Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Golley, Associate Professor (Research) Nutrition and Dietetics, Flinders University

More than one-third of Australians’ energy intake comes from junk foods. Known as discretionary foods, these include biscuits, chips, ice-cream and alcohol. For those aged 51-70, alcoholic drinks account for more than one-fifth of discretionary food intake.

These are some of the findings from the Nutrition across the life stages report released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare today.

The report also shows physical activity levels are low in most age groups. Only 15% of 9-to-13-year-old girls achieve the 60-minute target. The prevalence of overweight and obesity remains high, reaching 81% for males aged 51–70.

The food intake patterns outlined in this report, together with low physical activity levels, highlight why as a country we are struggling to turn the tide on obesity rates.

Read more: Fat nation: the rise and fall of obesity on the political agenda

Not much change in our diets

The report shows little has changed in Australians’ overall food intake patterns between 1995 and 2011-12. There have been slight decreases in discretionary food intake, with some trends for increased intakes of grain foods and meat and alternatives.

The message to eat more vegetables is not hitting the mark. There has been no change in vegetable intake in children and adolescents and a decrease in vegetable intake in adults since past surveys. The new data show all Australians fall well short of the recommended five serves daily. We are are closer to meeting the recommended one to two serves of fruit each day.

Australians are consuming around four serves of grains, including breads and cereals, compared to the recommended three to seven serves.

One serve of vegetables is equivalent to ½ cup of cooked vegetables. For fruit, this is a medium apple; grains is around ½ cup of pasta. A glass of milk and 65-120g of cooked meat are the equivalent serves for dairy and its alternatives, and meat and its alternatives respectively.

Read more: Food as medicine: why do we need to eat so many vegetables and what does a serve actually look like?

The data show a trend of lower serves of the five food groups in outer metro, regional and remote areas of Australia. Access to quality, fresh foods such as vegetables at affordable prices is a key barrier in many remote communities and can be a challenge in outer suburban and country areas of Australia.

There was also a 7-10 percentage point difference in meeting physical activity targets between major cities and regional or remote areas of Australia. Overweight and obesity levels were 53% in major cities, 57% in inner regional areas and 61% in outer regional/remote areas.

The CSIRO Healthy Diet Score compares food intake to Australian Dietary Guidelines. You can use these to see how your diet stacks up and how to improve.

Discretionary food servings

Discretionary foods are defined in guidelines as foods and drinks that are

not needed to meet nutrient requirements and do not fit into the Five Food Groups … but when consumed sometimes or in small amounts, these foods and drinks contribute to the overall enjoyment of eating.

A serve of discretionary food is 600kJ, equivalent to six hot chips, two plain biscuits, or a small glass of wine. The guidelines advise no more than three serves of these daily – 0.5 serves for under 8-year-olds.

Since 1995, the contribution of added sugars and saturated fat to Australians’ energy intake has generally decreased. This may be a reflection of the small decrease in discretionary food intake seen for most age groups.

But across all life stages, discretionary food intakes remain well in excess of the 0-3 serves recommended. Children at 2-3 years are eating more than three servers per day, peaking at seven daily serves in 14-to-18-year-olds. The patterns remains high throughout adulthood, still more four serves per day in the 70+ group.

Read more: Junk food packaging hijacks the same brain processes as drug and alcohol addiction

The excess intake of discretionary foods is the most concerning trend in this report. This is due to the doubleheader of their poor nutrient profile and being eaten in place of important, nutrient-rich groups such as vegetables, whole grains and dairy foods.

Our simulation modelling compared strategies to reduce discretionary food intake in the Australian population. We found cutting discretionary choice intake by half or replacing half of discretionary choices with the five food groups would have significant benefits for reducing intake of energy and so-called “risk” nutrients (sodium and added sugar), while maintaining or improving overall diet quality.

Main contributors to discretionary foods

Alcohol is often the forgotten discretionary choice. The NHMRC 2009 guidelines state:

For healthy men and women, drinking no more than two standard drinks on any day (and no more than four standard drinks on a single occasion) reduces the lifetime risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury.

For adults aged 51–70, alcoholic drinks account for more than one-fifth (22%) of discretionary food intake. Alcohol intake in adults aged 51-70+ has increased since 1995. This age group includes people at the peak of their careers, retirees and older people. Stress, increased leisure time, mental health challenges and factors such as loneliness and isolation would all play a part in this complex picture.

Read more: Four ways alcohol is bad for your health

Young children have small appetites and every bite matters. The guidelines suggest 2-to-3-year-olds should have very limited exposure to discretionary foods. In, studies the greatest levels of excess weight are seen in preschool years.

Biscuits, cakes and muffins are the key source of added sugars for young children. These are also the top source of energy and saturated fat and a key source of salt in young children. This is the time when lasting food habits and preferences are formed.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University

You walk and talk and live on land, but your ancient relatives were fish.

It took about 480 million years for these fish to evolve and adapt to different environments and become the many different back-boned species (including ourselves) that are known as vertebrates.

But how did it happen?

Read more: It’s less than 2cm long, but this 400 million year old fossil fish changes our view of vertebrate evolution

The field of palaeontology looks at the when, where and why of animals changing over time and in response to their environment. Today a new paper by University of Pennsylvania’s Lauren Sallan (with other US and UK colleagues) answers the “where” question concerning our most distant fishy ancestors.

For the first time, the work shows that shallow coastal lagoons were vital in the early days of fish evolution. Today, similar seas (“shelf seas”) include places like Bass Strait, where water less than 200m deep forms around a continental shelf.

These places are still important today in sustaining biodiversity of life on Earth – so if we don’t look after our shallow oceans, the long term consequences for sea life could be dire.

Invasion of the ocean

To conduct their research, the scientists used a database of 2,827 fossil vertebrate species. These spanned the 120 million years from when fishes first appeared (around 480 million years ago) to when they conquered the land as four-limbed creatures known as tetrapods (around 360 million years ago). The database plotted species habitats against their time ranges, and identified important stages in new species forming (known as diversification).

The research highlights that nearshore coastal environments, including estuarine and lagoonal settings, were hotspots for major episodes of early vertebrate diversification – not the open oceans where we might think fishes would naturally undergo evolutionary events.

Fishes with robust body shapes (such as lobe-finned species like the lungfishes) later sought habitats closer to land to diversify, whereas slender small-scaled forms like the jawless thelodontids (such as the yellow fish in the image below) and certain sharks tended to move to deeper water environments.

Lead researcher Lauren Sallan told me:

This research sets up an “invasion of the ocean” on par with the invasion of land. Our early ancestors moved into freshwaters quickly, but shifts onto reefs, and from there to the open ocean and new continents, required a great deal of time and change.

Fish with and without jaws

The first diversification of early jawless fishes (resembling the lampreys and hagfish of today) lead to many armoured fish groups appearing early in the Silurian Period (around 420 million years ago). Armoured fish had hard plates on their bodies, and most lived in shallow inland seas of the Northern hemisphere continents.

The oldest fossil record of jawless fishes comes from Australia, as seen by simple torpedo-shaped forms like Arandaspis that lived in the shallow Larapintine seaway across Australia some 470 million years ago.

The first great radiation of jawed fishes (known as “gnathostomes”) took place in China about 440 million years ago. By the start of the Devonian Period (419 million years ago), all the major groups of jawed fishes had appeared and dispersed to all parts of the globe.

Read more: The eyes have it: how vision may have driven fishes onto land

Other fishes evolved in discrete regions, like the East Gondwana Province (Australia and Antarctica) and in the supercontinent of Euramerica (a landmass combining much of North America and Europe).

Animals known as “the Wuttagoonaspis fauna” included many bizarre forms of placoderm and other primitive fishes, and is Australia’s oldest local group of vertebrates. Remains of these distinctive fishes that lived around 395 million years ago are found at many sites within a two million square kilometre area of central Australia.

Historic reefs were different

Reefs are well known as hotspots of biodiversity – today, many thousands of species of fishes live around coral reefs. But we now know this wasn’t always the case.

Prehistoric reefs, known from about 500 million years ago, were built by different organisms throughout time. Devonian period reefs, home to many species of fishes, were predominantly constructed by algae and sponges, with lesser input from corals.

Kimberley Devonian reefs were home to over 50 different species of ancient fishes that lived on algal structures bordering most of north-western Australia.

But the new research shows that Silurian and Devonian reefs were not unusually high in diversity, as previously supposed. This suggests that reefs played a much less important role in the early rise of jawed fishes than we thought.

Look after our shallow waters

The take home message of the new paper is that the cradle of early vertebrate diversification took place mostly in shallow water habitats near or spilling over the edges of a continent.

The regular rise and fall of sea levels over time would have had a great effect on habitat size for these marine species, making them particularly vulnerable to extinction when communities lived in basins that developed low oxygen levels.

Such extinctions involved many factors, and wiped out some of the dominant groups of fishes at the end of the Devonian period, including the placoderms. This allowed the modern fish groups, comprising mostly bony fishes and sharks, to become established.

Read more: Elementary new theory on mass extinctions that wiped out life

The research holds some implications for today, as explained by one of the paper’s authors, University of Birmingham’s Ivan Sansom:

This work highlights how important these increasingly vulnerable near-shore areas are for species evolution. Modern threats from a combination of climate change, elevated sea levels, over-fishing and pollution could have extremely damaging effects on future species diversification.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Wright, Associate Professor in History, La Trobe University

When Kerryn Phelps claimed her historic by-election win on the weekend, she called the triumph a “a victory for democracy”, signalling “a return of decency, integrity and humanity to the Australian government”.

As well as taking a progressive stand on social issues, Phelps vowed to represent all those who were disgusted by the internal brawling and destructive power plays of Australia’s elected officials. One commentator rejoiced that people who were “tired of the spineless and incompetent politicians who are intent on destroying the joint” were finally getting their moment in the sun. “Hear us roar,” the journalist cheered, channelling a mutinous Helen Reddy.

Was Phelps aware that her roll call of values and virtues — decency, integrity, humanity — harked back to a much earlier age of grassroots political activism led by women?

The idea that institutional outliers are the new brooms that can sweep clean the filthy floors of national legislatures has a far-reaching lineage. “Cleansing the Augean stables” has long been an allegory for ridding an administration of corruption. Most recently, we have seen what can happen when a perceived underdog promises to “drain the swamp” of American government, as Donald Trump did.

Trump was hailed as the hero of the marginalised and silenced — those buried by the sludge of Washington — for being a man of steel, able to leap petty bureaucrats (and nasty women) in a single bound.

But the “new brooms” metaphor for scrubbing the halls of power has more often been gendered female. This is particularly true in Australia, where white women had a singular advantage: they were the first in the world to win the right to stand for parliament, a paradigm-shifting reform that was ushered in by the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act in 1902. Pre-figuring Phelps, Australia’s trail-blazing political reformers at the turn of the 20th century were fully enfranchised women intent on using their new super power to puncture the fetid pustule of federal parliament.

Read more: Quotas are not pretty but they work – Liberal women should insist on them

One of the arguments against women’s eligibility to sit in parliament was that parliament, like the pub, was “no place for a lady”. “If such were true,” countered Nellie Martel, who stood for election to the Senate in 1903, “women should be sent there to purify it, and it certainly required cleansing.”

The notion that women would “purify politics” through their inherent female qualities of munificence, rectitude and sobriety — as well as maternal skills of negotiation, conciliation and care — was central to the suffragists’ moral claim to political equality.

Vida Goldstein, who also ran for the Senate in 1903, adopted a light-hearted way to describe the need for women’s direct parliamentary representation:

Man seems to be constitutionally unable to keep things tidy.

As I write in my new book, during her 1903 campaign for the Senate Goldstein joked that it had always been woman’s lot to tidy up after men: “He leaves the bathroom in a state of flood, his dressing-room a howling wilderness of masculine paraphernalia, his office a chaos of ink and papers” — and this disorderly boor was equally “untidy in the nation”. No wonder the “national household” was in such “a terrible state of muddle”. Women’s vote and their presence in parliament would, according to Goldstein, lead to a more principled approach to “national housekeeping”.

Such gendered metaphors and stereotypes were not challenged by Edwardian-era women’s rights advocates. It was a later generation of feminists whose demand was to be liberated from the role of “angel of the hearth” or spiritual redeemer — God’s Police, the hand rocking the cradle and wielding the broom.

Suffrage campaigners of the early 20th century proudly accepted their “natural” function as civilisers of the civilisers. (It’s sobering to remember that the same act that gave Australia’s white women their leading global edge also disenfranchised all Indigenous Australians on the grounds that, as Senator Alexander Matheson argued in debating the Franchise Bill, “if every one of these savages and their gins [were put] upon the federal rolls” the nation would be “swamped by aboriginal votes”).

In settler-colonial White Australia, suffragists simply wanted the political power to make the white man’s burden woman’s burden too.

But the first-wave feminists would be rolling in their largely unmarked graves to know that women joining the ranks of parliamentarians barely changed their male colleagues’ outlook and demeanour at all. Some women (Margaret Thatcher, for example) revelled in the opportunity to play the hawk and had no qualms about ruffling geopolitical and domestic feathers in the most noxious fashion. Other women have found it more difficult to adopt moves from the playbook of toxic masculinity: belligerence, bellicosity and bullying.

Recently, we’ve seen female MPs in Australia call time’s up — or at least time-out — on such on-field antics, particularly when the aggression is directed at women themselves. In August this year, Liberal MP Julia Banks announced her decision to quit federal politics, citing the “cultural and gender bias, bullying and intimidation” of women in parliament.

Read more: A ‘woman problem’? No, the Liberals have a ‘man problem’, and they need to fix it

It’s worrisome that the prevailing culture of sexism has changed so little in over a century of parliamentary politics being a gender-inclusive workplace. “We were subjected to ridicule, contempt, abuse and to anything but flattering cartoons,” lamented Nellie Martel after her 1903 Senate campaign. The limits of participatory democracy are sorely tested by such cultural intransigence.

Despite Kerryn Phelps and her support crew being dressed in suffragette purple — the symbolic colour of courage — she did not claim her victory as a win for women as such. Rather, as a seasoned and astute campaigner, Phelps flew the flag for the non-party vote. By running as an independent, she was able to channel the disaffection and discontent of a cosmopolitan community.

This call to grassroots activism was also a hallmark of the Federation-era feminists. Vida Goldstein deplored what she called “the ticket system” of politics. In her view, the party machine led to “disastrous consequences”: feeble candidates, selfish and greedy egoists, mere “log-rollers” who had been trundled into parliament purely because they were on the party’s ticket. Oftentimes, such politicians were “men of doubtful character, men whose social life is a scandal” and who could be found “intoxicated” in parliament.

The teetotalling Goldstein ran for parliament as an independent five times – in vain. Contemporaries believed she would have easily won if she’d stood for the Labor Party. Women, it transpired, voted more along class than gender lines.

It may well be that neither female voters nor female politicians turned out to be the democratic disinfectants that the women who fought for the franchise expected. Perhaps, the degree of muck and debris to which they were exposed as fully enfranchised citizens was more insidiously entrenched than they could have imagined from outside the stable.

Or, maybe, women just aren’t that fond of cleaning. But one insight from the Federation era of hope and optimism still rings true. Goldstein was ever at pains to:

… give honour where honour is due: to the men of Australia, who have grown so far in democratic sentiment that they can tolerate the idea of living with political equals.

Living with and as political equals is surely the most potent solution for reform.

Clare Wright is the author of You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, by Text Publishing.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Garry Jennings, Chief Medical Advisor at National Heart Foundation of Australia; Senior Director, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute

Heart attacks happen more frequently in winter, a major Swedish study has confirmed.

Published today in JAMA Cardiology the research found the incidence of heart attacks in a sample of more than one-quarter of a million people increased with lower air temperature, lower atmospheric air pressure, higher wind velocity and shorter sunshine duration.

They saw the most pronounced association with air temperature. An increase in 7.4℃ was associated with a 2.8% reduction of heart attack risk.

Doctors have long acknowledged heart attacks are more likely to occur in cold weather. Every medical student over the past five decades has seen medical artist Frank H Netter’s classical illustration of a middle-aged man clutching his chest as he steps out of a warm building into a cold winter’s night.

Not all heart attacks are typical but in the mind of Netter and his medical advisers of the time, there is nothing more typical than that.

It is well documented that heart attack rates rise soon after a major natural disasters such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption or tsunami. These probably bring forward the timing a heart attack that was going to happen anyway as there are slightly fewer heart attacks a few weeks later.

But natural disasters are of course unpredictable, so we can’t prepare for them in the same way as some natural rhythms: night and day, summer or winter, wet or dry seasons. This is why research that confirms something we can plan for is a risk factor is important.

Predicting heart attacks

Reasons for why someone is prone to a heart attack are clear. These are obvious risk factors such as high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, smoking or diabetes as well as unseen underlying genetic and environmental factors. But the the reasons for the timing of heart attack are more difficult to understand.

Atherosclerosis, the underlying disease process leading to blockage of a coronary artery and heart attack, develops over many decades. There appears to be randomness to when thrombosis, the blood clot that forms in a vein or artery and causes the final and sudden event, occurs. It can occur during sleep, emotional stress and extreme physical activity – but more commonly, it occurs when not much is happening at all.

Read more: How Australians Die: cause #1 – heart diseases and stroke

Then there are other people with advanced coronary artery disease who have never had a heart attack. If we knew more about the short-term triggers, we could help people with coronary disease avoid some of them. And if we knew some of the longer-term influences on rates, we could tailor scarce resources in the emergency and health systems to be ready for peak periods.

Why is winter riskier?

There is a clear association between cold and artery function (the vessels that deliver oxygenated blood from the heart to other parts of the body). This can be illustrated by a common physiology lab manoeuvre known as the cold pressor test. People are asked to put their forearm into iced water. Blood pressure rises immediately because arteries constrict, presumably to maintain core body temperature at normal levels.

Read more: Health Check: what do my blood pressure numbers mean?

Simple hydrodynamics tells us constriction is more profound and impacts more on the flow through a tube – in this case a coronary artery – at points of obstruction. In a few people with coronary disease the cold pressor test is enough to cause the artery to spasm and for flow to cease until the artery relaxes again.

But there are other factors that make heart attack more likely in winter than in summer. In many places, air pollution is more common, and evidence is accumulating that certain particles in the air are related to heart disease. Winter is also flu season, which makes people already at risk of heart disease more vulnerable.

And our life is very different in winter than in summer. Studies performed by myself and my colleague Dr Gillian Deakin while she spent a year on a polar station in Antarctica demonstrated this. In winter it is always dark, and the weather prevents expeditioners doing much outside activity; they tend to put on weight and drink more alcohol.

Inevitably emotions are high when a disparate group is confined to a small area for a long time and away from their families and other everyday supports. Not surprisingly, their heart health was not the same as when they arrived. Blood pressure was higher and the metabolic pattern of their blood less healthy. This was remedied with a regular supervised exercise program.

Read more: Interactive body map: physical inactivity and the risks to your health

In summer there was a general feeling of “joie de vivre” as expeditioners conducted most of their work activities for the year. These often involved long hikes, moving large items of equipment and other physically demanding tasks. More light and milder weather allowed more time for outside leisure activities too as they explored the extraordinary Antarctic landscape and fauna.

Their blood pressure and metabolic profile improved markedly. The same exercise program they had undertaken in winter did little to improve these further as they were already at peak or near peak fitness.

What about heat?

This is an extreme example of what happens to many of us in temperate climates across the seasons and most smaller studies have reported a similar pattern to Sweden. Sudden variations in temperature also seem to be associated with heart attacks.

In Sweden and Antarctica there are very cold winters and much warmer summers. What about in the tropics where extreme heat is a defining climatic feature. A study in Pakistan also found a winter peak in admissions to coronary care units in winter. However, there was another peak in mid-summer when temperatures were highest.

So, by all means keep warm and comfortable in winter but get out and do something too. Look after your risk factors and see your doctor regularly for a heart check.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rosemary Stanton, Nutritionist & Visiting Fellow, UNSW

A new study out this week has shoppers wondering whether it’s worth paying more for pesticide-free organic food.

The research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found those who chose more organically grown foods over 4.5 years had slightly lower rates of cancer, and in particular, lymphoma and postmenopausal breast cancer.

But while there is a correlation between eating organic foods and lower rates of cancer, it doesn’t necessarily mean one caused the other. People who choose organic foods are likely to be healthier, wealthier and better educated, all factors known to impact risk of cancer.

Read more: Clearing up confusion between correlation and causation

As the researchers note, this is the first study of its kind. The findings need to be confirmed in other studies before organic food can be proposed as a preventive strategy against cancer.

Past research has found, however, that higher intakes of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains – however they’re grown – and lower intakes of processed and red meats can decrease your risk of cancer.

So, if you don’t want to buy organic produce or can’t afford it, it’s fine to buy conventionally grown plant foods, especially if this means you eat more fruit and veg.

How was the research conducted?

This research was part of the French NutriNet-Santé study and included almost 70,000 volunteers who were free of cancer.

At the beginning of the study, each participants’ diet was assessed based on the French nutritional guidelines and their food and drink consumption recorded in three 24-hour snapshots over two weeks.

Two months into the study, the participants were asked to provide specific information about their consumption of 16 categories of organically labelled foods. This included fruits, vegetables, soy-based products, dairy products, meat and fish, and so on.

The participants were then given an “organic food score”. If they chose organically produced foods in all 16 categories, they would get a maximum score of 32.

The health of each participant was assessed each year and monitored for a median period of 4.5 years. When any cases of cancer occurred, details were independently confirmed with the individual’s hospital or treating physician.

What did they find?

The participants’ organic food scores ranged from 0.7 to 19.4. These were used to divide the group into equal quartiles.

The overall cancer risk was 25% lower in those who had the highest organic food score.

Read more: Interactive body map: what really gives you cancer?

Cancers showing the greatest correlation with decreased risk were breast cancer (especially in postmenopausal women) and lymphomas (especially non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma).

No correlation appeared with prostate or colorectal cancers, although the relatively short time frame would have made any change unlikely.

What do we need to take into account?

As previous studies with this group had shown, people who choose organically grown products tend to have higher income, higher levels of education and healthier diets. So the researchers adjusted for these factors.

They also made adjustments for other factors that could affect the outcome: age, sex, the month the participants were included in the program, marital status, physical activity, smoking status, alcohol intake, family history of cancer, body mass index, height, energy intake, and the intake of dietary fibre and also red and processed meat.

For women (who made up 78% of the study group), they also adjusted for the number of children they had, oral contraception use, postmenopausal status and use of hormonal treatment for menopause.

But although the researchers tried to adjust their results for these confounding factors, when so many are relevant in those who consumed more organically grown products, it’s hard to be definite about the validity of the findings.

Participants with a high organic food score also had generally healthier diets with higher intake of fruits and vegetables and lower consumption of red and processed meats. They also had lower levels of obesity.

So was it pesticides in conventional products that are related to some cancers, as the researchers hypothesised? Or is it that those who choose organic products over conventional foods have better diets and healthier lifestyles?

This research doesn’t, and can’t, tell us the answer.

Read more: Organic, grass fed and hormone-free: does this make red meat any healthier?

Confirmation in future studies

This is the first study of its kind. The only study with some resemblance was a 2014 British study that asked women if they ate organic foods “never, sometimes, usually or always”.

The British researchers found 21% less non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in women who “usually or always” ate organic food. It also noted organic food eaters had a very slight increase in breast cancer (but the participants also drank more alcohol and had fewer children – both factors that can increase the risk of breast cancer).

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified some pesticides as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. This means there is limited evidence of a link between pesticide use and cancer in humans, but sufficient evidence of a link between pesticide use and cancer in experimental animal studies.

Read more: Stop worrying and trust the evidence: it’s very unlikely Roundup causes cancer

There’s also evidence that people who consume more organically grown products have lower levels of pesticide residue in their urine and some research showing that self-reported intake of organic produce can be used to predict urinary levels of metabolites of some pesticides. So it’s an area worthy of more research.

The French study may have told us more if it included more accurate measurements of the various organically grown foods that were consumed and also the levels of particular pesticide residues in the participants’ urine.

An ideal way to study this issue in future would be to monitor rates of cancer in a group of similar people. Half would be given set amounts of organically grown foods; the other half would have the same amount of the same foods grown using conventional agriculture.

Their urinary levels of pesticide residues and the incidence of cancer over some years could then be assessed more accurately.

But the time and costs to conduct such a study make it unlikely to happen. – Rosemary Stanton

Blind peer review

The article is presents a fair, balanced and accurate assessment of the research study. – Tim Crowe

Read more: Research Check: will eating ‘ultra-processed’ foods give you cancer?

Research Checks interrogate newly published studies and how they’re reported in the media. The analysis is undertaken by one or more academics not involved with the study, and reviewed by another, to make sure it’s accurate.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jaime Gongora, Associate Professor, Animal and Wildlife Genetics and Genomics, University of Sydney

When you hear “beauty pageants” you probably think of human women (and men) competing. However, a series of pageants on the Arabian Peninsula celebrate the beauty of the dromedary, or one-humped camel.

Interest in camel beauty competitions has grown since the boom of oil production during the 20th century, as camels became associated with status and wealth.

Read more: Fossil suggests giant ancient camels roamed Canada’s Arctic north

These pageants have become massive. In 2017, some 30,000 camels competed in the King Adul Aziz Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia, which has a prize pool of around AU$45 million. The winners in six categories each get roughly AU$7.5 million, along with the crown of “Miss Camel”.

The lure of these glittering prizes has also led to cheating. Earlier this year 12 camels were disqualified from a camel beauty pageant in Saudi Arabia after receiving Botox injections to improve the look of their lips and noses.

So what constitutes a prize-winning camel?

Omani camel contests

Many breeds of camels compete in pageants across the Arabian Peninsula, so they are all assessed differently. I have worked with the Omani Camel Racing Federation to help develop a new scoring system, which aims to improve transparency and fairness.

A requirement of Omani beauty contests is that only pure-bred camels from Oman may participate. Camel owners must testify under oath to the authenticity of their animals’ pedigree, or they are banned from taking part.

Local committees of experts assess and rank the camels, which are categorised by age after a teeth examination. They look for:

• Coat: a natural appearance with shiny hair of a clearly definable colour. The brighter the hair, the more beautiful the pageant entrant is considered to be. No hair-colouring, tattooing or other cosmetic modification is allowed.

• Neck: must be long, wide, and elegant and lean, neither overly full nor skinny. The area between the neck and the hump should be long and strong.

• Head: should be large and upright as well as proportioned to the rest of the body. Lips are pouty and pendulous, with the upper lip being cleft, chin is visible from the front and side, and eyes are wide with long, dark lashes. Ears are long, furrowed and pricked up, and also keep the sand out.

• Hump: large and shapely, in the usual position close to the back – a good posture and a large hump may increase a camel’s chance of winning.

How competitions happen

Pageant contestants are housed away from the sun and fed milk, wheat, honey and dates before the competition. During the contest itself, a handful of judges appointed by Omani Camel Racing Federation inspect the camels, consult with each other, and rank the animals. The whole scoring process is qualitative, and at no point do the judges write a score or explain the reasoning behind their decisions.

The increasing popularity of camel beauty contests has caused some dissatisfaction over the absence of a formal scoring system.

While studying the genetics of a range of animals as diverse as crocodiles, platypuses, oryxes, wild pigs and peccaries, I agreed to take on a project to define criteria for competitions, based on the traditional judging system.

We began with a simple question: “What features make a camel beautiful from an Omani perspective?” We then developed a numerical scoring card to help judges explain their decisions.

We identified 22 body measurements across the head, upper body, front and rear, as well as general appearance and colour. Each of these is scored to give a maximum total of 100 points. The judges we have consulted are happy with the outcome and are looking forward to validating the system in upcoming major contests across Oman.

We are also assessing overall genetic patterns of the pageant contestants and their association with beauty traits. We will be extending our genetic studies to camels used for racing, milk and meat in Oman.

Read more: From feral camels to ‘cocaine hippos’, large animals are rewilding the world

The scoring and ranking of camels during beauty contests can be a challenging business. We hope giving judges a numerical system will lend support to their decisions and help keep the owners and the general public, and consequently the pageant contestants, happy.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tonia Gray, Associate Professor, Centre for Educational Research, Western Sydney University

Contrary to the belief we Aussies are a nature-loving outdoor nation, research suggests we’re spending less and less time outdoors. This worrying trend is also becoming increasingly apparent in our educational settings.

I have devoted the majority of my teaching and academic career to examining the relationship of people and nature. In the last few decades, society has become estranged from the natural world, primarily due to urban densification and our love affair with technological devices (usually located in indoor built environments).

Contact with nature can enhance creativity, bolster mood, lower stress, improve mental acuity, well-being and productivity, cultivate social connectedness, and promote physical activity. It also has myriad educational benefits for teaching and learning.

Read more: Why a walk in the woods really does help your body and your soul

Outdoors and learning

The word “kindergarten” originated in the 1840s from the ideologies of German educator Friedrich Froebel and literally translates to “children garden”. Propelled by innate curiosity and wonder, a Froebelian approach to education is premised on the understanding students learn best when they undertake imaginative play and curious exploration.

Not only is outdoor play central to children’s enjoyment of childhood, it teaches critical life skills and enhances growth and development.

Contemporary research shows outdoor play-based learning can also help improve educational outcomes. A recent study found being outside stimulated learning and improved concentration and test scores.

Nature contact also plays a crucial role in brain development with one recent study finding cognitive development was promoted in association with outdoor green space, particularly with greenness at schools.

Autonomy and freedom in the outdoors is both liberating and empowering for kids. Burning off excess energy outdoors makes children calmer and fosters pro-social behaviours.

Teaching and learning in natural environments encourages self-mastery through risk taking, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, and student-centred discovery. Imagination is also enhanced by free, unstructured play.

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

How to get kids outdoors more

Children need outdoor play, but we’re not giving them enough opportunity. Countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway spend up to half the school day outdoors (rain, hail or shine) exploring the real-world application of their classroom learning. Here’s what parents and teachers can do to get kids outside more.

Taking the classroom outside

Children learn better when they can experience learning, rather than hearing it read from a text book. A study in Chicago used brain scans to show students who took a hands-on approach to learning had experienced an activation in their sensory and motor-related parts of the brain. Later, their recall of concepts and information was shown to have greater clarity and accuracy.

Practical lessons outside will stick better in young brains than learning theory from a book. This may be why in 2017, the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (ACARA) included outdoor learning in the national curriculum.

Options for teachers include taking the class outside to write poetry about nature, measuring the height of trees for maths classes, or de-stressing using mindfulness and breathing techniques while sitting quietly in the shade of a tree.

An upcoming initiative Outdoor Classroom Day is happening in schools across Australia on November 1. This is a day where teachers are encouraged to take their classes outside. Alternatively, parents can make a special effort to take their child to the local park, river or beach.

Less time on screens

Conversations with parents and teachers show they’re increasingly concerned about technology’s broader impact on their children, in both dramatic and subtle ways.

In many ways our hunger for technology has overridden our desire for direct human interaction. Screens compete directly with authentic channels of communication such as face-to-face interaction. To combat this, parents can assign one hour on and one hour off screens.

Parents are role models and so we also need to monitor our own time on screens and spend quality time with children detached from our digital devices.

The sad reality is technology can become a pseudo-parenting device, a form of pacifier to keep the kids busy. Instead, we can encourage our kids to engage in simple, unstructured play experiences.

These could include creating an outdoor scavenger hunt where they collect items from nature, building forts or dens incorporating inexpensive materials such as branches and old sheets or blankets, climbing trees, or laying on the grass and looking upwards into the sky to watch the cloud formations.

Other methods include making mud pies or sandcastles at the beach or in a sandbox; encouraging the collection of feathers, petals, leaves, stones, driftwood, twigs or sticks to make creative artworks on large sheets of paper; planting a garden with vegetable seedlings or flowers with your child (let them decide what will be planted); putting on a jacket and gumboots when it rains and jump in puddles together; or making an outdoor swing or billycart.

Nature offers a never-ending playground of possibilities with all the resources and facilities needed. If stuck, search on the web for wild play or nature play groups nearby as they are growing in popularity and number. But most importantly, reinforce the message that getting wet, having dirt stains on their clothes and getting their hair messy is good and adds to the fun.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Wallis, Lecturer and Research Fellow, University of Southern Queensland

Many Australians dream about moving to the country, escaping the city for good.

We might have grown up watching television shows such as All Creatures Great and Small. More recently, we might have tuned in to McLeod’s Daughters, Gourmet Farmer or River Cottage.

This year the ABC has started production of Escape from the City, an Australian version of the long-running and popular British Escape to the Country series. And Channel Nine is reviving the series SeaChange, with its producer saying it’s more relevant now than when it first aired 20 years ago.

Read more: Meet the new seachangers: now it’s younger Australians moving out of the big cities

It seems many of us dream about making our escape from the rat race while watching these shows or leafing through a copy of Country Style magazine.

Most Australians live in cities, but there seems to be a collective desire to escape the concrete and glass for green fields and open spaces. Those who do this are popularly known in Australia as seachangers and treechangers.

So what is the media’s role in this?

My recent research has shown that the ideas of rural life presented in media can influence certain people in such a way that they might relocate to the country themselves. For these people, the places they end up moving to tend to embody in some way the values and ideals they find important. These values tend to be reflected in and shared in the media they consume.

Media – whether magazines, television shows, movies, or blogs – give consumers a space to imaginatively explore different ideas and roles. Leafing through the October 2018 issue of Country Style illustrates this. The “Living History” story sets the scene:

A sprawling heritage house in NSW’s upper Blue Mountains is the perfect stage for a family’s treasured collections.

Readers feel transported to this idyllic lifestyle, and the accompanying glossy pictures enable them to imagine their own lives in the country. They can picture themselves there, feel what it may feel like for the people in the story, experience the joys and sense their troubles.

Readers will maybe say things like how much they like this room, or how they hate the colour of the paint there. In doing this, they’re exploring these ideas in their own minds and relating to them.

This then allows people to expand their concepts of themselves. They can take these ideas and adopt the bits they want into their own lives. Influenced by the pictures in the story, they might choose to buy the table shown in the living room, or copy the style of sink in the kitchen. They might even decide to adopt a bigger version of this life story and move to the country themselves.

Read more: A housing affordability crisis in regional Australia? Yes, and here’s why

This is what these media do – they expand people’s imagination with new concepts that can be adopted or discarded as desired.

Tastes, values and ideals reflected and reinforced

The objects shown in the above example reflect taste. The style of house, the furniture, the clothes worn are all examples of taste, put together by stylists, home owners and photographers. They demonstrate the values and ideals that the owners want to share with others in material form.

In the magazine’s example, the armoire is painted a distressed white. The kitchen bench is an old converted table. These pieces of furniture have patina, which reflects longevity and connectedness.

The enclosed verandah floors are covered in jute rugs; these natural fibres connect people to the land and nature.

Owning objects like these gives people an opportunity to share their identity through material culture, which strengthens both their identity and their personal narrative.

The ideals and ideas passed on in this way are linked together in groupings called social imaginaries. These are sets of values and ideas common to a particular group of people.

In River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer, for instance, values include home-grown food and the beauty of the rural landscape. These shows promote an ideal of the country that is commonly shared by viewers who believe these things, or a version of them, themselves.

The original SeaChange series valued natural spaces such as the beach it was set on and the small town’s friendly community. These values are less evident in cities.

Media reinforce what the audience already has affinity for, and the audience influences what is produced because media creators want their work to succeed in the marketplace. This is an ongoing cycle that is self-perpetuating and evolving. It’s tweaked and adjusted continually, because media productions echo the culture they’re produced in.

We might think that we’re independent people who decide things for ourselves, but we also live in and are influenced by a culture that is reflected back at us through media and has impacts on our ideas about ourselves and our lives. We can’t underestimate the power of these reflections on our daily decision-making.

Read more: Why young women say no to rural Australia

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Hodgson, Associate Professor, Curtin Law School and Curtin Business School, Curtin University

Talk about a solution seeking a problem.

Former prime minister Paul Keating this week called for a national insurance scheme to support Australians aged 80 and over.

He says it will be needed to pay medical and other bills when super runs out, often around the age of 80.

We already have such a scheme. It’s called the age pension.

Read more: We won’t fix female super until we fix female pay, but Labor’s ideas are a start

We are prudent in retirement

As it happens, research from the Productivity Commission has found that older Australians are generally prudent in retirement.

Less than 30% of superannuation assets are taken as lump sums, and the amounts taken are small; typically around A$20,000 per person.

These amounts are usually used to pay down debt or to buy goods and services that can be used throughout retirement, such as home improvements and consumer durables.

The Productivity Commission reports concern that some retirees run down their superannuation balances too slowly.

The former prime minister’s idea isn’t new. He has been talking about an extra superannuation contribution of 2-3% of salary for some years. He badged it “Super Mark II” at a forum organised by Australia’s richest man, Anthony Pratt, executive chairman of Visy Industries, last November.

Yet we would be asked to pay another levy

It would require all taxpayers to pay a levy, as for Medicare, which would be used to fund an insurance scheme that would pay age care and health bills for those who lived beyond 80.

Like any insurance scheme, it wouldn’t pay out to those who paid the levy but didn’t satisfy the payout requirement – in this case living beyond 80.

It would be a form of longevity insurance, just like the age pension, which is funded from general taxation.

Which not all of us would get back

On its face it would benefit women more than men, because on average they live longer.

But funding it would disproportionately hurt women. On average women’s wages are lower than men’s, meaning they would notice more an extra 2-3% of their employers’ salary bill being directed away from their pay packets. It would be on top of the 12% of salary Labor and the Coalition have pledged to eventually direct to super in a few years’ time, up from the present 9.5%.

Those women might be better served by setting the age pension and rent assistance at reasonable levels, the sort that are needed to live properly in retirement, as was originally intended.

And we already have access to lifetime anuities

The proposal also cuts across the current drive to get people to take their super payouts as deferred annuities that keep paying out for as long as they live.

These products have been available privately for some time, but their tax treatment and their treatment under the age pension means test punish people who take them up.

One of the recommendations of the 2014 Financial System Inquiry (Murray Inquiry), was that the industry further develop these products and the Treasury examine removing barriers to taking them up.

Even though they are not popular

The regulations that govern superannuation have already been amended to make it easier.

One of the problems is that, with current low returns on safe investments, such products require a large amount of capital to deliver a low income, whereas account-based pensions can do better, at least until they run out – and they are more flexible.

Adequate retirement incomes are fundamental to the dignity of Australians as they age and live longer.

Longevity is what the pension is for

For women, typically on lower working incomes than men, the continued safety net of the pension is vital to providing for them.

For the growing number of women who rent in retirement, adequate rent assistance is essential, and the current rate should be reviewed with a view to being lifted.

Doing things properly would help more people, more easily, than yet another add-on to an already complicated web of schemes.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics and PLuS Alliance Fellow, UNSW

According to ABS figures released last week, the unemployment rate in Australia has fallen to 5%. This isn’t as low as the 3.7% level in the United States, but by historical standards it is low for us.

We need to go back a decade, to just before the financial crisis of 2008, to see levels much lower than this, when the unemployment rate briefly touched 4%.

This raises the important question of what level of unemployment constitutes “full employment”?

Economists often used to say it was 5%. That’s because even if the jobs market was so tight that employers couldn’t get workers, there would always be some unemployment. Some completely unsuitable people wouldn’t get jobs and some people would be counted as unemployed even when they were moving from one job to another.

Read more: The problem with official statistics – and three ways to make them better

Attempts to stimulate the economy or cut interest rates to get the unemployment rate below 5% was therefore seen as pointless, because it would merely stoke inflation. Which is why the 5% rate has been referred to by the ungainly acronym of NAIRU – the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment.

How low can our unemployment rate fall before it genuinely reaches NAIRU and can fall no further, and what are the barriers to getting there?

The short answer is we have no idea, but we should find out by setting policy levers to push unemployment as low as we can.

Do we measure unemployment correctly?

First to the question of whether we measure the unemployment rate correctly. The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines unemployment this way:

Unemployed persons are defined as all persons aged 15 years and over who were not employed during the reference week, and (i) had actively looked for full-time or part-time work at any time in the four weeks up to the end of the reference week, and were available for work in the reference week, or (ii) were waiting to start a new job within four weeks from the end of the reference week, and could have started in the reference week if the job had been available then.“

Critics often point out that this does not capture “underemployment” – where people do work but not as much as they want to – very well at all.

Read more: How the unemployed ‘disappear’ and why it matters

They are almost surely correct, but there’s nothing new in that, meaning we can be confident comparing the unemployment statistics now to those five years or a decade ago.

Unemployment can’t be zero

The 2010 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences was won by Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Passarides for their analysis of how “search frictions” can affect markets. Chief among these frictions is looking for a job. Employers need to advertise. Employees need to find these ads. A good match must be made. These things take time.

Indeed, Peter Diamond’s seminal contribution was to show that even small frictions can have a very large effect on things like the level of unemployment. LinkedIn and online job ads are great, but they make neither search frictions nor unemployment go away.

How low can unemployment go?

The idea of NAIRU is still routinely spouted in generic commentary about why a drop in unemployment means we should immediately brace for an interest-rate rise.

But there are a couple of problems with it – which is why modern economics has largely eschewed it.

Read more: Why the unemployment rate will never get to zero percent – but it could still go a lot lower

First, NAIRU may not even exist. It is premised on the notion of a “Phillips Curve” – a stable negative relationship between the the rate of unemployment and wage rise that hasn’t been found in the data for at least 25 years.

Second, even if the NAIRU does exists, we have known for more than 20 years that its level is super-hard to estimate. Is it 5%, or 4% or 3.5%? Hard to say.

Even an architect of the theory, Nobel-prize winning Ned Phelps, has argued that structural change might change it over time..

Testing the waters

All this means that for the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates because unemployment has fallen to 5% would be a missed opportunity at best, and dangerously silly at worst.

With inflation still subdued, room to move downward on interest rates, and wages growth stagnant, we should test what full employment really means in Australia in 2018.

Having fully 5% of Australians looking for work who can’t find it – plus potentially many more underemployed – is a huge waste of economic, and much more importantly, human resources.

We shouldn’t let out-of-date acronyms and failed theories suggest otherwise.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Dalziell, Associate Professor, English and Literary Studies, University of Western Australia

This week sees the Australian release of Leonard Cohen’s posthumous volume The Flame: Poems and Selections from the Notebooks. Among the song lyrics and notebook extracts that comprise the book are selections of new poetry, much of it touching on ageing and mortality, but not without characteristic humour.

In one, the poet wryly recounts: “In the elevator / Of the Manchester Malmaison Hotel / I have to put on reading glasses / To find the button for my floor”.

This elevator experience is very different from that which Cohen had in the late 1960s at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where he encountered Janis Joplin. As legend has it, by the time the hotel’s slow-moving lift reached the fourth floor, Cohen and Joplin were destined to spend the night together.

The Chelsea Hotel is one place with which Cohen is inextricably linked, thanks in large part to the song “Chelsea Hotel no. 2” wherein he gave his own version of the Joplin liaison. Another is the Greek island of Hydra, where Cohen spent much of his 20s before “running for the money and the flesh” offered by New York’s singer-songwriter scene. He would also pinpoint Hydra’s erotic potential in song, with Half the Perfect World describing “The polished hill / The milky town” where “love’s unwilled, unleashed / Unbound”.

Cohen was working on The Flame at the very end of his life, a circumstance reflected in its contents. But his formative years on Hydra were influential in shaping his sense of self and career. The story of Cohen on Hydra in the ’60s has become central to his personal myth because it is seen as a crucial time of existential and sexual freedom, intellectual liberation and creative solidarity.

One version has it that, after several months in London on a Canadian government grant, a conversation with a suntanned bank teller on a gloomy spring day propelled Cohen to buy a ticket to Athens, and then take a ferry to Hydra in search of sunshine, succour and sex. He was to find all three in abundance and to start his makeover as a bohemian, cosmopolitan author and singer-songwriter.

The research for our book Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 has uncovered and drawn on many new first-hand accounts of Hydra’s artists and writers, as well as LIFE photographer James Burke’s photographs of this postwar expatriate community. We have been particularly indebted to a little-known New Zealand-born novelist, journalist, editor and publisher, Redmond Frankton “Bim” Wallis.

With his wife Robyn, Wallis turned up on Hydra in mid-April 1960, only days before Cohen arrived. The Wallises eventually left Hydra for good in August 1964. In September 1960, Cohen would buy an island house where he lived for much of the next decade and to which he returned occasionally throughout his life.

Fortunately for us, Wallis had a camera with him and kept a diary of his time on the island. He later worked intermittently at turning his diarised observations into fiction.

Even more fortunately, the National Library of New Zealand’s Turnbull Library later proactively solicited from Wallis numerous personal documents, including unpublished diaries, photos, correspondence and manuscripts. These included his only adult novel, Point of Origin (1961), written on Hydra, and unpublished titles such as The Submissive Body; Bees on a String; Juan Carlos and the Bad-assed Belgian; and The Unyielding Memory.

Thinly veiled autobiographical fiction

Whatever the shortcomings that saw The Unyielding Memory left unfinished, it immediately commanded our attention. The manuscript was Wallis’s attempt to represent his Hydra experience as thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, and it provides many insights into life on the island in the early 1960s. These include an intriguing first-hand account of Cohen on the brink of the international renown that would make him one of the most significant literary and musical figures of the coming decades.

Not only did Wallis and Cohen arrive on Hydra within days of each other, but they also had a similar introduction to the island when they immediately fell within the orbit of the Australian writers, George Johnston and Charmian Clift.

This couple had been on Hydra since 1955 and was the gravitational centre of the expatriate colony. With their shared devotion to writing piqued by the quarrelsome intensity of their relationship, Johnston and Clift — who appear in The Unyielding Memory as George and Catherine Grayson — adopted a nurturing attitude to the younger generation of would-be authors and artists who made their way to the island. They organised accommodation for the newly arrived Wallises and provided a bed in their own house for Cohen.

Wallis and Cohen would become close. They were of similar age, with Wallis born in September 1933 and Cohen in September 1934. They would have recognised in each other the commonalities in their conservative, upper-middle-class, religiously based backgrounds. The rabbis in Cohen’s family were matched by the ministers in Wallis’s.

It was a similarity that Wallis acknowledged in The Unyielding Memory, although the character Nick Alwyn (Wallis) ruefully observes that while he and Saul Rubens (Cohen) had a shared experience of overbearing mothers, “Saul somehow managed to cope with that, [and] there was no trace of it in his work”.

They were also united by stepping into, and becoming part of, an intricate web of artistic, intellectual and sexual rivalries and affiliations that swirled through the expatriate community amid long days and nights in the taverns and kafenia of the dockside agora.

The Unyielding Memory follows closely the known relationship between Wallis and Cohen as they establish themselves among the expats. This includes Cohen’s rapidly blossoming relationship with Marianne Ihlen (Margaretha in the manuscript) and his purchase of an island house; Cohen visiting the Wallises when they spend a period in London — where he introduces them to marijuana — and the Wallises moving into Cohen’s/Rubens’s house when they return to Hydra and Cohen/Ruben is away.

Letters between Cohen and Wallis

During Cohen’s/Rubens’s absence, the relationship continues in the form of correspondence between the two characters. The letters in the novel are based entirely on correspondence between Wallis and Cohen. They show Cohen/Rubens focused on the reception of his work and the demands put upon him as his career moves into television and film, while Wallis/Alwyn is interested in reporting to his absent landlord island happenings and gossip, of which there are plenty.

The other important link between the two young men is the literary one, as their comparable upbringings in cities at the fringe of the Anglophone literary world find them equally ambitious and serious in their intention to make a living from writing. There was, however, a notable gulf in their achievements at the point when they arrived on Hydra.

By 1960 Cohen already had a reputation as a promising poet with support from some of Canada’s foremost writers of a previous generation. He also had a first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), to his credit, which had been generously praised by Northrop Frye, Canada’s (and indeed North America’s) leading critic.

Wallis, on the other hand, had little to his literary arsenal in 1960 other than ambition. In his diaries Wallis reported his belief of Cohen: “This one is going to come very close to being a great writer.” In The Unyielding Memory, Wallis/Alwyn concedes that Cohen/Rubens not only possesses abilities that far outweigh his own, but these are also married to an intense focus that he himself is unable to match.

As Wallis wrote, he found in Cohen’s/Rubens’s demeanour an ironic, observational detachment that seemed necessary to a writer.

[Rubens] interested Nick, because he seemed to be so self-contained, mildly amused by what he saw around him, passionate about work, and deliberately enigmatic. His public utterances were always somewhat non-committal or pregnantly oblique … He was, to use a word coming into fashion, cool.

Wallis creates a portrait of a man who could engage in literary matters without the competitiveness that troubles others’ relationships. He also paints Cohen/Rubens at some remove from the boisterous expatriates but also willing and happy to socialise with them.

As photographs of Cohen strumming a guitar one September evening at the Douskos taverna in 1960 suggest, while his career as a singer-songwriter was still some years away, he had a fledgling ability to engage an audience. According to the Australian political commentator Mungo MacCallum, another who found himself on Hydra in the early 1960s, Cohen’s musical tastes in those days were “union songs – Old Paint, the horse with the union label, was a speciality”. Wallis recorded Cohen/Rubens similarly:

As for Saul’s politics he was, Nick had decided, as revolutionary as the songs he sang, but an observer. Saul would never — like Malraux, like Camus — actively fight fascism. What Saul would do was look at the results of rebellion, visit Cuba, talk to radicals, observe demonstrations. He would recognise that he was not equipped to man the barricades, but was equipped to stir the emotions, to encourage.

Whereas Cohen would go on “to stir the emotions” and attract lasting international fame for his songs, books and poetry, Wallis’s future took a quieter path.

On leaving Hydra for good in 1964, Wallis returned to journalism and worked for Australian Associated Press on Fleet Street. He then had a long career in editing and publishing. He did not write another adult novel. He returned to New Zealand only rarely and briefly, living his last years in France.

Many chapters of The Unyielding Memory exist in variant drafts and reflect Wallis’s lifelong struggle to find a suitable structure for his Hydra material. As he conceded: “The problem has always been that the reality was more powerful than fiction I could invent, and turning fact into fiction has proved extraordinarily difficult.”

Taking stock

Turning his experiences into art was something Cohen was good at, as The Flame attests. There is a sense that, at the end of his life, Cohen is taking stock and putting things in order with this volume.

As per Cohen’s design, the book is organised into three sections, with drawings and self-portraits interspersed throughout. The first part is a collection of 63 poems, a selection from decades of work. The second section contains lyrics from recent albums. And the third part is made up of extracts from the notebooks Cohen kept since he was a teenager.

Among the notebook sketches is acknowledgement of the cost involved for those brought into Cohen’s creative orbit. Janis Joplin was not the only one whose encounter with Cohen was laid bare in song. Cohen writes with understanding of his Hydra lover, Marianne Ihlen (of So Long Marianne fame, a song that was started in Montreal and completed in the Chelsea Hotel):

Marianne on Aylmer Street
enduring my hatred
until it rusted
and naming me higher and higher
until my view was wide
enough to love her

The poems tell of lovers and friends, and desires hardly lessened with age. They also range across contemporary politics and music culture. One pointed poem declares “Kanye West is Not Picasso”, while a notebook entry tells of a dream of Tom Waites playing his music, “so / beautiful and original and / sophisticated – so much better / than mine”.

The last poem in the sequence, I Pray For Courage, faces death and faith directly:

I pray for courage
At the end
To see death coming
As a friend

If Cohen writes unblinkingly of his coming death, then he also looks back to his past. Tucked among the notebook extracts is a modest stanza in which he reflects on how singular and enduring his experience of Hydra is:

I could not slip away
without telling you
that I died in Greece
was buried in that
place where the donkey
is tethered to the olive tree
I will always be there

As with his chronicler, Redmond Wallis, Hydra was never far from Leonard Cohen’s mind.

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

At the unveiling of her official portrait on Wednesday, Julia Gillard said she’d wanted it to reflect that “I was different to every other prime minister who came before me”, and she hoped it would send some messages to the school children who would see it in future years.

Gillard has approached the painting – a large, dramatic close-up of her face – as part of her legacy record, which will always revolve around her as Australia’s first female PM. Beyond that – and I write as someone critical of her government at the time – I suspect she’ll likely be viewed more favourably in retrospect than while in office.

One important initiative she took was highlighted this week: she set up the royal commission into the sexual abuse of children, which led to Monday’s apology to victims. At the ceremony Gillard was the centre of warm regard.

Judgements about prime ministerial legacies often change as time goes on. The “small stuff” and the mistakes can over-influence the early assessments. With that qualification, what can we say about how the legacies of the three prime ministers of this government will be seen?

Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull will both be condemned for squandering the mandate given to the Coalition in 2013 – Abbott by breaking promises and bad decisions, Turnbull by his flawed 2016 campaign.

Scott Morrison, unless his prayers for a political miracle are answered, will go down as the fireman who arrived late armed only with leaky buckets to confront a building ablaze and collapsing.

Even after all that’s happened and regardless of Morrison’s own pragmatism, the government remains in thrall to revenge and ideology, seemingly unable to rise above either. This is despite the obvious point that the only way of improving its fortunes is to do so.

Saturday’s Liberal disaster in Wentworth brought messages that are not being heeded. If anything, the byelection result has reinforced the old schisms.

Take the hoo-ha over Morrison sending Malcolm Turnbull to represent Australia at next week’s conference in Bali on ocean sustainability. Before he was deposed, Turnbull had promised Joko Widodo that he would attend. Morrison, unable or unwilling to go himself, told the Indonesian president Turnbull would keep the appointment.

With their hostility to Turnbull further fuelled by his failure to assist the Wentworth campaign, assorted critics, including Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce, have condemned the decision to have the former PM represent Australia at this conference about the environment.

The critics simply don’t care that a row about whether Turnbull’s services are used just puts disunity on display again – to say nothing of looking petty and embarrassing to the outside world.

This is a minor sideshow, however, compared with the continuing crisis over energy policy.

Wentworth told the government voters care about climate change and want it properly addressed. The right’s argument about the seat not being typical doesn’t negate that fact – it’s a general message, albeit particularly strong from Wentworth.

Yet the government continued to display its tin ear, with its one-sided policy that fails to properly integrate emissions reduction into a broad approach on energy.

Morrison and minister Angus Taylor announced, or rather re-announced, their “big stick” measures to force power companies to lower prices, including threatening to break up recalcitrants. As well, they’re on the look out for a new coal-fired power plant to underwrite, undeterred by experts’ scepticism.

They’re deaf to the plea from a diverse group of stakeholders who in a joint statement called “on all sides of politics to deliver stable policy and investment certainty by addressing all parts of the energy trilemma – cost, reliability and emissions reduction.”

Instead the government resorts to its sloganeering about “fair dinkum power” and Angus Taylor being the minister “to get electricity prices down”. The danger for the Coalition is that come the election, Taylor’s moniker (perhaps in Labor advertising?) might become “the minister who failed to get electricity prices down”.

When he reshuffled the ministry after becoming leader, Morrison split energy and environment, giving the latter to West Australian Melissa Price. Over the past fortnight Price’s weakness as a performer has been exposed in parliament.

Although the issue she’s been pursued on – an alleged (but disputed) crass remark to the former president of Kiribati – is unrelated to emissions reduction policy, it’s obvious she’s a soft target for the opposition. Coalition strategists will be anxious to keep her out of head-to-head election debates against Labor’s competent climate spokesman, Mark Butler.

The government’s ragged edges are obvious on multiple fronts.

It has sent out conflicting signals this week on whether it is serious about trying to get refugees, especially children, off Nauru, a touchy subject in its own ranks, reflected in an emotional parliamentary speech on Thursday by Liberal MP Julia Banks.

It was unable to reach a deal with Labor to bring in legislation to scrap discrimination against gay students – which it had promised this sitting fortnight. Something that should have been simple became complicated; anyway, by this week Morrison had noticeably lost his earlier pre-Wentworth sense of urgency.

Meanwhile evidence to Senate estimates hearings exposed the haste around last week’s announcement, also directed at Wentworth, that Australia would consider moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Foreign Minister Marise Payne admitted the proposal was first discussed with her on the Sunday before the Tuesday announcement.

Morrison dismisses anything about process as just reflecting “the Canberra bubble”. But process matters for good governance – and at the moment it’s decidedly slapdash.

On Thursday Kerryn Phelps, new independent member for Wentworth, was in Canberra. Phelps has yet to be sworn in but her presence was a reminder that things will just become more fraught for the government in the hung parliament.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julie Henderson, Research Associate, Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity, Flinders University

The Royal Commission into aged care has begun its 18-month investigation into the quality and safety of Australia’s residential aged-care system.

Topping the list of priorities is to uncover substandard care, mistreatment and abuse, and to identify the system failures and actions that should be taken in response.

But we don’t need a royal commission to tell us the number-one thing that can improve care in nursing homes: implementing minimum staffing levels.

Read more: Essential reading to get your head around Australia’s aged care crisis

Based on our research from 2016, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation recommends residents receive 4 hours and 18 minutes of care per day for optimal health and well-being.

It’s also important to get the right mix of staff performing for these hours and minutes. Half of the care should be provided by care workers (who undertake a short TAFE course), 30% by registered nurses (who complete a three-year bachelor degree at university), and 20% by enrolled nurses (who complete an 18-month diploma).

Nurse ratios in hospitals

It’s no surprise nurse shortages affect patient care. Nurse staffing shortfalls in hospitals have been associated with poorer patient outcomes, longer stays in hospital, and a higher risk of death within 30 days of discharge.

Poor staffing causes stress and frustration among nurses, who constantly feel rushed and unable to provide the type of care their patients deserve. This leads to greater job dissatisfaction and burnout.

One way to ensure nurse staffing levels is to implement mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios. California did this in 1999, when it mandated ratios ranging from one nurse to two patients in intensive care, to one nurse to six patients for women who had given birth.

Read more: Australia’s aged care residents are very sick, yet the government doesn’t prioritise medical care

After the ratios were implemented, the nurses’ patient loads decreased and they reported being able to provide better quality care. They also felt more job satisfaction and were less likely to burn out. Importantly, rates of complications and premature death decreased.

Minimum aged-care staffing

Seemingly small tasks in aged care can have a big impact on residents. If they don’t receive adequate assistance at meal times, for instance, they may lose weight and become malnourished. If they’re bed-bound and aren’t moved frequently enough, they’re at risk of developing painful pressure sores.

As with hospital-based care, minimum staffing ensures staff have enough time to complete these important tasks and has been associated with improvements in health outcomes for residents with multiple illnesses.

Importantly, increasing direct care hours reduces the use of medication to manage difficult resident behaviour, allowing residents to maintain their independence.

Increasing direct nursing care also decreases the likelihood of residents being transferred to emergency departments, as their symptoms can be managed in the facility.

One key downside, however, is that the introduction of minimum staffing levels can result in a shift away from employment of registered nurses towards staff with less education and skills, as has happened in the United States.

What happens in Australia?

All Australian states and territories have legislation to determine the minimum staffing levels in hospitals to ensure patients receive timely care and close monitoring. But no such legislation exists in the aged-care sector.

The current Australian Aged Care Quality Agency standards say aged-care facilities need to be adequately staffed with appropriately skilled and qualified staff but they don’t specify what constitutes adequate.

In 2015, residents in Australian aged-care facilities received 39.8 hours of direct care per fortnight. This averaged 2.86 hours per resident per day and is significantly below the recommended 4 hours 18 minutes per day.

Read more: What is ‘quality’ in aged care? Here’s what studies (and our readers) say

Our research, commissioned by the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation commissioned research, set out to investigate what constitutes safe levels of staffing in residential aged care.

In phase one, we tested six “profiles” for residents requiring between 2.5 and 5 hours of nursing care daily, using the de-identified data of 200 residents. We then recruited experienced registered nurses to time and record what amounted to nearly 2,000 nursing and personal care interactions in hospitals, aged care and rehabilitation facilities.

We ran the six “profiles” made up of timed care activities through seven focus groups of nurses working in aged care to determine the proportion of residents who meet each profile.

Overall, we found more than 60% of aged care residents required four or more hours of care per day. This rate is likely to be similar in most aged-care facilities across the country.

The second component of our research involved surveying 3,206 staff working in aged care to determine the amount and types of care missed and the reasons why. This is care missed or delayed because of multiple demands, inadequate staffing and material resources, or communication breakdowns.

Staff believed care was being missed in all facilities, with higher levels of missed care reported in privately owned facilities (both for-profit and not-for-profit).

Unscheduled tasks such as responding to call bells and to toileting needs within five minutes were most likely to be missed – as were the social and behavioural needs of residents.

Complex care activities such as wound care, medication and end-of-life care were less likely to be missed, although there were deficits in some areas.

When asked to indicate the reasons why care was missed, the respondents cited:

• having too few staff
• the complexity of resident needs (for example, more residents receiving palliative care and with dementia)
• inadequate skill mix of nursing and care work staff
• unbalanced resident allocation (some staff having heavier workloads than others).

Beware cost saving

Many of the problems in the aged-care sector can be addressed with adequate staffing, and ensuring residents receive, at a minimum, the required 4 hours and 18 minutes of care each day. But staffing hours should not be increased by replacing nursing staff (who have clinical education and skills) with lower-skilled care workers.

Read more: Aged care failures show how little we value older people – and those who care for them

In recent years, some residential aged-care providers have been reducing the number of enrolled nurses employed and substituting them with care workers to offset staffing costs. Between 2003 and 2012, 21,000 more care workers were employed, along with 2,326 fewer registered nurses.

It’s important to ensure the skill mix includes enough registered nurses for the complex assessment and specialised nursing care now required by residents.

It’s clear the royal commission must investigate staffing shortfalls rather than simply blame nurses and carers who often struggle to provide the level of care they’d like to.

Read more: FactCheck: is the Coalition spending ‘$1 billion extra, every year’ on aged care?

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter C. Doherty, Laureate Professor, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

As a broadly trained life scientist, my concern about climate change isn’t the health of the planet. The rocks will be just fine! What worries me is a whole spectrum of “wicked” challenges, from sustaining food production, to providing clean water, to maintaining wildlife diversity and the green environments that ensure the survival of complex life on Earth.

What’s more, as a disease and death researcher, I think of climate change as equivalent to lead poisoning: slow, cumulative, progressive and initially silent but, if not treated in time, causing irreversible, catastrophic damage.

The link between climate change and human health is obvious. The likely success of Dr Kerryn Phelps in the Wentworth byelection also suggests the informed public gets it. More broadly, Doctors for the Environment Australia has campaigned vigorously against Adani’s proposed Queensland coal mine, and has very strong student chapters. Young people are energised and, as they mature and take power, the political and legal situation regarding energy generation could change very quickly.

Read more: Infographic: here’s exactly what Adani’s Carmichael mine means for Queensland

The world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet, has a high-profile commission that will report every two years until 2030 on the broad-ranging issue of climate and human health. The journal has just published a letter from just about every leading Australian medical scientist working in a relevant area that protests the federal government’s contemptuous dismissal of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Read more: The UN’s 1.5°C special climate report at a glance

Astronauts have shown us how incredibly fragile the atmosphere looks from space. The idea that we should wait for things to get worse before taking action to protect it seems insane.

We need legislators who can think and act for the long term. This issue is simply too big for individuals or volunteer groups. Unless politicians are prepared to put a substantial price on greenhouse emissions, it’s difficult to see how a capitalist economic system can move us forward. Clean coal? The US 45Q tax reform, which offers credits for carbon capture and storage projects, suggests we would need a carbon price of at least US$50 a tonne to make this technology economically feasible.

Australia’s governments at every level could be acting now to promote the planting of vegetation, including less readily combustible tree species. We could be embracing, and funding, energy efficiency while constructing all new buildings – especially hospitals and large apartment complexes – in ways that protect their inhabitants. A realistic carbon tax could pay for some of that, while also stimulating jobs and growth and providing investment certainty.

Some moves are already being made in the right direction. The Gorgon gas project is planning to extend its strategy to inject carbon dioxide into the ground rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. CSIRO’s new hydrogen economy roadmap shows how (with the endorsement of Chief Scientist Alan Finkel) we can develop gas exports based on hydrogen rather than natural gas, to supply emerging markets in countries such as Japan.

Read more: The science is clear: we have to start creating our low-carbon future today

A more familiar export product is wood. Planting and harvesting trees mimics nature’s mechanism for storing carbon. Perhaps it’s time for CSIRO and the universities to reinvest in developing wood technologies that displace concrete for at least some forms of construction. Modular wooden houses could also easily be moved away from low-lying areas hit by river flooding and sea level rise.

My wife Penny and I recently joined a small organised tour that took us more than 5,000km around Western Australia. That made us very aware of competing realities. On one hand, we have the human constructs of community, politics and economy. On the other is the reality of nature, imposed by the laws of physics and the fact that all life systems have evolved to live within defined environmental “envelopes”.

Apart from the glorious WA wildflowers and extensive wheat fields, the prominence of mining was very clear. Metals are essential for just about any renewable energy strategy, although the massive amounts of diesel burned in the extraction process are clearly an issue. Could that transition to carbon-neutral biodiesel?

WA also has extensive coastal salt pans: might they be used, perhaps with pumped seawater, to cultivate algae for biofuel production? And, in the face of a global obesity pandemic, the best thing we could do with sugar cane is to convert it to biofuels.

If ethanol is bad for internal combustion engines, perhaps we should revisit external combustion? In WA, we went to the HMAS Sydney memorial in Geraldton. Like all big ships of her time, the Sydney was powered by steam turbines. Turbine power generation could be part of a mix driving electric/wind ships of the future.

Our WA trip also made us very conscious of the complex ecosystems that, in the end analysis, sustain all life. Plants use chemical signals (plant pheromones) to “talk” among themselves, to other species, and to the insects they attract for pollination. Some plants rely for reproduction on a single insect species. If the insects die, they die. We’re currently in the sixth mass extinction – this one caused by humans. As temperatures ramp up, rainfall patterns change, and firestorms grow stronger and more frequent, the effects will be terminal for many species.

Read more: Earth’s sixth mass extinction has begun, new study confirms

With much of our land unsuited to agriculture, Australia is the biggest solar collector on Earth. Visiting WA also made us very aware of the enormous, untapped wind potential on the west coast. Apart from battery storage, making hydrogen from seawater offers an obvious strategy for dealing with both the remoteness of generation sites and the variability of supply from renewables, while also returning oxygen to the atmosphere. We could be the clean energy giants!

None of this will happen without the help of major corporations that have the wealth and power to influence governments, along with the globalised structure that facilitates the development and implementation of solutions. What’s very encouraging is that many of the multinationals are now moving forward to develop strategies for supplying global energy needs while minimising greenhouse gas emissions. There’s no way they want to be the “tobacco villains” of the 21st century!

This is an adapted version of a speech given in Melbourne on October 24 at the international ghgt-14 meeting.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University

The climate is changing before our eyes. News articles about imminent species extinctions have become the norm. Images of oceans full of plastic are littering social media. These issues are made even more daunting by the fact that they are literally global in scale.

In the face of these global environmental crises it can be hard to know where to start to help change the state of our planet. But in a paper published in the journal Sustainable Earth, we set out how to translate many of our global environmental issues into action at a more manageable level.

Our approach aims to chop global problems into digestible chunks that you – as an individual, a chief executive, a city councillor, or a national committee member – can tackle.

We call it “planetary accounting”, because it is about creating a series of environmental “budgets” that will stop us overshooting the planet’s natural boundaries. From that, we can then calculate everyone’s fair share, and hopefully in the process make it easier to visualise which individual, corporate or community actions will have a real environmental impact.

Read more: Is it possible for everyone to live a good life within our planet’s limits?

The planetary boundaries, developed in 2009, are a set of non-negotiable global limits for factors such as temperature, water use, species extinctions and other environmental variables. These aim to quantify how far we can push the planet before threatening our very survival.

The nine planetary boundaries are listed below; exceeding any of these limits puts us at risk of irreversible global damage. We are currently exceeding four, so it’s fair to say the situation is urgent.

Despite providing important information about the health of our planet, the planetary boundaries fail to answer one very important question: what can we do about it?

The problem with the planetary boundaries is that they are limits for the environment, not for people. They cannot be easily related to human activities, nor do they make sense at smaller scales.

A national government would be hard-pressed to determine what a fair share of the world’s species extinctions might be. A commuter deciding whether to take the bus or drive to work doesn’t really know how her decision will affect the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The planetary boundaries measure outcomes; they do not prescribe actions.

The ecological footprint – which estimates how many Earths would be required for a given level of human activity – has long been used as a tool for environmental policy and action. But many experts think this measure is too simplistic. How can a single statistic possibly capture the range and complexity of human impacts on our planet?

Planetary accounting

This is where planetary accounting comes in. It offers a new approach to understanding the global impacts of any scale of human activity. It takes the “safe operating space” defined by the planetary boundaries, and then uses these limits to derive a set of quotas that we can act on.

Using this approach, we have drawn up a set of ten global budgets for environmental factors, including carbon dioxide emissions, release of nitrogen to the environment, water consumption, reforestation, and so on.

These budgets can then be divided among the world’s population in easily quantifiable units. That way, nations, cities, businesses and even individuals can begin to understand what their fair share actually looks like.

If the planetary boundaries are a health check for planet Earth, then you can think of these quotas as the prescription for a healthy global environment.

To extend the health analogy, it’s rather like having a general checkup with a doctor, who might measure a range of variables such as your blood pressure, heart rate, weight and liver function. If any of these are outside the healthy range, the doctor might recommend a healthier diet, more exercise, or avoiding smoking or drinking too much.

Read more: Our food system is at risk of crossing ‘environmental limits’ – here’s how to ease the pressure

Similarly, if we find we are exceeding our environmental fair share – say, by taking too much carbon-intensive transport, or eating too much nitrogen-intensive food – then we can begin to take action.

Planetary accounting is designed to work at a range of scales. We could use it to inform anything from individual actions, to city planning targets, to corporate sustainability goals, to global environmental negotiations.

It could even be “gamified”, perhaps in the form of apps that let players compete with one another to live within their share of global environmental budgets. Or it could be used to draw up “planetary labels” similar to the nutritional information labels that help keep food companies honest and the public informed.

Planetary accounting won’t solve all the complex problems our planet faces. But it could make it easier to answer that all-important question: “What can I do to help?”

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Seth Lazar, Associate Professor, Australian National University

What do we want driverless cars to do in unavoidable fatal crashes?

Today researchers published a paper The Moral Machine experiment to address this question.

To create data for the study, almost 40 million people from 233 countries used a website to record decisions about who to save and who to let die in hypothetical driverless car scenarios. It’s a version of the classic so-called “trolley dilemma” – where you have to preference people to prioritise in an emergency.

Read more: The trolley dilemma: would you kill one person to save five?

Some of the key findings are intuitive: participants prefer to save people over animals, the young over the old, and more rather than fewer. Other preferences are more troubling: women over men, executives over the homeless, the fit over the obese.

The experiment is unprecedented in both scope and sophistication: we now have a much better sense of how peoples’ preferences in such dilemmas vary across the world. The authors, sensibly, caution against taking the results as a simple guide to what self-driving cars should do.

But this is just the first move in what must be a vigorous debate. And in that debate, surveys like these (interesting as they are) can play only a limited role.

How good is our first judgement?

Machines are much faster than us; they don’t panic. At their best, they might embody our considered wisdom and apply it efficiently even in harrowing circumstances. To do that, however, we need to start with good data.

Clicks on online quizzes are a great way to find out what people think before they engage their judgment. Yet obviously we don’t pander to all prejudices. The authors omitted race and nationality as grounds for choice, and rightly so.

Good survey design can’t be done in a vacuum. And moral preferences are not supposed to just be tastes. To work out the morally right thing to do (think of any morally weighty choice that you have faced), you have to do some serious thinking.

We want to base ethical artificial intelligence on our best judgements, not necessarily our first ones.

Read more: At last! The world’s first ethical guidelines for driverless cars

The world is ‘chancy’

The study used dilemmas that involved two certain outcomes: either you definitely hit the stroller or definitely kill the dog.

But actual decisions involve significant uncertainty: you might be unsure whether the person ahead is a child or a small adult, whether hitting them would kill or injure them, whether a high-speed swerve might work.

Computers might make better predictions, but the world is intrinsically “chancy”. This is a big problem. Either-or preferences in certain cases only go so far in telling us what to do in risky ones.

Suppose a self-driving vehicle must choose between letting itself crash and so killing its elderly passenger, or instead veering to the side and killing an infant.

The moral machine experiment predicts that people are on the side of the infant. But it doesn’t say by how much we would prefer to spare one over the other. Maybe it’s almost a toss-up, and we just lean towards sparing the child. Or maybe saving the child is much more important than saving the pensioner.

Views on this will be extremely diverse, and this survey offers us no guidance. But we can’t know how to weigh, say, a 10% probability of killing the child against a 50% probability of killing the pensioner, unless we know how much more important sparing one is than sparing the other.

Since literally every choice made by driverless cars will be made under uncertainty, this is a significant gap.

What surveys can’t tell us

The motivation for the moral machine experiment is understandable. The responsibility of encoding the next generation of ethical artificial intelligence is a daunting one.

Moral disagreement appears rife. A survey looks like a good way to triangulate opinions in a heated world.

But how we handle moral disagreement is not just a scientific problem. It is a moral one too. And, since the times of the ancient Greeks, the solution to that moral problem is not aggregating preferences, but democratic participation.

No doubt democracy is in crisis, at least in parts of the rich world. But it remains our most important tool for making decisions in the presence of unavoidable disagreement.

Democratic decision-making can’t be reduced to box ticking. It involves taking your vote seriously, not just clicking a box on a website. It involves participation, debate, and mutual justification.

Surveys like this one cannot tell us why people prefer the options that they do. The fact that a self-driving car’s decision correlates with the views of others does not, on its own, justify that choice (imagine a human driver justifying her actions in an accident in the same way).

Mutual justification is the heart of democratic citizenship. And it presupposes engaging not just with what our choices are, but why we make them.

Deciding together

Studies like this are intrinsically interesting, and the authors of this one are admirably explicit about what it is, and what it is not designed to show.

To build on these foundations we need to do much more reflection on how to weigh our moral commitments under uncertainty.

And we need to do so as part of an inclusive democratic process where we don’t just aggregate people’s preferences, but take seriously the task of deciding, together, our artificial intelligence future.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Kelly, Professor, Law School, La Trobe University

Next month, Tasmania’s parliament will consider a bill that would remove sex from birth certificates. If it passes, it would be the first state in Australia to take such a step.

Under the proposed law, a baby’s sex would still be recorded in the register of births and hospital records, enabling the state to track gender information for statistical purposes, but it would not appear on the child’s birth certificate.

The argument behind the proposal is that people who do not identify with the gender of their birth – transgender, gender-diverse and intersex people – are forced to “out” themselves constantly throughout life when their birth certificate is requested. This can cause embarrassment, raise privacy concerns and potentially lead to discrimination.

The difference between sex and gender

Sex is a biological concept that relates to a person’s physical features and characteristics, including genitalia and other reproductive anatomy, chromosomes and hormones. These features don’t always fit neatly within “male” and “female” categories. For instance, between 0.05% and 1.7% of people are born intersex.

In contrast, gender is a social concept that describes the way a person self-identifies or expresses themselves. A person’s gender identity may not always be exclusively male or female and may not always correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

The majority of Australian states and territories already permit birth certificates that record an individual’s sex as something other than male or female. South Australia, the ACT, NSW and the Northern Territory all provide a range of gender-neutral options for recording a person’s sex on their birth certificate, including non-binary, indeterminate, intersex, other and unknown.

In April, Queensland announced a review that would consider introducing similar measures.

Read more: Gender diversity is more accepted in society, but using the pronoun ‘they’ still divides

Other countries, including New Zealand, India, Germany and Bangladesh, as well as recently New York City, also permit gender-neutral and/or non-binary designations on birth certificates.

The proposal being debated in Tasmania goes a step further. While providing a gender-neutral option on birth certificates may improve the situation for non-binary and intersex Australians, there is growing interest in removing sex designations from birth certificates altogether.

A March 2018 discussion paper produced by the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia recommended doing this on the basis that:

it is preferable to avoid conflating information about a person’s biological sex (recorded at birth) with information about a person’s gender identity (which cannot be known at birth and only becomes apparent at a later time when the child is able to form and articulate their own gender identity)

Other jurisdictions around the world are now moving in this direction. The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan, for instance, recently amended their laws to permit individuals to opt out of displaying a sex designation on their birth certificate.

Why remove sex from birth certificates?

For the transgender and intersex communities, removing sex from birth certificates just makes life less complicated.

Having a gender identity that does not match the sex designation on a birth certificate can create confusion and potentially expose people to discrimination when an identity document is requested, such as when they register at a school or university or apply for a passport. Birth certificates are also used to accumulate identity “points” for anything from applying for a credit card to commencing a job.

Read more: Friday essay: transgenderism in film and literature

As Dr David Cox, chairman of the Law Commission of Western Australia’s recent review, put it:

For the vast majority of the population it’s not going to make one iota of difference … it’s not going to affect the fabric of government, it’s not going to affect the fabric of society, it’s not doing anything really, but it’s going to make life a lot easier for a small group of people.

Removing sex from birth certificates would also eliminate the need for the parents of an intersex child to choose a sex for their baby to be publicly recorded.

This can be a highly difficult and emotional decision for parents and, in some instances, will not reflect the child’s understanding of their gender later on. Leaving the birth certificate blank allows the child to make that decision once they have the knowledge and maturity to confirm their gender identity.

In some states, such as Victoria and Tasmania, people can only change the sex on their birth certificates if they undergo gender reassignment surgery. The decision to have this costly and invasive surgery should be based on one’s health and emotional needs alone.

Would this impact society in any way?

Even though such a move wouldn’t impact society at large, opposition to the proposed Tasmanian legislation has been extremely vocal.

The Australian Christian Lobby, for instance, said the proposed reforms “greatly diminish” the significance of birth certificates because they would erase “historical truths”.

This suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of birth certificates. As the Victorian Law Reform Commission recently concluded, the primary purpose of a birth certificate is to provide verification of a person’s legal identity, not to record biological details.

For example, birth certificates for people who were adopted or conceived via assisted reproduction reflect their legal parentage, not their genetic origins. It is birth and hospital records that provide an historical record of birth, along with adoption and donor conception registers.

Tasmanian Attorney-General Elise Archer also expressed her concern, saying such a move:

exposes the state to a range of potentially serious unintended consequences.

She didn’t articulate what those “unintended consequences” might be.

Allowing transgender and intersex people to accurately state their legal identity and giving them control over their sensitive personal information will greatly improve their lives, without any impact on the broader population.

Like past decisions to remove race and parental occupations from birth certificates, eliminating sex is another step towards combating discrimination.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alana Mann, Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney

This article is part of the ongoing Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

One might be tempted to ask “what’s cooking?” as a slew of leading thinkers on food systems change converge on Australia.

Among those giving workshops, talks and town halls in cities throughout Australia this month are: Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of the Food First think-tank in Oakland, California, and author of A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism; Jahi Chappell, author of Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond; Jonathan Latham, author of The Poison Papers; Carey Gillam, author of Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science; and food systems researchers Charles Levkoe and Jose L. Vivero Pol. Devita Davison, co-founder of FoodLab Detroit, travelled here in 2017 to share how food entrepreneurs are breathing life back into her post-industrial city.

Brought to our shores by local advocates of food systems change, these thought leaders are sharing their knowledge and experiences of how we might reclaim a food system that has effectively been corporatised, to the great detriment of our health, our planet and our democracy.

Contrary to popular critique, our food system is not broken. As Holt-Giménez explains so eloquently in his book, it works perfectly well for Big Food. Multinational food, beverage, agri-business and retail corporations control global supply chains. But they don’t feed the world.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that family farms produce 80% of the world’s food in 2014. It’s mostly produced by women and girls who, ironically, are the most likely to be food-insecure.

Why? Largely due to poverty, made worse by flawed government policies and global mega-corporations that wield the power to destroy local food economies, ruin human health and annihilate biodiversity.

Four companies: Bayer-Monsanto, ChemChina-Syngenta, DowDuPont and BASF now control over 50% of the world’s commercial seeds. These highly profitable businesses are enabled by a regulatory system that effectively criminalises the saving, exchange and sale of seeds by local farmers.

In terms of health, nearly one in three people globally suffer from at least one form of malnutrition in the form of wasting, stunting, vitamin deficiency, diabetes or obesity in what has become known as the “double burden” of malnutrition.

How have we got here? As Holt-Giménez explains, the global capitalist economy that drives our food system has fostered overproduction of cheap, calorific food. In doing so it has transformed the relationship between capital and labour to create social exclusion, poverty and food insecurity.

In pockets of economic irrelevance in every country and city on Earth people are deprived of basic infrastructure and services, particularly if they are perceived to have no value in global flows of wealth and property.

Hope of a turning point

Holt-Giménez has hope, however, that we are reaching a critical juncture in capitalism, with the emergence of “food utopias” that prefigure radical, structural change.

At the October 17 event “Building Food Utopias: Voice, Power and Agency”, hosted by University of Sydney, he was joined by sustainable food systems advocate Eva Perroni and Joel Orchard, founder of Future Feeders. It’s an organisation dedicated to creating peer-to-peer support networks for young farmers.

Given the average age of the Australian farmer is 56, Orchard’s initiative is a vital step to ensure our future food security, particularly in conditions of high financial risk and land scarcity.

As a scientist working with farmers to improve the quality of milk, Orchard saw those same farmers pouring it down drains in a depressed market. His experience led him to become part of the counter-movement against industrial agriculture.

Now managing his own peri-urban plot in Mullumbimby, Orchard has co-founded the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Network Australia and New Zealand with Victorian grower Sally Ruljancich. It provides a platform for small-scale and agro-ecological farmers who need a strong voice in policymaking.

“Farming has historically been such an individual and isolating pursuit,” Orchard said. “It’s vital that we include the perspectives of farmers both at the policy and consumer education level.

“At the moment, many small-scale and agro-ecological farmers don’t have a say in the policies that make a difference to their working lives.”

The CSA Network joins a number of like-minded organisations including the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). AFSA lobbied the Victorian government for planning system reforms that now recognise small-scale pastured pig and poultry farms as low risk. This has effectively unshackled these farmers from their industrial counterparts in planning legislation.

At the Food Sovereignty Convergence in Canberra this month, AFSA amended its constitution to be an explicitly farmer-led organisation, like its international allies La Via Campesina and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty.

“Putting the voice and decision-making power in the hands of small-scale agroecological farmers puts AFSA in alignment with the global food sovereignty movement – we’re here to radically transform the food system from the ground up,” said AFSA president and farmer Tammi Jonas.

An underground insurgency

These farmers are part of what Charles Massy, in his remarkable book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth, calls an “underground insurgency”. They are regenerating the land and revisioning market exchange. They represent an emergent thinking that manifests itself not only in care for the Earth but in genuine concern for the health of rural and urban eaters.

These networks are essential in the counter-movement against input-intensive, conventional modes of agriculture and the crippling effects of market concentration – including the “Colesworth” duopoly in Australia – that put the price squeeze on farmers.

According to Holt-Giménez, strengthening these social networks and institutions that promote the interests of small-scale, agroecological farmers is essential in our privatised food system. “It’s in policymakers’ best interest to strengthen them so that truly transformative and effective public policy is achieved.”

Information-sharing with international advocates is key to the transformation we need, but solutions also lie closer to home.

Indigenous Australians developed sophisticated ecosystem management. By “getting out of the way of Mother Nature” – or combining ecological literacy with lack of ego, as Massy puts it – First Nations people survived for more than 40,000 years.

Their innovation is now internationally recognised through initiatives like the Aboriginal Carbon Fund, which is building a sustainable Aboriginal carbon industry through peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing.

The voices of these local thought leaders must be included in policymaking.

Novel approaches to community engagement are needed to bring us all together on food-related issues. These include communities of practice, food policy councils, social enterprises and solidarity economies.

Many of these fledgling “utopias” are already incubating in rural towns and urban neighbourhoods.

One thing is clear. Separated more by time and capacity than ideological approach, groups and communities working for a better food system are mobilising across Australia. Our food system is ripe for repairing, reclaiming and revisioning.

The author acknowledges and thanks: food activist and researcher Eva Perroni, organiser of Holt-Giménez’s visit to Australia; Sydney Environment Institute, Sydney Policy Lab and Sydney Ideas.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Koh, Honorary Associate, Faculty of Business, School of Management, University of Technology Sydney

Banks don’t need 10 commandments to do the right thing, but just six, says the head of the banking royal commission.

The first of those commandments set out by Commissioner Kenneth Hayne is to “obey the law”. The other five relate to ethical conduct: do not mislead or deceive; be fair; provide services fit for purpose; deliver services with reasonable care and skill: and when acting for another, act in their best interests.

Banks are, in fact, required as a condition of their banking licence to treat customers “efficiently, honestly and fairly”. In addition to the ABA Code of Banking Practice, which covers the industry, banks also have “codes of conduct” that they promote with assurances any breaches will be dealt with harshly.

Read more: Banking Royal Commission’s damning report: ‘Things are so bad that new laws might not help’

Often this is mere window dressing. The truth is that most codes of conduct are just glossy, aspirational documents handed to new employees then promptly forgotten until an excuse to fire someone is needed. Their lie has been exposed by the many examples of dishonest, illegal, deceptive, fraudulent, grossly incompetent or grossly negligent conduct revealed by the royal commission.

How to make codes of conduct real tools of good behaviour rather than exercises in deceptive advertising? The answer is to enshrine Justice Hayne’s six commandments in every bank’s code of conduct, and make any breach to that code criminal.

Codes of conduct

Major banks publish their official codes of conduct prominently. The codes are endorsed by boards, and clearly state there are censures for code breaches. For example, the National Australia Bank code threatens staff with termination for breaches.

These codes are effectively a company’s promise about how it will behave and what it will deliver. Any failure to uphold it could potentially be pursued in court – by the corporate regulator, individuals or a class action – as misleading and deceptive conduct.

Read more: Codes of conduct: making things clear is better than ‘keeping it real’

Value to customers

In general, the banks have viewed their codes as non-binding statements of comfort with no real enforceable value to aggrieved customers.

Two legal rulings in recent years, though, have taken a different view.

In 2015 the Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal ruled (in Doggett v CBA) that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia had breached the Code of Banking Practice by failing to exercise care and diligence in forming a view on a borrower’s ability to repay a loan. The bank had been chasing two loan guarantors for more than $3 million.

The Court of Appeal followed this up with a 2016 ruling that the National Australia Bank had no claim to demand nearly $4 million from a man who had agreed to be a loan guarantor. The judgement in NAB v Rose found the NAB officer involved in the loan had breached two clauses of the Code of Banking Practice by failing to tell the guarantor he should seek independent advice or offer him a 24-hour cooling-off period.

Value to shareholders

While failing to uphold its code of conduct may make a bank liable to customers, failing to report breaches makes it potentially liable to shareholder action. This is because shareholders arguably rely on those promises to guide their investment decisions.

In 2017 shareholders sued the Commonwealth Bank for inadequately disclosing bank risks from climate change. They did so on the basis of the bank’s duty to notify investors of material matters under section 299A of the Corporations Act.

Though the lawsuit was dropped when CBA acknowledged these risks in its 2017 annual report and promised to report climate change risks in the future, this case shows shareholders expect banks to declare all risks, not merely credit and market risk.

APRA’s prudential report into the CBA, published in April, also highlighted the importance of risk from reputational damage from practices inconsistent with its code of conduct.

This may be why ANZ has become the first Australian bank to publicly report such breaches. However, the information in its reports is meagre. The reports do not identify how significant a breach is, actions taken, managerial sanctions or lessons learnt.

Changing climate

Regulators, and to some extent political parties in government, have traditionally been reluctant to pursue banks too aggressively (as evidenced by the protracted delay in calling the financial services royal commission).

Read more: Royal Commission shows banks have behaved appallingly, but we’ve helped them do it

Growing public anger and the revelations at the royal commission have now changed the operating climate. There is now serious risk that all conduct (even those inconsistent with a bank’s code of conduct) are fair game for legal challenges.

Statutory reform

Public reporting of code breaches should be standard industry practice. Banks should see such reporting as one step in rebuilding public confidence and trust. Shareholders have no other way to assess a company’s expected behavioural standards except through its published code of conduct.

But just reporting failures to meet minimum conduct standards doesn’t change a bank’s culpability in breaching its responsibilities in the first place. If a board fails to take remedial action when that code is breached, it should be held liable for providing false or misleading information and breaking contractual guarantees.

Codes of conduct should be an area where the banking royal commission’s final report recommends specific reforms.

Read more: There is nothing sacrosanct about corporate culture; we can and must regulate it

To protect customers, the law could mandate behaviour defined in a code of conduct to be strictly liable, and breaches criminal, and allow exemplary damages to be awarded.

Even if regulators are reluctant to enforce the law to protect customers, making it clear that codes of conduct are legally binding and breaches strictly liable will allow more individuals and class actions to confidently sue banks that fail to uphold the minimum standards of behaviour society expects.

To most of us Justice Hayne’s guidelines for ethical conduct might seem like stating the obvious, but apparently bankers need to be told explicitly.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoltan Szabo, Cellist and musicologist, University of Sydney

Review: András Schiff, Sydney

On top of its usual, high quality series of chamber music concerts, Musica Viva presented its audiences with a special event this week. After an absence of more than 20 years, pianist András Schiff gave two gala concerts with different programs in Melbourne and Sydney.

Schiff’s solo concerts always follow a carefully designed plan. For example, in recent years, he was touring the world with a program that consisted of the last sonatas by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. After the success of this program, he created a similar one of the second-last sonatas by the same Viennese masters.

The Sydney recital paid homage to the late piano pieces of Johannes Brahms, complemented with compositions by other composers, whom Brahms held in high esteem, such as Bach, Mozart and Schumann. Appealingly, there was also a tonal relationship between the individual works; the last movement of one piece was in the same or closely related key as the first one of the next.

In order to appreciate these harmonic connections, Schiff politely but emphatically asked his audience in a short speech before he sat at the piano, that they hold their applause until he, the artist, indicated the appropriate time.

Read more: How Beethoven’s ‘mistake’ became one of our most famous tunes

Random, tentative clapping between movements has often disturbed the atmosphere of a performance at the Opera House’s Concert Hall. By explaining his attempt to achieve the intimacy of a recital in a living room, Schiff persuaded his near-capacity audience to remain completely silent until the very end of each half of the program – a major coup in itself.

He didn’t stand or take any break between the various compositions, forming a majestic arch of sixteen continuous movements in the first half of the concert, lasting over an hour, and only marginally less in the second. While this created an ethereal atmosphere and the intimacy of the recital was almost tangible, at the same time, the unremitting focus on music, and the music alone, demanded an extreme level of concentration from the audience, one that few music lovers are ever exposed to.

The sense of intimacy was both appropriate and palpable in the opening item of the concert, the seldom performed Theme and Variations in E-flat major, “Ghost Variations”, the very last composition of Robert Schumann. The composer attempted suicide after writing the first few variations, then completed the work the following day, before he was admitted to an asylum for the mentally disturbed, never to write music again.

Schiff’s reading of this poignant work was indeed “quiet and inward”, as the theme’s description suggests (leise, innig). It was as if the audience was witnessing a simple, private conversation with a close friend. The atmosphere of the recital was immediately established, with every note clear, a perfect balance between various parts, when dynamics were treated not so much as levels of volume but as sound qualities.

The gentle murmur of the last variation led with no more break than a second, maybe two, into the first of Three intermezzi by Johannes Brahms. This cycle is headed by an epigraph, taken from Johann Gottfried Herder’s folksongs, starting with “Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and sweetly!” This, coming immediately after the heartbreaking circumstances around the composition of the Schumann variations, and Beethoven’s “Farewell” (Lebewohl) sonata following later, suggested a possible second connecting thread for the evening: the feeling of departure, dreaming, otherworldliness, an underlying theme of the sublime and surreal.

One of the most appealing features of Schiff’s artistry is the clarity of texture. In these Intermezzi, soft dynamics prevail. (In the first one of them, extraordinarily, the composer’s dynamic instructions oscillate between the softest sounds, “piano” and “pianissimo” in musical notation, and never go louder.) In this performance, every voice was audible and had its own significance, without ever becoming overly strong.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Rondo in A minor followed, in a similarly introverted performance; polished and presented as if behind a veil. By now, it was clear to everyone in the hall that Schiff’s appearance on stage may have looked subdued with something bordering on insouciance, but in fact, his utmost focus was on effectuating his singularly unique sense of musical style.

It was not until the first and third of Brahms’s Six Pieces for piano, the last item before the interval, when the audience was exposed to the first outbursts of energy and louder dynamics. They were much needed amongst the regal poise surrounding them.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s final Prelude and Fugue no 24 in B minor from the first volume of his collection The Well-tempered Clavier opened the second half, exposing Schiff’s esoteric, almost meditative approach at its best. Governed more by a gentle and irreversible flow than a direction towards a musical climactic moment, it was as pleasing as Four pieces for piano, the last compositions written by Brahms for piano.

Read more: Decoding the music masterpieces: Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites

With Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E-flat major, “Les adieux”, Schiff demonstrated that his virtuosity is not burdened by technical difficulties. The turmoils of the work brought out a far greater range of dynamic contrast than ever before in this concert. Even these dynamics were less than sufficient in the enormous cavity of the Concert Hall, serving as a warning that, economic considerations aside, it is an unsatisfactory venue for solo recitals.

The structure of Schiff’s programs, the combination of music and silence, his measured walk onto stage, the careful planning of his playing, his unique sonic world and its faultless execution make his musical personality hugely compelling and an almost cultic one.

However, while fully respecting his artistry, I was rarely touched by emotional upheavals, volatility and an element of surprise during the concert, surely an integral part of great compositions. The pianist’s artistic personality often appeared to be more prominent than that of the composers.

Four encores finished the evening, including truly authentic and touchingly simple readings of two smaller compositions by Schiff’s compatriot, Béla Bartók.

András Schiff performed at the Sydney Opera House on October 22.