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

Review: Shadow Catchers at Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin denied using a body double, saying he’d been offered one before but declined. The rest of us, in our glorious anonymity, might take up the offer. An actual person could shadow us through daily life. They could hold us tight while we attend to the task of living. They could reply to emails, chauffeur children and stand in for us at work while we go to the beach instead.

Body doubles come into focus in a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Curated by Isobel Parker Philip, Shadow Catchers includes almost 90 works from the art gallery’s collection: photography, video, sculpture and installations from Australia’s most respected artists, alongside important international works.

Common to the works is the use of shadows, body doubles and mirrors, many of which challenge a straight forward understanding of photography and the moving image.

The camera can lie

Shadow Catchers shows that since the first photography in 1827, the medium has given us truthful copies of ourselves and the world. However, we also know it is easily exploited. In the era of fake news, we increasingly question the veracity of images.

One of the oldest works in the exhibition, Clarence H. White and Alfred Stieglitz’ 1907 work Experiment 27 (lady in white with crystal ball), shows images have long performed a dual function of revealing but also manipulating or concealing reality. The exhibition presents us with distortions, mirror images and doppelgangers and brings us truth and fiction in equal measure.

Viewing the works of Patrick Pound, Jacky Redgate and Debra Phillips, I wondered whether I was seeing the moon, the Earth, a UFO, a mirror or a simple ball.

I was drawn into the cosy domestic space of what I thought was a lesbian couple. Instead, I was being intimately invited by Emma Phillips to witness the tenderness of twin attachment.

The self-splitting allure of the mirror reveals itself in works by Tracey Moffatt and Lewis Morley (famous for his portrait of Christine Keeler). The erotic force of a simple shop mannequin is the signature of French photographer Pierre Molinier.

Ilse Bing’s intimate self-portrait from 1931 illustrates the central curatorial premise, duplicating her dark beauty in a staging of two angled mirrors where she looks both at us and away from us.

Other highlights include eight imposing photographs by Eugenia Raskopoulos. Activating the illusory properties of the mirror after a hot shower, letters from the Greek alphabet are wiped onto the steamy surface.

Grand scale

Merilyn Fairskye’s large scale portraits, printed on a plastic substrate, emit a shadow onto the wall behind them and create a schism that gently ruptures the faces of her subjects.

Body double, a work by Julie Rrap, is the centrepiece of the exhibition. The artist has worked with notions of the double in sculpture, video and photography since the early 1980s. Two silicon rubber casts of the artist’s body lie corpse-like on a stage, one face down and one face up. A ghost-like figure of a man or a woman is projected onto the bodies. The projection of the body rolls across the stage from one figure to the other, appearing to resuscitate the silicon forms.

The organisation of the works across four rooms intermingles historical works with the contemporary, reminding us that the present is always informed by the past.

The exhibition offers a poetic reflection and critical account of our enduring fascination with technologies of representation.

While the exhibition successfully returns us to photography’s past and the defiant contribution of postmodern approaches to “doubling”, it neglects to question our current and future predicament.

The world today is saturated, even drowning, in shadows, which we are too slow or too tired to catch. Today we share the world with millions of our body doubles whether we want to or not.

Shadows and mirrors follow us through daily life and reflect us in the screens of our digital devices, ultrasound images, x-rays, dentists’ moulds; our experience of ourselves in the world is constantly mediated through the experience of seeing ourselves duplicated. Bitmoji, digital avatars, gaming skins, VR personas, Instagram feeds, CCTV surveilance and passport scans mean we have plenty of body doubles lurking in cyberspace.

It is suggested we live in a post-photographic time. What this means is that technology is creating images of and with us, for and not for us. These may be better or worse than our mortal bodies and mostly beyond our control.

Shadow Catchers is showing at Art Gallery of New South Wales until May 17.

– ref. Shadow Catchers review: fakes, body doubles and mirrors from the analog to the digital lens – https://theconversation.com/shadow-catchers-review-fakes-body-doubles-and-mirrors-from-the-analog-to-the-digital-lens-132668

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

Fourteen states held Democratic primaries on Tuesday US time. Joe Biden is likely to win ten of those states, to four wins for Bernie Sanders. Biden crushed Sanders by 47 points in Alabama, 30 points in Virginia, 19 in North Carolina, 18 in Arkansas, 17 in Tennessee and 13 in Oklahoma.

Biden had surprise wins in Minnesota (nine points over Sanders) and Massachusetts. That is Elizabeth Warren’s home state, but she finished third, with Biden winning 33%, Sanders 27% and Warren just 22%. Biden won Texas by 4%, and is likely to win Maine.

Sanders won just three states: his home state of Vermont (by 29 points), Utah (by 17) and Colorado (by 13). Sanders is likely to win California, where he currently has a nine-point lead. Many more votes remain to be counted in California, Utah and Colorado, and these votes could assist Sanders. Particularly in California, later votes trend left.

A few days before Super Tuesday, it had looked so different. Even though Sanders had only about 30% of the national vote, that appeared enough for a large delegate plurality against a divided field. So how did Biden come back so strongly?

On Saturday, Joe Biden crushingly won the South Carolina primary with 48.4%. Bernie Sanders was a distant second with 19.9%, followed by Tom Steyer at 11.3%, Pete Buttigieg 8.2%, Elizabeth Warren 7.1% and Amy Klobuchar just 3.2%. According to exit polls, black voters made up 56% of the electorate, and voted for Biden by 61-17 over Sanders.

After disappointing results in two diverse states – Nevada and South Carolina – Buttigieg ended his campaign the next day. Buttigieg is the first candidate to leave while still polling over 10% nationally. On Monday, Klobuchar also withdrew, and she and Buttigieg endorsed Biden at a rally.

In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sanders came unexpectedly close to Hillary Clinton. However, this was partly due to Clinton’s lack of appeal to lower-educated whites, something that Donald Trump exploited in the general election.

Once Klobuchar and Buttigieg withdrew, Biden was able to consolidate the vote of Clinton’s supporters: higher-educated whites and black voters. Biden has a stronger appeal to lower-educated whites than Clinton. So once moderates consolidated behind one candidate, that candidate was able to dominate.

After spending a huge amount of money on Super Tuesday ads, Mike Bloomberg bombed. He did not come close to winning a single state, finishing third or worse in all states contested.

According to the delegate count at The Green Papers, Biden now leads Sanders by 497 to 395, with 65 for Bloomberg and 47 for Warren. Biden leads the overall popular vote by 35.1% to 27.3%. There are many more contests to come, starting with six states next Tuesday that account for 9% of delegates, but Biden is clearly in the box seat to win at least a plurality of all pledged delegates.

Israel and Germany

At Monday’s Israeli election, right-wing parties won 58 of the 120 seats (up three since the September 2019 election) and left-wing parties 55 (down two). Netanyahu’s coalition will be three seats short of a majority. This election was the third in a year after no government could be formed following April and September 2019 elections.

On my personal website, I covered the February German political crisis in Thuringia, in which the far-right AfD and conservative CDU supported a small pro-business party’s leader to become state president. It is the first time that any German party has cooperated with the AfD to form government.

– ref. Biden easily wins Super Tuesday after strong comeback in past few days – https://theconversation.com/biden-easily-wins-super-tuesday-after-strong-comeback-in-past-few-days-132754

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

The good news is our economy was performing better than had been thought in the lead-up to the bushfires and coronavirus.

Updated figures in Wednesday’s national accounts show the economy grew 0.6% in the three months to September, rather than the 0.4% previously reported, and a healthier-than-expected 0.5% in the three months to December.

Combined, these figures pushed annual economic growth up above 2% to 2.2% for the first time in a year in which it had been below 2% for the longest period since the global financial crisis.

Annual GDP growth

Not to put too fine a point on it, it looks as if we were actually experiencing the the “gentle turning point” repeatedly promised by Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe.

As Lowe put it during the second half of last year:

After having been through a soft patch, a gentle turning point has been reached. While we are not expecting a return to strong economic growth in the near term, we are expecting growth to pick up.

The figures show the economy began (gently) picking up after the Reserve Bank began cutting rates in June. Counting this week’s latest interest rate cut, it has cut four times.

But the coronavirus and the bushfires have consigned the turning point to history.

Negative growth now possible

Not for a minute does Treasurer Josh Frydenberg believe the economy continued to improve this quarter, the March quarter.

Reminded that the support package promised by the prime minister will come too late for the three months to March, and reminded that many businesses haren’t been able to trade much, Frydenberg was asked to assess the risk the economy might now be going backwards, a state of affairs that if it continued long enough would be a recession.

Read more: We’re staring down the barrel of a technical recession as the coronavirus enters a new and dangerous phase

He replied that the Treasury believes the bushfires alone will shave 0.2 points from growth in the March quarter. Added to that will be the risk from the spread of the coronavirus, which he believes will be “substantial”.

Tonight (Wednesday) Frydenberg and Treasury officials will take part in a phone hookup with other members of the International Monetary Fund to discuss developments including interest rate cuts in both Australia and the United States.

Treasury update on Thursday

The Treasury will finalise its estimate of the impact of the coronavirus on March-quarter GDP later in the evening and report it to a Senate estimates hearing beginning at 9am Thursday.

It means we will know the likely impact at about the same time as the treasurer.

To support retirees hurt by four near-consecutive rate cuts, the treasurer is considering cutting the deeming rate – the rate investments are deemed to have earned for the purposes of the pension income test. It’ll be the second deeming rate cut in the space of a year and will make it easier for retirees earning very little to remain on the pension.

Read more: They’ve cut deeming rates, but what are they?

The focus of the support package will business investment, which slid an unexpected 1.1% in the final three months of the year and 3.4% over the course of the year in defiance of budget forecasts it would climb.

Standard of living slipping

Although not ruling out support for householders, Frydenberg said mortgage holders had done well out of the past four rate cuts. Households with A$400,000 mortgages could soon be paying $3,000 less per year than they had in June.

Living standards, as measured by the Reserve Bank’s preferred measure, real net national disposable income per capita, went backwards in the December quarter, slipping 1.3%. Over the year, it climbed just 1.2%.

Read more: The first economic modelling of coronavirus scenarios is grim for Australia, the world

Household spending recovered somewhat, climbing 0.4% in real terms in the December quarter after inching ahead only 0.1% in the September quarter.

Throughout the year to December, real household spending grew 1.2% at a time when Australia’s population grew 1.5%. This means the consumption of goods and services per person went backwards.

Government spending provided substantial support. Over the year to December public spending on infrastructure grew 4.1% in real terms.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said on Wednesday he would try and boost that by asking state and local governments to bring forward whatever projects they could, to start work in the next three to six months.

Recurrent government spending grew 5%.

– ref. Support package gains shape as GDP turning point swamped – https://theconversation.com/support-package-gains-shape-as-gdp-turning-point-swamped-132969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ayesha Tulloch, DECRA Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Identifying the difference between a native burrowing frog and an introduced cane toad is fundamental ecological knowledge. After bushfires ravaged Australia’s animal and plant communities and razed millions of hectares of land, such knowledge has never been more important.

Ecological awareness shouldn’t be confined to experts in the field. Creating an informed community that values Australia’s unique species and ecosystems is fundamental to nature protection.

This includes getting young people get excited about the environment. Storytelling can play a crucial role in this – helping children learn about the natural world and its challenges.

You’d think that with such a bounty of unique, fascinating wildlife, Australian nature stories would dominate children’s literature. But we still have a way to go.

Telling nature’s stories

Australia is home to more than one million species, many of which are found nowhere else. Tragically, it also has the fourth-highest level of animal species extinction in the world.

Some 100 Australian species have become extinct and more than 1,700 are listed as threatened. This is due to threats such as climate change, invasive species, environmental degradation, land clearing, unsustainable agriculture, and an increase in natural disturbances such as drought and fire.

Read more: Want to help save wildlife after the fires? You can do it in your own backyard

To fix the mistakes of the past, and prevent those of the future, it’s important that young people become more knowledgeable about Australia’s environment than previous generations. Storytelling can do this. It imparts information, nurtures emotional connections with natural places and allows us to reimagine our world.

Indigenous cultures, including in Australia, know the power of stories. For tens of thousands of years they have used oral storytelling to transmit information to future generations, keeping natural history alive.

Children and nature

A UK study in 2002 showed children have an amazing capacity for learning about creatures. At age eight, most could identify nearly 80% of a sample drawn from 150 “species”.

But there was a catch. The “species” were Pokémon characters. When it came to identifying real wildlife, the same age group correctly identified pictures such as “beetle” and “oak” less than half the time.

Read more: Australia’s threatened birds declined by 59% over the past 30 years

The Pokémon study showed children have the capacity to identify a large number of characters (and therefore species), but this capacity was not being applied to real animals and plants.

Recent research into young people’s knowledge of the environment, particularly in Australia, is limited.

But in one 2015 survey, Australian high school students displayed low levels of understanding when asked to define key environmental concepts.

Less than 50% of students could define “ozone layer”, “ecology” and “sustainable development”, and only one-third were aware of “biodiversity” as a concept. “Fire” was never mentioned as important by these students despite being a critical component of Australia’s environment.

But on the upside, 68% of the students said protection of the environment was important.

What’s missing from kids’ literature?

As children, many of us learnt about Australia’s plants and animals from spending time outside in the garden or bush. But these days many kids, particularly those in cities, have little or no access to nature.

A 2018 study found children today spend half the amount of time playing outside that their parents did as youngsters. And 10% of the children studied had not been in a natural environment such as a park or beach for at least a year.

Read more: How you can help – not harm – wild animals recovering from bushfires

For this reason, exposure to ecology through storytelling is particularly important. But often, Australian stories can get drowned out.

Take, for example, the list of the top 51 kids’ books of all time, according to Australian bookseller Dymocks. A few books featuring Australian animals make the list, including Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Wombat Stew by Pamela Lofts. But books featuring animals are dominated by introduced or overseas species: dogs, sheep, pigs, rabbits, bears, donkeys, cows and hippopotamuses.

Search for a children’s book on “horses” in the popular Readings bookstore, and you’ll find hundreds, but search for a children’s book on “bushfires” and you’ll only find a handful.

What’s out there?

Quality books featuring Australian ecology are available if you seek them out.

Mem Fox wrote her classic Possum Magic in 1983 after being frustrated by the lack of picture books teaching children about Australia’s plants, animals and environments.

Big Rain Coming by Katrina Germein tells a story of an isolated desert Aboriginal community waiting for the rain, teaching children about the “boom-bust” nature of Australia’s arid zone.

Read more: Children’s books can do more to inspire the new generation of Earth warriors

One Small Island by Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch explores Macquarie Island’s unique geological history, its discovery by white explorers and ensuing environmental damage, as well as the importance of protecting and restoring it.

Christina Booth’s haunting One Careless Night teaches children about the reality of extinction. It uses a minimalist poetic style and misty illustrations to recreate the life and death of the last Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).

Every ecologist has a story to tell

Scientists miss great opportunities to communicate their stories to the public when they publish only in academic journals. And some authors are keen to write stories about environmental issues but lack the scientific background.

Bringing authors, illustrators and ecologists together can help bridge that gap. We did this late last year at the annual conference of the Ecological Society of Australia, through a workshop on writing ecologically accurate children’s stories.

Through story, ecologists can give children the knowledge to care for our landscape and its irreplaceable plants and wildlife, and the hope of knowing they can make a difference.

Read more: Living data: how art helps us all understand climate change

– ref. Does your child know more about dinosaurs than dugongs? Perhaps they’re reading the wrong books – https://theconversation.com/does-your-child-know-more-about-dinosaurs-than-dugongs-perhaps-theyre-reading-the-wrong-books-126841

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Matthews, Director, Academic Quality, Massey University

New Zealand’s announcement of a fossil fuel ban for default KiwiSaver funds from mid-2021 has left many questions unanswered – including whether it is appropriate for governments to make ethical investment choices on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people, who already have that option.

Climate change minister James Shaw described the decision as “putting people and the planet first”.

No New Zealander should have to worry about whether their retirement savings are causing the climate crisis.

KiwiSaver is a voluntary retirement savings scheme for people in employment, to which the government makes an annual contribution. People who join KiwiSaver without actively choosing a fund are allocated to default funds, and the ban on fossil fuel investments applies to new default providers appointed next year.

But it will have broader impacts because about 600,000 current default members – about 23% of New Zealand’s workforce – and their investments will be moved across to the new funds.

Read more: New report shows the world is awash with fossil fuels. It’s time to cut off supply

How to define fossil fuel investments

Detailed rules have not been released yet, but the wording suggests a narrow definition of investments that will be excluded, limited specifically to fossil fuel production.

At this stage, similar schemes internationally, such as the US 401K plan or the UK’s NEST scheme, do not have rules but offer ethical funds for their members to choose.

Read more: BlackRock is the canary in the coalmine. Its decision to dump coal signals what’s next

As of January this year, there were three million people enrolled in KiwiSaver, New Zealand’s national workplace-based retirement savings scheme. 1.3 million of those people joined the scheme through automatic enrolment and were initially placed in default funds – but despite the intended temporary nature of these funds, nearly 600,000 KiwiSaver members remained. This represents an increase of 2% over a year earlier, according to figures from the Internal Revenue Department.

At the end of December 2019, NZ$65.7 billion was invested in KiwiSaver. Assuming that the average balance is the same for KiwiSaver members in default and non-default funds, this would put the funds managed in default funds at NZ$13 billion.

The first question is simply how fossil fuel production is defined. It obviously includes oil companies, but does it also cover the distribution and sale of fuel, which would capture transport companies and entities such as fuel distributor Z Energy? Does it include the financing of fossil fuel extraction and production, which could impact the big Australian banks?

The final definition will have a substantial impact on what investments are actually excluded under the ban.

Ethical investment

A related question is why the ban should be limited to the production of fossil fuels. With fossil fuels described as a leading cause of the climate crisis, it would seem appropriate to also target users of fossil fuels, such as airlines and car manufacturers.

A complicating factor is that fossil fuel activities may be only a part of a company’s operations. At what level does the extent of fossil fuel business require that the company be included in the ban?

Another question is why fossil fuels have been singled out. If the government is going to get involved in making ethical judgements for KiwiSaver members, why restrict it to only some types of ethical concerns? What about the other “sin stocks”, such as alcohol and tobacco?

A true ethics-based approach would require default providers to sign up to the United Nations’ principles for responsible investment or to seek certification under the Responsible Investment Association Australia’s programme.

The government announcement included other changes, such as a move from conservative to balanced funds, to improve long-term returns for default members. But there is uncertainty about the impact of the fossil fuel ban on financial performance from the default funds.

Read more: For the sake of our retirement savings, it’s time to reform the investment management boys’ club

Ethical choices versus political moves

When announcing the fossil fuel ban this week, the government argued that the ban could benefit KiwiSaver members, pointing to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund’s adoption of a climate change investment strategy in 2017 without negative impacts on financial performance.

But this is not an accurate comparison. The superannuation fund’s strategy is a broader targeted divestment of high-risk companies.

It is difficult to assess the impact on the KiwiSaver funds’ financial performance without the detail of the ban. A bigger question is why the government should exercise any form of ethical judgement on behalf of default members? The default schemes were designed as a temporary holding fund until members make an active choice about their preferred fund.

Members with particular ethical views have always had the option of moving to another fund that better aligns with their values and interests. Mindful Money reports there are currently six providers offering 19 KiwiSaver funds that have a fossil free policy. It also identifies funds that are weapons free, sin free or offer higher environment, social and governance standards.

For those interested in exploring investment options that align with their ethical position, the Responsible Investment Association Australia (which also covers New Zealand) offers an interactive tool that allows individuals to select investment options matching their values and interests. Sorted also offers information about ethical KiwiSaver funds.

The government has not provided a convincing argument for why it should be making ethical investment decisions for KiwiSaver members. Like all KiwiSaver members, default members have the ability to move to a non-default fund that offers a responsible investing approach. The decision to restrict the ban to fossil fuels and the lack of detail suggests it is a political action, rather than a fully considered ethical policy.

– ref. NZ’s fossil fuel investment ban for popular KiwiSaver funds is more political than ethical – https://theconversation.com/nzs-fossil-fuel-investment-ban-for-popular-kiwisaver-funds-is-more-political-than-ethical-132863

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Macdonald, Associate Professor, Molecular Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast

The daily number of new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) cases is now nine times higher outside China than in the country where the disease was first detected.

In Australia, reports this week of local transmission of the coronavirus, which causes the disease now called COVID-19, are a turning point in our disease management.

Our disease surveillance systems are well placed to keep abreast of COVID-19 and provide some reassurance that transmission is unlikely to go undetected in the community. But there’s still more we could do.

Read more: Worried about your child getting coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know

Why is the coronavirus hard to detect?

Detecting all people infected with COVID-19 is a global problem. There are too many existing respiratory infections, such as colds and flus, in any country to be able to test everyone with coronavirus symptoms.

Each of us gets around two to three upper respiratory tract infections a year. Globally, that amounts to around around 18.75 billion infections a year.

There are not enough testing kits readily available to test people at this scale.

So who is tested?

In Australia, people are currently tested for the coronavirus if they’ve travelled from or through a country considered to pose a risk of transmission in the 14 days before getting sick, or if they have a link to a known case.

This testing criteria has changed as the outbreak progressed, and will continue to do so.

How else do we track possible cases?

Apart from directly testing people suspected of having COVID-19, Australia has a surveillance plan to detect coronavirus in people or populations who don’t know they’re infected.

Australia’s emergency response plan for mitigating COVID-19 says we will use surveillance networks set up for the influenza pandemic emergency reponse plan and some of this is already occurring.

Read more: It’s now a matter of when, not if, for Australia. This is how we’re preparing for a jump in coronavirus cases

The Australian Sentinel Practices Research Network (ASPREN) is a network of GPs who log the number of patients they see in total, compared to the number of patients they see with influenza-like illness. These GPs collect samples from a small subset of those patients to see if COVID-19 is circulating. Samples are then sent to SA Pathology for testing.

Another surveillance network that may be activated is FluCAN. This reports on the number of hospitalisations due to a disease, usually influenza, as well as clinical data from the cases. The information helps public health experts get a better picture of how severe the disease is, and the symptoms.

But while these systems can monitor disease levels in those sick enough to seek medical care, they don’t give us an indication of the amount of milder disease that might be circulating in our communities.

This is where an online surveillance system called FluTracking can help. Anyone in the community can join and answer two simple questions each week about whether they have a fever and/or a cough.

The system provides information on how much influenza-like illness is circulating in the community. If we’re seeing more than usual, it might signify a community outbreak.

FluTracking was activated for COVID-19 surveillance last month.

What else could we be doing?

There are questions, however, about how early in an outbreak the surveillance systems will detect cases.

Will they detect community transmission when an outbreak reaches ten cases? Or will it take hundreds or even thousands of cases to trigger a warning through the network?

Read more: Coronavirus: 5 ways to put evidence into action during outbreaks like COVID-19

Innovations from other countries suggest there are additional measures Australia could adopt to improve our surveillance networks.

Testing at home or on the road

London adopted a system at the end of January to test mild cases of disease in the patients’ homes. This helps with self-isolation and reducing disease spread.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh has opened a drive-through testing clinic to reduce the chances of viral spreading.

Australia’s emergency response plans include provisions to mobilise flu clinics to help keep patients from overwhelming emergency services. Drive-through services could be an excellent addition to these existing plans.

Rapid testing

One of the biggest concerns with current testing is the time it takes to ship a sample to a laboratory for testing. This can result in a delay of one to two days before getting the results. During peak epidemic times, testing can’t cope with demand.

Researchers in China, however, have reportedly developed a rapid coronavirus test that can detect the virus using a fingerprick of blood in 15 minutes. The test detects if the body has mounted an immune response (Ig M antibodies) to the virus.

While the data is not yet published, the researchers reported success from the 600 samples they tested.

Rapid diagnostic tests are typically cheap to manufacture, can be mass produced, and can be easily used by health workers outside a laboratory.

Reporting on negative test results and surveillance systems

Positive COVID-19 cases from all the surveillance sources are reported as they occur. But while influenza surveillance reports include the number of negative tests results, it’s unclear whether COVID-19 surveillance reports will do the same.

Reporting on negative tests results could help ease community concern that coughs and sneezes people see on the train or in their office are unlikely to be due to the undetected spread of COVID-19.

Local health services should also provide regular updates on the types of COVID-19 surveillance actively being performed, and in which communities. This information can help reduce anxiety levels and assure communities that spread of coronavirus can be effectively monitored.

Read more: Coronavirus is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories – here’s why that’s a serious problem

– ref. How do we detect if coronavirus is spreading in the community? – https://theconversation.com/how-do-we-detect-if-coronavirus-is-spreading-in-the-community-132349

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Maguire, Associate Professor, University of Newcastle

The Australian government has announced its intention to use powers under the Biosecurity Act, if needed, in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Attorney-General Christian Porter has described these powers as “strange and foreign to many Australians”, but potentially necessary in the face of a pandemic.

Read more: We’re in danger of drowning in a coronavirus ‘infodemic’. Here’s how we can cut through the noise

The 2015 Biosecurity Act aims to manage biosecurity threats to human, animal and plant health. In the context of coronavirus (COVID-19), a biosecurity risk under this legislation would be defined as:

• the likelihood of a disease spreading in Australian territory
• the potential for that disease to cause harm to human health and/or economic consequences.

What powers could the government exercise?

The Biosecurity Act is a mammoth piece of legislation, comprising 11 chapters and 645 sections. It is framed in terms that deliver extensive powers to relevant officers. The attorney-general is correct in saying these powers will seem very foreign to many members of the Australian community.

The director of human biosecurity, in consultation with chief health officers in the states and territories, may determine that a disease is a “listed human disease”. COVID-19 has been listed as such a disease, as it is communicable and may cause significant harm to human health.

People with listed diseases may be subject to “human biosecurity control orders”. Control orders can require people, among other things, to:

• provide their contact information and health details (including body samples for diagnosis)
• restrict their behaviour
• undergo risk-minimisation interventions (including decontamination) and/or medical treatment
• accept isolation from the community for specified periods.

If a person does not consent to a control order, the director may require them to comply. In some cases, if they refuse, a person may be detained by police.

A person who fails to comply with a control order or escapes from detention could be charged with a criminal offence. Under the act, these offences carry penalties ranging up to imprisonment for five years.

The director may also designate “human health response zones”. This may result in restrictions on entering or leaving a particular area. Failure to comply may incur a fine.

Chapter 8 of the Biosecurity Act sets out circumstances in which the governor-general may declare a “human biosecurity emergency”. Sweeping powers are then available to the health minister.

During a human biosecurity emergency period, the Health Minister may determine any requirement that he or she is satisfied is necessary:

a) to prevent or control…

(ii) the emergence, establishment or spread of the declaration listed human disease in Australian territory or a part of Australian territory…

This power includes, but is not limited to, imposing requirements on:

• entering or leaving specified places
• restricting or preventing the movement of people in or between places
• evacuating places.

Criminal and civil penalties can also apply to people who refuse to comply with requirements under such emergency powers.

In practice, the health minister or delegated officials could require the closure of premises such as shopping centres or sporting facilities. The potential restrictions could have a far-reaching impact on people’s daily lives.

Coercive powers and the community

Such powers, including civil and even criminal penalties, are not uncommon globally. Other countries have similar laws for the purpose of containing the spread of communicable diseases. For example, in Singapore the police can enforce quarantine-related measures.

In China, where the COVID-19 outbreak originated, some infected people are facing police investigation for failing to avoid contact with other people. Indeed, some have been charged with the crime of endangering public security. Penalties for conviction could be very severe, ranging up to life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

To avoid the abuse of such powers, the Chinese Supreme Court has recently warned against the strict application of endangering public security charges in relation to pandemic control measures.

Concerns will certainly be raised in Australia about the exercise of special and emergency powers. The attorney-general is clearly aware of this. He has said the more extreme powers would be used only as a “last resort”. Yet he has also confirmed that biosecurity powers are very likely to be used on a large scale.

The Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment is the frontline agency administering the Biosecurity Act. Its website aims to engage Australian citizens with their responsibilities to protect Australia’s biosecurity.

The Biosecurity Act sets out extensive provisions with the apparent aim of ensuring special powers only be exercised where warranted and for the shortest possible time. It also provides for judicial review of certain decisions under the act. Lay people may find it quite challenging, though, to interpret their rights under the act when faced with the imposition of a coercive measure.

Read more: Is the coronavirus a pandemic, and does that matter? 4 questions answered

Many Australians may be tolerant of special governmental powers if they see such intervention as essential to protect everyone’s health. The community is undoubtedly being inundated with information about the COVID-19 outbreak from government and media sources.

On the other hand, some people may be tempted to resist coercive powers that interfere with their personal liberty. The president of the Law Council, Pauline Wright, notes that the powers under the Biosecurity Act can be exercised against a person even where the relevant officer does not know or reasonably suspect the person is infected with coronavirus.

It will be crucial for government officers to be cautious in their use of special powers. They must seek to balance legitimate efforts to protect public health with individuals’ rights to liberty and due process.

– ref. Explainer: what are the Australian government’s powers to quarantine people in a coronavirus outbreak? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-the-australian-governments-powers-to-quarantine-people-in-a-coronavirus-outbreak-132877

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake Goldenfein, Lecturer, Swinburne University of Technology

Australian police agencies are reportedly using a private, unaccountable facial recognition service that combines machine learning and wide-ranging data-gathering practices to identify members of the public from online photographs.

The service, Clearview AI, is like a reverse image search for faces. You upload an image of someone’s face and Clearview searches its database to find other images that contain the same face. It also tells you where the image was found, which might help you determine the name and other information about the person in the picture.

Clearview AI built this system by collecting several billion publicly available images from the web, including from social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Then they used machine learning to make a biometric template for each face and match those templates to the online sources of the images.

It was revealed in January that hundreds of US law enforcement agencies are using Clearview AI, starting a storm of discussion about the system’s privacy implications and the legality of the web-scraping used to build the database.

Australian police agencies initially denied they were using the service. The denial held until a list of Clearview AI’s customers was stolen and disseminated, revealing users from the Australian Federal Police as well as the state police in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.

Lack of accountability

This development is particularly concerning as the Department of Home Affairs, which oversees the federal police, is seeking to increase the use of facial recognition and other biometric identity systems. (An attempt to introduce new legislation was knocked back last year for not being adequately transparent or privacy-protecting.)

Gaining trust in the proper use of biometric surveillance technology ought to be important for Home Affairs. And being deceptive about the use of these tools is a bad look.

Read more: Why the government’s proposed facial recognition database is causing such alarm

But the lack of accountability may go beyond poor decisions at the top. It may be that management at law enforcement agencies did not know their employees were using Clearview AI. The company offers free trials to “active law enforcement personnel”, but it’s unclear how they verify this beyond requiring a government email address.

Why aren’t law enforcement agencies enforcing rules about which surveillance tools officers can use? Why aren’t their internal accountability mechanisms working?

There are also very real concerns around security when using Clearview AI. It monitors and logs every search, and we know it has already had one data breach. If police are going to use powerful surveillance technologies, there must be systems in place for ensuring those technological tools do what they say they do, and in a secure and accountable way.

Is it even accurate?

Relatively little is known about how the Clearview AI system actually works. To be accountable, a technology used by law enforcement should be tested by a standards body to ensure it is fit for purpose.

Clearview AI, on the other hand, has had its own testing done – and as a result its developers claim it is 100% accurate.

That report does not represent the type of testing that an entity seeking to produce an accountable system would undertake. In the US at least, there are agencies like the National Institute for Standards and Technology that do precisely that kind of accuracy testing. There are also many qualified researchers in universities and labs that could properly evaluate the system.

Instead, Clearview AI gave the task to a trio composed of a retired judge turned private attorney, an urban policy analyst who wrote some open source software in the 1990s, and a former computer science professor who is now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. There is no discussion of why those individuals were chosen.

The method used to test the system also leaves a lot to be desired. Clearview AI based their testing on a test by the American Civil Liberties Union of Amazon’s Rekognition image analysis tool.

However, the ACLU test was a media stunt. The ACLU ran headshots of 28 members of congress against a mugshot database. None of the politicians were in the database, meaning any match returned would be an error. However, the test only required the system to be 80% certain of its results, making it quite likely to return a match.

Read more: Close up: the government’s facial recognition plan could reveal more than just your identity

The Clearview AI test also used headshots of politicians taken from the web (front-on, nicely framed, well-lit images), but ran them across their database of several billion images, which did include those politicians.

The hits returned by the system were then confirmed visually by the three report authors as 100% accurate. But what does 100% mean here?

The report stipulates that the first two hits provided by the system were accurate. But we don’t know how many other hits there were, or at what point they stopped being accurate. Politicians have lots of smiling headshots online, so finding two images should not be complex.

What’s more, law enforcement agencies are unlikely to be working with nice clean headshots. Poor-quality images taken from strange angles – the kind you get from surveillance or CCTV cameras – would be more like what law enforcement agencies are actually using.

Despite these and other criticisms, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That stands by the testing, telling Buzzfeed News he believes it is diligent and thorough.

More understanding and accountability are needed

The Clearview AI case shows there is not enough understanding or accountability around how this and other software tools work in law enforcement. Nor do we know enough about the company selling it and their security measures, nor about who in law enforcement is using it or under what conditions.

Beyond the ethical arguments around facial recognition, Clearview AI reveals Australian law enforcement agencies have such limited technical and organisational accountability that we should be questioning their competency even to evaluate, let alone use, this kind of technology.

– ref. Australian police are using the Clearview AI facial recognition system with no accountability – https://theconversation.com/australian-police-are-using-the-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-system-with-no-accountability-132667

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

Benjamin Netanyahu may well have survived to fight another day as Israel’s prime minister after a third knife-edge election in less than a year.

However, it could be days, or even weeks, before a new Israeli government emerges, after the horse-trading that has become standard after decades of close-run elections.

With more than 90% of the vote in the March 2 election counted, Netanyahu’s nationalist Likud party and its allies can probably muster 59 seats in the 120-member Knesset, two short of a majority.

Read more: Trump’s Middle East ‘vision’ is a disaster that will only make things worse

The main opposition Blue and White party of ex-general Benny Gantz will have trouble cobbling together a Knesset majority of the centre and left, given Gantz has ruled out a coalition with the Arab List.

Gantz’s party slipped at the election from its showing in the previous encounters over the past year, in April and September. This will weaken his hold on his leadership and diminish his bargaining power in a coalition-building process.

The Arab List represents Israel’s Arab population. This accounts for 20% of the country’s people, or 17% of eligible voters.

The Arab List is set to improve its position in the Knesset from 13 to possibly 14 or 15 quotas. This is a significant advance.

The wild card in all of this is the position of the staunchly secularist Yisrael Beiteinu party of Russian émigré Avigdor Lieberman, whose list appears to have secured up to seven quotas.

This places Lieberman, a former Netanyahu ally turned antagonist, in a potentially powerful king-making position. Lieberman has declared he will not serve in a government populated by the more extreme Orthodox Jewish parties. These political alignments shun military service.

But if there is a lesson in Israel’s politics in this latest fractious stage it is that no constellation of political forces can be taken for granted. Election fatigue after three polls in 12 months may well drive various players towards some sort of accommodation.

Israeli support for the status quo in the person of Netanyahu, who is under indictment on criminal charges, has signalled exasperation with continuing political paralysis. Gantz and his centrist party did not made a compelling case for change.

Lieberman’s support for any coalition that might eventually emerge could be described as fluid, depending on the allocation of the spoils of victory and his own resolute opposition to partnership with parties on the extremities of the religious right.

All this raises the possibility of a national unity coalition that would involve Natanyahu in partnership with Gantz. The two might rotate the premiership. This sort of arrangement has been tried before with varying degrees of success.

It was significant that on election night, after it became clear Netanyahu was likely to survive and Gantz had slipped, the two leaders refrained from making negative references to each other.

On security issues, they are not far apart, in any case.

The point of all this is that Israel has entered a period during which the playing cards will be shuffled in an attempt to come up with the sort of hand that enables relatively stable government.

Complicating calculations about the next stage is the fact that Netanyahu is due in court on March 17 to face serious charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

His allies in the Knesset have said they will seek to pass a law that would preclude, or freeze, the prosecution of any sitting prime minister.

That manoeuvre is given little prospect of success.

What may evolve is that judges agree to delay hearings for a short period, pending attempts to form a government. In any case, court proceedings may well drag on for a year or more.

In the meantime, Netanyahu would continue in his role. Remarkably, criminal charges do not preclude such a continuation in office.

On the other hand, the uncertainties a criminal trial engenders would be potentially destabilising politically.

In the end, the willingness of enough Israelis to look the other way when it comes to charges of criminality appears to have enabled Netanyahu to survive as prime minister.

This observation comes with the caveat that, in political terms, not much can be taken for granted in Israel.

Typical, perhaps, of attitudes towards the case against Israel’s leader were these remarks in The Guardian by a small businesswoman in Jerusalem:

I don’t mind if he eats takeaway food in boxes covered with diamonds. Look what is happening around us.

One of the charges against Netanyahu is that he improperly used public funds to feed himself and his family.

From an international perspective, the Israeli election result is likely to pose a significant dilemma. That is if Netanyahu presses on with his threats to annex settlement blocs in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.

Most countries regard these settlements on land occupied after the 1967 Six-Day War as illegal under international law.

Read more: Fifty years on from the Six Day War, the prospects for Middle East peace remain dim

This is where a potential Netanyahu victory aligns itself with a possible Trump re-election.

No American president has been as accommodating to Israel’s nationalist impulses. No US administration has been as antagonistic to Palestinian aspirations.

Washington yielded to long-standing Israeli pressure to move its embassy to Jerusalem and at the same time reverse US policy that regarded settlements as a breach of international law.

If Netanyahu is confirmed as Israel’s prime minister for another term and Trump is re-elected, prospects for an accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians will likely become more distant.

Elections have consequences.

– ref. Netanyahu set to survive another knife-edge Israeli election – https://theconversation.com/netanyahu-set-to-survive-another-knife-edge-israeli-election-132858

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ximena Nelson, Associate Professor of Animal Behaviour, University of Canterbury

Avian experts have repeatedly demonstrated the remarkable brainpower of birds. Parrots, in particular, have established a reputation as skillful imitators – a talent that requires a complex network of neural connections.

Now, researchers Alex Taylor and Amalia Bastos from the University of Auckland have once again observed parrots beating the odds when it comes to intelligence.

Working with kea (Nestor notabilis) at Christchurch’s Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, their research has revealed this species’ ability to understand probability. Apart from humans and great apes, kea are the only animals to demonstrate this.

The study, published today in Nature Communications, details how these fascinating feathered creatures calculate the chance of something happening.

Clever, calculating kea

The study involved presenting a few different kea with two jars, each containing different-coloured tokens: orange and black. The birds were first made to understand that black tokens could be exchanged for food.

Read more: Are pigeons as smart as primates? You can count on it

Then, one person discretely removed one token from each jar and presented the closed hands to the kea. More often than not, the birds would successfully identify which hand was most likely to have a black token, based on the proportions of black and orange tokens in the corresponding jar.

The researchers then increased the difficultly of the task, by changing the colour proportions in the two jars, and even dividing the jars into more than one section per jar. Even then, the kea correctly predicted which hand was most likely to contain the token that would get them a tasty treat.

Figuring out friend from foe

In one test, the birds were faced with two people – one taking a token seemingly at random from a jar with lots of black tokens, and another person who “actively searched” for a black token in a jar containing only a few.

Remarkably, the kea knew not to trust both people equally, and would choose the hand of the person who actively looked for a black token.

While their study only involved a small group of birds, Taylor and Bastos have clearly demonstrated the kea’s capacity to weave several sources of information together, and make decisions about the probability of an event happening.

The kea were able to combine this information into a single prediction about where a rewarding token was most likely to be.

The effort it takes to think

When faced with a decision, all animals may think of the problem in terms of: “is it worth my effort to do this?”

For example, animals in the wild must evaluate if it’s worth risking being attacked by a predator in order to find food.

While such reasoning during uncertainty may actually be more common than we think, it’s difficult for experts to effectively test this. Thus, the analytical approach used in this study effectively sets it apart.

Things were not made easy for the kea. They had to solve problems that combined reasoning.

The parrots even managed this in scenarios where the result of their reasoning was not affected by probability alone (like a human thinking “is it worth my effort to go surfing today when only one wave appears to be a good one?”), but also by physical barriers (“then there’s that pier I’ll have to contend with”) and social cues (“but the surf cam is showing heaps of people out there, so that one wave must be amazing!”).

Read more: Bird-brained and brilliant: Australia’s avians are smarter than you think

Ultimately, for the kea, the decision depended on the weighting assigned to each individual factor. This level of reasoning is no trivial task, and has so far been demonstrated only in humans. While chimps can account for social cues, they haven’t been found to simultaneously do the same for physical cues.

Not only did Kea parrots consider social information in their decisions, this information also came from members of a different species. They evaluated human social behaviour.

Also, the authors demonstrated the birds didn’t gradually learn to make the right choices, but were already “working it out” from the start. We know this because the number of “correct” choices in the first trial was too high to be achieved through pure luck.

Kea-ping their eyes peeled

We know logical inference has evolved in humans, but why in kea?

These parrots often forage for food by digging for hidden items under the dirt (often deep in the ground), using their beaks. Given they live among the huge mountainous landscapes of New Zealand’s South Island, we assume kea don’t dig randomly for roots and bulbs.

They probably consider whether the likelihood of digging at a certain location is “worth the effort”, and likely make this evaluation based on the health and type of leaves they can see.

Since kea are also a reasonably social species, there’s a good chance they look for food in places their fellows have already had success. They can often be spotted flocking to the same plant for berries.

Read more: By studying animal behaviour we gain an insight into our own

That said, these are informed guesses, and at this point we don’t precisely know why kea can evaluate probability with such sophistication.

However, it’s believed the cleverness of this parrot lies in its unusual ability to find a huge array of different types of food, both above and below ground.

Are there other species that can make decisions based on complex statistical inferences? Probably.

But whether or not we find them depends on asking the right questions of the right species, just as Taylor and Bastos have.

– ref. Polly knows probability: this parrot can predict the chances of something happening – https://theconversation.com/polly-knows-probability-this-parrot-can-predict-the-chances-of-something-happening-132767

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Associate Research Fellow, Deakin University

The US has signed an historic agreement with the Taliban that sets Washington and its NATO allies on a path to withdraw their military forces from Afghanistan after more than 18 years of unceasing conflict.

It is now hoped the deal will lead to a more complicated process of negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan government – starting as early as next week – to work toward a complete ceasefire and new political roadmap for the country.

This is critically important because until now, the government has been absent from the peace process at the insistence of the Taliban.

The opening of this window to end one of the world’s most debilitating and protracted conflicts has been welcomed by many US allies, including Australia.

Read more: After US and Taliban sign accord, Afghanistan must prepare for peace

However, many seasoned observers, including prominent American politicians and former diplomats and military leaders, are concerned the agreement concedes too much to the Taliban without requiring it to make any substantive commitments to ensure a genuine peace process.

The deal has completely sidelined the Afghan government and civil society and does not provide any explicit references, much less guarantees, for the protection of human rights in Afghanistan, especially for women and minority groups who were suppressed and persecuted by the Taliban.

Indeed, cracks have already begun to emerge in the deal. On Monday, the Taliban refused to take part in the intra-Afghan talks until the government released 5,000 Taliban prisoners, which President Ashraf Ghani has refused to do.

As a result, many Afghans are worried that rather than being the start of a comprehensive peace process for the country, the deal is merely a cheap withdrawal troop agreement intended to serve US President Donald Trump’s political interests during an election year.

Will the Taliban sever ties with terror groups?

The agreement is to be implemented in two separate processes. The first commits the Taliban to take measures to prevent al-Qaeda and other terror groups from using Afghanistan as a safe haven from which to threaten the US and its allies.

In return, the US and NATO have agreed to a complete withdrawal of all forces from the country within 14 months. It is scheduled to begin with the departure of over 5,000 troops and the closure of five military bases within 135 days of the signing of the agreement.

In the short term, the Taliban will likely tactically reduce its relations with certain elements of the local al-Qaeda network to demonstrate its commitments under the deal. But its relationship with these international terror groups is far more complicated and nuanced than the agreement recognises.

Research has shown the Taliban sees foreign militant groups as valuable allies due to their shared ideologies and longstanding material support for one another. This is provided these groups don’t directly challenge their power in the country.

This explains why the Taliban’s ties with al-Qaeda are so enduring, despite the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan aimed at dismantling the terror group. In particular, the Haqqani Network, a semi-autonomous component of the Taliban movement, has a long history of working closely with al-Qaeda and other groups.

Read more: Afghanistan’s suffering has reached unprecedented levels. Can a presidential election make things better?

On the other hand, the Taliban has fiercely resisted groups such as the Islamic State when it has threatened to seize Taliban territory.

As a result, the Taliban is likely to intensify its attacks on already weakened Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan, rather than going after more dispersed elements of al-Qaeda under the agreement with the US.

But verifying the group has followed through on its commitment to completely sever ties with al-Qaeda and other terror groups may prove to be extremely difficult in the long run. Especially after the withdrawal of the US military and intelligence assets from the region.

Many challenges lie ahead in peace talks

For negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan government to succeed, both sides will need to find a compromise on the future of the country’s political system. This would require the Taliban to abandon its goal of restoring its ultra-conservative Islamic Emirate, which it sought to establish from 1996-2001.

The Taliban will also need to make robust guarantees for basic civil and political rights and to shut down its safe havens for militants across the border in Pakistan.

The Taliban has so far steadfastly refused to directly negotiate with officials of the Afghan government, which it describes as an illegitimate imposition of western powers.

Read more: How to end Afghanistan war as longest conflict moves towards fragile peace

The divisions that have intensified within the government since September’s presidential election will only serve to strengthen the Taliban’s position. And the implementation of the first stage of the US military withdrawal is likely to further weaken the government and embolden the Taliban.

Consequently, it is highly doubtful a complete and durable political settlement will be achieved within the 14 months of the complete foreign troop withdrawals.

Yet, despite the failings of the government, the public has not shifted its support to the Taliban. Last year, a national survey by the Asia Foundation found 85% of Afghans had no sympathy for the Taliban.

Taliban negotiators have said they are not seeking to monopolise power and are willing to recognise the rights of women and freedom of expression according to Islam. But given the group’s draconian interpretation of Islam, it is far from certain it is ready to recognise the vibrant role Afghan women now play in the public sector and civil society.

The rights of ethnic and religious minorities also remain a concern. The Hazaras, for one, have been relentlessly persecuted by the Taliban since the 1990s.

Finally, the Taliban’s sanctuaries and power bases in Pakistan will undoubtedly remain a sticking point in any peace talks on the future of Afghanistan. A durable peace is unlikely to materialise when an insurgent group can wage wars from across the border with impunity and backed by elements of a powerful neighbouring state.

Despite these challenges, the fact a peaceful resolution to the war is on the agenda of regional and global powers is a positive development. A genuine peace is likely to be the outcome of trials and errors, a long process that requires patience and sustained international commitment.

– ref. Lasting peace in Afghanistan now relies on the Taliban standing by its word. This has many Afghans concerned – https://theconversation.com/lasting-peace-in-afghanistan-now-relies-on-the-taliban-standing-by-its-word-this-has-many-afghans-concerned-132756

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jose Polo, ARC Future Fellow, Anatomy & Developmental Biology, Monash University

“I would like to know why organs like your liver and brain can regenerate while others can’t?” – Maggie, age 9, Melbourne

This is a great question Maggie. Scientists have actually been trying to answer this question for a long time. The good news is after many years of research we now have a good idea of how this works.

What are cells?

As you may know, the body is made of cells. We sometimes call these cells “the building blocks of life”. Nature builds all the parts of our bodies with cells.

In other words, you might have played with Lego before. Cells are like pieces of Lego! Just like Lego blocks do, cells come in lots of shapes and colours. Cells can also do lots of different things.

Your skin is made of different cells. Some of them make your hair, and some make your scars when you get a cut, for example.

Even your blood is made of many different cells. The red blood cells give your blood its red colour.

Read more: Curious Kids: why don’t burns bleed?

So going back to your question, some cells in our body are very special because they can multiply. Not only that, these special cells can turn into other cells as well. The name of these special cells is “stem cells”, and they are the key to our organs regenerating.

Imagine if your Lego blocks could do that!

Which organs can regenerate themselves?

Maggie, you’re very clever at nine to know what “regeneration” means, but in case some other young readers don’t, regeneration is when our organs fix themselves after they’ve been damaged. Our organs might have been damaged if we get injured or we’re very sick.

Organs like our skin (yes, the skin is the biggest organ of the body!) need to regenerate often. The skin’s stem cells produce new cells when the old ones are lost, like when we get a paper cut.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do we have two kidneys when we can live with only one?

Our livers are very good at regenerating themselves because they too can make new cells. The cells of the liver are called “hepatocytes”. Hepatocytes start to multiply when the liver is damaged. So hepatocytes work like stem cells.

Intestines are another good example of an organ which regenerates itself. Our intestines regenerate all the time, even when we’re healthy. They lose cells when we digest food, but the stem cells in the intestines multiply to keep this important organ working well.

Which organs aren’t very good at regenerating?

The brain actually can’t regenerate itself well because when the brain is damaged its cells find it harder to make new ones. This is because the brain has very few of the special cells, or stem cells.

In recent years, we’ve found some areas of the brain can regenerate. But we still need to do more research to better understand how this works.

We do know the brain is better at regenerating itself when we are young than when we are old.

Read more: Curious Kids: how does our brain send signals to our body?

– ref. Curious Kids: why can some organs regenerate while others can’t? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-can-some-organs-regenerate-while-others-cant-128217

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Judith Friedlander, Post-graduate Researcher, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

Just like humans, animals like living near coastal plains and waterways. In fact, cities such as Sydney and Melbourne are “biodiversity hotspots” – boasting fresh water, varied topographies and relatively rich soil to sustain and nourish life.

Recent research showed urban areas can support a greater range of animals and insects than some bushland and rural habitat, if we revegetate with biodiversity in mind.

Read more: How you can help – not harm – wild animals recovering from bushfires

Urban regeneration is especially important now, amid unfathomable estimates that more than one billion animals were killed in the recent bushfires. Even before the fires, we were in the middle of a mass extinction event in Australia and around the world.

Losing animals, especially pollinators such as bees, has huge implications for biodiversity and food supplies.

My team and I are creating a B&B Highway – a series of nest boxes, artificial hollows and pollinating plants – in Sydney and coastal urban areas of New South Wales. These essentially act as “bed and breakfasts” where creatures such as birds, bees, butterflies and bats can rest and recharge. Everyday Australians can also build a B&B in their own backyards or on balconies.

City living for climate refugees

I spoke to Charles Sturt University ecologist Dr Watson about the importance of protecting animals such as pollinators during the climate crisis. He said:

The current drought has devastated inland areas – anything that can move has cleared out, with many birds and other mobile animals retreating to the wetter, more temperate forests to the south and east.

So, when considering the wider impacts of these fires […] we need to include these climate refugees in our thinking.

Many woodland birds such as honeyeaters and parrots have moved in droves to cities, including Sydney, over the last few years because of droughts and climate change, attracted to the rich variety of berries, fruits and seeds.

I also spoke to BirdLife Australia’s Holly Parsons, who said last year’s Aussie Backyard Bird Count recorded other inland birds – such as the white-winged triller, the crimson chat, pied honeyeater, rainforest pigeons and doves – outside their usual range, attracted to the richer food variety in coastal cities.

Read more: To save these threatened seahorses, we built them 5-star underwater hotels

What’s more, there have been increased sightings of powerful owls in Sydney and Melbourne, squirrel gliders in Albury, marbled geckos in Melbourne, and blue-tongue lizards in urban gardens across south-east Australia.

With so many birds and pollinators flocking to the cities, it’s important we support them with vegetated regions they can shelter in, such as through the B&B Highway we’re developing.

The B&B Highway: an urban restoration project

B&Bs on our “highway” are green sanctuaries, containing pollinating plants, water and shelters such as beehives and nesting boxes.

Read more: Spiders are threatened by climate change – and even the biggest arachnophobes should be worried

We’re setting up B&Bs across New South Wales in schools and community centres, with plans to expand them in Melbourne, Brisbane and other major cities. In fact, by mid-2020, we’ll have 30 B&Bs located across five different Sydney municipalities, with more planned outside Sydney.

The NSW Department of Education is also developing an associated curriculum for primary and early high school students to engage them in ecosystem restoration.

If you have space in your garden, or even on a balcony, you can help too. Here’s how.

For birds

Find out what bird species live in your area and which are endangered using the Birdata directory. Then select plants native to your area – your local nursery can help you out here.

The type of plants will vary on whether your local birds feed on insects, nectar, seed, fruit or meat. Use the guide below.

More tips

Plant dense shrubs to allow smaller birds, such as the superb fairy-wren, to hide from predatory birds.

Order hollows and nesting boxes from La Trobe University to house birds, possums, gliders and bats.

Put out water for birds, insects and other animals. Bird baths should be elevated to enable escape from predators. Clean water stations and bowls regularly.

For native stingless bees

If you live on the eastern seaboard from Sydney northward, consider installing a native stingless beehive. They require very little maintenance, and no permits or special training.

These bees are perfect for garden pollination. Suppliers of bees and hives can be found online – sometimes you can even rescue an endangered hive.

Also add bee-friendly plants – sting or no sting – to your garden, such as butterfly bush, bottlebrush, daisies, eucalyptus and angophora gum trees, grevillea, lavender, tea tree, honey myrtle and native rosemary.

For other insects

Wherever you are in Australia, you can buy or make your own insect hotel. There is no standard design, because our gardens host a wide range of native insects partial to different natural materials.

Building your insect hotel

Use recycled materials (wooden pallets, small wooden box or frames) or natural materials (wood, bamboo, sticks, straw, stones and clay).

Fill gaps in the structure with smaller materials, such as clay and bamboo.

In the wood, drill holes ranging from three to ten millimetres wide for insects to live in. Vary hole depths for different insects – but don’t drill all the way through. They shouldn’t be deeper than 30 centimetres.

Give your hotel a roof so it stays dry, and don’t use toxic paints or varnishes.

Place your insect hotel in a sheltered spot, with the opening facing the sun in cool climates, and facing the morning sun in warmer climates.

Apartment-dwellers can place their insect hotels on a balcony near pot plants. North-facing is often best, but make sure it’s sheltered from harsh afternoon sunshine and heavy rain.

– ref. B&Bs for birds and bees: transform your garden or balcony into a wildlife haven – https://theconversation.com/bandbs-for-birds-and-bees-transform-your-garden-or-balcony-into-a-wildlife-haven-129907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Crotty, Associate Professor in Australian History, The University of Queensland

In recent weeks, Melbourne’s elite St Kevin’s boy’s college found itself at the centre of a grooming scandal. The school’s principal stood down after a Four Corners episode revealed the poor support provided during court proceedings to a student who had been groomed by a sports coach at the school.

The revelations came a few months after St Kevin’s boys were filmed chanting a misogynist song on a tram.

In my 2001 book, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920, I explored the masculine culture in Australian elite boys’ schools in the late 19th and early 20th century. I concentrated on Geelong Grammar, Sydney Grammar, Wesley College in Melbourne and St. Peter’s in Adelaide. But I also considered the system as a whole because the schools were very much a network.

I am a long way from wishing to defend schoolboys who think it’s OK to sing offensive songs on a public tram. But I do have a degree of sympathy for them. They imbibed the offensive culture that legitimates such songs, rather than creating it. Revolting as the boys’ behaviour was, it is worth setting in context.

A hyper-masculine culture

St Kevin’s is one of a raft of elite schools established in Melbourne’s east in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

When the public school network was being established in Melbourne, and around the country, there was little to no government-funded secondary education. Melbourne’s elite schools, and the relatively nearby Geelong College and Geelong Grammar School, catered for and reproduced the Victorian professional and ruling classes.

Read more: New South Wales has 48 selective schools, while Victoria has 4. There’s an interesting history behind this

These schools soon developed creeds of hyper-masculinity. They encouraged sports and often made them mandatory. They fostered military cadets, encouraged martial virtue among those they saw as future defenders of the empire and nation, and prized toughness. Honours boards, prizes and “colours” signified elite achievement and school esteem, more commonly won on the sporting field than through academic or cultural excellence. And they scorned anything effeminate.

Throughout my research, which included memoirs of schoolboys and other records, I discovered the weak often suffered under regimes that left the school toughs to enforce conformity. Sometimes this was in the playground or on the sporting field and, other times, more frighteningly in the dormitories.

These were all-male institutions which sought to produce the “real men” of the next generation. Their practices reflected contemporary concerns about the decline of the British race in the colonies and the effeminising effects of urban life.

Read more: Australian study reveals the dangers of ‘toxic masculinity’ to men and those around them

Times have changed, but modernisation in these schools has been slow and uneven. There are more female teachers, they are now more ethnically diverse and they pay more attention to academic and cultural achievement. But they still consider themselves something of a class apart from the rest of the secondary education system.

They rely heavily on their tradition and accumulated wealth to offer educational experiences beyond the financial reach of most. They still prize sporting success and demand loyalty to the colours. They have reputations, brands and interests to protect in a crowded educational market.

One of the persistent problems with these sorts of hyper-masculine institutions is that unless carefully managed, the group cohesion is maintained through contempt for – and sometimes outright hostility towards – outsiders. For members of elite boys’ schools, outsiders include rival elite schools, but much more so those who are not part of “the club” at all.

And the more hyper-masculine such schools are, and (notwithstanding the huge advances made in ridding society of homophobia, in which the young have been in vanguard) the more hostility one sees towards anyone who fails to fit the mould, including women. In this they share much with other all-male institutions that emphasise and prize masculine power.

Read more: How challenging masculine stereotypes is good for men

It’s worth noting that the chant the boys were singing (“I wish that all the ladies….”) was not their own invention. It appears to have originated in the US Army as a marching song and is also sung on occasion by male football teams, in all male (and possibly in some mixed) university residential colleges – and by some apparently inebriated male students of Catherine McAuley College in Bendigo just last week.

The presence of women does not appear to deter; it makes the song even more a statement of hyper-masculine dominance if women are shifting uncomfortably in their seats, nervously laughing or protesting to no effect. The St Kevin’s boys are in “good” company.

We can’t let this go on

This is the culture these kids were inducted into, one they dared not question as they sought to belong. To this extent, they share much with boys and young men initiated into other hyper-masculine communities that encourage loyalty to the group and the submission of self.

It is little surprise they express their group values by attacking, mocking, taunting and showing scant respect towards outsiders, and even “others” within the institution (such as women at the Australian Defence Force Academy).

Such cultures are not easy to reform. The staff who run such institutions cannot be everywhere at every moment, and more than one has been defeated by determined and resistant young men. The problematic all-male colleges at the University of Sydney, for instance, have defeated the reforming efforts of more than one warden. And we have seen numerous failed attempts to reform the culture of the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Read more: Forceful and dominant: men with sexist ideas of masculinity are more likely to abuse women

St Kevin’s is simply the latest example, and a distinctive one in that recent events have shown a boys’ club culture among the staff as well as among the students.

We can’t afford to let this continue. The sense of entitlement, flouting of community standards and contempt for others that so often pervades all-male institutions and their members can manifest in offensive chants sung on public transport.

It can also manifest in poor support for victims of grooming. Or in covering up or committing sexual abuse. Or in incinerating a woman and her kids as they prepare to head off to school.

We can’t just point the finger at the individuals who occasionally make the headlines. Toxic masculinity needs to be eradicated in its boys’ club breeding grounds, including schools.

– ref. Elite boys’ schools like St Kevin’s were set up to breed hyper-masculinity, which can easily turn toxic – https://theconversation.com/elite-boys-schools-like-st-kevins-were-set-up-to-breed-hyper-masculinity-which-can-easily-turn-toxic-132433

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristy Muir, Professor of Social Policy / CEO, Centre for Social Impact, UNSW

We are a country that has become richer than we possibly ever could have imagined. We have had 29 years of unprecedented, world-record holding economic growth.

Although economically things are a little precarious in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak and our worst bushfires in recorded history, ahead of the first gross domestic product (GDP) announcement for the year, it’s worth acknowledging this remarkable achievement.

But what has it meant for people’s lives? The figures tell us little about whether life is getting better.

In 1991, the last time GDP went backwards for two consecutive quarters, 258,226 babies were born in Australia.

Samantha and Andrew

Let’s call one of them Samantha, born in Bently, an area of high socioeconomic disadvantage in Western Australia, and the other Andrew, born in the suburb of Griffith in the Australian Capital Territory.

During the first two years of their lives, around one in 10 families with children were in a jobless household.

Andrew’s parents had jobs. Samantha’s didn’t.

By the time Samantha and Andrew were 25, in 2016, average household disposable income was twice what it had been when they were born, even after accounting for higher prices.

Read more: Labor is right to talk about well-being, but it depends on where you live

But it’s not hard to see that, despite economic growth, their lives were different.

Samantha had less education, was underemployed, in housing stress and skipping meals to feed her kids. Andrew had higher education, was employed full-time, lived with high-income parents and was saving for a deposit for a place of his own.

While economic growth made us wealthier as a country, it hasn’t been good for all of us.

We need a measure that sits alongside gross domestic product that tells us whether we are actually getting better off.

What matters is whether we are really better off

The idea of a broader measure of social progress isn’t new – a collaboration called the Australian National Development Index has been underway a few years now, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics used to publish “Measures of Australia’s Progress” until budget cuts in 2014.

New Zealand introduced a “well-being budget” last year, targeting mental health, child welfare, Indigenous reconciliation, the environment, suicide, and homelessness, alongside traditional measures of productivity and investment.

Labor’s treasury spokesman, Jim Chalmers, has promised to do the same when Labor is next in office.

Read more: How do we measure well-being?

Australia’s Social Progress Index, launched last month by the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW Sydney and the Social Progress Imperative will go further, and much further than the national accounts to be released today.

It will enable the well-being and opportunities to be ranked and compared by location and time.

The online tool enables anyone to explore how we are tracking on 12 components grouped into three domains: basic human needs, foundations of well-being, and opportunity.

Finding the components wasn’t easy.

We needed to consider data availability, data detail, sample sizes, and reliability. We considered more than 400 possibilities.

While it is by no means the only (or perfect) way of understanding Australian living standards, it pushes us significantly beyond GDP.

It asks and answers universally important questions, such as:

• Do people have adequate housing with basic utilities?

• Do people have access to an educational foundation?

• Are people free to make their own life choices?

• Is this society using its resources so they will be available to future generations?

Economic growth doesn’t tell us much

The results show a stark disconnect between economic and social progress. While our GDP has been rising, we have fared poorly on environmental quality and access to information and communications.

At a state and territory level, despite having high gross state product per capita, Western Australia and the Northern Territory ranked 7th and 8th on most of the indicators.

The rising tide has not lifted all boats.

This is evident in Andrew and Samantha’s lives (the Australian Capital Territory ranks first overall, Western Australia 7th) and also in the aftermath of the bushfires.

People were cut off from power, information, communication, and access to resources. Many struggled to breathe. We lost much of our ecosystem.

Read more: It’s time to vote for happiness and well-being, not mere economic growth. Here’s why:

The economy is fundamental to improving our well-being and fuelling our social progress, but it isn’t everything and it isn’t necessarily inclusive.

If we had inclusive growth we wouldn’t be able to predict babies’ futures by the postcodes in which they were born. We would be able to meet basic human needs regardless of how much was spent and earned each quarter.

Today’s national accounts will be important, as a spur to asking other important questions, rather than as the final answer.

– ref. Today’s GDP figures won’t tell us whether life is getting better — here’s what can – https://theconversation.com/todays-gdp-figures-wont-tell-us-whether-life-is-getting-better-heres-what-can-132739

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carolyn McKay, Senior Lecturer – Criminal Law, Procedure, Digital Criminology, University of Sydney

Green is a colour that evokes nature, fecundity, sustainability.

At the traffic lights it signals go; on a boat, starboard.

It’s a soft celadon glaze; an intense Van Eyck wedding dress; frothy, aromatic matcha tea; aurora borealis; a meditative praying mantis. It’s jungle camouflage, Joyce’s snotgreen sea, green mould and Martians.

If green had a smell, would it be freshly cut grass – or bile-infused Exorcist vomit?

Green, like all colours, has innumerable meanings and cultural associations. My interest in green stems from the books I curated in Lurid: Crime Paperbacks and Pulp Fiction.

My favourite books in Lurid are the green Penguin crime series from the 1960s. Penguin was founded by Allen Lane in 1935 and revolutionised publishing through a focus on well-designed, pocket-sized and affordable high-quality literature, as distinct from mere pulp.

Read more: Friday essay: the complex, contradictory pleasures of pulp fiction

The covers were standardised yet stylish and instantly recognisable: two horizontal bands of colour separated by a central white band featuring the author’s name and title in Gill Sans font. Initially designed by Edward Young, the aesthetic was strengthened in 1947 by German typographer Jan Tschichold’s Penguin Composition Rules.

The cheerful Penguin logo, also designed by Young, was the only pictorial element on these early covers. In Jeremy Lewis’s Penguin Special, he writes Penguin eschewed the lurid picture jackets – “breastsellers” – adopted in the US in favour of English restraint and text-only designs.

The books were colour-coded by subject: the now classic orange for fiction, dark blue for biographies, red for drama. Of the first ten Penguin books published, two were crime and colour-coded green.

Since curating the Lurid exhibition, I’ve been wondering: why green? Why not blood-spatter red or noir black?

The affect of green

As a visual artist as well as a visual criminologist, I have a great interest in colour and its affective qualities.

The initial green used on Penguin crime covers was a slightly earthy green, not unlike terre verte. This is a soft green pigment traditionally used as a cool element when mixing flesh tones in a limited palette of flake white, yellow ochre, Venetian red and ivory black, depending on the subject’s skin tones.

Terre verte is often used as a grisaille or underpainting in figurative works and portraiture. But there are so many other irresistible greens in oil painting: cobalt, emerald, viridian, phthalo, cadmium, sap, olive, chromium.

The original earthen green hue of Penguin crime was brightened in the 1960s when Italian art director Germano Facetti challenged the traditional Penguin design rules and hired Polish graphic designer Romek Marber to revitalise the book covers.

The “Marber Grid” and pictorial covers placed the typography and Penguin logo in the top third of the cover and allowed two-thirds of the layout for striking modernist illustration and graphic design.

The covers of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon and Lord Peter Views the Body show the distinctive and recurrent white stick figure Marber applied only to her books.

The Busman’s Honeymoon, in particular, shows Marber at his best. The geometric design evokes a staircase with a corpse – the identifying device of the white cut-out – at the bottom.

Marber’s last Penguin crime cover design was for Ellery Queen’s The Scarlet Letters in 1965. With the letters X and Y that, in the novel, a dying man traces in his own blood, the design introduces trickles of red, photography and a solid black background.

Looking at these book covers today, there is power in the simplicity of these designs with their limited colour palette, elements of photomontage, collage, drawing and geometric pattern, and use of sans serif font.

And, of course, there is the bright green.

The Penguin crime series is not the only one to feature green. Launched by Collins in the 1930s, the White Circle Crime Club used a bold graphic design featuring two menacing figures and variations on a restricted palette of green, black and white.

This green branding was an intentional strategy to compete directly with the green Penguins.

Green to kill

Why green? Perhaps the answer lies in green’s association with toxicity.

The 18th century’s Scheele’s green, derived from arsenic, was vivid and alluring. The 19th century’s emerald green was highly desirable, and used extensively in clothing and wallpaper, including that of William Morris. Unfortunately, it was horribly poisonous: arsenic fumes from Emerald Green wallpaper killed.

Read more: How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library

Green, then, is deadly. Green radioluminescent paint shone brightly on watches and caused radium poisoning; green chlorine gas was first used as a chemical weapon in the first world war.

The green of absinthe’s la fée verte, the green fairy, is intoxicating, once thought to be hallucinogenic, and an ingredient in Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon cocktail.

With these lethal associations the green of crime fiction starts to make sense.

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.

– ref. ‘Freshly cut grass – or bile-infused Exorcist vomit?’: how crime books embraced lurid green – https://theconversation.com/freshly-cut-grass-or-bile-infused-exorcist-vomit-how-crime-books-embraced-lurid-green-132763

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

New Zealand joined 48 other countries affected by the novel coronavirus last week when health authorities confirmed the first COVID-19 case. The news prompted panic buying of supplies in some places, but it had long been expected.

The management of the case seemed exemplary. Shortly after arriving in New Zealand from Iran, the person became unwell, rang the national health information service (Healthline) and was directed to a hospital where they were placed in isolation. Family members and fellow passengers on the flight were tracked and placed into home quarantine.

As yet, there is no evidence of transmission to others and New Zealand remains at the “keep it out” stage of its pandemic plan.

Read more: It’s now a matter of when, not if, for Australia. This is how we’re preparing for a jump in coronavirus cases

Preventing a pandemic

Like many countries, New Zealand has two broad phases in responding to an emerging pandemic: the containment phase followed by the management phase.

The containment phase aims to prevent, or more likely delay, the arrival of a pandemic. New Zealand is managing this by excluding some travellers entirely (currently from China and Iran, except New Zealand residents and their families). It also requires those arriving from a growing list of countries to “self-isolate” for 14 days to reduce the risk of infecting others if they develop disease. Such quarantine is unsupervised, but travellers are encouraged to register with Healthline.

Read more: Why New Zealand is more exposed than others to the economic chills of China’s coronavirus outbreak

Border controls make intuitive sense for limiting the movement of infectious diseases between countries. There is evidence they delay the entry of pandemic diseases, and they have sometimes prevented the spread of pandemics to islands. Travel restrictions are not generally supported by the World Health Organization, but it offers no advice specific to islands or for extremely severe pandemics.

If a case of COVID-19 is detected during this containment phase, efforts are made to “stamp it out” by isolating the person and placing their contacts under quarantine. Such measures were effective in ending the SARS epidemic, but are probably unlikely to do more than delay the more infectious COVID-19.

A COVID-19 pandemic could potentially become one of the greatest public health disaster threats in New Zealand since the 1918 influenza pandemic when 9,000 New Zealanders died.

Read more: We’re in danger of drowning in a coronavirus ‘infodemic’. Here’s how we can cut through the noise

Managing a pandemic

The detection of cases that have no known connection to travel typically marks the beginning of community transmission and a shift in focus from eliminating an infection to managing it.

With COVID-19, this stage may arrive quite suddenly. Because most cases are mild, the virus may be transmitted through several generations before being detected, perhaps only when someone develops more severe symptoms and is admitted to hospital. This pattern is called silent transmission. It has been reported in a number of locations for COVID-19, including in the US.

In the management phase, interventions focus on dampening down transmission by encouraging hand washing and cough etiquette, which can be poor even during pandemics. Social distancing (working from home, closing schools etc) is also effective at slowing transmission, at least for influenza pandemics.

During this phase, the focus is also on ensuring health-care services are organised to manage increased demand, particularly for scarce resources such as intensive care, and health-care workers are protected from infection.

Health services are critical for reducing the risk of death during a pandemic. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has a relatively high case fatality risk. Nearly 1% of the infected people on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship have died.

What New Zealand needs to do

New Zealand has many natural and institutional advantages in managing the health and economic threats of a pandemic. Like Australia, New Zealand’s island status and ability to control its borders may buy time to continue pandemic planning. Given the seasonality of other known coronaviruses, the summer timing may provide further protection.

But the pandemic has hit New Zealand at a challenging time for public health. Capacity has been reduced by erosion and fragmentation of responsibilities across several agencies over the past decade or more. New Zealand is emerging from a severe national measles epidemic that had its roots in neglected public health infrastructure that failed to raise immunisation coverage sufficiently to prevent it.

New Zealand has a relatively low score, coming in far behind Australia, on the Global Health Security Index, which assesses pandemic capacity. We hope that an upcoming review of the health and disability sector will propose a major upgrade of public health in New Zealand.

Read more: Smallpox, seatbelts and smoking: 3 ways public health has saved lives from history to the modern day

New Zealand’s response to COVID-19 is driven by the 2017 edition of the influenza pandemic plan. But we should also learn from the experience of other countries.

COVID-19 disease risk is highest for older people and those living with chronic health conditions such as diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and heart disorders. Unfortunately, a pandemic is likely to magnify social and ethnic inequalities through multiple pathways linked to poverty, poorer access to health care and a higher prevalence of chronic health problems.

We should learn from China’s apparent success in containing the pandemic, while at the same time balancing all interventions with a strong focus on human rights.

Here are other measures New Zealand could consider to prepare for this pandemic:

• Start talking about a pandemic, rather than using euphemisms, to make it more real.

• Form a parliamentary group to ensure multi-party engagement with the response. During an election year, it would be distracting for the response to become politicised.

• Follow Australia’s lead and other developed countries and rapidly develop a specific COVID-19 emergency plan.

• Consider measures to protect the most vulnerable populations. One option is “protective sequestration” to prevent spread to certain islands or regions as was achieved in the 1918 flu pandemic. This approach is being rolled out at a country level by Pacific nations, notably Samoa which now has some of the tightest border controls in the world.

• Also consider a “safe haven” policy to protect vulnerable groups such as older people with chronic conditions by temporarily moving them to carefully managed locations (such as aged care facilities) for the duration of the pandemic.

– ref. COVID-19 has now reached New Zealand. How prepared is it to deal with a pandemic? – https://theconversation.com/covid-19-has-now-reached-new-zealand-how-prepared-is-it-to-deal-with-a-pandemic-132857

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

Never has a virus featured so prominently in a Reserve Bank statement.

The word “coronavirus” is mentioned nine times in the governor’s seven-paragraph statement.

His board cut the cash rate from an all-time low of 0.75% to a new all-time low of 0.50% “to support the economy as it responds to the global coronavirus outbreak”.

Up until the coronavirus, it had looked as if “the slowdown in the global economy that started in 2018 was coming to an end”.

The coronavirus has “clouded” that outlook.

It is “too early to tell how persistent the effects of the coronavirus will be and at what point the global economy will return to an improving path”.

Financial markets have been volatile “as market participants assess the risks associated with the coronavirus”.

In most economies, including the United States, there is an expectation of further rate cuts.

The coronavirus is having a “significant effect” on Australia’s real economy, particularly in the education and travel industries.

Read more: The first economic modelling of coronavirus scenarios is grim for Australia, the world

The uncertainty is “also likely to affect domestic spending”.

GDP growth in the March quarter (but not the December quarter whose figures will be released on Wednesday) is likely to be “noticeably weaker than earlier expected”.

Once the coronavirus is contained, the Australian economy is expected to return to an improving trend.

But given the evolving situation, it is difficult to predict how large and long-lasting the effect will be.

Summing up, the bank says the global outbreak is “expected to delay progress in Australia towards full employment and the inflation target”.

It decided to cut rates to provide “additional support to employment and economic activity”. Importantly, it will continue to monitor developments closely with a view to doing more.

The final sentence, the one which usually carries the key message, says: “the board is prepared to ease monetary policy further to support the Australian economy”.

Would it have cut without the coronavirus?

It probably wouldn’t have cut without the coronavirus. It most likely would have had to cut at some point because the economy is weak. We will get an update about how things were in the three months to December on Wednesday, but the news up to the end of September was awful.

Household spending, which accounts for more than half of gross domestic product, barely budged. Over the year to September it grew just 1.2% in real terms, the least since the global financial crisis. Australia’s population grew 1.6% in that time, meaning the volume of goods and services bought per person went backwards.

Early figures on private new capital expenditure which will be incorporated into the national accounts released on Wednesday show business investment went backwards over the December quarter (down 2.8%) and over the entire year (down 5.8%).

The May budget and the December budget update forecast a jump in business investment, which it is hard to see happening.

Read more: Now we know. The Reserve Bank has spelled out what it will do when rates approach zero

Governor Philip Lowe has been reluctant to cut in part because he is running out of traditional ammunition.

He has said that for practical purposes the next step – 0.25% – is zero, a point beyond which he would need to use unconventional measures (which have been used so much overseas they are no longer that unconventional) to stimulate the economy further.

The most likely one is buying government and mortgage bonds from investors in order to force money into their hands, making the cash rate graph the bank has been updating for 30 years now no longer relevant as an indicator of what it is doing to stimulate the economy.

Reserve Bank cash rate

He has decided to cut because he is contractually obligated to do what he can to contribute to “the economic prosperity and welfare of the people of Australia”, which is at risk.

What good will the cut do?

Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank announced they were passing the cut on to borrowers straight away after an appeal by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to their better natures.

The government would absolutely expect the four big banks to come to the table and to do their bit in supporting Australians as we go through the impact of the coronavirus. I don’t see it any different to what Qantas did when we called out to Qantas and we said, we need your help, we need to get some people out of China.

Before today’s decisions the average standard variable mortgage rate was $4.7% The average basic variable mortgage rate was 3.05%. Today’s cuts will take it to 2.8%.

They will save many mortgage holders an extra A$30 per month on repayments on top of the $150 saved since June. That will allow them to spend more or to borrow more by extending their mortgages, further increasing the financial attractiveness of investments such as solar panels or home insulation, and perhaps further supporting home prices which have turned up since the bank began cutting.

Where mortgage holders direct the proceeds of the cuts to Australian businesses, it’ll help keep them afloat or give them the confidence to borrow for expansion at record low interest rates.

Although it is often said that interest rate cuts have less effect when interest rates get low, there is no particular reason to believe this is the case. There is reason to believe interest rate cuts have little effect when consumers and businesses have other reasons for not borrowing or spending much, which might well be the case at the moment.

What will the government do?

The government is drawing up a stimulus plan. Just don’t call it that.

Morrison says it will:

be a targeted plan, it will be a measured plan, it will be a scalable plan, we will ensure that we do not make the same mistakes of previous stimulus measures that have been put in place.

That probably means he won’t be delivering cheques to households as Labor did during the global financial crisis. The Coalition tried something similar, delivering out-sized tax refund cheques after the May budget, and it didn’t work that well.

He’ll almost certainly announce new investment allowances for businesses, if necessary ones that effectively pay businesses to borrow.

And he and his ministers will be surveying the economy sector by sector.

Read more: We’re staring down the barrel of a technical recession as the coronavirus enters a new and dangerous phase

He has spoken personally with the bosses of Coles and Woolworths seeking assurances they won’t run low on supplies. He says if necessary they can talk to each other, something normally not allowed by competition rules.

They have already talked to Kimberly Clark, which manufactures toilet paper. It has set up a line of production in South Australia to ensure shops don’t run out.

– ref. One word repeated 9 times explains why the Reserve Bank cut: it’s “coronavirus” – https://theconversation.com/one-word-repeated-9-times-explains-why-the-reserve-bank-cut-its-coronavirus-132871

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Wake, Program Manager, Journalism, RMIT University

Australia’s news landscape, and the ability of citizens to access quality journalism, has been dealt a major blow by the announcement the Australian Associated Press is closing, with the loss of 180 journalism jobs.

Although AAP reporters and editors are generally not household names, the wire service has provided the backbone of news content for the country since 1935, ensuring every paper (and therefore every citizen) has had access to solid reliable reports on matters of national significance.

All news outlets have relied on AAP’s network of local and international journalists to provide stories from areas where their own correspondents couldn’t go, from the courts to parliament and everywhere in between.

Despite a shrinking number of journalists in recent years and a rapid decrease in funding subscriptions, AAP continued to stand by its mission to provide news without political partisanship or bias. Speed was essential for the agency, but accuracy was even more important.

But AAP has struggled in recent years as newspapers and radio and television stations have sought to cut costs and started sourcing content for free from the internet, thanks to global publishing platforms, such as Google.

When AAP shut down its New Zealand newswire in 2018, it said subscribers were under pressure and asking for lower fees.

Media mergers, such as that of Nine and Fairfax, have also been bad for AAP, as companies consolidated their subscriptions. Sky News also gave up its AAP subscription to use News Limited in 2018.

The mantra within AAP had long been, if a major shareholder sneezes, the wire agency catches a cold.

Read more: Media Files: What does the Nine Fairfax merger mean for diversity and quality journalism?

Independence and integrity

In the opening to the book, On the Wire: The Story of Australian Associated Press, published in 2010 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of AAP, John Coomber wrote about the value of the wire service:

AAP news has no political axe to grind, nor advertisers to please. News value is paramount, and successive boards, chief executives and editors have guarded its independence and reporting integrity above all else.

Because it supplies news and information to virtually every sector of the Australian media industry, AAP can’t afford to do otherwise. Unsupported by advertising or government handout, it has only its good name to trade on.

So much has changed in the news industry since AAP was formed by Keith Murdoch in 1935. Back then, it took a staff of only 12 people, with bureaus in London and New York, to bring overseas news into Australia.

But even in its earliest days, as an amalgamation of two agencies, the Australian Press Association and the Sun Herald Cable Service, it was set up to save money.

Read more: Should governments provide funding grants to encourage public interest journalism?

With the cost of cables, which were charged by the word, the pooling of resources was significant at the time. The AAP journalists were therefore required to create concise Australian-focused reports for local papers.

Although AAP reports were sometimes drawn together from other news sources, the agency’s reporters sometimes did their own original reporting. This led to wordage blowouts on major events, such as Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Austria in 1938, which set a record for the AAP’s wordage for the year.

The second world war was an unlikely boost to AAP as senior journalists from Australian papers were seconded to war zones as AAP special representatives.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Ray Maley, later Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ press secretary, was sent to Singapore. His story of the first clash between Australian and Japanese troops was widely used in newspapers in Britain and the US, as well as Australia.

Winston Turner, “our man in Batavia” (now Jakarta), was one of the last AAP journalists to get out of the region, escaping the invading Japanese by the narrowest of margins.

Award-winning journalism

AAP’s glory days weren’t just confined to the past. It has published numerous, award-winning stories in recent years, such as Lisa Martin’s report on Peter Dutton’s au pair scandal.

Long-time readers of Fairfax newspapers might remember the federal budget in 2017 when AAP filled the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age because Fairfax reporters had gone on strike. The copy written by Fairfax’s skeleton staff was sloppy, while AAP’s stories shone with the agency’s emphasis on accuracy.

AAP photographers, too, have captured moments of Australian history, such as Lukas Coch’s Walkley Award-winning picture of Linda Burney in blue high heels in the air celebrating the passage of the marriage equality law in 2017.

Coch also took famous photo of then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard in the arms of an AFP officer when she lost a shoe while exiting a Canberra restaurant surrounded by protesters.

Rich training ground lost

One of the saddest parts of the closure of AAP is the loss of fantastic training opportunities for young reporters starting out in journalism.

AAP has produced some big names in journalism, including Kerry O’Brien, the PNG correspondent in the 1960s, and SMH editor Lisa Davies and Joe Hildebrand, who both started as AAP cadets.

Read more: ‘A government without newspapers’: why everyone should care about the cuts at Fairfax

AAP has solidly taken in four or five cadets each year for the past decade, and in recent years, a small group of editorial assistants. Over 12 months, the AAP cadets have been taught to write fast and accurately while also learning shorthand, video skills, ethics and media law.

During the global financial crisis in the 2000s, AAP took four cadets, while The Age took on none, and the Herald Sun only two.

As news of the AAP’s closure spreads across the country, it will be seen as yet another blow to public interest journalism in Australia.

Australia needs more sources of news, not fewer. The loss of AAP should be mourned not just by newsmen and women across the country, but by every single person who cares about democracy and the valuable work journalists do in keeping the public informed and the powerful to account.

– ref. The closure of AAP is yet another blow to public interest journalism in Australia – https://theconversation.com/the-closure-of-aap-is-yet-another-blow-to-public-interest-journalism-in-australia-132856

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Collins, Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

Children need healthy food in the right amount so they get all the nutrients needed to grow, learn and thrive.

The Australian dietary guidelines outline the number of daily servings children need each day from each food group, based on their sex and age:

This is just a guide; your child’s needs will depend on their activity levels, but it’s good to get a sense of what you should be aiming for.

Keep in mind serving sizes vary for each of the five food groups. For example, here’s what constitutes a serve of grains:

Choosing from five food groups sounds simple enough. But supermarkets can carry up to 30,000 products. Many foods are heavily marketed and it’s rarely the healthy ones.

So children end up eating more junk foods and fewer fruits and vegetables than recommended. A 2011-12 survey of two to 18 year olds found 38% of children’s average total energy intake came from junk foods. Cakes, muffins, slices, biscuits, chips, packet snacks, processed meats and sugary drinks were the main contributors.

In 2017-18, just one in 17 children aged two to 17 years ate the recommended daily serves of vegetables.

So how do you get kids to eat less junk and more healthy food?

Say no to junk foods

While young children can recognise healthy foods fairly easily, they find it hard to know which foods are energy-dense, nutrient-poor “junk” foods.

The foods available in your home act as a powerful signpost to your children about what to eat. When there are unhealthy snack foods in the pantry children (and adults) eat more of them.

Read more: What is a balanced diet anyway?

Unfortunately, it’s hard for parents to avoid some messages their children receive around food, especially from advertising.

But try to ignore those requests; eventually your child will stop asking. A survey of 7,800 children found that kids who “often” asked for items advertised on TV were 30% more likely to become overweight during two years of follow-up.

Avoid portion distortion

Keep a watch on the size of portions. Serving bigger amounts can lead to unconsciously eating more.

We reviewed portion sizes of common foods and drinks that children aged two to 16 years consumed, from 1995 to 2007.

We found typical portion sizes for cooked meat and chicken, mixed chicken dishes, bacon and ham, fish and pizza had increased.

Portion sizes decreased for most dairy products, breakfast cereals, vegetables and some packaged snacks.

Read more: Health check: do bigger portion sizes make you eat more?

Don’t let fussy eating derail healthy eating plans

It is common for children to go through a period of fussy eating with reports varying from one to three out of every five.

Kids’ appetites can vary a lot, particularly among toddlers who are more likely to only eat when they are hungry, regardless of whether it is meal time or not.

Strategies that help children eat healthily include learning by seeing what others do and having direct contact with foods through touch, taste and smell.

Read more: How to tell if your kid’s ‘fussy eating’ phase is normal

Try to have set meal and snack times (breakfast, lunch and dinner and two to three snacks) and offer children foods from each of the food groups daily. If a child isn’t hungry at that time, wait until the next scheduled meal or snack and offer food then.

At the dinner table focus on the behaviours you want to see. Do this by praising the child who is trying the meal and tasting new foods. For example, “I love the way you tasted that eggplant”.

Finally, plan inexpensive meals that do not take long to prepare and that children can feed themselves, such as those on the No Money No Time website.

Want more information on nutrition for kids?

We have developed two free three-week Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

1. Food for Kids: Discovering Healthy Eating is an interactive course designed for primary school aged children. Topics include: what’s in food; how it gets digested in the body; identifying healthy food and drinks; and reducing food waste.

2. Food for Kids: A Parent’s Guide is designed for parents, teachers and everyone interested in child nutrition. Topics include: how food and drinks influence growth and development; which foods and how much are needed for children to meet nutrition guidelines; and how to develop healthy household eating habits.

Courses start March 4 but you can enrol any time during the course, once it starts.

If you want to know how your child’s current dietary patterns rate, and are looking for some specific tips to improve their nutrition, you can do the Healthy Eating Quiz here.

Read more: Five things parents can do to improve their children’s eating patterns

– ref. How much food should my child be eating? And how can I get them to eat more healthily? – https://theconversation.com/how-much-food-should-my-child-be-eating-and-how-can-i-get-them-to-eat-more-healthily-130470

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Ganter, Senior Climatologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The past Australian summer was a season of two contrasting halves. So did the midsummer weather change make a dint in the drought, and is it likely to continue through autumn?

The first half of summer was exceptionally hot, dry and dusty. Parts of eastern and southern Australia were engulfed by significant bushfires, and smoke haze covered large areas.

In the second half of the season, tropical moisture at times extended into southern Australia, producing well above-average rainfall for some areas. This was great news for many, but some parts of the country missed out. Other areas need follow-up falls over the coming months to ease the long-term dry, and inland water storages increased only slightly.

The autumn outlook suggests warmer-than-average temperatures for most of the country. There is also a slightly increased chance of wetter-than-average conditions in parts of southern Australia, indicating some areas could see a gradual easing of the drought conditions.

What happened this summer?

Summer 2019-20 was the nation’s second hottest in 110 years of records, driven in part by Australia’s hottest December on record in 2019. Warmth across much of the tropical north and east persisted into January and February. Summer nights were second-warmest on record.

Total summer rainfall was closer to normal – 8% below the long-term average. But the rainfall figures hide the significant shift in the climate mid-way through the season.

Australia experienced very warm and dry conditions in the lead-up to summer. With a delayed onset of the monsoon moving into the southern hemisphere, heat built across northern and central Australia from the start of December and was drawn south by weather systems.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

Australia had its hottest day on record on December 18, with a nationwide average temperature of 41.88℃. This was far above the previous record of 40.32℃ set on January 7, 2013.

Six other days in December 2019 also exceeded this previous record. To put this in context, the Australia-wide average maximum temperature has exceeded 40℃ for more days in the past two summers than in the preceding 110 years combined.

The hottest temperature recorded this summer was at Nullabor, South Australia, on December 19, when it reached 49.9℃.

Averaged across the continent, December maximum temperatures were 4.15℃ above average – the previous December record was 2.41℃ above average, set in 2018.

Then the rains came

Early January brought a noticeable change to the weather, with the first tropical cyclones of the season and the belated arrival of the monsoon.

Tropical cyclones Blake and Claudia brought heavy rain to much of the Top End and northern and central parts of Western Australia, while the east coast saw heavy falls in northern New South Wales and southeast Queensland.

February brought more tropical moisture to the continent and another two cyclones—Damien and Esther.

Despite this, temperatures across the north remained very warm. The monsoon did not arrive until January 18, some three weeks later than normal, though almost a week earlier than the previous year. Even after the monsoon arrived it was sporadic, so did little to temper the heat.

The Darwin River Dam (Darwin’s main water storage) dropped to 54% capacity – the result of two relatively dry wet seasons in a row.

In contrast, in southern parts of Australia, February felt milder than normal. After Melbourne had three days over 40℃ in December – the most in December since 1897 – it had no days at all over 35℃ in February. This last happened in 1994.

What’s driving all this?

The abrupt change in weather patterns mid-season can be attributed to changes in two key Australian climate drivers: a strong positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), and a negative phase of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM).

A positive IOD typically brings drier weather to much of southern, central and northern Australia. The 2019 positive IOD was the strongest since 1997 and affected large parts of the country (and eastern Africa) during the second half of the year. Normally such an event ends with the movement of the Asian monsoon into the southern hemisphere in late spring/early summer, but in 2019–20 this movement occurred about a month later than usual.

The delayed arrival of the Australian monsoon was likely related to the strength of the IOD itself, which prevented the monsoon’s southward shift.

Read more: The air above Antarctica is suddenly getting warmer – here’s what it means for Australia

The negative SAM typically brings drier and hotter than average weather to much of southeast and eastern Australia in spring and summer. It was triggered by a sudden warming of the stratosphere above Antarctica, identified in early September. This rare event affected Australian climate from October to December.

Both negative SAM and positive IOD are known to enhance the likelihood of increased springtime heatwaves and fire weather in southeast Australia.

In addition to these events, Australia’s changing climate underpinned the drier and warmer weather across southern Australia in winter and spring.

What to expect in autumn

Rain has eased the dry in some places, but more is needed. Most heavy rain was recorded east of the Great Dividing Range, while larger totals west of the range generally fell in regions that didn’t feed into water storages, or where soils were so dry there was little runoff into storages.

While Sydney’s water storages rose from 42% to 81% during the second half of summer, storages in the northern Murray—Darling Basin only rose from 6% to 12% – similar to levels at the height of the Millennium drought.

And while some areas had good summer rainfall, others missed out. Western NSW and southwest Queensland endured another dry summer.

Read more: ‘This crisis has been unfolding for years’: 4 photos of Australia from space, before and after the bushfires

The autumn outlook suggests parts of southern Australia have a slightly increased chance of being wetter-than-average, while scattered parts of the north may see a drier end to the northern wet season. Autumn days are likely to be warmer than average for most of the country, except for parts of southern Australia, suggesting evaporation will remain above average.

This outlook would indicate some areas could see a gradual easing of the drought conditions.

For more information, watch the Bureau’s March–May 2020 Climate and Water Outlook video and subscribe to receive Climate Information emails.

– ref. After a summer of extremes, here’s what to expect this autumn – https://theconversation.com/after-a-summer-of-extremes-heres-what-to-expect-this-autumn-132862

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leah Mercer, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, Curtin University

Review: Beethoven’s Fidelio. West Australian Symphony Orchestra, West Australian Opera and Perth Festival.

There’s something disconcertingly compartmentalised about opera – particularly opera in concert. The audience stays lit throughout, and the chorus sit behind the orchestra looking at us looking at them.

Then there’s the surtitles, the amplification of the voices that separates them from their source, the position of the singers across the front of the orchestra, the varying degrees to which they enact the experience of their characters, and the fact they’re all dressed in contemporary clothes not connected to their characters.

Add to this there is something out of time about opera. But maybe that’s just me, maybe it’s just out of my time.

All of these variables were in play as I watched Beethoven’s Fidelio, presented by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO) and Perth Festival in association with the West Australian Opera.

When the narrator (Eryn Jean Norvill) enters and says something like “Imagine a world entirely unlike ours, or maybe it isn’t so different…” the shackles of my preconceptions and discombobulation start to soften. Equal parts storyteller and commentator, Norvill provides the perfect bridge for us to cross over into Fidelio’s world.

As she continues, her words make us imagine a prison, and a prison of “misdirected desires”; a garden and a garden of freedom. Themes of love, imprisonment and freedom run through this work.

Read more: Ahead of his time, Beethoven still inspires

Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera. Presented here in concert rather than production, WASO’s principal conductor, Asher Fisch, suggested the addition of narrated text to provide a throughline for the audience. Using description and commentary, writer Alison Croggon touches on the tangle of love (both misplaced and perfectly placed) and the themes of corruption and political persecution underpinning this story.

A bridge between old and new

The narration provides hooks for the audience to grasp, and historical and contemporary context to remind us how these themes remain as pertinent as ever.

Croggon tracks Beethoven’s diminishing faith in Napoleon to the way he redeveloped the opera from its poorly received premiere in 1805 to the final version, which was rapturously received in 1814. Then, she writes of illegally detained prisoners, “everywhere, even today, even in this country”, and the work seems to bristle with contemporary, cultural relevance.

Croggan highlights the ways the powerful punish those who tell the truth, and the undeniable truth, “not every wall is visible”.

Standing behind a lectern with script in view, the audience views the narrator differently from the singers who are wholly immersed in the physical act of performing these songs. This divide creates a striking contrast in embodiment.

There are many highlights throughout the evening. The quartet in act one, between Leonore (disguised as the boy Fidelio) (Christiane Libor), Marzelline (Felicitas Fuchs), Jaquino (Andrew Goodwin) and Rocco (Jonathan Lemalu), starts as a delicate interplay between Marzelline expressing her love for Fidelio and Leonore her fear of exposure. It builds into a complex overlap as the other characters join.

Read more: Performing Beethoven – what it feels like to embody a master on today’s stage

The thrilling complexity of juggling four concurrent points of view makes this quartet an early turning point where all the diverse elements seem to come together. The form settles. Or perhaps I just settle into the form.

Warwick Fyfe is impassioned as the evil prison governor, joined by the 40-strong male members of the WASO chorus in his rousing introduction. His is a visceral performance. From the thump of his footsteps as he enters the stage, Fyfe’s performance supersedes the concert form, giving a peek into how this character could be played in a full production.

When we return from interval, the house lights are slightly dimmed to suggest Leonore’s descent into the underground prison to rescue her husband Florestan (Tomislav Mužek), falsely imprisoned for political reasons. We first see Florestan seated, leaning forward, hands crossed in his lap. This simple staging choice helps encapsulate his suffering.

In the program, Croggan says one of the things that drew her to Fidelio was here was an opera in which the woman doesn’t die. She is, in fact, the hero who rescues her husband. Her reveal as his wife Leonore rather than Fidelio is splendidly performed by Libor, culminating in a beautifully performed duet with Florestan.

To paraphrase Croggan’s narration, “Leonora’s other name is Hope.” This is how the evening ends, full of rousing hope and joy. The crowd hisses with glee at the curtain call of the villain and yells bravos and bravas for everyone else.

The sense of triumph in the room is infectious. Beethoven’s music and Croggan’s images – “the garden is always there waiting for us” – resound as we walk away into the night.

– ref. Fidelio review: Beethoven’s only opera bristles with contemporary relevance – https://theconversation.com/fidelio-review-beethovens-only-opera-bristles-with-contemporary-relevance-132271

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Priya Chacko, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Adelaide

Last week, India’s capital, New Delhi, experienced its worst communal violence targeting a religious minority in more than 30 years. The death toll currently stands at 43 and parts of northeast Delhi remain under lock-down.

As per usual after incidents of violence against minorities in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded with days of silence. Finally commenting on Twitter, he said, “peace and harmony are central to our ethos” and appealed for “peace and brotherhood at all times”.

But under Modi, India’s ethos is Hindu, and peace and brotherhood requires religious minorities to know their place. It is this sort of Hindu nationalism that led to the attacks on Muslims, their homes, schools and their places of worship.

The Gujarat model goes national

Modi was elected in 2014 on the promise he would bring his “Gujarat model” of high growth rates driven by private-sector-led manufacturing to national prominence.

But the Gujarat model also involved the promotion of a vicious right-wing populist politics, which sought to create and elevate a Hindu majority out of a socially and economically diverse population to act as a voting bloc for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

This strategy relied on the creation of a common enemy in Muslims and secular liberals. It involved the strategic use of violence to polarise communities in areas where the BJP faced the most electoral competition.

Critics warned that although Modi had seemingly adopted a technocratic focus on governance and development during the election campaign, his right-wing populist politics of division bubbled just below the surface and would be unleashed if the BJP came to power.

Read more: India’s plan to identify ‘illegal immigrants’ could get some Muslims declared ‘foreign’

As polarisation has intensified over the past six years, the critics were proven right.

Muslims and Dalits have been the targets of lynchings by Hindu activists in the name of protecting cows, a long-standing Hindu nationalist preoccupation.

University students, activists, opposition politicians and protestors who challenge the government have been charged with sedition or incitement to violence.

Yogi Adityanath, a militant Hindu monk, was also appointed as chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh.

Since being reelected in May with an even bigger majority, the Modi government has claimed a mandate to fulfil long-standing Hindu nationalist demands to further marginalise minorities in India.

The Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens

The Citizenship Amendment Act was one of these demands. The act violates the non-discriminatory spirit of India’s constitution by allowing persecuted Hindus, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan – but not persecuted Muslims – a fast-tracked route to citizenship.

Modi’s government has also promised a National Register of Citizens that will require Indians to provide documentary evidence of their citizenship.

A version of this exercise was conducted in the state of Assam, with disastrous effects. About 1.9 million Assamese were declared non-citizens and will now have to go through a long appeals process in special courts that function poorly.

Read more: Indian citizenship has now been reduced to ‘us’ versus ‘them’

Human rights groups have called the proposed NRC an anti-poor measure. Indian Muslims fear the government will also rob them of their citizenship and constitutional rights.

The joint CAA-NRC agenda of the Modi government has stirred millions of Indians into peaceful protests around the country, showcasing a spirit of collective resistance not witnessed since India’s independence movement in the 1940s.

The most powerful protests have been led by Muslim women – a first in Indian history – in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh area. The protesters have occupied a public space here for two and a half months, braving the bitter cold of northern Indian winters.

Shaheen Bagh has also inspired over a hundred other women-led permanent protests around India.

Rhetoric leads to violence

Last week’s violence in New Delhi is a consequence of the ruling regime’s campaign against the protests. This campaign intensified during the BJP’s election campaign when the party mobilised public support against the protesters by accusing them of fomenting violence and disrupting public order.

Travelling to Delhi to energise voters, Adityanath, the militant Hindu monk in Uttar Pradesh, said the protesters should be fed “bullets”. Anurag Thakur, a BJP member of parliament and minister of state, chanted “shoot the traitors” at an election rally, referring to protesters.

This was followed by two incidents of shootings at students and protesters by individuals who identified as Modi supporters.

Read more: Narendra Modi has won the largest election in the world. What will this mean for India?

Despite being roundly defeated in the Delhi election, BJP leaders have continued their campaign of polarisation in preparation for future elections.

Last week’s violence was sparked when BJP leaders and supporters mobilised to break up protests against the CAA and NRC in Delhi. It was no accident the violence was concentrated in fiercely contested electorates where BJP leaders had urged voters to show their anger against the Shaheen Bagh women by voting for the party.

The perpetrator of the hate speech that sparked the violence, BJP leader Kapil Mishra, continues to make provocative statements against opponents. The police, who are accused of being indifferent and complicit in the violence, have yet to charge him with an offence.

Nothing to see here

While parts of Delhi burned, Modi was entertaining US President Donald Trump, who praised India’s tolerance. Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham was also visiting India with a large trade mission and touted India’s rule of law and tolerance as its strengths. Both declared the violence to be a matter for India.

The tide is beginning to turn, however. Potential Democratic presidential nominees Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both criticised the Modi regime. (The BJP president, BL Santhosh, responded by threatening to interfere in the 2020 US presidential election.)

The Greens’ Mehreen Faruqi, meanwhile, has moved a motion in the Australian Senate that is critical of the Indian government.

Mounting international criticism is unlikely to alter the BJP’s policies or approach, which are rooted in its Hindu nationalist raison d’etre.

But international support will bolster resistance within India against a regime striving for political domination through violent polarisation.

– ref. Why Modi’s India has become a dangerous place for Muslims – https://theconversation.com/why-modis-india-has-become-a-dangerous-place-for-muslims-132591

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warwick McKibbin, Chair in Public Policy, ANU Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (CAMA), Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

The COVID-19 coronavirus is spreading across the world. Initially the epicenter was China, with reported cases either in China or in travellers from China. There are now at least four further epicenters: Iran, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

Although the World Health Organisation believes the number of cases in China has peaked and should fall, case reports are climbing from countries previously thought to be resilient due to stronger medical standards and practices.

In a strongly connected and integrated world, the impacts of the disease will go beyond mortality (deaths) and morbidity (people incapacitated or caring for the incapacitated and unable to work).

Companies across the world, irrespective of size, depend on inputs from China – much more so than during the 2002-04 China-centred Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic.

Read more: World economy flashes red over coronavirus – with strange echoes of 1880s Yellow Peril hysteria

In 2003 China accounted for less than one twentieth of world trade. It now accounts for one seventh, making it the world’s biggest importer and an integral part of most global production chains.

Just as important to the world economy, panic is distorting spending. Global stock markets have plunged.

Fear is as important as trade

Entire cities in China have closed and travel restrictions have been placed on people entering from infected countries.

The fear of an unknown deadly virus is similar in its psychological effects to the reaction to terrorism threats and produces a high level of stress, often with longer-term consequences.

A large number of people feel at-risk at the onset of a pandemic, even if their actual risk of dying is low.

Read more: We’re staring down the barrel of a technical recession as the coronavirus enters a new and dangerous phase

The International Monetary Fund expects COVID-19 to knock 0.4 points off China’s economic growth target of 5.6% and 0.1 points off global growth, an assessment it will continue to update.

On Monday the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development sliced 0.8 points off its forecast for China’s growth and 0.5 points off its forecast for Australian growth.

As part of a large research project in the Centre for Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) at the Australian National University, we have applied experience gained from evaluating the impact of SARS for the World Health Organisation in 2003 and 2006 to seven scenarios for COVID-19:

The scenarios vary the attack rate (the proportion of the total population contracting the virus), the mortality rate (the proportion of total population who dies), whether epidemic is a one-off (essentially temporary) or recurrs each year (essentially permanent), and whether it spreads globally or is largely confined to China.

Australian faces a significant hit to GDP

We find that in the four scenarios where the epidemic goes global, Australia’s GDP which in the 12 months to December grew just 1.7%, would suffer a hit in the first year of between 2% and 7.9%, most likely sending GDP backwards (a recession).

In all countries the sharp hit to growth would be followed by a gradual recovery.

The results are very sensitive to the assumptions used, including government responses in each country.

In the short term, central banks and treasuries will need to make sure disrupted economies continue to function.

Australia: percentage change in real GDP

While cutting interest rates is an option, the shock will require a mix of monetary, fiscal and health policy responses. Quarantining affected people and reducing large scale social interaction would be an effective response.

Wide dissemination of good hygiene practices can be a low cost and highly effective response that can also reduce the extent of contagion and keep down the social and economic cost.

The longer-term responses are even more important.

Many governments have been reluctant to invest sufficiently in their health care systems, especially in public systems in less developed countries where many infectious diseases are likely to originate.

Investments in overseas public health matter

The idea that any country can be an island in an integrated global economy is being proved wrong.

Poverty kills people. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 shows that diseases, potentially generated in poor countries due to overcrowding, poor public health and interaction with wild animals, can kill people of any socioeconomic group in any country.

There needs to be vastly more investment in public health and development in the richest but also, and especially, in the poorest countries.

Read more: It’s now a matter of when, not if, for Australia. This is how we’re preparing for a jump in coronavirus cases

Our study suggests big economic costs in countries such as Australia can be avoided through global cooperative investment in public health in all countries.

We have known this for decades, yet politicians continue to ignore the scientific and economic evidence about the role of global public health in improving the quality of life and driving economic growth for us all.

– ref. The first economic modelling of coronavirus scenarios is grim for Australia, the world – https://theconversation.com/the-first-economic-modelling-of-coronavirus-scenarios-is-grim-for-australia-the-world-132759

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dustin Marshall, Professor, Marine Evolutionary Ecology, Monash University

Apart from mammals and birds, most animals develop as eggs exposed to the vagaries of the outside world. This development is energetically “costly”. Going from a tiny egg to a fully functioning organism can deplete up to 60% of the energy reserves provided by a parent.

In cold-blooded animals such as marine invertebrates (including sea stars and corals), fish and reptiles, and even insects, embryonic development is very sensitive to changes in the temperature of the environment.

Thus, in a warming world, many cold-blooded species face a new challenge: developing successfully despite rising temperatures.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do eggs have a yolk?

For our research, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we mined existing literature for data on how temperature impacts the metabolic and developmental rates of 71 different species, ranging from tropical crocodiles to Antarctic krill.

We found that over time, species tend to fine-tune their physiology so that the temperature of the place they inhabit is the temperature needed to minimise the “costs” of their embryonic development.

Temperature increases associated with global warming could substantially impact many of these species.

The perfect weather to grow an embryo

The energy costs of embryonic development are determined by two key rates. The “metabolic” rate refers to the rate at which energy is used by the embryo, and the “development” rate determines how long it takes the embryo to fully develop, and become an independent organism.

Both of these rates are heavily impacted by environmental temperature. Any change in temperature affecting them is therefore costly to an embryo’s development.

Generally, a 10°C increase in temperature will cause an embryo’s development and metabolic rate to more than triple.

These effects partially cancel each other out. Higher temperatures increase the rate at which energy is used (metabolic), but shorten the developmental time.

But do they balance out effectively?

What are the costs?

For any species, there is one temperature that achieves the perfect energetic balance between relatively rapid development and low metabolism. This optimal temperature, also called the “Goldilocks” temperature, is neither too hot, nor too cold.

When the temperature is too cold for a certain species, development takes a long time. When it’s too hot, development time decreases while the metabolic rate continues to rise. An imbalance on either side of this scale can negatively impact a natural population’s resilience and ability to replenish.

As an embryo’s developmental costs increase past the optimum, mothers must invest more resources into each offspring to offset these costs.

When offspring become more costly to make, mothers make fewer, larger offspring. These offspring start life with fewer energy reserves, reducing their chances of successfully reproducing as adults themselves.

Thus, when it comes to embryonic development, higher-than ideal temperatures pack a nasty punch for natural populations.

Since the temperature dependencies of metabolic rate and development rate are fairly similar, the slight differences between them had gone unnoticed until recently.

Read more: Why cold-blooded animals don’t need to wrap up to keep warm

Embryos at risk

For each species in our study, we found a narrow band of temperatures that minimised developmental cost. Temperatures that were too high or too low caused massive blow-outs in the energy budget of developing embryos.

This means temperature increases associated with global warming are likely to have bigger impacts than previously predicted.

Predictions of how future temperature changes will affect organisms are often based on estimates of how temperature affects embryo survival. These measures suggest small temperature increases (1°C-2°C) do not reduce embryo survival by much.

But our study found the developmental costs are about twice as high, and we had underestimated the impacts of subtle temperature changes on embryo development.

In the warming animal kingdom, there are winners and losers

Some good news is that our research suggests not all species are facing rising costs with rising temperatures, at least initially.

We’ve created a mathematical framework called the Developmental Cost Theory, which predicts some species will actually experience slightly lower developmental costs with minor increases in temperature.

Read more: Flipping the genetic ‘switch’ that makes many animals look alike as embryos

In particular, aquatic species (fish and invertebrates) in cool temperate waters seem likely to experience lower costs in the near future. In contrast, certain tropical aquatic species (including coral reef organisms) are already experiencing temperatures that exceed their optimum. This is likely to get worse.

It’s important to note that for all species, increasing environmental temperature will eventually come with costs.

Even if a slight temperature increase reduces costs for one species, too much of an increase will still have a negative impact. This is true for all the organisms we studied.

A key question now is: how quickly can species evolve to adapt to our warming climate?

– ref. From crocodiles to krill, a warming world raises the ‘costs’ paid by developing embryos – https://theconversation.com/from-crocodiles-to-krill-a-warming-world-raises-the-costs-paid-by-developing-embryos-132673

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elena Campbell, Associate Director – Research, Advocacy and Policy, Centre for Innovative Justice, RMIT University

Adolescents are consistently identified as perpetrators of violence against family members. We know this from a decade of Victorian court and police data. Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence also highlighted the growing recognition that adolescent perpetration is a serious concern.

Further, findings by the Australian Institute of Criminology indicate that adolescents in contact with police for violence often have further contact soon after, including for breaches of protection orders. Victorian Crime Statistics Agency figures also recently confirmed what we’ve known for some time: adolescent perpetrators often experienced violence as a child.

Read more: Long ignored, adolescent family violence needs our attention

But what we have known little about is how effectively the civil justice response – the predominant response in some jurisdictions – deals with this issue. The Positive Interventions for Perpetrators of Adolescent violence in the home (PIPA) project, released this week, finds the civil response in Victoria is often ineffective and sometimes damaging in dealing with adolescents.

This is because police and court mechanisms are failing to account for perpetrators’ age, the relationship of trauma to their behaviour, and their capacity to understand orders or avoid breaching. It is also because there is sometimes more concern the system will come under scrutiny for not doing enough than for the risk to vulnerable families.

In our research, we reviewed 385 court and legal files and spoke to over 150 practitioners across three Australian states. Victorian files revealed cases involving serious risk, but also matters where an adolescent’s behaviour did not appear to meet the legal definition of family violence but an interim order was imposed nonetheless.

Around 25% of court files involved adolescents identified as on the autism spectrum. These families were highly distressed by system intervention. Some feared their other children might be removed. This fear overtook their hope for much-needed support for the child causing harm.

At the other end of the scale were cases involving violence by adults as well as children, but it was the children who were targeted for intervention.

In some files, lawyers detected parental misuse of the system and referred matters to the Children’s Court Clinic for assessment. This confirmed these children had been brought to court as perpetrators, but were in fact the victims of current abuse. The system inadvertently colluded in this abuse instead of addressing it.

One-third of cases involved adolescents excluded from home, but with no legal requirement to consider safety in relation to where they were placed. Similarly, despite orders against children under 14 being imposed regularly, legislation does not require that their capacity to understand these orders be considered. This contrasts with a criminal law principle that the capacity of children under 14 to understand the nature of an offence must be considered.

Further, high rates of trauma and disability among children identified as perpetrators make it even less likely they will comply with orders or regulate their behaviour. At its simplest, this means our system is sometimes imposing intervention orders on 13-year-olds who are on the autism spectrum, or who have histories of profound trauma, and then wondering why they return to court for failing to comply.

Our findings are not critical of police or courts. Most are desperate for more options. Rather, the settings of the current civil response are not equipped to deal with the complexity that adolescent family violence involves.

Read more: ‘Silent victims’: royal commission recommends better protections for child victims of family violence

Criminal mechanisms are not the alternative, either. This is because criminal justice system involvement is a known predictor of future involvement, despite the additional support that diversionary measures sometimes afford.

Nor is the answer to exclude certain forms of perpetration from legislative definitions. While this may mean children are not inadvertently captured in a one-size-fits-all response, it also means the behaviour is not recognised or tracked by the system at all. As a result, families are left to struggle in even greater isolation.

Rather, our research shows that more nuance and discretion, legislative checks and balances, and whole-of-family risk assessment are needed. We should track the rate of adolescent perpetration, but also respond to what sits behind it. This is to ensure children do not suffer from responses designed to deal with adult perpetrators.

If families are deterred from seeking help because they know the system’s intervention may make things worse, we will never have reliable figures on adolescent perpetration. Addressing this is a crucial step towards helping affected families feel supported and safe.

– ref. Adolescent family violence is a growing problem – and the legal system is making it worse – https://theconversation.com/adolescent-family-violence-is-a-growing-problem-and-the-legal-system-is-making-it-worse-132663

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Blyth, Paediatrician, Infectious Diseases Physician and Clinical Microbiologist, University of Western Australia

The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19, has infected nearly 90,000 people and caused more than 3,000 deaths so far.

Parents are understandably concerned. But it’s important to keep in mind that comparatively few children have tested positive for the virus, and deaths in children are very rare.

Here’s what we know so far about how children are affected.

Read more: It’s now a matter of when, not if, for Australia. This is how we’re preparing for a jump in coronavirus cases

Remind me, what is COVID-19?

COVID-19 is caused by a new strain of a family of viruses discovered in the 1960s. Coronaviruses get their name from a distinctive corona or “crown” of sugary proteins surrounding the virus when seen under a powerful microscope.

Coronaviruses circulate in humans, usually causing a mild illness with cough and a runny nose. Coronaviruses are also frequently found in animals with speculation COVID-19 emerged from animals, most likely bats.

Three novel coronaviruses have emerged this century.

In 2002-03, SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus) emerged in China spreading to North America, South America and Europe. More than 8,000 cases were identified and around 10% of those infected died.

MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus), emerged from camels in Saudi Arabia in 2012. A large outbreak followed in South Korea in 2015. Nearly 2,500 cases have been reported and 34% of those infected died.

Read more: Explainer: what is the MERS outbreak in South Korea?

SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV infection in children is less commonly reported than would be expected. For example, 3.4% of cases of MERS coronavirus in Saudi Arabia were in children, where around 15% of the population is under 19 years of age.

A similar pattern was seen in SARS, where the rate of reported infection in children under 14 years of age was much lower than in older age groups.

COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has already caused more deaths than SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV combined.

So what about children?

The number of reported COVID-19 cases in children remains low: of more than 44,000 confirmed cases from China, only 416 (less than 1%) were aged nine years or younger. No deaths were reported in this age group.

In Australia, only one child has so far had confirmed COVID-19 infection.

It remains unclear whether the low numbers of child infections recorded is due to:

• low numbers of children being exposed to the virus
• low numbers of children being infected, or
• low numbers of infected children developing symptoms severe enough to present for care.

If large numbers of children are not getting sick, why does it matter?

If children are infected yet have milder symptoms, they may still play a critical role in COVID-19 transmission. Children are mobile, shed large volume of virus, congregate in groups and are at lower risk of severe disease so often maintain their daily activities.

Preventing school-age children getting infected with influenza has been shown to be an effective community prevention strategy. In the absence of a COVID-19 vaccine, school closures may need to be considered when looking at ways to decrease community spread, if children are found to be key transmitters of infection.

What symptoms do children get?

Chinese doctors report infected children often have a cough, nasal congestion, runny nose, diarrhoea and a headache. Less than half of the children have a fever. Many have no symptoms.

The majority of children and adolescents with COVID-19 in China had mild infections and recovered within one to two weeks.

Even infants, who are traditionally more susceptible to severe respiratory infections, had relatively mild infections.

How can you tell if it’s COVID-19?

Most children with COVID-19 present with respiratory symptoms and/or a cough, which is indistinguishable from other common viruses including influenza and rhinovirus.

But so far, all children with confirmed COVID-19 have had family members or close contacts with confirmed infection.

Read more: Kids are more vulnerable to the flu – here’s what to look out for this winter

In the early part of an Australian epidemic, confirming COVID-19 infections will be important to guide our public health response. However if COVID-19 cases continue to climb, this testing approach may change to only test patients who are hospitalised as the only benefit of confirming COVID-19 infection will be to inform treatment and infection control practices in hospitalised patients.

At this stage, it’s unclear if antiviral therapies are useful in the treatment of COVID-19. Many older drugs, such as lopinavir used to treat HIV, have been used to treat some severe cases but need to be formally evaluated. Clinical trials have been registered and some results from Chinese researchers are expected soon.

However, as children have such mild symptoms, it would be hard to justify exposing them to potential side effects of antiviral medication, such as nausea, vomiting and allergic reactions, for little benefit.

How do I prevent my family from being infected?

COVID-19 is spread by droplets generated when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Infection can be transmitted if a person touches objects or surfaces that an infected person has coughed and sneezed on and then touches their mouth, nose or face.

The best way to avoid COVID-19 infection (and infection with any other respiratory virus) is by washing your hands with soap and water, using a tissue or the crook of your elbow to cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze and by avoiding close contact with others who are unwell.

Masks in the community are only helpful in preventing people who have COVID-19 disease from spreading it to others. There is little evidence supporting the widespread use of surgical masks in healthy people to prevent transmission in public – and it’s almost impossible to get small kids to consistently wear these.

A vaccine for COVID-19 is still some way off. But it’s worthwhile getting your child vaccinated against influenza. This is not only to protect your child against influenza, but also to reduce the chance your child might be considered to have COVID-19, and to minimise other illnesses in the community that would use health resources.

Read more: Here’s why the WHO says a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months away

– ref. Worried about your child getting coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/worried-about-your-child-getting-coronavirus-heres-what-you-need-to-know-131909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Church, Chair Professor, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW

For many coastal regions, sea-level rise is a looming crisis threatening our coastal society, livelihoods and coastal ecosystems. A new study, published in Nature Climate Change, has reported the world will lose almost half of its valuable sandy beaches by 2100 as the ocean moves landward with rising sea levels.

Sandy beaches comprise about a third of the world’s coastline. And Australia, with nearly 12,000 kilometres at risk, could be hit hard.

Read more: Ancient Antarctic ice melt caused extreme sea level rise 129,000 years ago – and it could happen again

This is the first truly global study to attempt to quantify beach erosion. The results for the highest greenhouse gas emission scenario are alarming, but reducing emissions lead to lower rates of coastal erosion.

Our best hope for the future of the world’s coastlines and for Australia’s iconic beaches is to keep global warming as low as possible by urgently reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Losing sand in coastal erosion

Two of the largest problems resulting from rising sea levels are coastal erosion and an already-observed increase in the frequency of coastal flooding events.

Erosion during storms can have dramatic consequences, particularly for coastal infrastructure. We saw this in 2016, when wild storms removed sand from beaches and damaged houses in Sydney.

After storms like this, beaches often gradually recover, because sand from deeper waters washes back to the shore over months to years and in some cases decades. These dramatic storms and the long-term sand supply make it difficult to identify any beach movement in the recent past from sea-level rise.

What we do know is that the rate of sea-level rise has accelerated. It has increased by half since 1993, and is continuing to accelerate from ongoing greenhouse gas emissions.

If we continue to emit high levels of greenhouse gases, this acceleration will continue through the 21st century and beyond. As a result, the supply of sand may not be able to keep pace with rapidly rising sea levels.

Projections for the worst-case scenario

In the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released last year, the highest greenhouse gas emissions scenario resulted in global warming of more than 4°C (relative to pre-industrial temperatures) and a likely range of sea-level rise between 0.6 and 1.1 metres by 2100.

For this scenario, this new study projects a global average landward movement of the coastline in the range of 40 to 250 metres if there were no physical limits to shoreline movement, such as those imposed by sea walls or other coastal infrastructure.

Read more: What does the science really say about sea-level rise?

Sea-level rise is responsible for the vast majority of this beach loss, with faster loss during the latter decades of the 21st century when the rate of rise is larger. And sea levels will continue to rise for centuries, so beach erosion would continue well after 2100.

For southern Australia, the landward movement of the shoreline is projected to be more than 100 metres. This would damage many of Australia’s iconic tourist beaches such as Bondi, Manly and the Gold Coast. The movement in northern Australia is projected to be even larger, but more uncertain because of ongoing historical shoreline trends.

What happens if we mitigate our emissions

The above results are from a worst-case scenario. If greenhouse gas emissions were reduced such that the 2100 global temperature rose by about 2.5°C, instead of more than 4°C, then we’d reduce beach erosion by about a third of what’s projected in this worst-case scenario.

Current global policies would result in about 3°C of global warming. That’s between the 4°C and the 2.5°C scenarios considered in this beach erosion study, implying our current policies will lead to significant beach erosion, including in Australia.

Mitigating our emissions even further to achieving the Paris goal of keeping temperature rise to well below 2°C would be a major step in reducing beach loss.

Why coastal erosion is hard to predict

Projecting sea-level rise and resulting beach erosion are particularly difficult as both depend on many factors.

For sea level, the major problems are estimating the contribution of melting Antarctic ice flowing into the ocean, how sea level will change on a regional scale, and the amount of global warming.

The beach erosion calculated in this new study depends on several new databases. The databases of recent shoreline movement used to project ongoing natural factors might already be influenced by rising sea levels, possibly leading to an overestimate in the final calculations.

Read more: Sea level rise is inevitable – but what we do today can still prevent catastrophe for coastal regions

The implications

Regardless of the exact numbers reported in this study, it’s clear we will have to adapt to the beach erosion that we can no longer prevent, if we are to continue enjoying our beaches.

This means we need appropriate planning, such as beach nourishment (adding sand to beaches to combat erosion) and other soft and hard engineering solutions. In some cases, we’ll even need to retreat from the coast to allow the beach to migrate landward.

And if we are to continue to enjoy our sandy beaches into the future, we cannot allow ongoing and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The world needs urgent, significant and sustained global mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

– ref. The world may lose half its sandy beaches by 2100. It’s not too late to save most of them – https://theconversation.com/the-world-may-lose-half-its-sandy-beaches-by-2100-its-not-too-late-to-save-most-of-them-132586

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carolyn MacCann, Associate Professor, University of Sydney

The ability to understand emotions contributes almost as much to students’ grades as their IQ.

Past studies show two personal qualities are important for student academic success – intelligence and conscientiousness.

IQ scores explain about 15% of the differences between students’ grades. Conscientiousness, such as having the diligence to do enough study, explains about 5%.

Our recent research has found emotional intelligence explains 4% of differences between students’ achievement. But the ability to understand emotions, a component of emotional intelligence, explains about 12% of differences in students’ grades.

What is emotional intelligence?

Different researchers use slightly different definitions of emotional intelligence.

Some define emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage your own and other people’s emotions. This is called “ability emotional intelligence”.

Others also include character traits such as optimism, impulse control and the ability to motivate yourself. This is called “mixed emotional intelligence” because it is a mix of abilities and character traits.

We examined the findings of more than 150 studies on the link between emotional intelligence and academic performance. These studies included more than 42,000 students and 1,246 different estimations of the size of the relationship between emotional intelligence and academic performance.

Read more: Children benefit when taught social and emotional skills – but some methods are better than others

Some of the studies in our analysis used rating scales to assess emotional intelligence. Here, test-takers might rate their emotional abilities with items like “I am aware of the non-verbal messages other people send” or rate their mixed emotional intelligence with items like “I am motivated to succeed”.

Others tested emotional intelligence directly by measuring participants’ emotional abilities with skill-based tasks. For example, test takers might be asked to identify which emotion is expressed in a face.

We found that, overall, emotional intelligence explained about 4% of differences in students’ academic achievement. But some emotional intelligence types were more important than others.

Skill-based emotional intelligence, such as reading people’s faces, explained 6% of differences in academic achievement, but self-ratings of emotional abilities explained 1% of differences. So, emotional skills assessed from the outside are more important for students’ academic performance than students’ self-ratings (or self-beliefs) about their emotional skills.

But some emotional skills were more important than others. The two most important emotional skills for academic success were understanding emotions and managing emotions.

Students who can understand emotions can accurately label their own and others’ emotions. They know what causes emotions, how emotions change and how they combine. Students who can manage emotions know how to regulate their emotions in a stressful situation. They also know what to do to maintain good social relationships with others.

Emotion management skills accounted for 7% of differences in academic performance . Emotion understanding skills accounted for 12%. That is, understanding emotions is more important for student success than conscientiousness (5%) and almost as important as students’ IQ (15%).

Read more: Understanding others’ feelings: what is empathy and why do we need it?

Emotionally intelligent students tend to be more intelligent as well as more conscientious. But our study found it wasn’t just that emotionally intelligent students were also more likely to be intelligent and conscientious.

We applied a statistical technique called meta-regression to examine what the effect of emotional intelligence would be if everyone had the same level of conscientiousness and intelligence.

For students who had the same levels of conscientiousness and intelligence, emotional intelligence was still linked with higher academic performance.

For students with the same levels of intelligence and conscientiousness:

• self-ratings of mixed emotional intelligence (the one involving both skills and character traits) explained 2.3% of differences in performance

• emotion understanding skills explained 3.9% of differences in performance

• emotion management skills explained 3.6% of differences in performance.

Why is emotional intelligence linked to good grades?

There are at least three reasons why we believe emotional intelligence relates to higher academic performance.

First, students with higher emotional intelligence can regulate their “academic emotions”. Students may feel anxious about tests and performance. They may feel bored when learning required but dull material. And they may feel frustrated or disappointed when they try their hardest but still can’t quite get the hang of a task.

Students who can regulate these tough emotions will achieve more. Anxiety will not impair the test performance. They can push through the boredom and frustration to master dull or difficult material. They can learn from negative feedback or failure rather than be derailed by disappointment.

Read more: Here’s what teachers look for when kids start school

Second, students with higher emotional intelligence can form better social relationships with their classmates and teachers. They can get help with schoolwork or with social and emotional needs when they need it.

Third, many non-technical academic subjects require an understanding of human emotions and social relations as an inherent part of the subject matter. Analysing universal themes of love and betrayal in Shakespeare plays requires not just verbal skills but emotional knowledge and skill. Analysing the role of charismatic leaders in the rise of fascist regimes likewise requires social knowledge and analysis.

Our results show that teachers, parents and students should focus on student’s emotional skills not just for student’s well-being, but for their ability to succeed academically.

– ref. Understanding emotions is nearly as important as IQ for students’ academic success – https://theconversation.com/understanding-emotions-is-nearly-as-important-as-iq-for-students-academic-success-131212

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Arthure, PhD Candidate, Archaeology, Flinders University, Flinders University

Archaeological research has uncovered the remains of a 19th-century Irish community beneath an otherwise ordinary paddock in rural South Australia. Fitting the clustered form of settlement known as a “clachan”, it’s the first to be identified in Australia. Even more remarkably, this community thrived many years after this traditional way of living died out in Ireland.

The story of this discovery began in November 2012 when I walked for the first time on Baker’s Flat near Kapunda, about an hour’s drive north of Adelaide. I was an Irish-Australian archaeologist in search of an Irish colonial settlement.

In 1842, the discovery of copper at Kapunda led to the development of Australia’s first successful metal mine. The Irish arrived in 1854, seeking work as mine workers. They settled on an unused section of land close to the mine known as Baker’s Flat.

Read more: Why archaeology is so much more than just digging

The Irish of Baker’s Flat

The histories are not kind to the Irish of Baker’s Flat. A 1929 collection of Kapunda stories established a narrative about the settlement as haphazard and chaotic, full of squalid hovels and unrestrained animals, and which essentially operated as a closed Irish community set apart from the rest of the town. Along with newspaper accounts of fights, public drunkenness and land disputes, the scene was set for these Irish to be perceived in stereotypical fashion as dirty, drunk, rebellious and lawless.

Years later, in the 1950s, the remains of any houses were demolished so the land could be farmed. Baker’s Flat was effectively erased from the landscape. The Irish were forgotten.

When I began researching the archives, trawling through the records of court cases and land disputes, I was really just trying to understand that community better.

The Irish had occupied Baker’s Flat from 1854 until at least the 1920s. At its peak in the 1860s and 1870s, 500 people were living there. Surely they couldn’t all be drunk and rebellious, or as one-dimensional as the dominant narrative implied.

Read more: Aussie slang is as diverse as Australia itself

Following the clachan trail

I was looking for more depth and balance, but what I found turned out to be even more interesting. A surveyor’s plan from 1893 is the only historic map of the site. It shows a cluster of buildings in the north-west quadrant.

A series of photographs from 1906 depicts Irish-style cottages nestled into the landscape.

Affidavits from a court case disputing ownership and control of the land describe shared decisions, collective action and communal animal management. These facts hinted that this community might have operated as a clachan.

This traditional Irish way of living was characterised by clusters of farm dwellings and outbuildings built in the Irish style. In a clachan, the inhabitants managed the farming land communally. Unlike a classic village, clachans did not have services like shops or pubs.

Until the mid-19th century, clachans were widespread in Ireland. They died out, however, in the social upheaval following the Great Famine of 1845–1850. My research at this point indicated that, while the clachan was vanishing in Ireland, a vibrant one was flourishing in the heart of South Australia. Significantly, the only other clachan outside of Ireland to be hinted at so far is a cluster of houses built by 19th-century Irish migrants on Beaver Island, Lake Michigan.

Bringing in the archaeology

The next step was to test my theory using archaeological methods. First was a surface survey in 2013. Teams of archaeology students walked along a set route, observing and recording what they could see on the surface.

This survey identified the remains of 13 buildings (now just small heaps of rubble) and scattered broken glass and ceramics, mainly in the north-west quadrant.

Based on these findings, we carried out a geophysical survey in 2016. Using ground-penetrating radar and a magnetic gradiometer, we found several large sub-surface features.

These were clustered together and fit the pattern of rectangular structures about 10m long and 5m wide. There were also indications of paths and enclosures.

We tested these findings by excavation over two summer field seasons in 2016 and 2017. The excavations uncovered the walls of a long rectangular house, dug into the bedrock. It was one room deep, shaped like a traditional Irish dwelling, and matched the design of the photographed houses from 1906.

There was a cobbled path to the east. A small rubbish dump contained many 19th-century glass and ceramic fragments and butchered bones.

Read more: Googling the past: how I uncovered prehistoric remains from my office

Here lies a clachan

When all the evidence is combined, it confirms the presence of a clachan, the first to be identified in Australia. Analysis of the glass, ceramic and bone artefacts is ongoing but indicates so far that the Irish were generally drinking, eating and using the same things as other members of the broader colonial Australian community.

What is different here is the way they chose to live, building houses in the Irish tradition, living close together and making decisions jointly.

We do not know if the Baker’s Flat Irish deliberately set out to establish a clachan in a small corner of South Australia. It was such a common style of living at the time they left Ireland it may well be they just continued doing what they had always done and that it emerged organically. But they left enough behind to build a picture that challenges the stereotypes.

The archaeology is revealing that it wasn’t all chaos and lawlessness at Baker’s Flat. There was order. And this order took the particular form of the clachan.

As well as looking at the ancient past, archaeology is also about the recent past and what might lie beneath an unassuming paddock. It focuses on people and the things they discard or leave behind. For me, it’s about ordinary people, whose stories get forgotten as time goes by, but who leave traces in the landscape and the archives for archaeologists to uncover.

– ref. Unearthing a traditional Irish village that lingered in a South Australian field – https://theconversation.com/unearthing-a-traditional-irish-village-that-lingered-in-a-south-australian-field-132344

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Stevenson, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient History, UQ, The University of Queensland

The Satyricon by Petronius is an unusual surviving text from the ancient world. It is not a work of history, nor a work of soaring epic poetry like Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid, and for various reasons it is hard to get a handle on.

Its contents are pretty grubby because it is about lowlifes and lowlife behaviour. It depicts petty theft, casual violence, opportunistic sex, prostitution, vulgar gluttony, crass displays of wealth by the most ridiculous social climber and gross disrespect for a range of gods, goddesses and hallowed religious rituals, like funerals and proper treatment of the dead. All the good sleazy stuff for when you’re in the mood for that sort of thing.

Rather than a work about heroes or kings or queens or uplifting examples of how to live a virtuous life, the Satyricon is almost a how-to manual for the opposite.

It is the earliest surviving novel in Latin literature, but it is not even close to being intact. We appear to have bits of three books out of an original 16 or possibly more. So we run into problems trying to understand what the plot of the whole work might have been and whether the bits that survive are representative of it.

As far as we can tell, it’s a tale about the misadventures and love triangle of three young men – the narrator Encolpius, Ascyltus and the younger Gitōn.

They all behave disreputably, all know hunger and poverty, all hurt people, and all get hurt in return.

Encolpius arguably suffers the most when he upsets Priapus, a god of fertility, who renders him impotent. Priapus is normally represented in Roman art sporting an enormous, erect phallus – even weighing it in one famous example. He is a minor deity in comparison to Jupiter or Hercules, but he has one outstanding trait, which means a great deal to the “heroes” of this novel.

When Priapus deprives Encolpius of his virility, he strikes at the core of Encolpius’s identity, causing him much distress and forcing him in panic to seek a succession of absurd remedies.

The main characters are not good boys. They are jealous, perpetually randy, violent, unfaithful and capricious. They separate and come back together. They lack depth. And they meet a series of characters who complement their deficiencies with flaws of their own.

They look for food, shelter, sex and sexual restoration. Charlatans abound. Everyone is selfish and untrustworthy. Religion is flouted and abused, even though it plainly has power.

The attitude to religion seems to be “whatever works”, but no one is exactly sure what works, so they indulge themselves in equal amounts of devotion and derision – with predictable results.

Read more: Friday essay: the erotic art of Ancient Greece and Rome

Our youths seem to be travelling between locations around the Bay of Naples – a notorious region of excess and extravagance, heavily influenced by Greek culture and less constrained by traditional Roman discipline than other parts of Italy.

There is little certainty about this, as with so many features of the tale, but the easy movement between city dives and country villas makes sense in this region.

The banquet of Trimalchio

The most outrageous character they run across is the nouveau-riche pretender Trimalchio, whom they meet through an acquaintance, Eumolpus, who is said to be a poet but is more like a sleaze with intellectual pretensions.

Together they end up at a sumptuous feast at Trimalchio’s villa – the famous Cena Trimalchionis or “Banquet of Trimalchio”.

The feast is a riot of nonsense. Trimalchio, an ex-slave who has bought his freedom, tries to prove he is a man of culture as well as wealth like his free-born counterparts in neighbouring villas and regions. In doing so, of course, he proves only that he completely lacks class or sophistication of any kind and emerges as a self-loving ignoramus.

There is way too much food, especially the meats and sweets. The dishes are too exotic and difficult, especially the tiny birds. They are served in ostentatiously absurd ways by a bizarre collection of slaves and other functionaries. The guests grab greedily and unappreciatively, upsetting plates, cups and each other. The talk is gross and unedifying.

Trimalchio ends up inviting his cronies to a rehearsal of his funeral, which he has planned meticulously on the model of a noble’s or emperor’s funeral. He fails to see how far he falls short. Clothes, and other props, do not make the man.

But there is more to the feast than meets the eye. The vulgarity of the subject matter is especially memorable because it is conveyed by a master satirist or comic genius.

Trimalchio is described with great attention to detail and inventiveness, and with a certain sympathy rather than vindictiveness. Trimalchio and his hangers-on are acquainted with high literature, though they mangle it terribly, sometimes speaking in vulgar Latin and in language rendered comic by its malapropisms and other features. The writer is a virtuoso for pulling off these effects so cleverly.

A comic approach

The key to interpretation is that the text is a satire, as its name implies. It is inspired by the deeds of satyrs: lecherous, half-human creatures of myth, obsessed with sex. They were symbols of the outrageous, the destabilising and the violent.

The youths of our tale are plainly modelled on them. And the text is comic in approach, designed for a festival atmosphere, when it’s okay to release the irrational, the absurd and the bottled-up frustrations that go along with daily commitment to civilised straightness.

The comic silliness of it all is important to consider when pondering the author and purpose of the work. The author, according to the name that has survived with the text, was Titus Petronius Arbiter.

He is generally identified with the prominent courtier of Nero, the senator Gaius Petronius, who was forced to commit suicide in AD 66 for his part in a conspiracy against the emperor. In a famous passage (Annals 16.17-20), Tacitus says Nero looked to this man as his “arbiter of elegance”, as though his judgment of culture and pleasure was admired.

Read more: Mythbusting Ancient Rome – the emperor Nero

This identification between the author of the Satyricon and the Petronius of Tacitus might be right. Roman nobles were highly educated in literature and philosophy. Intellectual attainment was one of the myriad ways they competed with one another for social pre-eminence. Such a man might well have been capable of the literary virtuosity and wit that is on display in the text as we have it.

What is slightly worrying about this identification, however, is that Tacitus gives an appreciative portrayal of a man who sends up and resists a tyrant. Nero was certainly this, as the paranoia and murders of his reign indicate. Yet he was also a great sponsor of culture, especially literature and drama.

Even if the identifications with Tacitus’s Petronius and the reign of Nero are correct, we don’t need to adopt Tacitus’s tone and perspective. The Satyricon does not have to be a work with subversive intent against Nero, and Nero does not have to be read into the story in place of Trimalchio. Petronius does not have to be a social critic who was appalled by the corruption and depravity of Nero’s court.

It’s much more fun if he wasn’t any of these things in this work, but was instead a man who was excellent at satire in a spirit that was fundamentally light and frivolous.

Suggested translations: J.P. Sullivan, The Satyricon and the Fragments, translated with an introduction by J.P. Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. P.G. Walsh, Petronius: The Satyricon, translated with an introduction and explanatory notes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

– ref. Guide to the classics: Petronius’s Satyricon – sex, satire and naughty boys – https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-petroniuss-satyricon-sex-satire-and-naughty-boys-129351

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

The coronavirus has moved to a new stage in Australia, with the first two cases of local transmission of the disease.

The NSW government announced a 53-year-old Sydney health worker – who had not recently travelled abroad – had been diagnosed. The other case is the 41-year-old sister of an Iranian man who had arrived in Australia on Saturday. The woman had not travelled to Iran.

Other cases in Australia – now more than 30 – have been people who have come from abroad. There has been one death, a 78-year-old man who had been evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

Health authorities have anticipated the spread of the virus locally, with plans being ramped up to deal with that.

Efforts were being made on Monday to track down passengers who sat near travellers from Iran who have been diagnosed with the virus. There is now a ban on the entry of foreigners coming from Iran.

News of the local transmission comes amid the expectation the Reserve Bank will cut interest rates on Tuesday as the virus scare hits the economy, and panic buying of items such as toilet paper.

Hand sanitisers have been a runaway sales item. The share price of Zoono, a company that makes them, has jumped 70% in under a week.

On Friday the futures market rated the probably of a Tuesday rate cut at just 18%. On Monday it was rating the probability at 100%, with some economists even speculating about the possibility of the cut being double the usual 0.25%.

The Australian share market fell by 0.77%, after a 10% fall in what was the worst week since the global financial financial crisis.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said it was time for people to “give each other a pat on the back” rather than shaking hands. He also suggested a degree of caution when kissing.

In parliament, the government took a series of questions on the virus and its fallout. Attorney-General Christian Porter said it was important for Australians to understand the use of certain powers may become necessary in the months ahead.

Notably among these were changes made in 2015 to the Biosecurity Act, which replaced the Quarantine Act.

COVID-19 had been listed as a human disease for the purposes of this act in January.

“That has a number of very important consequences for Australia and Australians in what will no doubt be challenging months going ahead,” Porter said.

“There are two broad ranges of powers that people may well experience for the first time.

“There is the ability of the government to impose – always based on medical advice, but nevertheless impose – a human biosecurity control order on person or persons who have been exposed to the disease.

“It could require any Australian to give information about people that they’ve contacted or had contact with so that we can trace transmission pathways. It will also mean that Australians could be directed to remain at a particular place or indeed undergo decontamination.”

“Secondly, a very important power that may be experienced for the first time—and that we will be monitoring very carefully—is the declaration of a human health response zone, ” he said.

This was done with the Diamond Princess.

“But it’s very important to understand, going forward, that that is a power that can be used for either localised disease outbreaks in Australia or indeed to restrict individuals from attending places where a large number of people may otherwise choose to gather, such as shopping centres, schools or work.

“These are challenging times going forward, and these will be some of the first times that these important powers may be used,” Porter said.

– ref. First locally-transmitted COVID-19 cases in Australia, as Attorney-General warns drastic legal powers could be used – https://theconversation.com/first-locally-transmitted-covid-19-cases-in-australia-as-attorney-general-warns-drastic-legal-powers-could-be-used-132771