of the understanding of the church from the Council of Chalcedon (451) was Jesus’s state of being as fully human and fully divine. Some theologians interpreted this to mean he was fully formed from the beginning, with full knowledge of his godliness. This was difficult to portray in art and hence the man-child.

This interpretation of the two natures of Christ is not part of current teaching, but it dominated how the baby Jesus was depicted.

Many of those images are quite ugly. The art is not interested in naturalism but rather in theological expression.

In Western art throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, the influence of this theology was also evident with images of the baby Jesus either sitting up with a mature stance or tightly swaddled. The latter was an attempt to depict biblical references to a swaddled child or the shroud placed on Jesus after his death.

In the High Middle Ages in Assisi, Italy, St Francis altered the way the life of Jesus was viewed and experienced by creating dramatic events that showed in a realistic way how Jesus had come into this world. (In most art prior to this, the focus on Jesus had been his suffering on the cross and his divinity.)

Instead of Jesus being part of an austere God at a distance, St Francis introduced the life of Christ – particularly his birth – in a very realistic way, by staging street dramas re-enacting the birth of Jesus.

These were later shown in sculptural forms, becoming the first nativity scene. In these street dramas, re-enacted by local people, a real baby was placed in a crib to stand in as Jesus. It was felt people would be closer to God if they understood the humanity of Jesus.

Cherubic bambino

With the arrival of the Renaissance in Italy from the 14th century, the depiction of the baby became much more lifelike. This image of the “bambino” of great beauty has been evident in the centuries since.

In Italy, a rising middle class wanted family portraits with their babies looking natural and beautiful. The rise of naturalism and realism in art also radically changed depictions of baby Jesus.

Following the Renaissance, Baroque images of Jesus were very splendid and ornate. In the late Baroque, or Rococo style, these images became even more extravagant and sensual. A typical baby Jesus of this period reaches out to the world with arms outstretched, chubby faced and lying on gold-plated straw.

The eventual rejection of this extravagance by the church and cultural establishment from the late 1700s led to the development of neoclassicism, where a more moral and serious view of the world and religious notions became dominant. Mary and Jesus faded from view as subjects during this time.

One effect of the Reformation was the destruction of much art throughout Europe and a huge reduction in commissions for sacred works.

Into the modern period, secularism rose rapidly and the focus of art shifted towards non-religious subjects.

In the 19th century, most Christian art was either reproductions of earlier paintings or romanticised devotional art. Pretty images that had little symbolic content or religious relevance proliferated.

Going back

This huge new sculpture in a Mexican church has been placed on the wall behind the altar and totally diminishes everything else in the surrounding environment.

For the people who gather in this sacred space this would seem overwhelming: the altar is supposed to be the focus of worship but has been eclipsed by the sheer size of the work. Usually, a crucifix would be hanging on the wall behind the altar.

Perhaps most interesting is the way the huge adult face does not seem to match the body. We might laugh, but we could perhaps also ask: is this a deliberate return to the “little man”, a Jesus who was born a fully formed man?

– ref. Baby Jesus in art and the long tradition of depicting Christ as a man-child – http://theconversation.com/baby-jesus-in-art-and-the-long-tradition-of-depicting-christ-as-a-man-child-127812

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Maxwell, Senior Lecturer, University of Southern Queensland

I’m a geek. And as a geek, I love my tech toys. But over time I’ve noticed toys are becoming harder to understand.

Some modern toys resemble advanced devices. There are flying toys, walking toys, and roving toys. A number of these require “configuring” or “connecting”.

The line between toy, gadget and professional device is blurrier than ever, as manufacturers churn out products including drones for kids and plush toys with hidden nanny cams.

Read more: Looking for a high-tech gift for a young child? Think playgrounds, not playpens

With such a variety of sophisticated, and sometimes over-engineered products, it’s clear manufacturers have upped their game.

But why is this happening?

The price of tech

Toys these days seem to be designed with two major components in mind. It’s all about the smarts and rapid manufacture.

In modern toys, we see a considerable level of programmed intelligence. This can be used to control the toy’s actions, or have it respond to input to provide real time feedback and interaction – making it appear “smarter”.

This is all made possible by the falling price of technology.

Once upon a time, placing a microcontroller (a single chip microprocessor) inside a toy was simply uneconomical.

These days, they’ll only set you back a few dollars and allow significant computing power.

Microcontrollers are often WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, too. This allows “connected” toys to access a wide range of internet services, or be controlled by a smartphone.

Another boon for toy manufacturers has been the rise of prototype technologies, including 3D modelling, 3D printing, and low cost CNC (computer numerical control) milling.

These technologies allow the advanced modelling of toys, which can help design them to be “tougher”.

Read more: Not child’s play: The serious innovation behind toy making

They also allow manufacturers to move beyond simple (outer) case designs and towards advanced multi-material devices, where the case of the toy forms an active part of the toy’s function.

Examples of this include hand grips (found on console controls and toys including Nerf Blasters), advanced surface textures, and internal structures which support shock absorption to protect internal components, such as wheel suspensions in toy cars.

Bot helpers and robot dogs

Many recent advancements in toys are there to appease our admiration of automatons, or self operating machines.

The idea that an inanimate object is transcending its static world, or is “thinking”, is one of the magical elements that prompts us to attach emotions to toys.

And manufacturers know this, with some toys designed specifically to drive emotional attachment. My favourite example of this is roaming robots, such as the artificially intelligent Anki Vector.

With sensors and internet connectivity, the Vector drives around and interacts with its environment, as well as you. It’s even integrated with Amazon Alexa.

Another sophisticated toy is Sony’s Aibo. This robot pet shows how advanced robotics, microelectronics, actuators (which allow movement), sensors, and programming can be used to create a unique toy experience with emotional investment.

Screens not included

Toy manufacturers are also leveraging the rise of smartphones and portable computing.

Quadcopters (or drones) and other similar devices often don’t need to include their own display in the remote control, as video can be beamed to an attached device.

Some toys even use smartphones as the only control interface (used to control the toy), usually via an app, saving manufacturers from having to provide what is arguably the most expensive part of the toy.

This means a smartphone becomes an inherent requirement, without which the toy can’t be used.

It would be incredibly disappointing to buy a cool, new toy – only to realise you don’t own the very expensive device required to use it.

My toys aren’t spying on me, surely?

While spying may be the last thing you consider when buying a toy, there have been several reports of talking dolls recording in-home conversations.

There are similar concerns with smart-home assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, which store your voice recordings in the cloud.

These concerns might also be warranted with toys such as the Vector, and Aibo.

In fact, anything that has a microphone, camera or wireless connectivity can be considered a privacy concern.

Read more: Just like HAL, your voice assistant isn’t working for you even if it feels like it is

Toys of the future

We’ve established toys are becoming more sophisticated, but does that mean they’re getting better?

Various reports indicate in 2020, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will continue to be pervasive in our lives.

This means buying toys could become an even trickier task than it currently is. There are some factors shoppers can consider.

On the top of my list of concerns is the type and number of batteries a toy requires, and how to charge them.

If a device has in-built lithium batteries, can they be easily replaced? And if the toy is designed for outdoors, can it cope with the heat? Most lithium-ion batteries degrade quickly in hot environments.

And does the device require an additional screen or smartphone?

It’s also worth being wary of what personal details are required to sign-up for a service associated with a toy – and if the toy can still function if its manufacturer should cease to exist, or the company should go bust.

And, as always, if you’re considering an advanced, “connected” toy, make sure to prioritise your security and privacy.

– ref. Robots, AI and drones: when did toys turn into rocket science? – http://theconversation.com/robots-ai-and-drones-when-did-toys-turn-into-rocket-science-127503

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity

It took 400 years, but sometime in the early fifth century Christians transformed a tradition about Jesus’s miraculous virgin birth into a doctrine that inextricably connected sex with sin. It has plagued the church ever since, doing untold damage to generations of women in particular.

In its original context, the claim that Jesus was born to a virgin mother places his birth in a long line of miraculous biblical births. The Bible tells of numerous old women, barren women and young unmarried women (“virgins” in ancient terms) who surprisingly bore children. Their offspring were seen as a sign of God’s blessing of new life, often in the midst of suffering or hardship.

Read more: God made the rainbow: why the Bible welcomes a gender spectrum

The idea of original sin and its connection to sexual intercourse was popularised by African theologian Augustine. Not without controversy at the time, Augustine argued that humans were not born innocent, but rather sinful. His rationale was that sexual intercourse involves lust or sexual desire (a negative for him).

While Augustine tied this “original sin” back to Adam and Eve, the parallel focus on Mary’s perpetual virginity is relevant. If sexual intercourse produces sinful offspring, it was essential Mary be and remain a virgin so Jesus could, uniquely, be born sinless.

Such logic might seem absurd to many modern readers, but Augustine’s influence on Christian tradition cannot be overstated. In her book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Princeton Professor Elaine Pagels argues Augustine has left a legacy of problematic and complicated attitudes towards sex in the Christian tradition.

Attitudes, it is worth noting, that are not in the Bible. There is no suggestion in the biblical text that consensual sex is anything other than a gift from God. There is even an entire biblical book devoted to rather erotic poetry.

The idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin was already in circulation at this time, but the influence of Augustine’s thinking on original sin would lead the 19th-century Roman Catholic Church to adopt the doctrine of Immaculate Conception. This was the idea that Mary herself was immaculately conceived, so she could be a sinless vessel to carry the fetal Jesus. This move consolidated the association of purity and virginity, arguably leading to the Protestant Church’s purity culture movement in the 20th century.

The purity movement has its roots in 19th-century social movements that sought to abolish prostitution, raise the age of consent and limit pornography. Often led by women with the intention of protecting women, these movements appealed to men not to misuse their social and sexual power over women. However, the late 20th-century American purity movement looks quite different and has arguably done damage to women.

Read more: Jesus wasn’t white: he was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew. Here’s why that matters

In the 1990s, conservative American churches started focusing on a radical abstinence from sex, the nature of which would likely have appealed to Augustine. Known as “purity culture,” both men and women were expected to remain “pure”.

Women, however, inevitably bore the brunt of this teaching. Girls pledged their virginity and were given promise rings by their fathers, a placeholder for an engagement ring when their virginity would be promised to another man. Young women were taught that the most important thing they could offer their future husband was a body untouched by another male.

Much has been written about the culture of shame and sexual ignorance that has resulted from such an emphasis on sexual purity. There were two notable outcomes: sex outside of marriage became the worst form of sin and women who experienced sexual assault were often additionally traumatised by their church’s teaching about purity and shame.

The harm caused is now so widely acknowledged that a once vocal proponent of the no-dating purity culture, Joshua Harris, has recently apologised and retracted his views and his book on the topic.

Shame, purity and sexual ignorance continue to haunt Christian communities around the globe. In Melbourne, I have encountered Christians who abstained from anything except holding hands until marriage, only to find that the leap from total abstinence to sex in one night was painful, awkward and sometimes traumatising. If you have been told something is shameful your whole life, it takes more than a wedding ceremony to shift to a sex-positive mindset.

I’ve met Christian women who will not report a childhood rape because they fear being seen as “tainted goods” or “impure” to Christian men who might not want to marry them. The association of sex and sinfulness is so strong for some that a rapist’s sin can be internalised as their own.

Read more: How the ‘extreme abstinence’ of the purity movement created a sense of shame in evangelical women

In conservative Christian circles, sexual “sins” continue to be considered the worst kinds of sin. This legacy entrenches hierarchical gender roles, can push sexual activity underground as something hidden or secret, and arguably inhibits healthy sexual development in young people. Similarly, it diminishes any robust theology of sin and, alarmingly, it can create dangerous conditions for those vulnerable to sexual predation.

These centuries of thinking about virginity, sex and sinfulness have led us a long way from the woman whose child Christians celebrate at Christmas. Somehow, a virginal young woman became used by men to support claims that sex equals sin.

Yet, in the Christian tradition, Mary is best remembered as mother of God, prophet and faithful follower of Jesus. She has long been upheld as a model of faith for women in particular. And so she should be. Not because she was ever “pure” or remained a virgin, but because she exemplifies courageous faith.

– ref. From virgin births to purity movements: Christians and their problem with sex – http://theconversation.com/from-virgin-births-to-purity-movements-christians-and-their-problem-with-sex-118327

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Forgasz, Associate Professor, Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University

The eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah begins Sunday, December 22. From Melbourne and New York to Berlin and Moscow, thousands of people will gather to light giant menorahs. In many places, these public ceremonies will be accompanied by music, street food and carnivals.

These events may primarily target Jewish communities but, given their prominent locations, many non-Jews will also participate.

In the US especially, Hanukkah has become a widely recognised holiday. As well as lighting the National Menorah in Washington DC, the president hosts an annual Hanukkah party in the White House. In big cities like New York, parents of Jewish children are often invited into elementary school classrooms to explain Hanukkah to students.

Hanukkah has even entered American popular culture. The classic children’s Hanukkah song “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel” has appeared in several episodes of South Park.

And comic Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” became a national obsession when it was first performed on Saturday Night Live in 1994. Sandler even found two words to (sort of) rhyme with Hanukkah in the refrain:

Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah! So much fun-akah, to celebrate Hanukkah!

But in the Jewish calendar, Hanukkah is of relatively minor religious significance compared with the biblical festival of Passover or the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

So why has it become the most widely known and publicly celebrated of all Jewish holidays, particularly in the US?

The origins of Hanukkah

Hanukkah commemorates a historical event that took place in Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE, when the Seleucid Greek empire was the ruling power. In 168 BCE, the king Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed Jewish practice and defiled the Jewish Temple in the city by installing an altar to Zeus Olympios and sacrificing pigs.

A small army of Jews, known as the Maccabees, rebelled against this religious persecution. They regained control over the Temple, removed the symbols of Zeus and built a new altar so they could once again offer sacrifices in keeping with Jewish law.

Read more: Hanukkah’s true meaning is about Jewish survival

According to a legend recounted in the Talmud, a compilation of 3rd to 6th century Jewish teachings, a miracle occurred at this time.

There was only enough oil to keep the Temple’s menorah, one of its most important ritual objects, burning for one day. But the flame stayed alight for eight days, until a new supply of oil could be found – the basis for the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah.

An alternate version of history

Based on this version of events, Jews have seen the Maccabees as heroes who fought for religious liberty against a repressive regime.

But the historical record is more complex.

The most detailed accounts of the story of Hanukkah are recorded in First and Second Maccabees, historical books that describe the military and political events leading up to and following the Maccabean revolt. They are not included in the Hebrew Bible, but are part of the Catholic biblical canon.

According to First Maccabees,

lawless men came forth from Israel, and misled many, saying, ‘Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us’. … [T]hey built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.

These “lawless men” were not the Seleucid rulers, but Jews who wanted to integrate aspects of Greek (Hellenistic) culture with Jewish tradition.

Hellenistic culture was based on the Greek language, literature, art and philosophy, as well as the distinctively Greek form of social and political organisation, the polis. But Hellenistic culture also involved the worship of Greek gods and social customs, such as athletic contests, that some considered incompatible with Jewish tradition.

These Hellenising Jews were the targets of the Maccabees’ vengeful attacks as much as the Seleucid Greek regime itself. As First Maccabees relates:

They organised an army, and struck down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety.

In this light, the Maccabees were not heroic liberators and defenders of religious freedom. Rather, they could be viewed as intolerant religious zealots, intent on stamping out any attempt to “modernise” Jewish tradition.

Today, most Jews would still consider the Maccabees to be heroes and defenders of Judaism. Certainly, it’s the story that children are taught in Jewish schools and synagogues. However, they would be surprised, and likely rather disturbed, by the religious fundamentalism of the Maccabees that is represented in the historical sources.

Remaking Hanukkah in the image of Christmas

Diane Ashton, an American religious historian, has traced the history of Hanukkah in the US and described how Jews have transformed Hanukkah in the past two centuries to reflect the evolving traditions of Christmas.

Inspired by children’s Christmas events in churches, American rabbis began introducing special Hanukkah celebrations for children at synagogues in the 19th century. They would tell the story of Hanukkah, light candles, sing hymns and hand out sweets. This was a way to entice children to attend synagogues, which otherwise offered little of interest to them.

Over time, Hanukkah became one of the only times of the year that many Jewish families engaged with Jewish tradition.

Read more: How Hanukkah came to America

In the early 20th century, with the commercialisation of Christmas well under way, more changes occurred. Gift-giving was never a feature of Hanukkah historically, but new Jewish immigrants from Europe began buying presents for their children as a way of signifying their economic success in the new world.

In more recent years, the public display of menorahs has also been promoted by Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish Hasidic movement that aims to bring Jews closer to their own religion.

These displays, often alongside Christmas trees, have elevated the significance of Hanukkah in the minds of both Jews and non-Jews. They were even the subject of a US Supreme Court ruling in 1989, when the court rejected a request by the city of Pittsburgh to bar a large menorah from a public building, ruling it did not amount to a government endorsement of Judaism.

Over time, American Jews have thus remade Hanukkah in the image of Christmas. In doing so, they have been able to participate in the festive season in a way that is distinctly Jewish, balancing their desires to both assimilate and retain their unique cultural identity.

Read more: What Hanukkah’s portrayal in pop culture means to American Jews

Elsewhere in the world, while large-scale public menorah lightings have become more widespread, Hanukkah is mostly a time for families to come together. Fried food, to commemorate the miracle of the oil, features heavily in family celebrations, including the popular potato fritters called latkes and deep-fried, jam-filled doughnuts known as sufganiyot.

Giving small gifts to children has become common, though nowhere has Hanukkah reached the level of commercialisation and kitsch that it has in the US.

For any other Jewish festival, this might be seen as a corrupting influence. But given that Hanukkah remains, for most Jews, a relatively minor holiday, it is viewed with some bemusement as just another example of American meshugas (craziness).

– ref. The story of Hanukkah: how a minor Jewish holiday was remade in the image of Christmas – http://theconversation.com/the-story-of-hanukkah-how-a-minor-jewish-holiday-was-remade-in-the-image-of-christmas-127620

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Larissa McLean Davies, Associate Professor Language and Literacy Education, University of Melbourne

Alfred Tatum, a US education professor specialising in literacy for African American boys, coined the term “bookprint”. He said it’s something we all have – a list of books that have impacted how we see ourselves and the world.

What we read matters. Reading shapes the way we see the world, increases our understanding of others, and helps us imagine different narratives for ourselves.

School holidays are an ideal time for teenagers to expand their reading repertoire and pay attention to the bookprint they are creating (and is being created for them). It is important for young people to read literature that reflects their own life and also expands their experiences of the world.

Read more: Old white men dominate school English booklists. It’s time more Australian schools taught Australian books

In this spirit, we suggest five Australian texts that connect with diverse teenagers’ experiences and interests. This is not a quintessential list, but one designed to enhance any young person’s bookprint, at different ages and stages. These texts are by Australian writers, and written in the past five years.

1. Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman

Recommended for ages 16+

In Terra Nullius, Clare G. Coleman offers older teenagers the opportunity to immerse themselves in an imaginative response to colonisation.

Coleman’s creative representation holds both history and potential futures in tension, and an unexpected plot twist engages and provokes the imagination.

This book is an example of both climate fiction and speculative fiction. Climate fiction enables older teenagers to think about the implications of climate change from diverse perspectives, while speculative fiction encourages readers to use their imaginations to consider different futures or pasts.

The Tribe by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Recommended for ages 13+

The Tribe, by Arab-Australian writer, editor, teacher and community arts worker Michael Mohammed Ahmad, is short but powerful. It focuses on the experiences of Bani, an Arab-Australian boy, his family and their wider community.

The Tribe was Ahmed’s first work of fiction. It insightfully considers issues of identity, family, community, loyalty and love.

The text makes clear both the struggle and beauty at the heart of one immigrant family’s experiences of being Australian. The book is richly descriptive, and the reader is carried into the home that is the centre of Bani’s world.

Read more: Friday essay: how speculative fiction gained literary respectability

3. The Yield by Tara June Winch

Recommended for ages 16+

What does it mean to know the language of your country?

The question of language, lost and found, begins Tara June Winch’s latest novel. The Yield traces the history of a family in Massacre Plains on the banks of the Murrumby River.

After her grandfather’s death, August Gondiwindi returns to her family’s land. The story of her return is interspersed with the dictionary written by her grandfather before his death.

These complementary narratives reveal the complexity of place, voice, language and family in the Australian context and force a consideration of what has been lost.

While moments of violence and dispossession are central to the story, there is also tenderness and beauty in this novel by one of Australia’s most exciting authors.

4. Growing Up African in Australia, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Recommended for ages 15+

Growing Up African in Australia is this year’s addition to the popular and groundbreaking Growing Up series, which includes Growing up Queer in Australia and Growing up Disabled in Australia.

Growing Up African draws from a range of authors including disability advocate Carly Findlay, journalist and filmmaker Santilla Chingaipe, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child star Kirsty Marillier, and many more.

Like the others in the Growing Up series, this compilation acts as an intersection at which we can reflect on the similarities and differences of young people growing up across the country.

One section of the anthology, named “The Body”, is particularly noteworthy, with a range of authors describing their experiences grappling with body difference and self esteem.

Read more: Growing Up African in Australia: racism, resilience and the right to belong

For some young readers this will provide a moment of “I thought it was just me”. It might help others to see cultural beauty standards – and the challenges of growing up within them – through another’s point of view.

5. Meet Me at the Intersection, edited by Rebecca Lim and Ambelin Kwaymullina

Recommended for ages 13+

Like the Growing Up series, this new collection offers much-needed new voices and perspectives for young adult readers.

Conceived as a collection of stories about marginalised people, told by people from these marginalised groups, Meet Me at the Intersection presents stories, poems, and memoirs from First Nations writers, writers living with a disability, LGBTIQA+ writers and writers from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Including a range of established and emerging writers, this collection reminds us identities are complex, created at the intersections of race, disability and sexuality, and that we are collectively a richer nation if all voices can be heard.

As our research has shown, contemporary Australian fiction, for a range of reasons, is often omitted in school curricula.

Historically underrepresented people including Aboriginal writers, writers of colour, migrant writers, queers writers and writers living with disability are particularly underrepresented.

Read more: Diversity, the Stella Count and the whiteness of Australian publishing

Yet, we know it is of paramount importance Australian teenagers are able to locate their literary imaginations locally as well as globally, and that reading texts by and about diverse Australians will change the ways all young people see themselves and their communities.

For a longer list of Australian texts both historical and contemporary, see the Reading Australia website. This resource is designed for teachers, but is also a great starting place for parents and teenagers.

– ref. 5 Australian books that can help young people understand their place in the world – http://theconversation.com/5-australian-books-that-can-help-young-people-understand-their-place-in-the-world-127712

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dorothy Ann Lee, Stewart Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity College, University of Divinity

Belief in the virgin birth comes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Their birth stories are different, but both present Mary as a virgin when she became pregnant with Jesus. Mary and Joseph begin their sexual relationship following Jesus’ birth, and so Jesus has brothers and sisters.

Catholic piety goes beyond this, with Mary depicted as a virgin not only before but also during and after Jesus’ birth, her hymen miraculously restored. The brothers and sisters of Jesus are seen as either cousins or children of Joseph by an earlier marriage.

In Catholicism, Mary remains a virgin throughout her married life. This view arises not from the New Testament but from an apocryphal Gospel in the second century, the “Protoevangelium of James”, which affirms Mary’s perpetual virginity.

From the second century onwards, Christians saw virginity as an ideal, an alternative to marriage and children. Mary was seen to exemplify this choice, along with Jesus and the apostle Paul. It accorded with the surrounding culture where Greek philosophers, male and female, tried to live a simple life without attachment to family or possessions.

This extolling of virginity, however unlikely when applied to Mary, did have some advantages. The option of becoming a celibate nun in community with other women gave young women in the early church an attractive alternative to marriage, in a culture where marriages were generally arranged and death in childbirth was common.

Yet belief in the eternal virginity of Mary has also inflicted damage over the centuries, particularly on women. It has distorted the character of Mary, turning her into a submissive, dependent creature, without threat to patriarchal structures.

She is divorced from the lives of real women who can never attain her sexless motherhood or her unsullied “purity”.

A strong minded leader

Yet in the Gospels, Mary is a vibrant figure: strong-minded and courageous, a leader in the community of faith.

As the first Christian, Mary proclaims a radical message of social justice, where the poor are exalted and the powerful overthrown. She initiates Jesus’ ministry at the wedding of Cana and follows him to the cross, despite the dangers. She is a vital presence at the birth of the church at Pentecost, sharing the divine vision of a world transformed.

In line with the New Testament, the early church also gave Mary the title of “God-bearer” (Theotokos), which became part of Christian orthodoxy, not tied to her perpetual virginity.

Material art portrayed her in some contexts as a priestly figure (as in an 11th century mosaic from Ravenna), with her own autonomy and authority, where she embodies the symbolic vocation of all Christians to “give birth” to the transforming presence of Christ.

Diminishing female sexuality

In contrast to these powerful images, the alternative picture of Mary, the perpetual-married-virgin, deprives women of a model not only of leadership and courage, but also of sexual desire and passion.

Simone de Beauvoir, the influential, early French feminist, observed that the cult of the Virgin Mary represented the “supreme victory of masculinity”, implying that it served the interests of men rather than women.

The ever-Virgin diminishes women’s sexuality and makes the female body and female sexuality seem unwholesome, impure. She is a safe and nonthreatening figure for celibate men who place her on a pedestal, both literally and metaphorically.

The contradiction

It is true that Catholic women across the world have found great solace in the compassionate figure of Mary, especially against images of a very masculine, judgmental God, and the brutality of political and religious hierarchy.

But for this women have paid a price, in their exclusion from leadership. Mary’s voice has been permitted, in filtered tones, to ring out across the church, but real women’s voices are silent.

In today’s context, the cult of the Virgin becomes emblematic of the way the church silences women and marginalises their experience.

Marian piety in its traditional form has a deep contradiction at its heart. In a speech in 2014, Pope Francis said, “The model of maternity for the Church is the Virgin Mary” who “in the fullness of time conceived through the Holy Spirit and gave birth to the Son of God.”

If that were true, women could be ordained, since their connection to Mary would allow them, like her, to represent the church. If the world received the body of Christ from this woman, Mary, then women today should not be excluded from giving the body of Christ, as priests, to the faithful at Mass.

The Virgin cult cuts women off from the full, human reality of Mary, and so from full participation in the life of the church.

It is no coincidence that in the early 20th century, the Vatican forbade Mary to be depicted in priestly vestments. She could only ever be presented as the unattainable virgin-mother: never as leader, and never as a fully embodied woman in her own right.

The irony of this should not be lost. A fully human Gospel symbol of female authority, autonomy, and the capacity to envision a transformed world becomes a tool of patriarchy.

By contrast, the Mary of the Gospels, the God-bearer and priestly figure – a normal wife and mother of children – confirms women in their embodied humanity and supports their efforts to challenge unjust structures, both within and outside the church.

– ref. How the cult of Virgin Mary turned a symbol of female authority into a tool of patriarchy – http://theconversation.com/how-the-cult-of-virgin-mary-turned-a-symbol-of-female-authority-into-a-tool-of-patriarchy-127806

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Quilty, Senior Staff Specialist, Alice Springs Hospital. Honorary, Australian National University

This is one of our occasional Essays on Health, about one community’s attempt at closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health in the Northern Territory. It’s a long read.

You can see the gap driving through the main street of Katherine in the Northern Territory.

The broken shop windows, the dust, the wheelchairs and crutches and bandaged bodies sing out poor health and inequity.

Overcrowding and homelessness are pervasive, and there is very little reprieve from the oppressive heat.

Like many towns of its size, Katherine has its own hospital. Here, social and environmental determinants drive hospital attendance.

For instance, the town has some of the highest rates of homelessness in Australia, in a jurisdiction with the highest incarceration rates, lowest life expectancy and the poorest educational outcomes. The gap in Katherine is a chasm.

Read more: Three reasons why the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians aren’t closing

Who’s who in the emergency department?

The hospital is a busy place, made even more so by the emergency department frequent attenders who come and go through a constantly revolving door of admission and discharge.

Frequent attenders fall into two broad categories.

Roughly one-third are very sick, wracked by illness or chronic conditions, almost all underpinned by great social challenges. Despite stereotypes, this is a group that rarely drinks alcohol.

By contrast, grog is a driving force for the other two-thirds, often as a direct result of alcohol and its complications. Once again, illness and social exclusion are pervasive.

Most frequent attenders are Indigenous. They come from around 30 different tribal nations, each with unique language. Most are just three or four generations away from the first wave of colonisation.

Just over two-thirds are homeless, a situation shaped by subtle and ongoing forces of colonisation and subsequent displacement.

Read more: Making space: how designing hospitals for Indigenous people might benefit everyone

Only one-fifth of frequent attenders have access to a car in a town with no public transport (other than school buses). This affects people’s health in the tropics where it’s a long, hot walk from where most Indigenous people live to the pharmacy.

It is really no wonder more than half of frequent attenders have not taken their medicines, contributing to their presentation to the emergency department.

For frequent presenters to Katherine Hospital, poverty and illness go hand in hand. When you are living in an over-crowded house, and the A$20 power card feeding the air conditioner expires on a 43℃ tropical day, when your heart, lungs and kidneys are chronically malfunctioning and the insulin in the fridge slowly warms, the only free number you can call for help is “000” for an ambulance trip to hospital.

These are some of the real-world challenges of closing the gap in Indigenous health. But these challenges can be overcome.

Here’s what worked

We have recently published evidence of how a locally driven program can make a difference.

When some of the town’s most vulnerable people attend the emergency department, the program connects them to primary care and other supports. It also tackles underlying drivers of hospitalisation such as homelessness or inadequate housing.

The referral point taps into a critical moment when people choose to turn up to hospital, asking for help.

This an opportunity to do things differently. As such, the program re-defines “help” beyond the biomedical paradigm, to both improve health and use limited resources more efficiently.

This contrasts with past approaches grounded in discipline and law that have failed to meaningfully help people who suffer the combined disharmony of sickness, homelessness and alcohol.

Among the 109 people supported in the first ten months of the program, there was a 23% reduction in emergency department presentations.

More GP visits

A Grattan Institute report found the most disadvantaged people living in the remotest areas are the least likely to see or have access to a GP.

In Katherine, many of the people presenting frequently to the emergency department with chronic diseases would benefit from being managed by their GP or other primary care provider.

As a result of the program, there was a 90% increase in GP attendance.

Read more: Why the housing shortage exacerbates scabies in Indigenous communities

Community support is vital

The program has been developed gradually over the past five years, first with an understanding of who the hospital’s frequent attenders are, and then getting the community on board.

Central to the program’s success is this community support. The four main partners include the hospital, the Wurli-wurlinjang local Aboriginal health service, the local Aboriginal housing organisation and Katherine Regional Aboriginal Health and Related Services.

Other partners including the first ever homeless hub in Katherine (a drop-in centre and community space for homeless people), as well as St John Ambulance, Mission Australia, Red Cross and the territory housing department.

Read more: Refugees in their own land: how Indigenous people are still homeless in modern Australia

The harsh reality of the town camp

Just off Katherine’s main drag is a patch of thick scrub that shields visitors from seeing the harsh realities of Warlpiri Transient Camp. This is where many people who frequently present to the emergency department live.

This “temporary” camp, set up over 40 years ago, houses some of the sickest people in what is one of the sickest towns in Australia.

Up to 20 people live in small dwellings bursting at the seams. These structures often provide meagre refuge to people on dialysis, with failing hearts from rheumatic heart disease, and to the elderly and frail.

Only a handful of these dwellings are air conditioned; some don’t even have electricity. Often it is sickness that drives people from ancestral lands into bigger towns like Katherine to access health services like kidney dialysis.

But housing is less available than dialysis. And the camp is not a destination of choice.

Read more: Want to improve the nation’s health? Start by reducing inequalities and improving living conditions

Our analysis of the program demonstrates some striking features of people who live in the camp and who frequently attend the emergency department.

First, they are very sick. Almost 10% had died before the end of the first year of the program. Participants had an average of 2.8 significant health problems, many fold higher than the Australian average.

Three out of five didn’t have reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food. Almost one-third had chronic kidney disease, and 10% were on dialysis. Of the 11 people needing dialysis three times a week, eight met the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of homelessness; three were living in a tent.

Needless to say, nowhere else in Australia is it imaginable that someone sick enough to require dialysis has to live in a tent in temperatures regularly above 40℃.

Read more: Explainer: what is chronic kidney disease and why are one in three at risk of this silent killer?

A safe home, a working fridge and a good education

Modern western medicine is the icing on the cake of a healthy and meaningful life. For people who do not have even the most fundamental building blocks of a normal urban existence, like the vast majority of people in this trial, applying western medicine is like icing a cake that has not yet been baked.

A safe home, a fridge that remains powered and relatively stocked, access to transport, and a good education, are ingredients that need to be slowly and systematically put together over a lifetime for western medicine to be an appropriate first step in resolving an individual health problem.

Applying a biomedical model of emergency care is nothing more than a very expensive band aid. But emergency departments can be structured in innovative ways to make a much bigger difference.

Read more: To close the health gap, we need programs that work. Here are three of them

– ref. How a rethink of emergency care is closing the gap, one person at a time – http://theconversation.com/how-a-rethink-of-emergency-care-is-closing-the-gap-one-person-at-a-time-127020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Carley, Principal Engineer, Water Research Laboratory, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW

Depending on definitions, the coast of New South Wales, Australia, has about 70 ocean pools, with most located between Newcastle and Wollongong. South Africa has a comparable number, but the rest of the world has only a handful.

Why are ocean pools not more widespread? It isn’t the cost – our research suggests the public benefits of NSW ocean pools greatly outweigh the investment in building and maintaining them. And these pools do hold a special place in the hearts of the communities that use them.

Read more: Community pool projects show how citizens are helping to build cities

Architect and artist Nicole Larkin says of ocean pools:

Geographically they are outliers of the built environment poised at the threshold of our nation’s boundary. Anchored to our iconic coastline, they facilitate intimate encounters with the landscape and reflect its importance in our national psyche.

Ocean pools were not the first structures built on the Australian coast. There is a prolific network of Aboriginal fish traps around Australia, with many existing structures dating back thousands of years. Any coastal structures more than 6,000 years old now lie under the sea, as global sea levels have risen 120 metres from 21,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago.

The Bogey Hole in Newcastle is usually claimed to be the first post-European-settlement ocean pool. Convicts built it in 1819.

Most of the first ocean pools involved local residents or surf lifesavers excavating suitable sections of rock shelves and enhancing them with concrete, with many further iterations until arriving at their present form.

The earliest ocean pools in Sydney’s eastern suburbs date back to the 1880s. Many of the 15 ocean pools on Sydney’s northern beaches were constructed or upgraded as job-creation projects during the 1930s Great Depression. Many Sydney beaches have an ocean pool at each end – some even have more than one.

Why does NSW have so many?

The prevalence of ocean pools in NSW arose from a confluence of many factors – geology, climate, culture and economics.

Geology

The southern two-thirds of the NSW coast generally consists of short to medium-length sandy beaches, nestled between rocky headlands. Where those headlands are sandstone, there is an ideal balance between a material that can be fairly easily excavated, yet is stable over human time scales. These headlands have allowed pools to be sited on a stable foundation where they don’t alter the shape of the surrounding beaches or fill with too much sand.

Ocean pools and magnificent sandstone buildings are two manifestations of Sydney’s moniker “Sandstone City”.

Climate

Mild to hot air temperatures and tolerable to pleasant water temperatures – fed by the East Australian (“Nemo”) Current – are conducive to swimming, bathing and surfing.

Read more: Can you surf the East Australian Current, Finding Nemo-style?

Beach and ocean culture

Beach, ocean, swimming and surfing cultures developed in the early 1900s. Despite its pleasures, the ocean can be a dangerous place. Many people drowned in the early days of surf bathing and drownings on unpatrolled beaches continue to this day.

Ocean pools offer the pleasure of saltwater bathing by the beach, free from sharks, large waves and rips. In his poem The Ocean Baths, Les Murray described the experience:

I am not in the sea but the sea’s television.

Read more: From segregation to celebration: the public pool in Australian culture

However, almost all ocean pools have dangerous conditions at times. The Water Research Laboratory at UNSW Sydney has recently applied contemporary coastal engineering techniques for estimating wave overtopping to ocean pools. This work has reconciled the theory with the expert opinions of lifeguards and surf lifesavers for a range of pools.

Economic prosperity

Population centres near the coast, economic prosperity, along with job-creation projects during downturns also drove the construction of ocean pools.

Improved sewage disposal schemes for Sydney in the early 1990s, as well as Newcastle and Wollongong, vastly improved water quality on the beaches, further increasing the attraction of ocean pools and coastal living.

What makes a good ocean pool?

We have polled many users of ocean pools and their opinions are fairly uniform. The best ocean pools have three elements:

• a lap swimming area (preferably 50 metres long)
• a separate wading/splash area
• a space for people to congregate, as these are community gathering places.

For many users, ocean pools complement other ocean activities, rather than replace them. For example, surf lifesavers or surfers often train in them when the ocean is too flat or too dangerous.

Waves washing into pools make for spectacular photos. These can enhance the sense of wildness, the connection with nature, and flush the pool with clean seawater. But waves can also make a pool dangerous and fill the pool with sand, seaweed and sometimes boulders. So a balance is needed.

Pools repay the investment

The potential costs of maintenance (cleaning and repairs) have been cited in opposition to new ocean pools. We have surveyed the asset managers for many ocean pools and found annual maintenance costs range from about A$10,000 to A$140,000, with a typical amount of A$80,000.

The aggressive location (the “wild edge”) means most pools are refurbished at intervals of 10 to 20 years. The budgets for this work range from A$200,000 to A$1.5 million.

Pool upgrades have allowed the walls of most pools to be raised over time. This has generally outpaced recent sea level rise, but accelerating rises will require serious redesign or abandonment of many pools. Some may join the ranks of existing “ghost” pools, such as those surrounding the present Dee Why ocean pool (Isa Wye Rockpool) or the headland between Bilgola and Newport. A keen eye can spot these on Google Earth.

Improvements in pump technology and economic prosperity have meant many ocean pools now use pumps to maintain water quality, rather than relying only on wave overtopping. This allows for safer pools.

In the age of “business cases” we recently combined data on beach/pool use with the economic benefits of an aquatic facility visit from studies by the Royal Life Saving Society. This indicates a typical ocean pool has a basic economic benefit of A$2 million a year and a combined economic and health benefit of A$6 million a year. A high-use ocean pool has a basic economic benefit of A$3.5 million a year and a combined benefit of A$10 million a year.

Thus, if physically suitable and environmentally acceptable sites can be found, the economic payback on investment in an ocean pool is rapid. The people of NSW have always loved their ocean pools, so these findings only confirm their status as highly valued community assets.

The author acknowledges the contributions of Ian Coghlan, Chris Drummond, Nicole Larkin, council staff, pool users, lifeguards and volunteer lifesavers.

– ref. The timeless appeal of an ocean pool – turns out it’s a good investment, too – http://theconversation.com/the-timeless-appeal-of-an-ocean-pool-turns-out-its-a-good-investment-too-127912

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

As anticipated, the Australian government downsized a number of its economic forecasts in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) released this week.

Also as anticipated, the federal government did everything it could to retain its forecast budget surplus for 2019-20. Having pinned its economic-management credentials to one single economic statistic – remember those hokey phrases from the May budget, “back in the black” and “back on track” – it was never going to be otherwise.

Read more: 5 things MYEFO tells us about the economy and the nation’s finances

One casualty of the updated numbers is the forecast, made in May, that Australia’s net government debt would be reduced to zero by 2030. MYEFO projects that net debt in 2030 will instead be about 2% of GDP.

That is, essentially, a trivial difference. But it reveals a lot about the federal government’s view of fiscal management.

Governments living within their means

An oft-repeated line from Scott Morrison – one he used when he was treasurer as well as now he is prime minister – is that the government is “living within its means”.

If one doesn’t think about it too carefully, that phrase makes a lot of sense. Do we want governments not to live within their means?

But there’s a lot hidden in the words “live” and “means”.

The way the Morrison government likes to tell it, Australia pays a lot of interest on its foreign debt. According to official figures, the interest payment on the debt in 2018-19 was about A$14 billion.

That sounds like a lot, particularly when compared with, say, the amount of money the federal government spends on schools – A$19.6 billion in the past budget year, and about A$20.9 billion this year.

Such comparisons are made by members of the Morrison government (such as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg) quite a lot.

Yes, our interest bill is in the same ballpark as the federal government’s spending on schools. But school funding is a state responsibility. The NSW government alone spent A$17.3 billion on schools in 2018-19.

So the comparison between interest and spending on schools is misleading at best and disingenuous at worst.

If they wanted to, ministers could compare the interest payment with the amount of money the government collects from tobacco taxes – A$17.3 billion. That comparison makes our interest bill sound pretty small.

Read more: Vital Signs: why governments get addicted to smoking, gambling and other vices

Spending as an investment

What’s missing is the broader point that when the government borrows money to invest in social and physical infrastructure it can often generate returns far in excess of the interest cost.

Currently the federal government can borrow for ten years at an annual interest rate of about 1%. Investing in nation-building like road and rail infrastructure, schools, preventive medical care, mental health and recreational facilities would almost certainly generate a return of more than 1% a year.

If the government was a business it would jump at the opportunity to borrow at 1% and generate higher returns year after year (such as for education).

Read more: Vital Signs: it’s time to borrow to build

But conservative governments – as political outfits – love the narrative of belt-tightening and living within one’s means.

Beware of boondoggles

To be fair, without some financial discipline low interest rates on government debt can also be used to justify every idiotic pork-barrel project imaginable. These routinely come up on both sides of politics. Think of the Rudd government’s disastrous “pink batts” scheme, or Barnaby Joyce’s inland rail scheme.

White elephants are easy to find when governments get involved in spending without proper cost-benefit analysis. I have proposed, with my colleagues Rosalind Dixon and Alex Rosenberg, a method for doing cost-benefit analysis more rigorously to take account of the broader social benefits of government spending.

Governments aren’t households

One very simple thing to remember is that governments are not like households.

You and I will will not be around forever. When we die our financial dealings will be tallied up. Most of us would like to pass on something to our children. If we have the means and the discipline, many of us do.

But governments don’t end. They represent a population that carries on indefinitely. Their success is not measured by what gets passed on at some end point. It’s measured by what they do for the public year after year.

Sometimes that can be improved by borrowing sensibly to invest in social and physical infrastructure.

Read more: Surplus before spending. Frydenberg’s risky MYEFO strategy

In 2020 I hope we will hear less from Scott Morrison and his ministers about balanced budgets and debt elimination, and more about another phrase of his – “good debt” versus “bad debt”.

Australia is desperately in need of investment by the government – and sensible, nation-building infrastructure is definitely “good debt”.

– ref. Vital Signs: Australia’s nation-building opportunity held hostage by the deficit daleks – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-australias-nation-building-opportunity-held-hostage-by-the-deficit-daleks-129000

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherine Fahd, Director Photography, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

We are used to being spectators of news events — viewing difficult images beamed to us from the other side of the world, the next state or the next suburb.

This spectator lens can start to feel so familiar that we become numb to what we are witnessing. News reports show us another scene of destruction, another disaster, another cry for help, another decline. We can look away from the paper, turn off the television or radio. But our social media marches on.

Instagram images of smoke, coloured orange by the bushfire sun, catch us off-guard. Social sharing of images like those of the current bushfires cuts through the resistance we’ve built up to the news cycle, chipping away at the degrees separating us from the event itself.

Bringing us closer to disaster, for better or worse.

The frame

For the most part, news images are taken by professional photographers trained to frame a decisive moment; the picture-perfect scene that will capture an “event”. Photographers know how to manipulate light and composition to create a great image. We are accustomed to seeing catastrophes through their expert eye.

Our newspapers feature stunning photographs, such as one captured recently by Sydney Morning Herald photographer Nick Moir. In it, two firefighters hold their hands to their heads while running through an apocalyptic, dizzying shower of fire.

SMH photo editor Mags King told us “images taken by professional photojournalists … still retain their visceral impact and trigger a deeper reaction or a lasting thought on the subject”.

She notes that the fire photos taken by Moir are “highly considered”.

The impact, judging by the feedback, has been tremendous. They are nightmarish, powerful, all encompassing. I think people can see that they are not snaps. These are the type of photos that make you feel and that is the skill of a photojournalist who understands the tenets of photojournalism.

Sometimes that consideration can push an image too far. In 2015, a significant number of entries (20%) were disqualified from the World Press Photo competition for excessive manipulation and post-processing.

The 2019 World Press Photo top prize went to John Moore of Getty Images for his capture of a simple image, devastating in its natural depiction of a Honduran toddler crying as she and her mother were taken into custody by US border officials in Texas.

The winning photo is framed at the height of the small child, while her mother and the official’s figures are cut at waist height. We can see the child’s emotional reaction to the events unfolding at the adult level above her.

Stop, look, read

In photojournalism, the proximity of the photographer to the event is key. Robert Capa, the photojournalist who founded Magnum Photos in 1947 with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, famously said “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”.

Capa was so close to crisis that it cost him his life in 1954 when, at age 40, he stepped on a landmine while on assignment for Life in Northern Vietnam.

The task of the professional photojournalist — to distil a crisis artfully in an image that makes us stop, look and read — has never been more difficult. Exposure to images has reached unprecedented levels, while our trust in news has declined.

The proportion of Australians avoiding news increased from 57% in 2017 to 62% in 2019, and 28% say they are worn out by the volume of news. Meanwhile, social media analysts report 9,442,000 Instagram users in Australia in 2019, accounting for 37.2% of the country’s population.

Sharing, caring

Viewing images on Instagram offers a different, though linked, perspective to the photojournalist.

As the devastating bushfires ravage parts of New South Wales and Queensland, “ordinary” people are sharing, viewing, commenting on and “liking” images of the crisis engulfing the state.

Captured on smart phones, images posted on Instagram still frame the event as spectacle but from a different point of view. Proximity is still key, but it is gained via a different path. And the path images take to reach us is also different.

On Facebook and Twitter, news sharing from faceless sources is deemed responsible for the spread of fake news. Instagram (though owned by Facebook) is designed primarily so that images provide information. Caption plays a supporting role only.

The images are taken by amateurs and they are people we mostly know, or feel like we know, and follow on social media.

As Waleed Aly noted in response to photos on Facebook of the London Bridge attack in 2017, “images can be weaponised to evoke and reinforce existing narratives, confirm prejudices and galvanise a sense of shared outrage”.

A social stage

The algorithmic bubble that drives our social media feed, exposes us to images and sentiments that mirror our own. But increasingly, the public is suspicious of “spin” in news and images of crisis transmitted to us through news outlets that are owned by those with political biases, special interests and powers.

Researchers in Finland who studied issues of trustworthiness in amateur images in newspapers versus professional images, found that people tended to trust amateur ones more than the professional.

The amateur snaps were imbued with authenticity, and a lack of vested interests associated with news corporations.

That same authenticity might be available to us via Instagram, ironically the natural home of colour filters, selfies and silicon enhancements.

According to sociologist and social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson, the ontology of the “social photo” — the fundamentals of its reason for being — is sharing.

“Social photos are not primarily about making media but about sharing eyes,” he writes.

Images shared among friends and followers fuel a “social process” as catalysts for dialogue. Like the newspaper once did, Instagram offers a communal conversation.

While Instagram is a brand that carries a slick aesthetic, the feature of sharing and commenting creates a collective cultural archive. News photography can affect change but our responses to these images have reportedly dimmed as we become inured to images of children like three-year-old Alan Kurdi caught up in the refugee crisis.

Instagram has become a repository that collects and organises images through its various tools of hashtags and geolocation. More than just the playground for “influencers” and their polished images, it is the contemporary family album that also features images from connections who act as “our man on the ground” photojournalist.

Read more: Ten photos that changed how we see human rights

Closer to home

One might encounter a stream of images in seemingly random succession: a hotel room in Cologne, a family pet, children playing in the suburbs, a duck-faced selfie, a red sun, an image of smoke obscuring the Sydney Opera House, a radio announcer posing with Samuel L. Jackson, a friend’s son ice-skating somewhere, riots in Hong Kong, the army approaching protestors angrily in Beirut, fresh paint on canvas.

The images in this eclectic stream catch the viewer off-guard: images of crisis are couched within images of everyday life with kids, cats, selfies and fires.

These are not news images that comply with the tenets of photojournalism; they are taken on a smart phone and shared immediately. The snapshot taken by your friend on Instagram, as compared to the framed shot by a professional photojournalist, has a different kind of “proximity”.

In the age of Instagram, being close enough to take the good picture — in Robert Capa’s terms — means not just proximity to the scene or event, but also proximity to a social network that will receive the post in their feed (unless posts are, in turn, re-purposed by a news outlet).

So when someone you follow — who is a friend — “reports” on the fire from their backyard, it stops you in your tracks. A picture of a tree fern covered in lurid pink fire retardant shows how close the fire came.

Looking back on the same friend’s feed to see a bucolic photograph of a similar tree fern amongst daisies, only enhances the tragedy by showing what was once there and what has been destroyed in the fires.

For the viewer of the image, proximity means closeness to the person who took the photograph. It is this social connection — “kinship” in anthropological terms — to the photographer that can impact the way we respond to that image.

In the social realm, care and concern turns spectatorship into an act of obligated looking. Such an ethical response means we resist the impulse to look away.

– ref. Friday essay: seeing the news up close, one devastating post at a time – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-seeing-the-news-up-close-one-devastating-post-at-a-time-128774