Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kim Ellis Hayes, Senior Lecturer in Space Research & Law / In training as Suborbital Spaceflight PoSSUM Astronaut Candidate Graduate, Swinburne University of Technology

I’m currently training to become Australia’s first woman astronaut. I expect to fly my first suborbital mission sometime in 2023 as a payload specialist on a commercial mission. In other words, I’ll be one of few certified crew members who can handle specialised scientific equipment aboard a suborbital spacecraft.

Once we’re up there, my team and I expect to conduct research on Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an opportunity I consider out of this world. But it has taken a lot of effort for this dream to be realised.

My path to PoSSUM

As a female STEM and legal professional, my past jobs included working as a research scientist in mining and metals for BHP-Billiton, Rio Tinto and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) — but I always loved space.

After combining my science degree with two law degrees, I won a scholarship for the International Space University. I eventually received an Australian Government Endeavour Executive Award for a project at the NASA Kennedy Space Centre. With this I pivoted towards a career in the space industry, and have never looked back.

I was selected as a PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere) Scientist-Astronaut candidate and global ambassador for 2021. PoSSUM is a non-profit US astronautics research and education program run by the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS).

The program uses next-generation suborbital spacecraft to study the upper atmosphere and its potential role in global climate change. Generally speaking, a suborbital spaceflight is any flight that reaches an altitude higher than 80km, but doesn’t escape Earth’s gravity to make it into orbit.

Anything above 80km is deemed “space” under US legislation, although some nations (including Australia) don’t agree with this and the debate about where “space” begins — also called the Kármán line — remains ongoing.

Last month, commercial space tourism companies Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic completed the very first suborbital spaceflights carrying passengers (without research). This was an incredible achievement, which many have said could mark the beginning commercial space tourism.

Read more:
Keen to sign up for space tourism? Here are 6 things to consider (besides the price tag)

Preparing for every possibility

To graduate as a PoSSUM Scientist-Astronaut candidate, there are several academic and flight training components I must complete before I can head into space.

During academic training in 2020, I covered topics such as spaceflight physiology (what happens to the body in space), spaceflight life support, atmospheric science and spaceflight research equipment.

My flight training later this year will involve spending days with former NASA astronaut instructors and PoSSUM team scientists. On day one, we’ll begin to use the spaceflight simulator which is currently set up as the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 vehicle.

In the days that follow, we will receive high-G training, crew resource management training, high-altitude training and equipment training which will be crucial to conduct our research. We’ll learn how to operate a series of instruments to measure physical atmospheric properties.

We will also need to know our way around the spacesuits, which will be similar to those used by NASA. The famous orange suits are a life-support system for astronauts. Astronauts in orbital and suborbital spaceflights must wear them during launch, flight and return in case they have to exit the spacecraft in an emergency, or in case the spacecraft depressurises.

We’ll need to learn how to manage unexpected events such as decompression, too. This is when the pressure inside a spacecraft or spacesuit is reduced by a leak. If pressure becomes too low, breathing oxygen can be forced out of the suit. The astronaut will then experience hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in body tissues), which can be deadly.

Or let’s say we’re not able to land where we planned to; the training will cover how to manage a water landing and a fast exit from the vehicle. We must be prepared in case one of the electrical or physical systems fails, causing a hazardous environment.

Nobody likes to imagine things going wrong, but planning for emergencies is necessary.

A ‘steep’ learning curve aboard parabolic flights

It’s likely I will complete my first research flight to space on the Virgin Galactic vehicle — but given the rate of spacecraft development, it could be another similar craft.

Launching aboard a spacecraft subjects the human body to a variety of forces. Learning to identify and manage changes caused by these forces is critical. On day four of training I will climb into an aerobatic aircraft with a cruise speed of 317km per hour, in which I will practice using equipment and techniques to avoid blackouts during aerobatic flight.

The final test will be a series of parabolic flights simulating microgravity aboard a different aircraft. In parabolic flights, an aircraft repeatedly climbs steeply, then enters a deep dive, to create weightlessness for up to 40 seconds. This is repeated 20-25 times during the flight to demonstrate weightlessness in space. Experiments are conducted during weightlessness.

The last day of training will involve using virtual and augmented reality to practise planning space missions. We’ll be able to work on any aspect of the training we feel is needed before our final evaluation.

If all goes to plan, I will graduate with FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) qualifications as a spaceflight crew member for any space vehicle in the US (orbital and suborbital). Both my training and the work I will do aboard my first suborbital flight as a payload specialist fall within the guidelines outlined in the FAA’s advisory circular released on July 20.

If there are no further changes to the eligibility requirements or criteria, I could be nominated to receive Astronaut Wings once the mission is complete.

Why do research in space anyway?

But what’s the big deal when it comes to research in space? Well, for one, spaceflight allows researchers to observe how materials behave in the absence of gravity.

Studying how materials behave in weightless environments has proven immensely useful for scientists. For instance, studying how a virus replicates in space could help scientists develop better vaccines and treatments for diseases such as COVID-19.

Most people have heard of the International Space Station (ISS): the football-field sized laboratory in space which constantly orbits Earth. Generally, only space agency astronauts from the US, Russia, Japan and Europe will travel to and from the ISS in various orbital spacecraft (rockets). Doing research on the ISS is expensive, slow and subject to long wait times.

Australian companies can benefit from research opportunities offered by suborbital flights in the USA. Being able to complete human tended research on a suborbital research flight is a much more affordable option, and is therefore a game changer. It means small companies that couldn’t previously afford spaceflight can now get in the game.

It’s an honour for me to be able to train for this mission and hopefully bring the space dream closer to Australia. And by teaching space technology and law, I look forward to playing my part in advancing the next generation’s access to space.

Read more:
As if space wasn’t dangerous enough, bacteria become more deadly in microgravity

Kim Ellis Hayes works for Swinburne University of Technology and owns International Earth & Space Technology Pty Ltd

– ref. I’m training to become Australia’s first woman astronaut. Here’s what it takes – https://theconversation.com/im-training-to-become-australias-first-woman-astronaut-heres-what-it-takes-163173

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia A. O’Brien, Visiting Fellow, School of History, Australian National University, and Adjunct Professor, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University

Fiji now heads the grim list of Pacific nations counting their dead from coronavirus, having just passed Papua New Guinea’s toll. So far, 254 Fijians have died from the disease, and the nation is recording 1,000 new cases every day.

But numbers are an inadequate and inaccurate way to calculate the cost of the pandemic in the Pacific. Even in the Pacific’s COVID-free countries, the pandemic casts an ominous shadow.

The Delta variant has drastically altered the situation for the Pacific. It was first detected in Fiji in April and spread quickly. This is despite Fiji being the first Pacific nation to receive AstraZeneca vaccines through the COVAX program in March.

The Bainimarama government is being blamed for not executing a rapid mass vaccination campaign and not sufficiently locking down the nation. The other contagion accompanying coronavirus around the globe – misinformation – has also been blamed for widespread Fijian vaccine reluctance.

Now Fiji’s government is desperately fighting to contain the outbreak. Fears are circulating that it is facing a repeat of the 1875 measles epidemic that killed about 40,000 people.

A mandatory vaccination order was issued on July 8 to all government workers. Non-compliance will be punished by job loss. Currently, 25% of Fijians are fully vaccinated. The government has also expanded curfews for the main island and the outbreak epicentre, Viti Levu.

Beyond the urgency of saving lives and halting the disease’s spread, Fiji is also economically devastated by the pandemic. Most Pacific borders were closed by March 2020, instantly cutting the economic lifeblood of tourism.

Being a Pacific hub, Fiji is a dangerous launching point for the Delta strain to other nations. In early July, for example, nine travellers from Fiji arrived in New Zealand infected with COVID-19.

Read more:
The Pacific went a year without COVID. Now, it’s all under threat

The Solomons and Vanuatu

Repatriating students and their families from Fiji remains a serious concern for both the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The Solomons has decided to repatriate some, but most will remain in Fiji until more vaccines have been administered at home (currently under 3% are fully vaccinated).

Vanuatu’s low vaccination rate of under 8% also makes the return of students a perilous decision for lawmakers. Like Fiji, it is now considering a “no jab, no job” policy.

In addition to the risks posed by Fiji, both nations have had numerous scares from infected shipping crews. All Pacific nations must contend with this border vulnerability.

Papua New Guinea

The havoc unfolding in Fiji is bad news for Papua New Guinea. Though PNG recorded its first COVID-19 case in March 2020, it was not until one year later that a health crisis erupted.

PNG’s official toll is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg, as COVID testing was scaled back once vaccinations became the main focus for health authorities. And this was before PNG’s first confirmed case of the Delta variant was announced on July 16.

Again, mass vaccinations are PNG’s only defence. Vaccine donations have arrived from various sources, but only about 1% of the population is fully vaccinated according to available government reporting.

Australia has already donated thousands of doses to PNG and other Pacific nations, but with a reported stockpile of 3 million unused doses of AstraZeneca, the Pacific nations would be obvious places to send these.

Papua and West Papua

Over PNG’s border with Indonesia, COVID-19’s spread is clashing with another surge in political unrest. Tensions had been building again following the rebel killing of an Indonesian general in April. Then Indonesian legislators voted on July 17 to again controversially reshape Papua.

Protests occurred at the same time the Delta variant entered the community. Police controls limiting movements into rebel areas, ostensibly to curb COVID, have increased.

Papuan activists are concerned vaccine distribution will be withheld from rebel populations as an Indonesian tactic to further weaken them. West Papua leader Benny Wenda has called on the West to vaccinate Indigenous Papuans because COVID is an additional existential threat to his people. Wenda’s fears may have foundation. The Papua province has the lowest vaccination rates in Indonesia, at about 6%.

Elsewhere in the Pacific

The news is better in other parts of the Pacific. Numerous Pacific nations, including Tonga, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and American Samoa, have not recorded any confirmed COVID cases. Kiribati recently reported its first case, matching Samoa’s record to date.

The natural isolation of many Pacific populations will protect them for only so long. Analysis of the 1918 influenza epidemic shows outbreaks persisted in the Pacific through to 1921. When it reached the phosphate-mining island of Nauru in 1920, it killed 18% of the local populace.

A century later, Nauru has vaccinated all its adults against COVID and claims this as a “world record”.

Niue has also achieved herd immunity thanks to New Zealand’s swift donation of Pfizer vaccines, a process now being repeated in Tokelau. The Cook Islands, with its more complex geography, nonetheless has a high vaccination rate (55%) sustaining the travel bubble with New Zealand that opened in May 2021.

In the US territory of Guam, where the first COVID death in the Pacific was recorded in March 2020, tourism and vaccinations have merged in a different way. Travellers from Taiwan began taking “vacation and vaccination” trips from early July. While Guam recently reached 80% vaccinated, it also recorded its 142nd death attributed to the pandemic.

Like Guam, Palau got fast and adequate supplies of vaccines because of its freely associated relationship with the US. This has shielded them from the pandemic with near herd immunity.

Yet Hawaii is seeing the same recent surge as is afflicting mainland US. The Delta variant and July 4 parties have combined to unleash what President Joe Biden called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.

This latest surge, like earlier ones, disproportionately impacts Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander communities living in the US by a substantial degree.

COVID has devastated the US-based Marshall Islands community, especially in Arkansas, so alarming health officials they investigated it in 2020.

French Polynesia has grappled with the costs of an operating tourist industry since early 2020. Twice, borders have been closed when cases numbers and deaths rose, and then reopened. Now President Edouard Fritch is calling for compulsory vaccinations.

In New Caledonia, COVID has complicated a fractious political situation as it heads towards its final referendum on independence from France in December. In February 2021, a budget crisis exacerbated by COVID’s economic impact led to the collapse of the government. In July, the territory elected its first Kanak pro-independence leader in 40 years, increasing the likelihood of a vote to break with France.

COVID has also added complications to the protracted political crisis in Samoa that ended on July 26. Closed borders prevented non-resident voters returning to cast ballots in the April 9 election that saw Fiame Naomi Mata’afa become prime minister.

Read more:
Samoa’s first female leader has made history — now she faces a challenging future at home and abroad

Samoa has seen the same economic and social stresses due to COVID as elsewhere in the region. Many saw the introduction and extension of emergency powers by the now-defeated government (despite having only one case and no deaths) as another move towards autocracy. The political crisis has been a drag on all Samoan government functions, not least a sluggish vaccine rollout.

In another disaster, COVID pushes climate change to the backburner

Every Pacific nation faces its own challenges due to COVID. The region also has shared ones. The Pacific Islands Forum lost one-third of its members in February 2021 in part because meetings were held virtually. The fracturing of this regional body comes at a bad moment, not least in the fight against climate change.

Until COVID, this was the immediate existential crisis facing the region. Now activist worry climate change initiatives have stalled at the long-term peril of the region. As the Federated States of Micronesia president has argued, “economies can die and be revived but human beings cannot”. Whether this also applies to the planet remains to be seen.

Patricia A. O’Brien receives funding from the Australian Research Council and New Zealand’s JD Stout Trust.

– ref. Pacific nations grapple with COVID’s terrible toll and the desperate need for vaccines – https://theconversation.com/pacific-nations-grapple-with-covids-terrible-toll-and-the-desperate-need-for-vaccines-164769

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Moynihan, Assistant Professor, Bond University

Just weeks before the first COVID-19 cases emerged, Gallup published its latest poll on America’s views about business. At the bottom of the list of 25 sectors was the pharmaceutical industry. Below advertising. Below oil and gas. Below the banks.

The pandemic and the new vaccines have of course turned that reputation around, but let’s not forget why the pharmaceutical industry’s credibility sank so low.

Or how the industry got so big. One company, Johnson & Johnson, is currently worth around US$450 billion. About the same as the economy of Norway.

Read more:
Big Pharma’s COVID-19 reputation boost may not last — here’s why

The birth of the behemoths

The idea of the miraculous potion or cure-all dates back at least as far as Greek mythology. The goddess Panacea even gets a mention in the Hippocratic Oath.

The rise of the modern pharmaceutical industry is more recent, coming through the 19th century. On the eve of the 20th century, the German company Bayer famously launched its early blockbusters, including “Aspirin” and “Heroin.”

Around this time, US drug-makers were arguing for patent protections, or exclusive rights to market a drug for a specific period of time. By the 1950s, they’d won those arguments, and the US soon became the world’s biggest market for medicines.

Read more:
The US drug industry used to oppose patents – what changed?

In addition to patents, the other special ingredient for success was the right to market pills directly to doctors, and in the US, directly to consumers via television commercials.

At the dawn of the 21st century, in those dark ages before Facebook and Big Tech, pharmaceuticals was among the most profitable industries on the planet.

Wonder drugs, miracle cures

Clearly many medicines extend lives and reduce suffering. And while we need caution with hyperbole, some discoveries are major breakthroughs.

Antibiotics revolutionised the treatment of deadly infections, and gave a boost to science at the same time.

In the 1940s, one of the first-published “randomised controlled trials” was a test of Streptomycin for the treatment of tuberculosis.

In the 1980s, another famous class of wonder drugs was developed, this time to tackle the HIV-AIDS epidemic. The mysterious new virus bringing many people a death sentence would soon become a manageable disease.

And while some cancers remain incurable, others are treated and even prevented with medicines that are simply miraculous.

Extortionate prices, evaded taxes

Yet, in each case, the golden drugs have a dark side. As the World Health Organization notes, overuse of antibiotics helped make antibiotic-resistance “one of the biggest threats to global health”.

Over-pricing and patent protections for HIV medicines put them out of reach of the world’s poorest, and prices only came down after massive global campaigns for greater access.

With cancer, companies have demanded huge prices for products offering sometimes minimal benefits.

Read more:
If we don’t talk about value, cancer drugs will become terminal for health systems

Extortionate prices were feeding drug company mega-profits, and at the same time driving down the industry’s reputation. In a notorious example, the cost of the life-saving Epipen skyrocketed more than 400%, helping make drug prices a big issue in the 2016 US presidential election.

Industry argues high prices fund vital research. Critics say companies can spend more on marketing than research, and their profits sometimes derive from taxpayer-funded science.

To make matters worse, the big pharmaceutical companies are also among the big tax avoiders. A 2015 Senate hearing in Australia heard companies were paying rates as low as one cent in the dollar.

A global report from Oxfam in 2018 concluded the pharmaceutical industry was “cheating countries out of billions in tax revenues”.

Toxic marketing causes harm

The major problem with the drug giants is their unhealthy influence over medical science. The industry dominates research, and there’s strong evidence that company-sponsored studies tend to have a bias which favours the sponsor’s product.

Medical education is also heavily sponsored, with evidence suggesting an association between a doctor accepting just one meal at an “educational event”, and prescribing more of the sponsor’s drugs.

Read more:
Influential doctors aren’t disclosing their drug company ties

And the guidelines which can be so influential over a doctor’s prescribing decisions are too often written by medical experts with ties to drug companies.

Central to this marketing effort are these senior medical experts, sometimes called “key opinion leaders”, who claim to be independent yet accept fees for advice, consultancies or “educational” presentations to other doctors.

A former top-selling drug company sales representative turned whistleblower put it plainly in a 2008 piece in The BMJ:

Key opinion leaders were salespeople for us, and we would routinely measure the return on our investment, by tracking prescriptions before and after their presentations.

If that speaker didn’t make the impact the company was looking for, then you wouldn’t invite them back.

Unhealthy marketing means the latest most expensive pill is too often favoured over older cheaper options, or doing nothing at all, causing much harm and wasting precious resources.

Corporate crime

In 2009 came the biggest health-care fraud settlement in history. Pfizer was forced to fork out a US$2.3 billion fine for illegal promotion, false and misleading claims about drug safety, and paying kickbacks to doctors. That included a US$1.2 billion criminal fine, the largest ever in a US criminal prosecution.

One of the whistleblowers in that case happened to be a member of a special Pfizer sales team promoting Viagra. He revealed doctors were taken to breakfasts, lunches, dinners, Broadway shows, baseball games, golf courses, ski fields, casinos and strip clubs.

In 2013, Johnson & Johnson paid out US$2.2 billion in civil and criminal fines for putting “profit over patients’ health”. The company had illegally promoted powerful anti-psychotic drugs as behaviour control for the elderly and most vulnerable, overstating benefits and playing down dangerous side effects, including stroke.

Other court documents around the same time exposed how the giant global company Merck used dirty tricks to try and defend its controversial anti-arthritis drug Vioxx. Merck created a fake medical journal and drew up secret lists of academic critics to “neutralise” and “discredit”.

In the end, Vioxx was taken off the market because it was causing heart attacks, with estimates in The Lancet suggesting it may have led to 140,000 cases of serious coronary heart disease.

Read more:
The most powerful companies you’ve never heard of: Merck

Investigation and reform

Scandals like Vioxx tarnished the industry’s image, and brought more intense scrutiny.

The US National Academy of Sciences produced a landmark report arguing the closeness between doctors and drug companies could jeopardise the integrity of science, the objectivity of education, the quality of care, and public trust in medicine.

A series of US congressional hearings on unhealthy marketing produced the Open Payments register, mandated by US law to publicly list every company payment to every doctor.

Many around the world are reforming further, moving from transparency to independence. Italy brought in a special tax on drug company promotion to fund public interest research. Norway doesn’t give doctors full credit anymore for industry-sponsored education.

Read more:
Guidelines governing Canadian doctors’ relationships with pharma companies under review

But there’s a long way to go. A study in 2020 found 80% of the medicos who run the world’s most powerful doctors organisations still take money from drug and device companies. For research, for consultancies, for hospitality.

Even some agencies which assess drugs, notably the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), still rely on significant funding from industry, which pays to have its products assessed.

And the harmful marketing has continued. Just last month, a group of drug companies, including Johnson & Johnson, agreed to pay a total of US$26 billion for their roles in fuelling the opioid epidemic.

A prescription for trust

One drug company chief reportedly said last year the industry had a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset” its reputation.

Given the dark arts that drove pharma’s credibility to rock bottom, its fanciful to imagine the pandemic will magically end the misleading marketing and the price gouging.

Any post-pandemic recovery requires meaningful reform.

This article is part of a global Conversation series, The business of pharmaceuticals. You can read the other articles here.

Ray Moynihan is Assistant Professor at Bond University’s Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. He receives funding via competitive grants from Australia’s publicly funded National Health and Medical Research Council. Ray has written about and researched the pharmaceutical industry’s influence for almost 25 years and is the author of 4 books on the business of medicine.

– ref. COVID vaccines offer the pharma industry a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset its reputation. But it’s after decades of big profits and scandals – https://theconversation.com/covid-vaccines-offer-the-pharma-industry-a-once-in-a-generation-opportunity-to-reset-its-reputation-but-its-after-decades-of-big-profits-and-scandals-165082

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ya-Yen Sun, Senior Lecturer, The University of Queensland

In a non-COVID year, Australia’s vineyards host more than eight million wine tourists. While these visitors benefit wine producers and regional communities, they also generate a substantial amount of greenhouse gases.

If fact, our recent research showed tourist visits to vineyards comprise more than one-third of the industry’s total carbon footprint.

Wine tourism – also called “cellar door” visits – involves visiting vineyards, wineries, wine festivals and events to taste, drink and buy wine.

The Australian wine industry has already been forced to adapt to the effects of climate change. If it fails to curb emissions associated with wine tourism, the industry is contributing to its own demise.

Temperature change and ‘terroir’

In 2019, wine tourism contributed A$9.3 billion to the Australian economy – creating more jobs and economic output than any other part of the industry. It promotes exports and provides vital financial support for small winemakers and family farms that rely on cellar door sales to visitors.

When wine tourists aren’t in vineyards and tasting rooms, they often visit local restaurants, as well as cultural attractions such as museums, concerts and festivals.

Wine tourism gives travellers the chance to experience a region’s “terroir” – the particular geology, landscape, soil and climate that come together to make a region’s wine special.

Wine grapes however are particularly susceptible to temperature changes. In fact, the wine industry has been described as “the canary in the coal mine” for the way climate change will affect agriculture.

In Australia, winemakers have already been forced to adapt to heatwaves, drought, increased fire risk and salinity.

Previous research commissioned by Wine Australia has found global warming will bring many changes to the industry. For example, Australian winemakers may struggle to grow cool-climate varieties such as chardonnay and pinot noir.

Despite the industry’s vulnerability, the environmental sustainability of wine tourism is rarely addressed by either the industry or the academic literature. Our recent research sought to close this knowledge gap.

Read more:
Tourism desperately wants a return to the ‘old normal’ but that would be a disaster

Our findings

Past research into the wine industry’s carbon footprint has examined factors such as the emissions created by shipping the wine in heavy glass bottles.

Our research examined wine tourism activities that create carbon emissions, such as those associated with transport, accommodation, food and shopping. We traced how much wine tourists spend on the journey and the energy required to produce those services. We then allocated a share of total emissions to cellar door visits.

We found Australian wine tourism generates 790,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emisisons each year – one-third of the industry’s total carbon footprint. This translates to an average 101 kilograms of carbon emissions per winery trip, per person.

Domestic overnight wine tourists contributed the majority of environmental impacts (82%). However, due to their higher spending at wineries, their carbon emissions were lower than that of travellers from overseas when measured per dollar of spending.

We estimate one-quarter of wine tourists in Australia come from overseas, and long-haul flights form around 75% of international wine tourism’s carbon footprint.

Because of factors such as shorter flights, visitors from countries nearer to Australia – such as New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and Singapore – produce 20-40% fewer emissions per dollar spent than visitors from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Read more:
Major airlines say they’re acting on climate change. Our research reveals how little they’ve achieved

Stock up at the cellar door

Given the emisisons associated with international wine tourism, Australian wineries should target visits by domestic tourists. This would benefit both the environment and regional economies starved of international visitors during the pandemic.

In terms of overseas travellers, the Australian wine industry should target short-haul markets such as China, Japan and Singapore. This would reduce the industry’s reliance on tourists travelling to Australia on emissions-intensive long-haul flights.

Many of us will be wine tourists at some point – perhaps for an afternoon, overnight or even on an overseas trip to a famous wine region. So what can you do about your carbon footprint?

Visit accredited wineries that commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. And while you’re there, buy more bottles than you might have otherwise.

The typical Australian wine tourist buys three or four bottles at the cellar door. Why not make it a half dozen or more? A trip in which you buy ten bottles is more environmentally friendly than ten trips where you buy one bottle each time. And join the wine club for direct shipping.

Our cellar door purchases can also boost the bottom lines of wineries and enable them to invest in environmental sustainability. Few virtuous acts taste as good.

Read more:
Pass the shiraz, please: how Australia’s wine industry can adapt to climate change

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

– ref. Vineyard tourism is a big source of carbon emissions. Want to help? Then buy more wine – https://theconversation.com/vineyard-tourism-is-a-big-source-of-carbon-emissions-want-to-help-then-buy-more-wine-164600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Hartley, Honorary Senior Lecturer, The University of Queensland

On August 6, 1945, the US military obliterated Hiroshima with the world’s first deployed nuclear bomb. Several days later, artist Maruki Iri arrived in his hometown from Tokyo by train. Stunned by the devastation, he felt he was seeing “something that I wasn’t supposed to see”.

Travelling to his family home, the artist negotiated a wasteland, including mounds of dead and barely alive bodies. When his wife, Maruki Toshi, arrived a week later, the pair spent a month assisting bomb blast casualties.

With the end of the war, the Japanese Communist Party saw Allied Occupation forces as liberating Japan and encouraged its followers to focus on a bright future for Japan. Toshi and Iri were party members but struggled to comply. By 1948, each knew they must reproduce in visual art form the perdition they had witnessed.

The pair collaborated on each painting. Iri worked in traditional Nihonga (Japanese painting), although with an idiosyncratic surrealist turn. Toshi’s style was more westernised and featured the human form.

This “water and oil” aesthetic combination produced a spectacularly successful — although sometimes tense — collaboration. Subverting censorship, the Hiroshima Panels (known in Japanese as the Atomic Bomb Panels) were born.

Read more:
World politics explainer: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Hiroshima Panels

Over three decades, the couple produced 15 Hiroshima-themed panel-scenes, average size 1.8 by 7.2 metres, with accompanying descriptive text.

Each had eight Japanese-screen/scroll style distinct sections. Notwithstanding occasional swirls of colour — vermilion depicting the fires of Hiroshima/Hell — most were the stark black of sumi ink.

The collaboration was not always harmonious. Iri would splash ink over images painstakingly created by his wife. The resultant wash-effect, however, enhanced the impact of bomb-mutilated forms.

Read more:
Atomic amnesia: why Hiroshima narratives remain few and far between

Incrementally, the couple’s subject matter expanded to different but similar topics. When an American viewer raised the Japanese Imperial Army’s 1937 Nanjing massacre, the couple produced a 4 by 8 metre image of that atrocity.

They collaborated in this way almost until Iri’s death in 1995.

The first Hiroshima panel, Ghosts, originally titled August Six, was exhibited in February 1950 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum when occupation restrictions eased.

Ghosts is a searing depiction of bodies in the post-blast landscape. To the right is a heap of misshapen, ossified corpses, balancing precariously, several faces visible. Left and centre is a massed parade of upright figures, clothes sheared off by the blast, strips of scorched skin dripping from arms instinctively raised as shields.

Seemingly illuminated, the standing body of a woman throws her head back in horror or pain. Perhaps in both.

Depicting the true catastrophe

Initial responses in Japan were mixed. Allied restrictions resulted in limited awareness of Hiroshima’s ordeal, so some thought the work exaggerated. There were survivors who felt the images aestheticised the event. Nevertheless, the Marukis were clearly inspired to continue working on the Hiroshima theme.

One of the few atomic tropes permitted to circulate in the immediate postwar era was the familiar mushroom cloud. This cloud – necessarily distant – elided suffering.

The Marukis, however, depicted the catastrophic scenes beneath.

Several panels profile women with children. One is Bamboo Thicket. Survivors sought shelter in these thickets which often partially survived the explosion. With intertwining body parts and bamboo trunks, the left of the image suggests the catastrophic wind surge generated by the heat of the blast. A woman clasps a child.

Other infants, dead or alive, lie curled up on the ground. A boy – clothes torn away – embraces two younger children. One woman holds up hands charred raw by the thermonuclear heat. The clear visibility of faces makes for particularly disquieting viewing.

Crows depicts Korean victims of the blast, who were often forced labourers in wartime Japan. Deeply discriminated against, Koreans were forsaken by rescuers even in death and their cadaver eyes were pecked out by crows.

While human forms dominate most panels, this work foregrounds the eponymous birds swooping down from the right and eddying above before eventually blanketing the decomposing corpses. In a Marc Chagall-like twist, disembodied traditional Korean women’s attire – the full chima skirt and shaped jeogori coat – float ethereally above the scene.

Art and trauma

Ultra-nationalists in Japan perpetuate a discourse that elides Japanese war atrocity. This can never diminish the unspeakable trauma of the Hiroshima ordeal.

Art undoubtedly has the power to explore trauma. As University of Queensland academics Névine El Nossery and Amy L Hubbell have argued, art transmits trauma’s unspeakability. The power of art, they say, is to “transform and render pain.”

The Maruki Gallery is situated in rural Japan on a rise above the Toki River a little north of Tokyo. Opened in 1967 to make Maruki artwork available to all, the gallery expanded over the decades to include features such as a memorial to Korean people massacred after the 1923 Great Tokyo earthquake.

Read more:
Japan’s way of remembering World War II still infuriates its neighbours

The extraordinary Hiroshima Panels transform the intense pain of that great crime against humanity into images to be revisited across generations. With Maruki Gallery images now online, people everywhere can contemplate the Hiroshima trauma.

Viewers of the Hiroshima Panels become witnesses to that event. With this witnessing surely comes the need to prevent nuclear war.

A broad complement of Maruki art can be viewed at the Maruki Gallery website.

Barbara Hartley is affiliated with Just Peace, Qld., and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

– ref. The Hiroshima Panels are a remarkable artistic exploration of trauma – https://theconversation.com/the-hiroshima-panels-are-a-remarkable-artistic-exploration-of-trauma-164333

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Parke, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Auckland

Responding to the recent controversy over mātauranga Māori and the letter he co-authored titled “In defence of science”, Emeritus Professor Michael Corballis said: “We don’t know any Māori who knows what mātauranga is.”

This immediately made us wonder: what would happen if we asked a group of scientists what science is?

Common responses to the question “what is science?” focus on causal explanations, controlled experiments, hypothesis testing or falsification (those are popular options, not an exhaustive list).

All point to important aspects of science, and all have been proposed as ways of defining it. But there is no single answer to the question “what is science?”.

This doesn’t mean people can characterise science however they want. Far from it. Our point, instead, is that questions like “what is science?” or “is mātauranga science?” could be asking about any number of different ideas.

Ambiguous statements are poor starting points for careful, constructive debates. We see people talking past each other in discussions of mātauranga and science. These discussions could benefit from more careful articulation of the concepts at stake. We’ll start with science.

What is science?

When we ask what something is, we often seek a definition of that thing. But whereas some concepts are pretty easily defined (electron, uncle), some aren’t (art, life, science).

When we ask a question about a hard-to-define concept – “what is art?” or “what is life?” – dictionary definitions aren’t much use, because what we are after is an understanding of the range of conceptual work the term does for us.

So, when we ask “what is science?”, what are we asking? One way to answer is to list methodologies that many or most scientists use, such as testing hypotheses, conducting controlled experiments or gathering empirical evidence.

Another way to answer is to point to a list of goals and values – yes, despite the myth of a value-free ideal, values are part of science – that many or most scientists strive for. These include reproducibility, empirical accuracy or reliable causal knowledge of how the world works.

Yet another approach shifts away from listing science’s characteristic hallmarks and points to its status. Here, we might answer the question “what is science?” by saying something like, “science represents our best empirical knowledge of how the natural world works”.

The many faces of science

Any of those answers can be framed generically. We can talk about science universally: as a set of methodologies anyone can employ, values anyone can strive for, or status any body of knowledge can achieve, at a given time, in a given domain.

We can also talk about science in a specific way: as a modern institution housed in universities, companies and NGOs. We can talk about the history and culture of this institution: it traces back to the Enlightenment and to earlier times and places, and it is funded by governments and industry and rich donors.

We can talk about things this institution, or particular people involved in it, have done throughout its history: discovered antiseptics and subatomic particles and the structure of DNA, exploited indigenous peoples around the world in the name of research, come together globally to develop COVID vaccines in under a year.

We see all the above understandings of science — methodological, epistemic, status-based, universal and specific — on display, and often run together, in the recent debate about mātauranga and science. And that’s not even an exhaustive list of ways to address the question “what is science?”.

Slow down, show respect

Mātauranga spans Māori knowledge, culture, values and worldview. When someone asks, “is mātauranga science?”, there is a range of things they could really be asking about, including:

• does mātauranga (or do forms of it) use scientific methodologies to generate knowledge?

• do we value mātauranga as a valid way of knowing about the world alongside science?

• how should we uphold this value in a way that respects intersections and differences?

• should relevant content from mātauranga be taught in science classrooms?

These questions and others are (at a bare minimum) starting points for more productive discussions than “is mātauranga science?” There is nothing constructive to be gained by framing those questions in ambiguous definitional terms.

In closing, we note the question “what is philosophy?” has no clear and easy answer, either! A favourite quotation about philosophy says it is “thinking in slow motion”. More of that would be welcome in the current discussion.

In practice, that will mean striving to avoid ambiguity in everything we say, pausing with respect to consider our audience’s point of view — and choosing our words carefully.

Emily Parke has received funding from Marsden to explore mātauranga Māōri and science.

Dan C H Hikuroa has received research funding from Marsden, MBIE, National Science Challenges, Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, Te Pūnaha Matatini to explore mātauranga Māori and science.

– ref. Let’s choose our words more carefully when discussing mātauranga Māori and science – https://theconversation.com/lets-choose-our-words-more-carefully-when-discussing-matauranga-maori-and-science-165465

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Lamar, PhD Researcher, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand’s endemic tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) are the sole survivors of an ancient reptile order called Rhynchocephalia. Once widespread across New Zealand, tuatara survive in only a fraction of their historic range, on small offshore islands and in fenced eco-sanctuaries.

Despite massive conservation efforts to restore populations, our lack of knowledge about tuatara reproduction means some conservation techniques remain currently off the table.

Tuatara are unique among reptiles in that males don’t have a penis or hemipenes, making sperm collection difficult. But in our latest research, we describe how we managed to collect and characterise live sperm from tuatara for the first time.

Perhaps surprisingly, we found that tuatara sperm are the fastest swimmers of any reptile studied to date. This could help us boost the conservation of this unique and treasured species.

The global decline of wildlife has necessitated creative and far-reaching conservation efforts, including the freezing of eggs and sperm (known as gametes).

Gamete banking is a proactive conservation approach where researchers preserve genetically important sperm and egg cells before this genetic diversity is lost. While this is never preferable to natural reproduction, assisted reproduction has already been used with success on critically endangered species like the New Zealand flightless parrot kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus).

However, developing the methods for gamete cryopreservation for any species, especially one that represents a unique evolutionary branch, takes time.

‘Cloacal kisses’ and speedy sperm

Our first challenge was to figure out a way to sample live sperm. The male reproductive anatomy sets tuatara apart from other reptiles — without a penis, their reproduction is more bird-like.

Tuatara transfer sperm when the male aligns his cloaca (which serves as the opening for digestive, reproductive and urinary tracts) with the female’s. We found the best approach to collect a viable, sufficient sperm sample was just after this “cloacal kiss”, when the sperm was still visible on the edge of the female’s cloaca.

For the very first time, we were able to collect, image and measure the speed of swimming tuatara sperm. Even though tuatara generally live a long, slow life, it turns out their sperm are surprisingly fast.

Having fast swimmers may be an adaptation to aid male tuatara in their reproductive efforts. Other reptiles have an intromittent organ (either a penis or a pair of hemipenes) to aid in sperm delivery, but tuatara rely solely on the ability of their sperm to swim inside the female’s cloaca after mating.

While having sperm with distinct characteristics may be what helps tuatara reproduce, it also means the techniques required for cryobanking this sperm must be equally unique.

Climate change and tuatara conservation

Once widespread across New Zealand, tuatara now persist in 45 distinct populations across a fraction of their historic range.

The sex of tuatara hatchlings is determined by the temperature the eggs are exposed to during incubation, with more males hatching at warmer temperatures. As climate change continues to raise temperatures in New Zealand, we expect this will skew tuatara sex ratios, with the potential to drive some populations to be male-dominated and therefore functionally extinct.

Read more:
Many New Zealand species are already at risk because of predators and habitat loss. Climate change makes things worse

Such local extinctions will lead to a loss of valuable genetic diversity. Cryopreservation of tuatara eggs and sperm, to be used for assisted reproduction, could provide the insurance required to preserve genetic diversity and aid conservation of this vulnerable iconic species.

Formulating the best cryoprotectant to preserve sperm from the sole surviving species in a lineage as old as the dinosaurs with a unique reproductive anatomy amongst reptiles, would be challenge enough. When you add in the fact that tuatara mate like birds, are slow to reproduce, but paradoxically have extremely fast swimming sperm, it makes cryopreserving tuatara sperm a thorny problem.

Read more:
Not a lizard nor a dinosaur, tuatara is the sole survivor of a once-widespread reptile group

Our efforts to help ensure the future of the last of the Rhynchocephalians also taught us a great deal about these unique animals, viewed by Māori as guardians of knowledge.

Earlier this year, at the end of the Austral summer, we undertook another research season, collecting sperm and characterising the males it was collected from. Going forward, we will undertake more trials, test new cryopreserving agents and progress toward long-term gamete banking of this important reptile. Doing so will provide a pathway toward new conservation strategies for this taonga (treasured) species.

We would like to acknowledge Helen Taylor, of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, who has contributed to this research.

Dr Diane Ormsby works for Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Jennifer Moore, Nicola Jane Nelson, Sarah Lamar, and Susan N. Keall do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Tuatara are ancient, slow and endangered. But their super speedy sperm could boost conservation efforts – https://theconversation.com/tuatara-are-ancient-slow-and-endangered-but-their-super-speedy-sperm-could-boost-conservation-efforts-165173

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

The government is set to tweak its vaccination timetable to accelerate jabs for those aged 30 to 39, after Doherty Institute modelling showing it is vital to get younger adults quickly vaccinated, because they are high COVID transmitters.

Those in their 30s and 20s – scheduled for the Pfizer vaccine – are at the back of the queue under the rollout plan, becoming eligible from September-October, according to the man in charge of the rollout, General JJ Frewen, speaking some weeks ago.

With Pfizer in short supply, they are now under some pressure, including from Scott Morrison and changing health advice, to take the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Government sources said on Tuesday the plan would be tweaked, probably this week, after incoming Pfizer supply numbers were confirmed.

The Doherty modelling, used as a basis for national cabinet last week setting vaccination targets, says: “As supply allows, extending vaccinations for adults under 40 years offers the greatest potential to reduce transmission now that a high proportion of vulnerable Australians are vaccinated.”

The vaccine uptake by young people 16 and over “will strongly influence the impact of vaccination on overall transmission,” Doherty says.

The modelling was released on Tuesday at a news conference by Scott Morrison and Professor Jodie McVernon, Director of Epidemiology at the Doherty Institute.

McVernon said the 20 to 39 year olds were “the peak spreaders” of the virus.

“They will bring COVID home to their children, they will take it home to their own parents, and this is the group now where we’re proposing the reorientation of the strategy,” she said.

National cabinet last week agreed in principle to a four stage plan to move from the present suppression strategy (aiming for zero community transmission) to a limited reopening when 70% of people 16 and over have been fully vaccinated. When the vaccination level reached 80%, lockdowns would be rare and limited.

In an analysis for the national cabinet meeting, Treasury calculated the direct impact on economic activity of various vaccination scenarios modelled by Doherty.

Treasury found that “continuing to minimise the number of COVID-19 cases, by taking early and strong action in response to outbreaks of the Delta variant, is consistently more cost effective than allowing higher levels of community transmission, which ultimately requires longer and more costly lockdowns.”

At 50% vaccination rates, the direct economic cost of minimising cases is about $570 million a week; at 60%, it is about $430 million.

At 70%, with only low level restrictions needed, the expected economic cost of COVID-19 management falls to about $200 million each week, reducing to about $140 million at an 80% vaccination level.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the clear message from the economic modelling “is that until we get to 70% and above vaccination rates, the economic imperative is that governments need to move fast to get on top of those cases. If they don’t, we see lengthier and more severe lockdowns, which have a much more significant economic cost.”

“What Treasury have found is that at 50% and 60% vaccination rates, it’s five times more costly, should governments not move early to get on top of the virus.”

The NSW government has recently come under sharp criticism for not moving earlier in the current Sydney outbreak. There is now a prolonged lockdown.

Despite Australia’s still low vaccination rate – only about one in five 16 and over have had two doses – Morrison strongly rejected Anthony Albanese’s proposal that everyone who is fully vaccinated by December 1 should receive $300.

Morrison said the proposal was “a vote of no-confidence in Australians”, and “a bubble without a thought”. It said to people that health concerns they might have about a vaccine could be paid off.

Pointing to the relatively high level of take-up by older people Morrison said: “Do we really think that Australians of younger ages are less committed to their own health, the health of their families, the health of their communities, than those who are older? Of course not.”

“It’s not a game show. And it’s very important that we continue to respect how Australians are engaging with this process. So if they do have hesitancy about vaccines, I’m not going to pay them off. I’m going to pay a GP to sit down with them and talk them through their concerns, which is what I have already done.”

The Essential poll, released Tuesday, found 47% of people who have not been vaccinated say they would take Pfizer but not AstraZeneca. This unwillingness to receive AstraZeneca has increased substantially since April.

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

– ref. Accelerated jabs for younger people after Doherty modelling shows it’s vital to vaccinate them quickly – https://theconversation.com/accelerated-jabs-for-younger-people-after-doherty-modelling-shows-its-vital-to-vaccinate-them-quickly-165555

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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversations’s politics team.

In this episode, politics + society editor Amanda Dunn and Michelle talk about the outcome of last Friday’s National Cabinet meeting – an updated four-point plan for exiting COVID restrictions via vaccination levels of 70% and 80%.

They also discuss Scott Morrison’s vehement rejection of Anthony Albanese’s proposal that Australians be given $300 incentive to get vaccinated.

Additional audio

Gaena, Blue Dot Sessions, from Free Music Archive.

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

– ref. Podcast with Michelle Grattan: a four-stage plan and a $300 payment to get vaccinated – https://theconversation.com/podcast-with-michelle-grattan-a-four-stage-plan-and-a-300-payment-to-get-vaccinated-165542

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lien Duong, Senior Lecturer in School Accounting of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Curtin University

The A$39 billion (US$29 billion) that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s digital payments company Square is paying to acquire Australian upstart payments outfit Afterpay is the biggest takeover deal in Australian corporate history.

It surpasses the A$32 billion European commercial real estate giant Unibail-Rodamco agreed to pay for Frank Lowy’s Westfield Corporation in 2017.

The deal marks an extraordinarily successful journey for Afterpay, a company founded in 2014 and listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in May 2016 at $1 a share.

At the close of last week, before this deal was announced, its share price was A$96.66, giving it a market capitalisation of about $27.5 billion.

Square, which at the end of last week had a market cap of about US$123 billion, may pay 1% of its buyout offer in cash, but the rest will be in stock, giving Afterpay shareholders 0.375 shares of Square for each Afterpay ordinary share.

The stock swap means the implied price Square is paying for Afterpay share is about A$126.21 — a premium of about 30.6% to its closing price last Friday.

Why so valuable?

That’s to do with the profitability of the “Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL) market, in which Afterpay has been a pioneer. The market has become even more profitable due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated the use of online and cashless payments as well as leaving more people short of money.

How Afterpay works

BNPL companies are so-called because they work differently to traditional credit companies. The reason they emerged first in Australia can be attributed both to “the inventiveness of Australia’s retail and finance sectors” as well as a quirk in Australia’s credit regulation laws.

Under Australia’s National Consumer Credit Protection Act, credit is defined (in line with the dictionary definition) as a method of paying for goods with the credit provider making their profit through charging interest.

Afterpay does not charge consumers interest. The majority of its revenue instead comes from merchant fees, charging a commission of 4-6% on the value of the transaction plus 30 cents for every purchased. The rest of its revenue comes from charging late fees when customers fail to make repayments on time.

Afterpay’s standard repayment plan is four equal instalments every fortnight over two months. A missed payment incurs an initial $10 penalty. If you still have an outstanding balance after one week a further $7 is charged.

It could be argued these late fees are the equivalent of charging interest — and a hefty interest payment at that. One $10 late fee on a debt of $150 translates to an effective interest charge of 6.67% per fortnight.

But because they don’t explicitly charge interest, Afterpay and other BNPL companies are not covered by credit laws.

This has led to concerns about BNPL providers profiting at the expense of the most financially vulnerable consumers. In 2018 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission called for reform to close the legal loophole. It wanted BNPL providers to operate under the same rules as credit providers — including the same responsible lending obligations to perform a credit check and verify that customers could afford to take on the debt.

However, this has not happened. A Senate inquiry decided last year no regulation was necessary, instead endorsing self-regulation. Afterpay and its rivals signed a voluntary code of conduct earlier this year.

Read more:
What’s the difference between credit and debt? How Afterpay and other ‘BNPL’ providers skirt consumer laws

Booming profits

Despite these concerns, the ease of Afterpay’s technology has made it a very convenient way to buy things. Its logo is becoming ubiquitous. Over the year to June 30 the number of merchants offering it as a payment option increased by 77% to 98,200, and number of customers by 63% to 16 million.

In the first six months of 2021, Afterpay’s gross profit was US$284 million — about 150% more than the US$113 million profit it booked in the six months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (July-December 2019).

With the BNPL market proving to be so lucrative, credit card companies, banks and tech companies have been looking to muscle in. Visa announced its BNPL plans in July 2019, and it is just now rolling out its technology to merchants. Commonwealth Bank of Australia is also in the process of establishing its “StepPay” offering. Paypal launched its “Pay in 4” service last month. Apple last month also announced its own plans.

Read more:
How to know if your online shopping habit is a problem — and what to do if it is

Square, co-founded by Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009, has gone the simpler route by buying the pioneer in the market.

Afterpay’s board has unanimously recommended shareholders accept the offer. Both Afterpay and Square shareholders still need to approve the deal. So too does Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, under Australia’s foreign investment laws.

But this is all likely to be a formality. It’s an offer too good to refuse.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why Jack Dorsey’s Square paid a record $39 billion for Afterpay – https://theconversation.com/why-jack-dorseys-square-paid-a-record-39-billion-for-afterpay-165528

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geraldine Moses, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Pharmacy, The University of Queensland

One reason dietary supplements are so popular is the perception they’re harmless.

But like all drugs, there are many potential dangers from taking vitamins and minerals.

The problem is that, unlike conventional medicines, dietary supplements aren’t required to provide warnings to consumers of their potential risks.

Nor are they required to submit extensive documentation of their risks to Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), when they’re licensed for marketing, leaving us all uninformed.

This week, I published a paper in Australian Prescriber identifying six possible harms of taking vitamin and mineral supplements.

What do we mean by supplements?

Dietary supplements are natural health products such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, plant extracts, and algae used to augment people’s diets rather than treat disease.

Although these products are more commonly referred to as complementary medicines in Australia, particularly by the TGA, the term “dietary supplement” is frequently used by consumers and in the research literature.

Dietary supplements dominate the complementary medicines industry in Australia.

Sales reached A$4.9 billion in 2017, having doubled over the preceding ten years.

Complementary medicines are widely used in Australia. A national survey published in 2018 showed 63% of people use them regularly.

Supplements containing vitamins and minerals were the most popular type of complementary medicine, reportedly used by 47% of respondents. Examples include vitamin D, vitamin C, calcium, magnesium and vitamin A.

Read more:
Thinking about trying collagen supplements for your skin? A healthy diet is better value for money

6 potential harms of dietary supplements

People often say they’ve never heard of harms of dietary supplements. This isn’t surprising, given their marketing is largely based on benefits with little, if any, mention of potential harms.

What’s more, consumer information leaflets are never provided, and few products carry warnings on their packaging of potential serious effects.

Nonetheless, there are well-recognised harms from the ingredients of dietary supplements, which anyone who has studied pharmacology would know, especially when these substances are consumed in high doses.

For these reasons, some higher-dose vitamin A and selenium products are legally regulated by the TGA as Schedule 2 (pharmacy only), Schedule 3 (pharmacist only) and Schedule 4 medicines (prescription only) products.

When contemplating the possible harms that could arise with dietary supplements, most people just think of side effects.

However, as with any medicine, there are at least six types of harm that can occur which I identified in my research:

• Side effects. Side effects from vitamins and minerals can occur from short- or long-term use. Typically side effects emerge from doses that are too high, but not always. They can also cause new disease or upset existing conditions. There are risks from certain supplements during pregnancy and breastfeeding too

• Drug interactions. Interactions with other drugs, certain foods, and some diseases can make other drugs more toxic or less effective

• Cost. The cost of dietary supplements can impact on people’s finances and their ability to afford treatment or other essential items

• Delay more effective therapy. Time spent taking ineffective products may delay more effective interventions, waste valuable time and allow a disease to progress

• False hope or fraud. Falling for fraudulent claims offering false hope can be demoralising and depressing, which for some can make the difference between continuing to manage a health condition and giving up

• Medication burden. As the number of medicines and supplements increases, so too does the chance of something going wrong. This includes the risk of side effects, drug interactions, or making a mistake.

The key to safety is the dose

Many dietary supplements are used safely for medical purposes. Women are prescribed folic acid and iodine in pregnancy, for example, or vitamin and minerals supplements are given for deficiencies, such as iron.

The key to using them safely is the dose, which is determined from research demonstrating the benefits outweigh the risks.

This isn’t the case when people self-medicate with products purchased on the open market. Consumers rarely consider the effective or safe dose and often just take the dose recommended on the label – which could be useless – or whatever they guess is right.

Many people neglect the risk of overdosing on the same ingredient such as vitamin B6 or vitamin A, which is most likley when taken via multiple products.

Read more:
New vitamin supplement study finds they may do more harm than good

For people to make informed decisions about using dietary supplements, details about the benefits and harms should be evidence-based and readily available. People need to know not only where to look for this information, but also how to critique it.

Health professionals can assist people by openly discussing the risks and benefits of dietary supplements, explain why dose is important for both efficacy and safety, and direct them where to go for good quality information that goes beyond what’s on the manufacturer’s label.

Manufacturers should be required to make this information more readily available.

When assessing the potential benefits and risks of supplements, it’s vital to look beyond the main or well-known ingredient. Identify the exact product being used, all its ingredients, the dose being taken, and the potential for cumulative overdose from repeated ingredients in multiple products.

As with all medicines, if you have any side effects or problems after taking dietary supplements, report them to the TGA.

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

– ref. Vitamins and minerals aren’t risk-free. Here are 6 ways they can cause harm – https://theconversation.com/vitamins-and-minerals-arent-risk-free-here-are-6-ways-they-can-cause-harm-165399

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hugo Temby, Doctoral Researcher, Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program, Australian National University

Even after A$4,000 in repairs, Heather’s $18,000 rooftop solar and battery system is still not working.

Heather worked as a nurse until a workplace accident caused her to leave the workforce. She put most of her compensation towards making a switch to clean energy, hoping to bring down her energy costs and increase her comfort.

But a solar company sold her a system that wasn’t suited to her needs. They also didn’t clearly explain how the system worked or how to maintain it.

Heather’s battery failed after roughly two years. Her system’s complexity, and the limited handover provided by the company, meant she didn’t notice its failure during the short warranty period. Reflecting on the technical written information provided to her, Heather told us it was “way over my head”.

As a result, she is fully responsible for the cost of repairs, which she cannot afford. And she has since been told the battery is irreparable.

Heather’s story is one of many featured in our new report published today. It shows household clean energy technologies — such as rooftop solar, household batteries and electric vehicles — can be unnecessarily complicated, time consuming and costly.

Switching to clean energy at home

The aim of our report was to better understand stories like Heather’s to inform a Victorian Energy and Water Ombudsman review of the various new energy technology regulatory frameworks in Australia. These frameworks have not kept up with the pace of technological change.

We held in-depth interviews in 2020 and 2021 with 68 householders, businesses and industry experts based mainly in Victoria and South Australia. We asked why people were purchasing new energy technology, if it was meeting their expectations, and the issues people were encountering.

Nearly all householders we spoke with were motivated to some degree by environmental concerns, particularly the desire to reduce their emissions, and many expected some financial returns. Community mindedness, enthusiasm for technology and comfort were other common motivators.

And many wanted greater independence from untrusted energy companies. Distrust of the sector has multiple facets, but it often boils down to a sense the sector doesn’t have the long-term interests of the public in mind.

Going it alone

New energy technologies can be highly complex. It’s not always clear what differentiates one solar panel product from another. Some services, such as virtual power plants or battery aggregation, require a basic understanding of how the broader energy system works, which even energy insiders can struggle to understand.

Some householders told us they found it difficult to source reliable information about different electric vehicle products, which they felt weren’t being sufficiently well covered in mainstream car magazines.

Read more:
‘Smart home’ gadgets promise to cut power bills but many lie idle – or can even boost energy use

Meanwhile, many householders felt alone and unsupported in dealing with their new technology. Heather, for example, has gone through four different electricians.

Most told us they were investing significant time, effort and funds into researching, choosing, configuring and operating their technologies, with different technologies often interacting and various energy tariffs on offer.

Increasingly, people are being seen as idealised “prosumers” in a “two-sided market”. In other words, rather than asking people how they might like to engage with the energy system, householders are given narrow options revolving around solely financial mechanisms.

Most Australians don’t have the time and resources to do this work. Without a whole-of-sector strategy to ensure all Australians benefit from new energy technologies, we risk leaving people behind. This includes renters, apartment dwellers, people who can’t afford high up-front costs, or people who simply don’t have the time to do all the extra “digital housework” to maintain these technologies.

Alternative models, such as social enterprises or community energy, could make technology more accessible to renters and low income households. One example of this is solar gardens, where people can buy a share in a solar array located nearby, which in turn provides them with a discount on their bill.

But arguably, such options wouldn’t be required if our emerging energy system had resolved the energy trilemma in the first place.

Why this is so concerning

We know householders are a key part of the solution for climate mitigation, together with businesses and government.

There are many ways householders can decarbonise their electricity and transport. While not all involve buying new energy products, we consistently heard frustration about the lack of a coherent framework for different ways they could contribute.

Read more:
‘Die of cold or die of stress?’: Social housing is frequently colder than global health guidelines

According to the federal government, it will be “technology, not taxes” that will get us to our Paris emissions reduction commitments.

But this assumes new technology uptake will be straightforward and downplays potential risks. It also implies new technology is always preferable to alternatives like reducing consumption.

A narrow focus on technology also ignores the rebound effect. Research has shown that without deeper engagement with Australians about the energy system, it’s possible lower electricity costs from new energy technologies could actually increase energy use and emissions.

Where do we go from here?

Our new research shows we need better support for the nearly 2.8 million (and growing) Australian households and businesses that have already purchased new, clean energy technologies.

To make this happen, we need coordinated, climate wise policy across all levels of government with an engaged, evidence-based and equitable energy policy. This would help rebuild trust in Australia’s energy system.

If our national climate policy is to rely on new energy technology, it will be critical to ensure the technology – and its implementation – is better aligned with people’s needs and aspirations.

Read more:
‘I can’t save money for potential emergencies’: COVID lockdowns drove older Australians into energy poverty

Hugo Temby received funding from the Victorian Energy and Water Ombudsman and Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning.

Hedda Ransan-Cooper received funding from the Victorian Energy and Water Ombudsman and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning.

– ref. Complicated, costly and downright frustrating: Aussies keen to cut emissions with clean energy at home get little support – https://theconversation.com/complicated-costly-and-downright-frustrating-aussies-keen-to-cut-emissions-with-clean-energy-at-home-get-little-support-161682

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

I reckon Albo’s on the right track. The opposition leader wants to pay A$300 to every Australian who is fully vaccinated by December 1.

The Grattan Institute is on a similar theme. It has proposed a $10 million lottery, paying out $1 million per week from Melbourne Cup day. Everyone who has been vaccinated once gets one ticket. Anyone vaccinated twice gets double the chance.

The costs are tiny compared to what’s at stake. Treasury modelling released on Tuesday puts the cost of Australia-wide lockdown at $3.2 billion per week.

Paying people to get vaccinated fits the government’s criteria of a response that’s “temporary, targeted and proportionate”.

And the published research on small payments shows they are extraordinarily effective, often more effective than big ones.

A few years back, Ulrike Malmendier and Klaus Schmidt of US National Bureau of Economic Research discovered that a small gift persuaded the subject of an experiment to award contracts to one of two fictional companies 68% of the time instead of the expected 50%.

Small payments can be more effective than big ones

A gift three times as big cut that response to 50%, which was no better than if there had been no gift at all.

The effect of small payments to pregnant British smokers has been dramatic.

Offered £50 in vouchers for setting a quit date, plus £50 if carbon monoxide tests confirmed cessation after four weeks, £100 after 12 weeks and £200 in late pregnancy in addition to the counselling and free nicotine replacement therapy given to the other pregnant smokers, those offered the payment were more than twice as likely to quit — 22.5% compared with 8.6%.

Read more:
Albanese calls for $300 vaccination incentive, as rollout extended to vulnerable children

Never mind that these small sums ought to have made no financial sense.

The gifts were minuscule compared with the money the recipients would have saved anyway by not smoking, yet they worked so well that the researchers estimated the cost of the lives saved at just £482 per quality-adjusted year.

Around 5,000 British miscarriages each year are attributable to smoking during pregnancy. The participants randomly assigned the offer of a payment not to smoke gave birth to babies that were on average 20 grams heavier.

The incentives can be even smaller.

Mai Frandsen at the University of Tasmania has trialled offering smokers half as much — a A$10 voucher on signing up, then $50 per checkup in addition to support from a pharmacist. The results are encouraging.

Lotteries are cheaper still. The Grattan Institute’s suggestion of a $1 million per week payout sounds like a lot, but it isn’t when divided by Australia’s population.

A preliminary analysis of Ohio’s Vax-a-Million lottery found it increased takeup by 50,000-80,000 in its first two weeks at a cost of US$85 per dose.

Beer, doughnuts, dope

Other incentives offered with apparent success in the US include free beer, donuts and (in Washington state) free cannabis.

They needn’t work for everyone. A survey conducted by the Melbourne Institute in June found that of those who were willing to get vaccinated but hadn’t got around to it, 54% would respond to a cash incentive.

Of those who weren’t willing or weren’t sure, only 10% would respond to cash.

If you were paid a cash incentive, would you get vaccinated as soon as possible?

But the important thing about vaccination is that not everyone needs to do it.

The Grattan Institute believes 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated before we can reopen borders.

The national cabinet has adopted a lower target: 80% of Australians over 16, which is 65% of the population.

Vaccination expert Julie Leask says when it comes to child vaccines, most non-vaccinating parents are simply “trying to get on with the job of parenting”. If it’s made easy for them, they’ll do it.

Read more:
When will we reach herd immunity? Here are 3 reasons that’s a hard question to answer

There’s not a lot to be gained by trying to reach these who actually don’t want to be vaccinated. Try too hard, and you’ll get their backs up.

The tragedy of the government’s COVID vaccine rollout (aside from the difficulties with assuring supply) is that the government hasn’t made it easy.

Vaccination ought to be easy

The government could have made it easy. When it sought advice last year from departments including the treasury, it was told to do what’s done for the flu vaccine — to distribute it through employers and pharmacies as well as general practitioners, so as to make it almost automatic.

The best part of a year later, it’s a view the prime minister is coming round to. Most of us don’t go to the doctor very often — it’s out of our way.

Read more:
Over 18 and considering AstraZeneca? This may help you decide

For a government that came to office promising to slash red tape
for business and offered businesses incentives to invest, this government appears not to have fully grasped the importance of red tape and incentives when it comes to health.

It might yet. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday he had investigated something along the lines put forward by Albanese. General Frewen, in charge of the COVID taskforce, said it wasn’t needed “right now”.

When the time comes, if we remain under-vaccinated, Morrision can reach for it.

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

– ref. Paying Australians $300 to get fully vaccinated would be value for money – https://theconversation.com/paying-australians-300-to-get-fully-vaccinated-would-be-value-for-money-165520

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Intifar Chowdhury, PhD Candidate/Data Archivist, Australian National University

The 2019 federal election saw the lowest voter turnout since compulsory voting was introduced in 1924. Only 91% of Australians voted, amid reports young people “turned their back on democracy”.

In some seats, less than three-quarters of those entitled to vote cast a legitimate ballot. The biggest falls were in some inner-city electorates with high proportions of young voters. This comes off the back of a decline in electoral participation in advanced democracies, which has been disproportionately concentrated among young people.

Beyond the election, survey research has also suggested young Australians harbour more negative attitudes towards democracy than older people. A 2013 Lowy Institute poll found 48% of millennials did not believe democracy is superior to its alternatives.

So, are young Australians really turning away from democracy? My new research cautions against the idea that young Australians are disengaging from the principles and processes of our political system.

How should we think about youth and politics?

The idea that young people don’t care about politics is a highly contested one among researchers. There are three ways of thinking about how youth affects political attitudes and behaviours.

The first is young people are not interested in politics because of the “age effect”. There is a large body of literature arguing younger people have different attitudes towards politics than older people because of where they are in their lives. Politics may seem irrelevant because they are less likely to have things like a mortgage or kids.

The second is young people may have different attitudes due to a “generation effect”. That is, values about democracy do not vary with age rather, values formed during our formative years persist throughout people’s lives. For example, Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1960) — who saw unprecedented material growth from the construction, manufacturing and mining boon in their youth — may be more committed to democracy than the next generations.

The third is what’s known as “period effects”. Political and economic crises are considered contextual factors which shape the political outlook and behaviour of all citizens, irrespective of their age and generational memberships. For example, we may all be shaped by the COVID pandemic, regardless of how old we are.

These three factors — age, cohort and period, respectively — can influence people’s attitude and behaviour simultaneously, making it harder to attribute disengagement to any one factor.

What’s happening in Australia?

In Australia, some studies show engagement in democracy is dependent on age — that is, younger people in every generation have almost the same likelihood to be uninterested in their 20s. Other studies have argued for generational explanations: compared to their predecessors, today’s young people are more critical of and more readily express their grievances against politicians.

Read more:
Millennials are not the only ‘burnout generation’ (just ask the rest of us)

But these conclusions are hasty — as well as marginalising — for two reasons.

First, electoral disengagement does not necessarily mean rejection of democratic values. Young Australians’ overwhelming involvement in single-issue movements, such as the same-sex plebiscite, nation-wide climate and women’s rights protests, proves young people deeply care about politics. They just may not show it in the same way their parents or grandparents do.

Second, weak support for democracy may not be exclusive to young people and may temporarily apply to the entire electorate depending on the time period in question.

Analysing the data

Using survey data from the Australian Election Study from 2001 to 2019, I tested whether young Australians are any different from older Australians in their commitment to democracy.

Using statistical methods, I isolated “generation” and “age effects”. I then looked at people’s support for democratic principles, as well as their engagement with both offline (traditional) and online democratic processes.

Defying international trends, my analysis found young Australians are not significantly different from older age groups or older generations in their attitudes towards democratic principles (such as believing in the power of their vote) and offline traditional processes (such as discussing politics and persuading others to vote for a party/candidate and contributing money to a campaign).

When it comes to online processes (such as following a campaign or election on social networking sites), young people are in fact more engaged than their older counterparts.

Therefore, reading the 2019 decline in youth electoral turnout as an overall rejection of democracy, is not a satisfactory conclusion.

Among the three ways of thinking about young people and democratic engagement, I found that “period effects” best explain the situation. That is, something has changed in recent years to influence individuals across all ages and cohorts.

Compulsory voting might tie citizens to the Australian political system, but there has also been a significant decline in trust in politicians and political parties and a lack of confidence in the government’s capacity to meet people’s concerns. This means Australians are wary of the performance of key political actors and institutions — and may be less enthused about casting their vote.

Blaming young people won’t work

Disengagement at election time is by no means a good sign for democracy. Despite an increase in contemporary methods of engaging in democracy, traditional channels continue to be important for translating citizens’ wishes to policies. Brexit is a classic example of what happens when we discard those channels.

Read more:
Young people are anxious about coronavirus. Political leaders need to talk with them, not at them

But pointing fingers at any one group — such as young people — will make the issue worse, not better. The blame will further push young people away from traditional forms of participation, which is the case in other advanced democracies.

Rather than criticising young people, it is important to focus on how political institutions are falling short in catering for their needs. The best way to figure this out is to ask them and make room for their voices in key policy-making institutions, including the federal parliament.

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

– ref. Young Australians are supposedly ‘turning their backs’ on democracy, but are they any different from older voters? – https://theconversation.com/young-australians-are-supposedly-turning-their-backs-on-democracy-but-are-they-any-different-from-older-voters-163891

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University

Facebook recently announced significant changes to Instagram for users aged under 16. New accounts will be private by default, and advertisers will be limited in how they can reach young people.

The new changes are long overdue and welcome. But Facebook’s commitment to childrens’ safety is still in question as it continues to develop a separate version of Instagram for kids aged under 13.

The company received significant backlash after the initial announcement in May. In fact, more than 40 US Attorneys General who usually support big tech banded together to ask Facebook to stop building the under-13s version of Instagram, citing privacy and health concerns.

Read more:
Is social media damaging to children and teens? We asked five experts

Privacy and advertising

Online default settings matter. They set expectations for how we should behave online, and many of us will never shift away from this by changing our default settings.

Adult accounts on Instagram are public by default. Facebook’s shift to making under-16 accounts private by default means these users will need to actively change their settings if they want a public profile. Existing under-16 users with public accounts will also get a prompt asking if they want to make their account private.

These changes normalise privacy and will encourage young users to focus their interactions more on their circles of friends and followers they approve. Such a change could go a long way in helping young people navigate online privacy.

Facebook has also limited the ways in which advertisers can target Instagram users under age 18 (or older in some countries). Instead of targeting specific users based on their interests gleaned via data collection, advertisers can now only broadly reach young people by focusing ads in terms of age, gender and location.

Read more:
How companies learn what children secretly want

This change follows recently publicised research that showed Facebook was allowing advertisers to target young users with risky interests — such as smoking, vaping, alcohol, gambling and extreme weight loss — with age-inappropriate ads.

This is particularly worrying, given Facebook’s admission there is “no foolproof way to stop people from misrepresenting their age” when joining Instagram or Facebook. The apps ask for date of birth during sign-up, but have no way of verifying responses. Any child who knows basic arithmetic can work out how to bypass this gateway.

Of course, Facebook’s new changes do not stop Facebook itself from collecting young users’ data. And when an Instagram user becomes a legal adult, all of their data collected up to that point will then likely inform an incredibly detailed profile which will be available to facilitate Facebook’s main business model: extremely targeted advertising.

Deploying Instagram’s top dad

Facebook has been highly strategic in how it released news of its recent changes for young Instagram users. In contrast with Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri has turned his status as a parent into a significant element of his public persona.

Since Mosseri took over after Instagram’s creators left Facebook in 2018, his profile has consistently emphasised he has three young sons, his curated Instagram stories include #dadlife and Lego, and he often signs off Q&A sessions on Instagram by mentioning he needs to spend time with his kids.

When Mosseri posted about the changes for under-16 Instagram users, he carefully framed the news as coming from a parent first, and the head of one of the world’s largest social platforms second. Similar to many influencers, Mosseri knows how to position himself as relatable and authentic.

Age verification and ‘potentially suspicious’ adults

In a paired announcement on July 27, Facebook’s vice-president of youth products Pavni Diwanji announced Facebook and Instagram would be doing more to ensure under-13s could not access the services.

Diwanji said Facebook was using artificial intelligence algorithms to stop “adults that have shown potentially suspicious behavior” from being able to view posts from young people’s accounts, or the accounts themselves. But Facebook has not offered an explanation as to how a user might be found to be “suspicious”.

Diwanji notes the company is “building similar technology to find and remove accounts belonging to people under the age of 13”. But this technology isn’t being used yet.

It’s reasonable to infer Facebook probably won’t actively remove under-13s from either Instagram or Facebook until the new Instagram For Kids app is launched — ensuring those young customers aren’t lost to Facebook altogether.

Despite public backlash, Diwanji’s post confirmed Facebook is indeed still building “a new Instagram experience for tweens”. As I’ve argued in the past, an Instagram for Kids — much like Facebook’s Messenger for Kids before it — would be less about providing a gated playground for children and more about getting children familiar and comfortable with Facebook’s family of apps, in the hope they’ll stay on them for life.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Conversation that a feature introduced in March prevents users registered as adults from sending direct messages to users registered as teens who are not following them.

“This feature relies on our work to predict peoples’ ages using machine learning technology, and the age people give us when they sign up,” the spokesperson said.

They said “suspicious accounts will no longer see young people in ‘Accounts Suggested for You’, and if they do find their profiles by searching for them directly, they won’t be able to follow them”.

Resources for parents and teens

For parents and teen Instagram users, the recent changes to the platform are a useful prompt to begin or to revisit conversations about privacy and safety on social media.

Instagram does provide some useful resources for parents to help guide these conversations, including a bespoke Australian version of their Parent’s Guide to Instagram created in partnership with ReachOut. There are many other online resources, too, such as CommonSense Media’s Parents’ Ultimate Guide to Instagram.

Regarding Instagram for Kids, a Facebook spokesperson told The Conversation the company hoped to “create something that’s really fun and educational, with family friendly safety features”.

But the fact that this app is still planned means Facebook can’t accept the most straightforward way of keeping young children safe: keeping them off Facebook and Instagram altogether.

Read more:
‘Anorexia coach’: sexual predators online are targeting teens wanting to lose weight. Platforms are looking the other way

Tama Leaver receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) as a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

– ref. Instagram’s privacy updates for kids are positive. But plans for an under-13s app means profits still take precedence – https://theconversation.com/instagrams-privacy-updates-for-kids-are-positive-but-plans-for-an-under-13s-app-means-profits-still-take-precedence-165323

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Hocking, Emeritus Professor, Monash University

An immense trove of the most important royal historical material for decades has quietly been released in the United Kingdom. These are the diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Lady Edwina, from the 1920s until 1968.

As the last great-grandchild and godchild of Queen Victoria, uncle of Prince Philip and adored great-uncle of Prince Charles, Mountbatten exercised a “Rasputin-like influence” in the court of Queen Elizabeth.

Read more:
The queen’s gambit — new evidence shows how Her Majesty wields influence on legislation

He had a long, typically aristocratic, naval officer career from head of combined operations during the second world war to admiral of the fleet. He was also the last viceroy of India, presiding over transition and partition. All this gave Mountbatten an unmatched insight into the royal family and its intersections with the highest levels of wartime and post-imperial governance.

But the release of this material doesn’t just shed light on the royal family. It again highlights the significant barriers to accessing our history; specifically, the claimed “convention of royal secrecy” that imposes strict secrecy over royal communications across the Commonwealth nations.

A four-year battle

The release of the Mountbatten diaries is entirely due to the work of historian and Mountbatten biographer Andrew Lownie, who fought for four years to get public access to the previously secret diaries.

They are held in the Broadlands Archives, purchased by Southampton University from the Mountbatten family in 2010 for £2.8 million ($A5.3 million) using public funds. At the time, the university said it would “preserve the collection in its entirety for future generations to use and enjoy” and “ensure public access”.

The university’s catalogue gives their legal status as “public records”, and states they were “open on transfer”. Yet the papers were closed after an officious university historian warned the government the papers contained “many references to the royal family”.

Lownie’s initial request for access under the UK’s freedom of information regime was rejected by the university, citing a cabinet directive preventing the release of the diaries and letters. A successful appeal followed, which the university ignored until threatened with a contempt action.

Finally, late last month, 22 MPs signed a motion tabled in the House of Commons calling for “their publication without further obfuscation and delay”. The university finally released many — though not all — of the diaries.

Lownie, meanwhile, has spent £250,000 (A$472,000) of his own money in pursuit of public access to the Mountbatten archives, which were always purportedly a public resource.

A fascinating window

Former US ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith has previously described Mountbatten’s unabashed use of royal privilege for personal advancement:

no one was ever better served by the accident of birth or put royal connection to greater use.

So the Mountbatten archive will provide a fascinating window into a rare familial link to the final years of a fading, disintegrating, European royalty and its intersection with key episodes in British political history.

Many of Mountbatten’s (at times conflicting) roles attracted significant controversy, on which the diaries and letters in particular will shed great light. This includes the fiasco of the raid on the French coast at Dieppe in 1942. As Galbraith also noted, this was

widely believed the single most ill-advised, costly and generally disastrous operation of the war.

There is also the contentious, brutal, partition of India. And his unconventional “open marriage”, including Edwina’s close relationship with the first post-independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. All of these will be re-evaluated in light of this remarkable shared archive.

Yet, several files Lownie is particularly interested in are missing from the public release.

These include the 1947 and 1948 diaries covering the Mountbattens’ involvement in pre-Independence India, transition and partition, among “scores of files” not yet released. These crucial historical documents covering a contentious time in British imperial history remain locked away and the fight for public access to them continues.

‘Eeerily similar’ to the palace letters

Lownie’s case has been described as “eerily similar” to the long-running palace letters case I took against the National Archives of Australia, in its denial of access to archival documents relating to the royal family, “the effect being that public knowledge of key constitutional and political events is limited”.

Read more:
The big reveal: Jenny Hocking on what the ‘palace letters’ may tell us, finally, about The Dismissal

The denial of access to royal documents shields royal activities from the consideration of history, simply because of their absence from the public record, profoundly distorting the history itself.

Our own history gives us a clear example of this. The queen did not want the palace letters — her correspondence with governor-general Sir John Kerr about the dismissal of the Whitlam government — to be made public. And the National Archives of Australia and federal government unsuccessfully fought against public access to the letters all the way to the High Court. With their release, the history of the dismissal of the Whitlam government has changed dramatically.

As Australian National University historian Frank Bongiorno recently concluded:

the claim the palace had no involvement in the dismissal is now unsustainable. The palace was indeed a player.

Backlog at the archives

Unfortunately, the routine removal of royal material from the public archival record under the claimed “convention of royal secrecy” is just one means of denying access to key historical records.

The failure to deal with everyday requests for access to documents is, for the individual researcher and for history, more prevalent and no less severe.

The National Archives of Australia recently revealed the extent of this denial of access through institutional inaction, in answers to independent senator Rex Patrick in Senate estimates. Although the archives is statutorily required to deal with requests for access within 90 days, it has a backlog of over 20,000 requests that are at least one year overdue. More than half of those were submitted five to ten years ago.

Even more shocking is that 256 of these unfulfilled access requests are more than a decade old. Several applications for access which I submitted nine to ten years ago are still drifting somewhere in this archival black hole. I’ve written three books since then, and I’m still waiting for the archival documents intended for them.

My experience is, regrettably, by no means unique. As Patrick notes:

These chronic delays have had a severe impact on historical research and the understanding of our nation’s past […] Numerous research projects have been abandoned because of the failure of the archives to provide timely access.

These figures are an extraordinary indictment of Australia’s national archives’ failure to meet its core statutory function “to make Commonwealth records available for public access”. Little wonder it has ceased publishing figures on the access clearance backlog in its annual report.

Still waiting

Lownie has done us all a great public service in his efforts to bring the Mountbatten archives to public view. However, it should not be up to individual historians to take arduous legal action to ensure public archives — whether in universities or government-funded national archives — adhere to their requirements to make official records publicly available.

Read more:
How a British royal’s monumental errors made India’s partition more painful

This includes royal communications between governors-general and the monarch, as our High Court ruled in the palace letters case in 2020.

The National Archives of Australia has said that, as a result of the High Court’s decision, it would also release the royal correspondence of all governors-general from Richard Casey to Bill Hayden (1965 to 1996), thirty years of exceptionally significant archival records.

More than a year later, we are still waiting for their release.

Jenny Hocking has received funding from The Australian Research Council. She is a member of the National Executive and the National Committee of The Australian Republic Movement.

– ref. Secret history: the release of the Mountbatten archives and the fight to access royal diaries – https://theconversation.com/secret-history-the-release-of-the-mountbatten-archives-and-the-fight-to-access-royal-diaries-165380

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Doctor of Botany, The University of Melbourne

Have you had a knock on the door or perhaps a card in your letterbox telling you the trees in your garden are dangerous and need urgent work? Maybe you’ve been a bit worried about the trees, which seem to be getting bigger each year, and think: “Well, it can’t do any harm […] can it?”.

Unfortunately, deciding to take action might cause harm to the trees or significant financial loss to you.

There are some serious scams in several states involving knock-on-the-door tree loppers who pressure elderly home owners for work. This has led to petitions from victims and some local governments seeking to have tree loppers licensed. Some of these cases involve thousands of dollars and very poor quality work with potentially dangerous outcomes.

As a tree scientist who works with urban trees, I can assure you some large, old trees are well worth leaving alone, even you find them annoying sometimes. So if you are going to prune trees in your garden, especially healthy old trees, make sure you do it well.

Hiring a good arborist

Trees are large and sophisticated organisms, and people who work on them need to be qualified so they know how trees will respond to their actions. Otherwise, there’s a risk that work done on trees could actually make its structure unsound and unsafe.

There are many well-trained arborists in most Australian states who can work on your trees.

But how do you judge the good from the bad? Here are a few tips on what to look for in employing a good arborist.

First, a good arborist will have TAFE or university qualifications in arboriculture (at least a certificate Level 4), and substantial public liability insurance cover (at least A$10 million and most will have a A$20 million policy). Be sure to check your home insurance policy as tree work may not be covered, and if something goes seriously wrong it can be very costly.

Read more:
An act of God, or just bad management? Why trees fall and how to prevent it

Second, trained arborists won’t work on large trees or off the ground on their own. There will always be a crew of at least two, regardless of whether they’re using travel towers or ropes and harnesses to access a tree. They’ll also explain exactly what they propose doing to your tree and why.

And finally, most good arborists won’t describe themselves as tree loppers and will prune rather than lop your trees. Pruning is a targeted approach to tree management, while lopping is a wholesale removal of branches and foliage that can lead to problems in the months and years ahead.

So where can things go wrong? It’s not uncommon for elderly people to become worried about big, old trees that are perfectly safe, then have them removed and then find their property value has significantly declined at a time when they need assets most.

The unnecessary removal of a large old tree destroys an asset that has taken years of care. Its removal may seriously reduce your property value by up to 5% or $10,000 if the tree is a significant component of your garden.

When you feel ‘treegret’

Indiscriminately lopping a tree’s canopy — which can leave little or no foliage and greatly reduces branching — may seem like a good way to eliminate the risk of shedding leaves, fruits and dropping limbs.

But if it’s done to a healthy tree with a sound structure, you can create the very problem you were seeking to avoid: greater shedding and the development of a dangerous canopy.

This is because after severe lopping, many trees respond by producing lots of new shoots, called epicormic shoots. You may have seen these growing after fires. Epicormic shoots can be weakly attached to the trunk or larger branches of the tree in their early years and, if they’re not managed properly, the heavier shoots can shed substantially.

In any case, is the tree really so bad?

Many people are very aware of the things that annoy them about their trees — dropping leaves, flowers and fruits, blocked gutters and even cracked fences and paths.

They often forget or are unaware of the benefits these same trees provide. This includes shade in summer, moderating strong winds, which protects their roofs during storms or the value of tree roots systems in stabilising soil on steep house blocks.

You may only become aware of the value of these services after the tree has been removed – you acted in haste, but may regret the loss over the many years it takes to grow a replacement tree. This is treegret!

Ask the right questions

You can be doing the right thing when you decide to get work done that improves the appearance, structure or heath of a valuable old tree in you garden.

A branch may be growing too close to your home, a low branch may block access for vehicles or pedestrians, or you may have dead or diseased limbs posing a risk to the tree and a hazard to people.

Read more:
Here are 5 practical ways trees can help us survive climate change

But next time there’s a knock at your door and you have the chance to greet a tree lopper, don’t forget to ask them if they’re qualified. Ask how large their public liability insurance policy and what size crew will be working on your job.

And then ask them exactly what they propose to do to your tree.

I have asked all of these questions and been told of qualifications I know don’t exist, come from institutions that don’t train arborists, and of plans to lop or top my trees that I know will leave them less safe.

Greg Moore is a current Board member and former Chair of TREENET

– ref. Dodgy tree loppers are scamming elderly homeowners and hacking up healthy trees. Here’s what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/dodgy-tree-loppers-are-scamming-elderly-homeowners-and-hacking-up-healthy-trees-heres-what-you-need-to-know-164629

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Ward, Fellow in Historical Studies, The University of Melbourne

The COVID crisis has laid bare a crisis of trust.

In many Western nations there’s a small but significant minority refusing to follow distancing guidelines, wear masks or get a vaccination. Protests in recent weeks have demonstrated just how much they mistrust politicians, scientists, bureaucrats, the “mainstream media” and many of their fellow citizens.

And that’s a problem — because higher trust levels have been shown to be associated with markedly better outcomes in handling the virus. As the World Happiness Report 2021 published in March concluded, generally the higher the level of social trust, the lower the nation’s COVID-19 death rate.

So what can be done to combat this pandemic of mistrust?

Using data on national trust levels published over the past few years, my analysis suggests more than 80% of differences in trust levels between nations can be explained by just two factors: economic inequality and, to a lesser extent, perceptions of corruption.

This calculation underlines the importance of tackling the conditions in which misinformation thrives. Censorship and other blunt instruments have their place, but only treat the symptoms. To treat the cause requires promoting equality and fairness.

What ‘lost wallets’ reveal about trust

The World Happiness Report’s conclusions about the correlation between effective COVID responses and level of social trust drew on past research, including evidence from the 2019 World Risk Poll (sponsored by Lloyd’s Register Foundation).

That poll surveyed more than 150,000 people in 142 nations. One crucial question asked them to imagine losing a small bag of financial value and then say how likely it was that a stranger would return that bag. This question is a staple of social trust research, known as the “lost wallet test”.

For my analysis of the relationship between trust, inequality and corruption, I’ve mainly used another “lost wallet” study published in 2019, by University of Michigan behavioural economist Alain Cohn and colleagues in Switzerland. Their study went one better than asking people about their expectations; it actually tested levels of trustworthiness by “losing” 17,000 wallets in 355 cities across 40 nations and measuring how many came back to their “owners”.

This study broadly found actual returns to be slightly higher than expectations in the World Risk Poll. But both found consistent differences in social trust (and trustworthiness) between nations, in line with other survey results.

The results from the Cohn study are therefore a good measure of both trust and trustworthiness in different countries.

Measuring the impact of inequality

According to my calculations, inequality explains two-thirds (68%) of the differences between countries in social trust levels.

This is shown in the graph below. It uses only the 23 countries in the Cohn study that are members of OECD, because these have the most robust data measuring inequality.

The left Y axis shows the percentages of wallets returned. The bottom X axis shows the Gini coefficient: the standard measure of economic inequality, with the nations closer to 0 being more equal.

There’s a strong correlation between equality and levels of social trust, though clearly other factors are involved as well.

For example, consider the return rate for New Zealand (one of the highest in world), and then Australia, to the lower rates in Spain and Italy (less than 50%), despite all four countries having similar levels of economic inequality.

I calculate close to half of this difference can be attributed to perceptions of corruption. I did this using data from anti-corruption organisation Transparency International, which publishes annual survey of perceptions of corruption across the world and scores countries on a 100-point scale (the closer to 100 being better).

Read more:
Equality: our secret weapon to fight corruption

In 2020, New Zealand equal topped the list with a score of 88, compared with Australia on 77, Spain on 62, and Italy 53. (Australia has seen the biggest recent drop of any of these OECD countries, slipping from a score of 85 in 2012).

All up, equality and corruption perceptions appear to explain 82% of the differences in trust and trustworthiness between nations.

Promoting equality and fairness

Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean one factor causes the other. But in this case, there is strong supporting evidence to suggest inequality and perceptions of unfairness fuel mistrust.

As this year’s World Happiness Report noted, higher social and institutional trust levels are associated both with greater community resilience to natural disasters and individual resilience to ill health, unemployment and discrimination. More trusting societies and individuals are also happier.

If this wasn’t strong enough incentive for policies that promote fairness and equality, the epidemic of misinformation and mistrust exposed by COVID-19 should be. As psychologist John Ehrenreich has written in Slate:

Conspiracy theories arise in the context of fear, anxiety, mistrust, uncertainty and feelings of powerlessness.

Read more:
The less equal we become, the less we trust science, and that’s a problem

At the American Economics Association’s annual conference in January, a number of speakers focused their attention on the importance of trust. The Economist magazine summarised their conclusions:

higher levels of trust and social responsibility were associated with less scepticism of media reporting on COVID-19 and greater willingness to accept stringent lockdown measures.

Mistrust has been a major barrier in combating the coronavirus — and will present more challenges in the aftermath. Policies to enhance equality and fairness, and to reduce corruption, are potent vaccines in these tasks.

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

– ref. Equality and fairness: vaccines against this pandemic of mistrust – https://theconversation.com/equality-and-fairness-vaccines-against-this-pandemic-of-mistrust-160100

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherine Fahd, Associate Professor, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

In this series we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted.

Varanasi, or Banaras as the locals call it, is one of India’s most sacred cities. Located in the province of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, it is an important place of pilgrimage for Hindus.

Buddhists and spiritual seekers from around the globe are also drawn to its waters. For yogis there is a transformative promise of gurus and ashrams. For Buddhists there is Sarnath, the town where Buddha is believed to have given his first teaching after receiving enlightenment.

There is also bhang lassi, a yogurt drink laced with cannabis for psychedelic effect.

Author Geoff Dyer hilariously rendered Varanasi in his semi-autobiographical novel — Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi — as the place to go to lose and find yourself.

To be lost in Varanasi is dangerously exciting.

Everyday death and renewal

In 2018 I was awarded a two-month artist residency by Asialink to Varanasi’s Kriti Gallery. I had never been to India, and what I did know of Varanasi I had learned from television trips featuring actors Miriam Margolyes and Judith Lucy as guides. I remembered Margolyes’ visit to a hostel where people from all over India could reserve a room to wait out their death.

Varanasi is where Hindus want to die to escape the cycles of birth, death and rebirth.

Dying in Varanasi is everyday. That’s not to say dying is ordinary. On the contrary, it is a sacred art form, a spiritual passage that is part of the daily practice of living.

Art is everywhere, especially in the rituals and ceremonies performed in celebration of the Hindu gods.

I want to return to hear the chanting performed by the hustle of pallbearers as they commemorate the dead on their way to the rising flames. I wish to follow them to Manikarnika, one of the cremation ghats (broad steps to the riverbank).

To see a body in the street — veiled and wrapped in the most beautiful coloured silks, ribbons, pigments and flowers, and carried upon a bamboo stretcher for all to see — changed my view of death.

To be close to the everydayness of death reminds me I am alive. This is why Varanasi is addictive. Its effect is to make me hyper-aware of my living status, especially when I’m pinned by the horns of a bull to the wall of an alleyway as he tries to pass me.

Read more:
Friday essay: images of mourning and the power of acknowledging grief

Life without seatbelts

I long to be lost in the commotion of Varanasi street life, among the street dogs, buffaloes, cows, horses, and monkeys. A family on a motorbike, bodies piled onto and into every sort of automobile. No seatbelts, just flowing fabrics of the most beautiful patterns, colours and textures.

I want to cross the treacherous roads, to walk in front of cars, buses, trucks and tuk-tuks that are continuously beeping their horns in a cacophony of blasts and blares, knowing they won’t run me over.

Not even the smell of rotting rubbish mixed with the sweet aroma of cow dung, chai and warm milk deters this dream.

Varanasi is beautiful and filthy, vibrant and muddy, and home to stunning silks with intricate gold and silver thread work. You take the good with the bad in Varanasi: the abject poverty, friendly people, dust bowl cricket, endless paradoxes and the Harmony Bookshop.

When I return I will be customarily dressed in my all-black uniform from home. I will gaze upon the beautiful women in their brightly coloured sarees, the bits of flesh poking out teasingly at the waist. And I’ll wonder, “Why don’t I wear colour?”

In India, art is wearable. Art is on the streets and in the temples. And the front door of every house.

Read more:
Friday essay: the uncanny melancholy of empty photographs in the time of coronavirus

Bathing and prayer

Varanasi has 88 ghats. In two months, I only visited a quarter of them, including my favourite, Lassi Ghat.

The ghats are used chiefly for bathing rituals, for puja, and somersaulting.

It is oppressively hot, 38℃ at 8am. The locals bathe and pray and touch. Touch is everywhere. Bodies feeling, pushing, pressing, caressing, splashing each other. The texture of bodies. Hair and wrinkles.

No one is flexing, or spray-tanned or botoxed. Life is dirty and sacred and real. There is no airbrushing and no denying death. The water is magical but muddy. Highly polluted. No one seems to notice.

The performance of private rituals in public has long been my thing. In Paris, during the heatwave of 2003, I photographed bathers along the Seine.

Read more:
Yearning for touch — a photo essay

Women with cameras

Unlike Bondi Beach, I don’t need a permit to take photographs at the Ganga. The locals and pilgrims are unperturbed by a woman with a camera.

I learn that I am following in the footsteps of other female photographers. The late Australian photographer Robyn Beeche had been a regular visitor, as was the late great US photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

Studying their works reminds me that art is chiefly an expression of our humanity. An expression that is everywhere in Varanasi.

For now, from lockdown, I’ll travel through my photographs and as I do, I will perform a prayer for India, a country devastated by the pandemic.

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

– ref. If I could go anywhere: India’s Varanasi — a sacred site on a river of rituals and altered states – https://theconversation.com/if-i-could-go-anywhere-indias-varanasi-a-sacred-site-on-a-river-of-rituals-and-altered-states-164554

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

The opposition has urged the government to provide a $300 incentive payment to everyone who is fully vaccinated by December 1, to accelerate the rollout.

This payment should include those already vaccinated, the opposition says. It estimates this would stimulate the economy by up to $6 billion, and help struggling businesses.

With raising the vaccination level fast the only path to opening the country, Anthony Albanese said the government “needs to use every measure at its disposal to protect Australians and our economy.”

National cabinet on Friday endorsed in principle targets of 70% and 80% of people 16 and over being fully vaccinated for stages of reopening. But it put no dates on the targets, which would need to be reached both nationally and in individual states and territories.

Scott Morrison has said he thinks the 70% target could be reached by the end of the year.

The government says it will release the Doherty Institute modelling which advised on the targets.

The government has announced that from next Monday, the rollout will extend to vaccinating vulnerable children aged 12 to 15.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government accepted advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) that these children be prioritised for Pfizer.

About 220,000 children are identified as at higher risk of severe illness if they get COVID. They are

• those with medical conditions including asthma, diabetes, obesity, cardiac and circulatory congenital anomalies, neuro-developmental disorders, epilepsy, trisomy 21, and those who are immuno-compromised

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children

• all children aged 12-15 in remote communities.

The government is awaiting ATAGI recommendations about the use of Pfizer for the rest of the 12-15 age group. The advice is expected in some weeks.

Health Minister Greg Hunt urged parents “who have a child with a medical condition or who are immuno-compromised to bring them forward for vaccination”.

Meanwhile conflicting messages continued about AstraZeneca, with Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young standing by her earlier position. “I said I didn’t want 18-year-olds getting AstraZeneca, and I still don’t”.

Pressed at a news conference on what age people should get AZ, Young replied: “60.”

If people under 60 felt particularly concerned about their situation, “go and talk to your GP about whether or not you should be having a dose of AstraZeneca,” Young said. That was the advice of ATAGI, she said.

But Commonwealth acting Chief Medical Officer Michael Kidd said: “ATAGI has reaffirmed their previous advice that in a large outbreak, the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca are greater than the risk of the rare side effects occurring for all age groups.”

Asked whether Queensland was a large outbreak that allowed extra use of AstraZeneca currently, Kidd said “What we have is the eleven local government areas in south east Queensland are a Commonwealth hotspot and therefore this meets the definition of a significant outbreak”.

Hunt on Monday lashed out at the ABC, accusing it of having been “a vehicle for AstraZeneca critics”.

In written answers to questions from Four Corners, issued ahead of Monday’s program on the rollout, Hunt said “the ABC has given widespread and largely unchallenged prominence to critics of AstraZeneca”.

Defence minister Peter Dutton, who is leader of the House of Representatives, has been prevented by the Queensland outbreak from attending this week’s parliamentary sitting.

The latest number of new community cases in south-east Queensland was 13, with several schools involved in the outbreak and a number of very young children.

Dutton said in a Monday statement: “My sons attend a school subject to the current Queensland Health directive and as a household member I am subject to the 14 day direction. I will quarantine at home with my family.

“I will therefore be unable to attend Parliament, although will take part in Leadership, NSC, ERC and Cabinet meetings remotely. I will still perform my duties as Minister for Defence, however the Hon Christian Porter MP will perform Leader of the House duties whilst I am unable to attend.”

Porter lost his position as leader of the house in the wake of the allegation (that he denies) of historical rape.

Dutton had COVID in the very early stages of the pandemic. He is also fully vaccinated, and he tested negative on Monday morning.

Also on Monday, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development, Barnaby Joyce, announced an extension of assistance for the domestic aviation industry.

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

– ref. Albanese calls for $300 vaccination incentive, as rollout extended to vulnerable children – https://theconversation.com/albanese-calls-for-300-vaccination-incentive-as-rollout-extended-to-vulnerable-children-165383

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eva Ellmer, The University of Queensland

BMX freestyle has had its debut in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games and Logan Martin just made history by winning the first gold medal for Australia in the sport.

The fresh, youthful, and at times risky sport involves the execution of acrobatic tricks on a BMX bike while jumping over obstacles such as walls, box jumps and spines.

A box jump is a ramp with a flat, solid surface on top – similar to a table top. A spine is like having two quarter-pipes placed back to back. The spine is designed to gain height rather than distance.

Riders are scored on multiple aspects, such as the difficulty, originality, height and creativity of their tricks during a 60-second run.

Martin’s tricks explained

So, what exactly did Martin do to win gold? Here’s a quick explanation of the tricks in his repertoire:

1. Reverse triple tail whip into an orthodox triple tail whip

In a tail whip, the rider lets go of the pedals while using the feet to spin the back of the bike around the handlebars. Logan did it three times in a row.

He completed the first tail whip in his gold-medal performance in the counter-clockwise direction, or in the direction of his non-preferred hand. He then followed this trick with another triple tail whip in the direction of his preferred hand (clockwise). This is a trick only Logan has mastered.

2. 540 flair into an opposite flair to finish

In a flair, both the rider and bike do a backflip combined with a 180-degree turn.

Logan completed this trick by twisting one and a half times mid-air on one side of the quarter pipe, and finished his run with another flair in the opposite, non-dominant direction on the opposing quarter pipe.

3. “Nothing” front bike flip

In this move, Logan takes off on a jump and flips the bike between his legs mid-air while he remains motionless. He then catches the handles — still mid-air — and pulls the bike back to his body and safely lands on it.

The most important attributes for BMX riders

BMX freestyle is still considered a relatively new and emerging sport. Given the amount of time it has been around, however, the progression of the sport has been tremendous compared to more traditional sports.

Almost every conceivable trick with a bike has seemingly now been invented, meaning the progression of the sport lies depends on the creativity of the athlete to combine a number of tricks together.

Read more:
Alt goes mainstream: how surfing, skateboarding, BMX and sport climbing became Olympic events

For example, instead of just doing a backflip, riders now combine a backflip with a bar spin. Similarly, many riders now learn to perform tricks the opposite way – as showcased by Martin is his Olympic run. He completed a back-to-back triple tail whip, once with the bike spinning counter-clockwise and then clockwise.

The bigger the combination, the bigger the reward. This showcases that a rider has a large skillset and has taken time to learn and perform a broad range of tricks.

Elite riders like Martin can combine up to five tricks in one. However, doing big tricks with multiple combinations is only valuable if riders can maintain control of their bikes and bodies, and land smoothly.

Execution is one of the most important components of BMX freestyle. Martin is known for his smooth runs and has even himself described the sport as being “gymnastics on a bike”.

In my research on elite BMX riders, I found that by practising the biggest tricks on a daily basis, riders learn to develop an intuitive understanding of what feel “good” and what feels “bad”.

This allows the athletes not only to establish perceptual but also problem-solving skills, meaning they know when to quickly adjust their bodies (or bikes) to avoid a crash or serious injury.

For Martin, it means his best tricks becoming second nature to him, allowing him to fine-tune his movements and gain a competitive advantage to other riders.

Read more:
Most expensive, greatest gender parity, most sports: Tokyo Olympics by the numbers

How do they train?

What should be highlighted more in discussing the achievements of action sports athletes like Martin, is that many have learned and developed their skills in the absence of formally accredited coaches.

Unlike most traditional athletes who have had access to training programs and coaches, Martin taught himself most of his tricks or learned with and from his peers.

He also built a skatepark in his own backyard to help prepare for the Olympics. Here, he regularly rides with his best mates, Brendan Loupos (the 2019 world champion) and Jaie Toohey, who taught him the “nothing” front bike flip.

In a risky sport like BMX freestyle, having your mates around while learning dangerous tricks is important as they can help create a psychologically safe environment.

Action sport athletes tend to build strong trust relationships with their peers as they encourage and support one another in performing new and dangerous tasks. This helps a BMXer change their perception of negative emotions such as fear, enabling them to learn new tricks and develop their skills further.

As COVID restrictions forced the closure of two of Queensland’s indoor skateparks, Cycling Australia committed to building a new BMX freestyle indoor training facility to allow these athletes to continue with their training.

This also provided the opportunity for these athletes to train in a more formal coaching system for the first time.

Under the supervision of Wade Boots, Cycling Australia’s high-performance coach and technical director, and sports scientist Eric Haakonssen, the BMX freestyle athletes got in Olympic competition shape through cross training, periodisation (progressive cycles of training and recovery periods), and more emphasis on proper nutrition and breathing while riding.

In addition, strategic decisions were discussed in relation to the sequencing of tricks. For example, rather than pulling out his best tricks early on in Tokyo, risking a fault or crash, Martin completed a run he was comfortable with.

Little did he know it would be enough to win him the gold.

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

– ref. Tail whips and flairs: the jaw-dropping, high-flying tricks that won BMX freestyler Logan Martin the gold – https://theconversation.com/tail-whips-and-flairs-the-jaw-dropping-high-flying-tricks-that-won-bmx-freestyler-logan-martin-the-gold-165460

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phoebe Roth, Deputy Editor, Health+Medicine

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) recently announced provisional approval for the Pfizer vaccine to be used in 12-15-year-olds.

We learned on Monday that the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) has advised that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 12-15, those who live in remote communities, and those with underlying medical conditions should be prioritised to receive the jab.

With COVID vaccination for kids being such a hot topic, we asked five experts whether we should vaccinate children in Australia against COVID-19.

Four out of five experts said yes

Here are their detailed responses:

If you have a “yes or no” health question you’d like posed to Five Experts, email your suggestion to: phoebe.roth@theconversation.edu.au.

Disclosures:

Asha Bowen is co-chair of the Australian and New Zealand Paediatric Infectious Diseases (ANZPID) group of the Australasian Society of Infectious Diseases. She receives research funding from NHMRC.

Catherine Bennett has received NHMRC and MRFF funding, and is an independent expert on the AstraZeneca advisory board.

Julian Savulescu receives funding from the Wellcome Trust. This work was supported by the UKRI/AHRC funded UK Ethics Accelerator project, grant number AH/V013947/1.

Margie Danchin is a member of ATAGI’s working group on vaccine safety, evaluation, monitoring and confidence.

Nicholas Wood holds an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship and Churchill Fellowship.

– ref. Should we vaccinate children against COVID-19? We asked 5 experts – https://theconversation.com/should-we-vaccinate-children-against-covid-19-we-asked-5-experts-165316

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunit K. Singh, Professor of Molecular Immunology and Virology, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University

Over a year into the pandemic, questions around immune responses after COVID continue to confound.

One question many people are asking is whether the immunity you get from contracting COVID and recovering is enough to protect you in the future.

The answer is no, it’s not.

Here’s why.

Remind me, how does our immune response work?

Immune responses are innate or acquired. Innate, or short-term immunity, occurs when immune cells that are the body’s first line of defence are activated against a pathogen like a virus or bacteria.

If the pathogen is able to cross the first line of defence, T-cells and B-cells are triggered into action. B-cells fight through secreted proteins called antibodies, specific to each pathogen. T-cells can be categorised into helper T-cells and killer T-cells. Helper T-cells “help” B-cells in making antibodies. Killer T-cells directly kill infected cells.

Once the battle is over, B-cells and T-cells develop “memory” and can recognise the invading pathogen next time. This is known as acquired or adaptive immunity, which triggers long-term protection.

What happens when you get reinfected? Memory B-cells don’t just produce identical antibodies, they also produce antibody variants. These diverse set of antibodies form an elaborate security ring to fight SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Natural immunity is not enough

Getting COVID and recovering (known as “natural infection”) doesn’t appear to generate protection as robust as that generated after vaccination.

And the immune response generated post-infection and vaccination, known as hybrid immunity, is more potent than either natural infection or vaccination alone.

People who have had COVID and recovered and then been vaccinated against COVID have more diverse and high-quality memory B-cell responses than people who’ve just been vaccinated.

Studies indicate mRNA vaccines generate a more potent immune response with previous infection, at least against some variants including Alpha and Beta.

And studies have shown that antibody levels were higher among those who’d recovered from COVID and were subsequently vaccinated than those who’d only had the infection.

Memory B-cells against the coronavirus have been reported to be five to ten times higher in people vaccinated post-infection than natural infection or vaccination alone.

Is one dose enough after COVID?

Some reports have suggested people who’ve had COVID need only one dose of the vaccine. Clinical trials of approved vaccines didn’t generate relevant data because people who’d already had COVID were excluded from phase 3 trials.

One study from June showed people with previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2 tended to mount powerful immune responses to a single mRNA shot. They didn’t gain much benefit from a second jab.

A single dose of an mRNA vaccine after infection achieves similar levels of antibodies against the spike protein’s receptor binding domain (which allows the virus to attach to our cells) compared to double doses of vaccination in people never exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

We need more studies to fully understand how long memory B-cell and T-cell responses will last in both groups.

Also, a single dose strategy has only been studied for mRNA-based vaccines. More data is required to understand whether one jab post-infection would be effective for all the vaccines.

At this stage, it’s still good to have both doses of a COVID vaccine after recovering from COVID.

Does Delta change things?

The development of new vaccines must keep pace with the evolution of the coronavirus.

At least one variant seems to have evolved enough to overtake others, Delta, which is about 60% more transmissible than the Alpha variant. Delta is moderately resistant to vaccines, meaning it can reduce how well the vaccines work, particularly in people who’ve only had one dose.

There’s no data available yet about how effective a single jab is for people who were previously infected with Delta and recovered.

Read more:
Why is Delta such a worry? It’s more infectious, probably causes more severe disease, and challenges our vaccines

The most important thing you can do to protect yourself from Delta is to get fully vaccinated.

According to a Public Health England report, one dose of Pfizer offered only about 33% protection against symptomatic disease with Delta, but two doses was 88% effective. Two doses was also 96% effective against hospitalisation from Delta. The AstraZeneca vaccine was 92% effective against hospitalisation from Delta after two doses.

A few vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, are now planning to use a potential third dose as a booster to combat the Delta variant.

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

– ref. If I’ve already had COVID, do I need a vaccine? And how does the immune system respond? An expert explains – https://theconversation.com/if-ive-already-had-covid-do-i-need-a-vaccine-and-how-does-the-immune-system-respond-an-expert-explains-164236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Blazevich, Professor of Biomechanics, Edith Cowan University

The fastest sprinter is the world right now is Lamont Marcell Jacobs, who won Olympic gold in the men’s 100-metre sprint with a time of 9.80 seconds. You might be surprised to learn that most of the explosive power displayed by Jacobs and other elite athletes doesn’t come from their muscles, or even from their minds – it comes from somewhere else.

Muscles are important, but the real secret is using training and technique to store and reuse elastic energy in the best way possible – and that means making the most of your tendons. By understanding how this power is produced, we can help people walk, run and jump into older age and how to walk again after injury or illness.

Muscles are remarkably powerful. The average human calf muscle weighs less than 1 kilogram, but can lift a load of 500kg. In some cases, our calf muscles have even been shown to handle loads approaching a tonne (1,000kg)!

But muscles have a major performance issue: they can’t produce much force when they’re shortening at high speed. In fact, when we move at our fastest, muscles can’t theoretically shorten fast enough to help us at all – so how is it that we can move so quickly?

Muscles are strong, but slow

Muscles produce most of their force through the interactions of two proteins: actin and myosin. The rotating, globular “head” region of the long myosin filament attaches to the rod-like actin to pull it along in a sweeping motion, like an oar producing force to pull a boat along the water. So actin and myosin filaments form powerful mini motors.

Trillions of these mini motors together the large forces we need every day to walk upstairs, carry our shopping bags, or take the lid off a jar.

The head region of myosin is only 20 nanometres long. It’s so small that there’s no point comparing its size to a human hair, because it would barely even cross a handful of DNA molecules laid side by side.

Because it’s so short and only pulls actin a small distance in each stroke, a large number of strokes are needed to shorten a muscle by any distance. It’s like using first gear to get up a hill in a car or on a bike – good for force, but not for speed.

And the faster the muscle shortens, the less time each myosin is attached to actin, which reduces force even further. At a certain shortening speed, muscles can’t produce any force at all.

We can measure the power athletes produce during running and jumping, and we can estimate the power a muscle should produce by its size and the type of fibres it contains. When we compare these two values, we find that muscles can’t even produce half the power generated in sprinting or vertical jumping. And in overarm throwing, muscles can produce only 15% of the total power.

Read more:
Health Check: why do my muscles ache the day after exercise?

Energy return systems

So if the muscles aren’t producing the power to move a body at high speed, where is it coming from? Humans, like most other animals on Earth, make use of an “energy return system”: something that can store energy and release it rapidly when needed.

Our energy return systems are made of a relatively long, stretchy tendon attached to a strong muscle. When the muscle produces force it stretches the tendon, storing elastic energy. The subsequent recoil of the tendon then generates a power far superior to our muscles. Our tendons are power amplifiers.

There are several techniques we can use to increase energy storage. The most important is to first move in the opposite direction to the desired movement (a “countermovement”) so the muscle force is already high when the proper movement begins. Most of us learn this strategy when we’re young, when we first dip down before we jump upwards, or we draw our bat or racquet backwards before swinging it forwards.

The technique we use is key to maximising our elastic potential, and Olympic athletes spend years trying to optimise it.

Tendons that are stiffer or stretched further will store more energy and then recoil with greater power. During running, the greatest power is produced at the ankle joint, so it makes sense that sprint runners and the best endurance runners have stiffer Achilles’ tendons than us mere mortals.

They also have the muscle strength to stretch them. We haven’t yet accurately measured the stiffness of shoulder tendons in athletes, but we might assume they are built similarly.

Can we improve our energy return system?

The capacity to store and release elastic energy is partly determined by genetics, but it’s also something we can improve through training. Not only can training improve your technique, heavy strength training and other methods can also make your tendons stiffer.

As we develop from childhood to adulthood, we learn to make better use of elastic energy to produce more power and use it more efficiently. As we age further, our tendon stiffness and power output decrease, and it costs us more energy to move.

People with less stiffness in their Achilles’ tendon (and the accompanying lower strength in the calf muscles) have slower walking speeds. As walking speed is strongly associated with mortality and morbidity in the elderly, maintaining tendon stiffness may be important to our health and longevity.

Read more:
Health Check: in terms of exercise, is walking enough?

The greatest power during walking, running and jumping is produced at the ankle joint. This is an important target for athletes, but also for anyone who wants to maintain their walking capacity as they age.

Good ways to keep your ankle muscles conditioned include calf raises on a step, squat to calf raise exercises, and walking up and down hills whenever you get the chance.

If you feel game, you might even join a gym and enjoy the numerous ways to strengthen your calf and Achilles’ tendon, and lots of other muscles too.

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

– ref. Muscles are important, but stiff tendons are the secret ingredient for high-speed performance – https://theconversation.com/muscles-are-important-but-stiff-tendons-are-the-secret-ingredient-for-high-speed-performance-165458

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mairin Hennebry-Leung, Lecturer in Languages and TESOL, University of Tasmania

This article is part of a series providing school students with evidence-based advice for choosing subjects in their senior years.

Some students elect to study languages in their senior years because of personal interest, or because they have previously been successful in language learning. Others may choose to do so because of future career plans, or because they wish to further their studies at university.

Other important influences on students’ decisions are perceived cognitive benefits. Studying languages can lead to more effective thinking skills and enhanced intercultural understanding.

Research shows high achieving students in capital cities are most likely to study a language in years 11 and 12. This is particularly the case for students whose parents were born overseas in non-English speaking countries.

Girls are more likely to do languages than boys — research suggests they are just more motivated to do so.

If you’re thinking of studying a language in years 11 and 12, here’s what you should know.

Few students choose to study a language

In Australia, 10% of year 12 students studied a language in 2019. This compared with enrolments of 77% and 71% for the most popular learning areas, English and maths. The visual and performing arts were the second-least popular at 25%. In other parts of the world, however, language learning is on the up. So if you’re looking to broaden your horizons, learning a language is a good way to go.

We don’t know the exact reasons for the low enrolments. One reason could be that the language a student wants to learn isn’t always available. For example, the majority of students who study Indonesian at the primary level don’t continue when they enter secondary school, often because it’s no longer available.

Among students who do decide to study a language in years 11 and 12, the most popular choices are Chinese (22%), Japanese (20%) and French (18%).

Chinese is the second most widely-spoken language in Australian homes after English, which may be one reason for its popularity. But there are many factors that influence the popularity of a language, such as students of French being interested in French culture.

What can you do with languages?

If you’re planning on going to university, learning a language will give you a leg up in the applications. Some Australian universities actually offer bonus ATAR points to students studying a language. For instance, ANU will bump your score up by five points if you take a language.

There are many career pathways available to language graduates. Teaching, interpretation, translation and diplomacy are some of them.

Read more:
Learning languages early is key to making Australia more multilingual

A quick search on Seek throws up more than 4,000 jobs requiring language expertise including for lawyers, technical support engineers, sales representatives and market data analysts. Other options include finance, media, public relations, tourism, consulting, marketing, charity work, international business, foreign affairs or government work. Kevin Rudd’s knowledge of Mandarin gave him an edge as foreign affairs minister.

Many industries will welcome language graduates because they bring intercultural skills, which are crucial in our globally connected world. Plus, a second language can allow you to travel the world while developing your career.

What will you learn in the senior years?

What you will learn depends on which school you go to, what state you live in and which language you choose.

In most senior courses, you’ll not only learn the language but also its associated culture. For instance, in Victoria the senior language curriculum is organised into three broad themes:

• the individual, which looks at cultural topics such as relationships, educational aspirations, and leisure and sports

• the (language)-speaking communities, where you explore aspects of the history and the culture, arts and entertainment, lifestyles and ways of life

• the changing world, where you engage with social issues, youth issues, environmental concerns and work.

Across these themes you will gain historical insight into the language and its speakers. You will likely explore the art, literature and music that have grown out of these language communities, consider social issues, such as the role of women, and engage with issues such as the culture’s value systems on relationships.

Most of this learning happens through the actual language, so you’re growing your knowledge and understanding of culture, society and history, while developing your language skills.

How fluent you become by the end of year 12 depends on many factors, including how many years you’ve been studying the language and how much effort you put in.

Read more:
Is your kid studying a second language at school? How much they learn will depend on where you live

If you’ve been learning a language all the way through high school, by the end of year 12, you could aim for level B1 in an international certificate known as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This means you can deal with most situations you encounter while travelling, you can talk about your experiences and ambitions and explain your opinions, and you can understand the main points on things you regularly come across at work, school or elsewhere.

Is it better to take a language you’ve already been learning?

If you take the same language in the senior years as you have all through school, you will obviously benefit from already knowing a lot of the language as well as its grammatical structure.

But you could also take the opportunity to learn a different language, which will be easier to grasp now that you’ve already studied one.

Language learning involves developing knowledge about how language works. For instance, if you learn French throughout high school, you will develop a detailed and technical knowledge of the grammar of both English and French.

You could transfer your knowledge of how the French grammatical system works to another language.

What do the exams look like?

The structure of senior language exams differs slightly depending on the state you are in. But generally the exam will require students to read and respond to both written and oral texts.

The written exam may include reading a passage in the language and answering questions to demonstrate comprehension of the text’s ideas or arguments. There will also be questions that involve composing texts in the language, such as an email, a description of an event such as a holiday or a letter to a friend.

Read more:
What languages should children be learning to get ahead?

The oral texts are often pre-recorded and played to students several times. After listening to the oral texts, students are often asked to answer questions (in English or the target language). The oral exam may also include a conversation with the examiners and/or a discussion with the examiners on a prepared topic.

Read the other articles in our series on choosing senior subjects, here.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Thinking of taking a language in year 11 and 12? Here’s what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/thinking-of-taking-a-language-in-year-11-and-12-heres-what-you-need-to-know-164080

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon McCallum, Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

One of the constant challenges in education is keeping the learner engaged, motivated and connected in a world increasingly filled with distractions. Social media, streaming TV and video games all compete for students’ increasingly fragmented attention.

COVID-19 lockdowns only increased the opportunity for those distractions to interfere with learning. But, as we look hopefully towards a post-COVID world, perhaps we can take inspiration from the things many students are clearly drawn to — in particular, video games.

Of course, borrowing from video games and their design to inform educational practice isn’t new. Some have talked this up as “gameducation”, whereby courses are like games with trophies for participation and engagement.

It’s clear learning this way can be fun, but there is another important element of that experience that deserves closer examination — “flow”.

Gamers (athletes, too) experience this flow state when totally engaged in the game. Living in the moment and the experience, the activity is effortless and there is no sense of time passing.

Students can also experience flow, and this is when learning is at its most productive. So, the challenge in education is to plan for and achieve that level of engagement. Flow is and always will be the gold standard.

Learning as social activity

Learning has always been a deeply social activity, with the student connected to the institution, as Nietzsche put it, “by the ear, as a hearer”.

Schools relied on classrooms full of children learning the same material together, their shared attention helping to reduce distractions during focused moments of teaching.

Over time, various strategies for combating distraction have been developed, including offering students a smorgasbord of learning experiences, or cutting the length of lectures to account for the tyranny of concentration spans.

Read more:
How student-designed video games made me rethink how I teach history

But COVID-mandated videoconferencing deprives both students and lecturers, and drains the richness from these social interactions. Furthermore, learning mediated by screens simply amplifies the myriad distractions available online.

Even with cameras on, we’re not necessarily paying attention to each other, we’re paying attention to the screen.

But maybe this is where the qualities that define video games come into their own. After all, gaming is also a deeply social activity that allows for complex interactions and learning without the physical presence of anything more than a screen.

Harnessing distraction

Online games have already partly substituted for the things COVID-19 has affected — sports events, concerts and music festivals, parties and weddings.

Take the game Among Us, for example, which in September 2020 alone had 200,000 people going online to watch “impostors” try to eliminate “crewmates” from teams before they can complete a set of tasks or identify which players are the impostors.

Within the context of the game, the tasks are actually the distractions that prevent players from focusing on who is really an impostor. It is about observation, memory and insight — a game full of learning opportunities that teaches participants how to control distractions.

Read more:
How teachers can use video games to motivate students

The social cohesion created in the teams of Among Us players offers a template for teachers looking for ways to create engaging digital learning environments. Creating teams, allocating individual tasks that help the team and regularly changing team members all help to engage and stimulate students.

With online teaching making it harder for institutions to control the learning environment, it becomes imperative to making learning activities themselves more engaging in a screen-mediated environment.

Learning with distraction

As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message”. Understanding how games grab and hold attention can help with the design and implementation of new online learning tools.

Even some politicians are learning from games and using them to engage with the public. Gamification is also enhancing academic research and teaching.

Read more:
How playful design is transforming university education

The key lies in our definition of distraction. Screen learning must involve distracting students towards the things that really matter. In education, as in gaming, we can “court risk” without the fear of failing.

Rather than admonishing learners for not focusing when sitting at desks in school or in front of screens, we should work within our distracted world. We need to play with distraction, work with distraction and learn with distraction.

Paradoxically, distraction may not be the enemy, it could be the gateway to more attentive learning.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Gamers know the power of ‘flow’ — what if learners could harness it too? – https://theconversation.com/gamers-know-the-power-of-flow-what-if-learners-could-harness-it-too-164943

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Fisher, Lecturer, University of Canterbury

Nearly two decades on from the bitter political battle over ownership of the seabed and foreshore, a recent precedent-setting High Court decision passed almost without comment in the mainstream media.

Perhaps that is a sign the country as a whole has moved on. Various appeals now await a hearing, but if the judgment survives in its current form it may offer a way forward for many successful applications for customary marine title (CMT) and protected customary rights (PCRs) by Māori.

The case in question mainly involved whānau and hapū from Whakatōhea, but also their neighbours Ngāti Awa and Ngāi Tai, and their claim to the takutai moana (common marine and coastal area) in and around Whakatāne in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

The claims were made under the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act. Seen by many as only a marginal improvement on the now defunct Foreshore and Seabed Act, its thresholds for successful applications were felt to be still too high.

So, while there may have been limited expectations of Justice Churchman’s ruling, it’s safe to say he delivered something very much worth talking about.

Winning customary marine title

To understand why the judge’s decision was so noteworthy, it’s important to grasp what are considered three key factors in determining an application for customary marine title:

• the retention of land adjacent to the claimed foreshore

• the issuing of resource consents by local authorities

• third-party (public) use of the foreshore and seabed.

On all these, Justice Churchman ruled in favour of the claimants. He found the retention of adjacent land was not important, and loss of land may even have led to increased use of the takutai moana.

The judge recognised the importance local authorities have placed on resource consent consultation with tangata whenua as evidence of continued authority. And he found third-party use was protected under the legislation, and so could not be evidence of interruptions to use by the applicants.

As a result of these findings, the issuing of CMT may not be as difficult as was previously thought — and that is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the decision.

An overwhelmingly positive decision

It’s true the court seemed to follow the Crown’s preference for what it has termed “large natural groupings” (LNGs) for treaty settlement redress, rather than smaller hapū or whānau groups.

The consequent reliance on whanaungatanga (kinship) that seemed to work in this case may be strained in the long run, as some LNGs have been after treaty settlements.

Here, the court relied on Canadian jurisprudence when providing for non-exclusive orders covering Whakatōhea and Ngāti Awa in the west of the application area, and Whakatōhea and Ngāi Tai in the east.

Some fear this mix of different interests, without specific geographical and legal boundaries, could possibly open the door to fresh grievances.

But this is quite picky in the context of an overwhelmingly positive decision for many claimants.

Read more:
From Parihaka to He Puapua: it’s time Pākehā New Zealanders faced their personal connections to the past

Customary rights more challenging

In contrast to the supposedly more difficult “macro” claims for CMT, the applications for PCRs – the “micro” activity-based rights – weren’t as readily approved.

The specific customary rights in the Whakatōhea application were extremely varied. Unlike CMT, multiple orders for PCRs could be provided to different groups like whānau and hapū, rather than just iwi-sized groups.

The key was evidence customary activity was continually practised on the takutai moana. The applications included harvesting kaimoana (seafood) and fishing, exercising kaitiakitanga (guardianship), mana motuhake (independence) and rangatiratanga (self-determination), using resources for medicinal and healing purposes, and resource extraction.

Most of these activities, especially those related to all fishing except for whitebait, were specifically excluded by the Takutai Moana Act, meaning many (though not all) applications for PCRs were unsuccessful.

Read more:
The Crown is Māori too – citizenship, sovereignty and the Treaty of Waitangi

Small but tangible gains

Where might this all lead? There is no immediate financial windfall, such as in a treaty settlement. Exclusion of third parties was never going to be possible, and fisheries (other than whitebait) are completely excluded from the process.

Non-Māori will be almost entirely unaffected. The holders of CMT will obtain certain proprietary rights, such as for minerals other than gold, silver, petrol and uranium, and ownership of newly found taonga tūturu (Māori archaeological objects).

They will also have some measure of co-management of conservation permission rights, protection of wāhi tapu (sacred sites) and a stronger influence on the coastal policy statement planning process.

These won’t be of great use to all applicants, but they will be valuable to many.

Just the beginning?

As Treaty settlement negotiations slowly wind down, these applications for CMT and PCRs in the High Court are only just beginning. While many applicants have preferred the other option of direct negotiations with the Crown, the Crown has yet to begin a single negotiation.

If and when it does, the Crown’s reaction to Justice Churchman’s decision will be interesting. The Crown Law Office did not appeal his decision, leaving that to the Landowners’ Coalition (an incorporated society claiming to be a “voice for private property rights”), which is an interested party to nearly every application.

A number of whānau and hapū, some of which were awarded PCRs but not CMT, also appealed the decision.

Read more:
Separatist or radically inclusive? What NZ’s He Puapua report really says about the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Only time will tell if the Whakatōhea decision can withstand possible appeals that may run all the way to the Supreme Court. But if it does survive in its current form, it will be a template for future successful applications.

It might also provide some legitimacy for a process that many had dismissed as largely worthless, precisely because of the perceived difficulty of obtaining successful orders for CMT and PCRs.

For that alone, Justice Churchman’s reasoned and measured boldness should be applauded.

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

– ref. Has the High Court shown the way for successful Māori claims to marine title? – https://theconversation.com/has-the-high-court-shown-the-way-for-successful-maori-claims-to-marine-title-165381

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Hannan, Postdoctoral research fellow, Griffith University

Olympians are often seen as the epitome of human performance, with incredible physical and mental strength. And with the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games well underway, it’s hard to not be impressed by the sheer talent and determination of athletes competing from all over the world.

For many of us non-Olympians, the thought of possessing such capabilities is but a dream. But research in sport psychology suggests there are indeed some skills we can learn from the experts, as long as we’re willing to put in the work ourselves.

What makes an Olympic athlete?

Being an Olympian not only requires immense physical talent but also an incredible amount of psychological control. Sport psychologists have spent decades trying to identify the key psychological ingredients that make the world’s greatest athletes great.

For one, elite athletes display high levels of passion and commitment towards their sport. They also tend to believe in their own abilities more than the average person – which can protect them against the negative effects of stress.

Resilience and determination help them bounce back from defeat. A case in point: after competing in three prior Olympic games, British diver Tom Daley recently won his first ever Olympic gold medal in Tokyo.

While competing, athletes must effectively regulate their emotions and attention to ensure best performance. Not keeping their emotions in check may compromise their performance under pressure — a phenomenon often referred to as “choking”.

The withdrawal of gymnast Simone Biles from the US women’s team and all-round finals to focus on her mental health has highlighted to the whole world how important it is for athletes to be aware of their emotional and psychological functioning.

But how is discipline developed?

While genetics do play a role in shaping an elite athlete, life experiences and environmental factors are also very important. Characteristics such as self-efficacy (your belief in your ability to perform a task) develop through experience and continued support from others.

Read more:
Tokyo Olympics: what are the limits of human performance? Podcast

Studies show enabling a supportive environment which promotes free will, emotional expression and non-controlling feedback is important for enhancing athletes’ psychological well-being.

This type of environment fosters what we call “autonomous motivation”, which is the motivation to perform an action based on one’s own interest or enjoyment. Research has shown behaviours that are autonomously motivated are more likely to be maintained long-term.

Olympic champions often deal with multiple stressors relating to their sports performance, occupation and personal lives. But their work requires them to develop resilience and approach stressors as challenges to be overcome.

An athlete’s performance can also be impacted by a variety of environmental cues including their peers, opponents, training facilities, training activities and their coach. Coaches therefore have a particularly important role in shaping an athlete’s environment and promoting high performance.

Adopting an elite mindset

Whether or not you’re training for the 2024 Paris Olympics, adopting some of the psychological skills used by Olympians can help you maintain focus and motivation in your own life.

Whether you want to exercise more, reduce your alcohol intake, or maybe be more productive at home or work — the following techniques can help you adopt an elite mindset.

1. Goal-setting

Elite athletes often set short-term and long-term goals. Setting “SMART” goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound) can help you achieve those small wins to keep you motivated as you progress towards a greater goal.

When setting goals for yourself, try to make them meaningful by linking them to values you care about. For instance, you might wish to prioritise your health, or academic achievement. Doing so can help boost your motivation to achieve your goals.

2. Planning

Obtaining a goal can often take considerable time and effort, as we see with athletes preparing for the Olympics. Planning is an important psychological skill that can help you regulate your behaviour as you move toward your goals.

Consider creating detailed action plans which outline when, where and how you will progress toward your goal. Your action plan may look like this:

Every afternoon at 3:00pm (when) I will drive to the local swimming pool (where) and swim for 45 minutes (how).

In addition, creating detailed coping plans will help prepare you for potential challenges that may impede goal attainment. For instance:

If the pool is too busy, I will go for a 45-minute run through the park instead.

3. Positive self-talk

Many athletes engage in reflective practices such as self-talk to help them focus or concentrate on the task at hand.

Identifying positive key words or phrases such as “I can do it” and “I’m almost there” can help redirect your attention and increase motivation to persevere through difficult or challenging situations. Positive self-talk can also help enhance your self-efficacy, which is a strong predictor of various positive outcomes.

4. Mental imagery

Before running towards the vault or executing a serve in volleyball, athletes often use mental imagery to visualise their performance. Visualising the steps needed to perform an action or reach your goal can boost motivation and anticipated pleasure from completing the planned activity.

Read more:
The power of no: Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Black women’s resistance

So the next time you sit back to watch the world’s best compete for glory, think about how you too can adopt the mindset of an Olympian, and feel motivated to excel in your own way.

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

– ref. What Olympic athletes can teach us about regulating our emotions and staying dedicated – https://theconversation.com/what-olympic-athletes-can-teach-us-about-regulating-our-emotions-and-staying-dedicated-165170