Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Crofts, Professor, School of Law and Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong

A nine-year-old boy was recently charged with arson and five counts of murder in Illinois, US. In court, the boy didn’t even understand what “arson” meant.

In Australia, a nine year old cannot be prosecuted and found guilty of an offence, but a ten year old can. From ten until 14, children can be held criminally responsible in criminal proceedings if there is proof the child understood the wrongfulness of their behaviour.

But it’s increasingly clear ten years old is too young for a child to be held criminally accountable.

There have been calls for an increase to the minimum age of criminal responsibility in Australia for many decades. The commonwealth, state and territory governments have so far been reluctant to change the age level – but that may soon change.

Read more: Young crime is often a phase, and locking kids up is counterproductive

A private member’s bill currently before the federal parliament proposes to raise the minimum age to 14 for federal offences. And a working group reviewing the issue will report to the Council of Attorneys-General at the end of November.

Australia’s minimum age is low compared to other countries. Most European countries have set their age between 14 and 16, while others such as China, Russia, Japan and Sierra Leone have it set at 14.

The increase would be in line with Australia’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Last month the UN Committee recommended all countries should adopt a minimum age of at least 14, but preferably 15 or 16.

Breaking the cycle

Raising the age would break the cycle of early entry into, and entanglement within, the criminal justice system. Children arrested before 14 years old are three times more likely than those arrested after 14, to reoffend as adults.

It would particularly help address the crisis of over-representation of young Indigenous children in the criminal justice system.

Between 2016 and 2017, an average 566 children aged ten, 11, 12 and 13 years were in detention. Of these 69% were Indigenous children.

The criminal justice system is no place for children who lack the capacity to be criminally responsible at the age of ten, or even 12 or 14.

The part of the brain responsible for abstract reasoning and the ability to control impulses is still developing in children that age. They’re less able to gauge the longer-term consequences of their behaviour, understand the impact of their actions or to comprehend criminal proceedings.

Read more: Congratulations, you’re ten! Now you can be arrested

What’s more, research shows developmental and cognitive disabilities – which result in communication difficulties, cognitive delay, learning disabilities, emotional and behavioural problems and lack of inhibition – are more prevalent in the juvenile justice sector than in the general population.

What happens if the bill passes?

Even if passed, the bill might prove of limited use because it only applies to federal offences.

Such offences, often related to national or international matters, include importing serious drugs, tax and social security fraud, counter-terrorism, money laundering, environmental offences, human trafficking, slavery and servitude, and online child sexual exploitation.

So if the bill passes, a child could still be prosecuted for a state or territory criminal offence at a younger age than they could be prosecuted for a federal offence.

Read more: We need evidence-based law reform to reduce rates of Indigenous incarceration

Still, a change to the federal age might make the states and territories consider raising theirs to avoid such a situation.

It’s also possible for the federal government to step in and increase the age in all states and territories, to ensure Australia complies with its UN obligations. But such a move would probably be unpopular with the states and territories.

Soft on crime?

We might expect the bill will face no problem getting passed in parliament – the arguments for change are compelling. But setting the age of criminal responsibility isn’t just based on research, it’s a question of policy and is influenced largely by politics.

The bill could face an uphill battle, with politicians not wanting to appear as being soft on youth crime. The Federal Attorney-General Christian Porter, in a statement to the ABC, called the bill highly controversial because it would mean there would never be any circumstances where a person aged ten to 14 could be held responsible for their actions.

It must be made clear when the bill is being debated that increasing the age does not mean children will get away with crime and nothing can be done. There are more effective ways to respond to offending by children than the criminal justice system.

Read more: Locking up kids damages their mental health and sets them up for more disadvantage. Is this what we want?

In Scotland, which has recently raised its criminally responsible age to 12, children are rarely prosecuted, unless they commit a serious offence.

Children under 16 who commit an offence are generally referred to the children’s hearing system, which determines whether they are in need of support and can issue a Compulsory Supervision Order.

As Amnesty International note:

an educational, medical, psychological, social and cultural response that deals with the underlying causes is more effective and appropriate than a justice response.

– ref. A new bill keeping 10 year olds out of jail is a good start, but it needs to go further – http://theconversation.com/a-new-bill-keeping-10-year-olds-out-of-jail-is-a-good-start-but-it-needs-to-go-further-125872

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian J. Faulks, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University & NRMA-ACT Road Safety Trust Research Scholar, Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety (CARRS-Q),, Queensland University of Technology

Over the years, advances in technology and transport policy have greatly impacted drivers. In the 1980s this came in the form of random breath testing, and more recently, mobile drug testing.

A new policing tool under consideration may have a similar effect, as the New South Wales legislature considers the camera-based detection of illegal mobile phone use. Other states have also indicated interest in the program.

If the NSW rollout (scheduled for December) is enacted, within months there could be widespread detection of drivers illegally using mobile phones. This will likely receive community support, as the use of handheld phones is recognised as being dangerous.

Currently, an estimated two in three drivers (at least), are tempted to make or take a call, text, or browse the internet while driving. With these cameras, driver behaviour is likely to change radically, simply by increasing the risk of detection.

How will it work?

The cameras (which can be fixed or mobile) and their supporting software have been developed by Australian-Indian alliance Acusensus.

Known as the Heads-Up Distracted Driving Detection and Enforcement Solution, they can be used 24/7. As with speed cameras, a sensor system records the speed of vehicles, and a specialised camera captures a high-resolution image of the vehicle, driver and registration plate.

Using artificial intelligence, the system examines images to detect the possibility of mobile use. While all vehicles at a site are examined, only photos that are likely to show mobile use are sent to a human reviewer (with passengers and registration plates blurred).

If an offence is alleged, the evidence is forwarded to authorities who can issue fines.

2019 trial results

A trial conducted early this year at eight sites assessed 8.5 million vehicles, and Acusensus presented some results:

• 104,000 evidence packages of drivers using a mobile were detected, screened and adjudicated as evidence of an offence

• drivers offended more in lower speed limit areas

• offending happened throughout day and night, with only slight variation: slightly lower from 6am-9am; slightly higher from 7pm-9pm; and highest of all between 4pm-5pm

• 15% of offending drivers drove a heavy vehicle

• 85% of offending drivers were the only person in the vehicle

• 5% of offending drivers used the mobile with both hands while the vehicle was moving

• 75% of drivers were using their left hand to operate the mobile

• offending drivers were generally texting or viewing the mobile screen (28%), speaking on the phone (4%), simply holding the mobile (25%), or had the mobile on their lap (43%).

Currently in NSW, about 40,000 traffic infringement notices are issued annually for mobile use. During the trials, a limited number of cameras detected more than 104,000 offences within months.

The NSW government has announced plans for at least 135 million vehicles to be screened annually. If a similar detection rate is assumed, this means 1.65 million offences can be expected to be detected each year by the cameras.

However, these estimates are likely at the high end, as drivers will probably change their mobile use rapidly following the rollout.

The planned rollout

Currently, drivers who use a mobile illegally are fined A$337 and deducted 5 demerit points. Novice drivers, who aren’t permitted to use a phone at all, may exceed their limit with one offence and have to serve a three-month suspension.

But these penalties won’t apply at the start of the program, and there will be a three-month warning letter period for drivers.

Signage indicating mobile phone detection cameras are being used will also be placed on roads to make drivers aware.

Trouble in the courts

The proposed legislation will have a significant impact on the justice system and on driver licence administration, as large numbers of drivers will experience penalties and potential licence loss, and may seek to challenge infringements.

There are some heavily-debated aspects of the program. Firstly, the legislation will presume an object held by a driver is a phone and place an onus on a driver to prove it isn’t. This may be problematic if the object looks similar to a mobile phone, such as a chocolate bar or wallet. Under current enforcement practice for alleged illegal mobile use, police officers must provide evidence the object was a phone.

Issues around privacy also arise. Camera-based mobile enforcement is invasive, as images are purposely taken of the driver and passenger compartment. While the cameras are used in public spaces, privacy concerns remain around how images are stored, accessed and disposed of. Also, who has access?

The form in which evidentiary images are presented must be subject to explicit safeguarding rules, which should also be audited. Also, a legal obligation to delete images where no offence is detected must be enacted.

Given the scale of enforcement possible with the cameras, there will also be pressure to extend the program for other surveillance purposes.

Too many unknowns

The decision to introduce mobile phone enforcement in NSW, while worthwhile, seems rushed. While some elements of an evaluative approach are evident, others are missing.

For instance, there has been:

• no public report of the trial released,

• limited modelling (at best) of the impact on the justice system,

• no modelling of the impact on driver licence administration and

• no modelling of the personal, social and economic impact of potential widespread driver licence loss.

This is not to say the program should not be advanced. But it seems appropriate a sunset provision is inserted into the legislation, to allow for a review of the impact of the program.

Especially since the new camera-based enforcement approach will likely be a game-changer.

– ref. Caught red-handed: automatic cameras will spot mobile-using motorists, but at what cost? – http://theconversation.com/caught-red-handed-automatic-cameras-will-spot-mobile-using-motorists-but-at-what-cost-125638

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carol Johnson, Adjunct Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide

In a recent interview Malcolm Turnbull raised the possibility that these days many so-called “conservatives” in the Liberal Party might be better described as “authoritarian populists”.

It would be easy to dismiss his comments as being those of a bitter former leader. But maybe Turnbull has a point, and perhaps it might even be applied more broadly to the Morrison government.

Although the term “authoritarian populism” is often associated with far-right parties, it has also been used to describe mainstream governments, such as those of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990).

Read more: Why a code of conduct may not be enough to change the boys’ club culture in the Liberal Party

Thatcherite populist rhetoric mobilised the people against big government and elite special interests, which was combined with authoritarian measures such as increased policing of ethnic minorities and militant unions.

Authoritarian populist is a term now sometimes applied to Donald Trump. So it is well worth asking whether the Morrison government also has some authoritarian populist tendencies.

This is particularly the case given Morrison’s recent embrace of a Trump-influenced anti-globalist rhetoric, which seems partly aimed at asserting Australian independence from international human rights frameworks.

The populist tinge to Morrison’s politics was obvious during the 2019 election campaign. Morrison countered Labor’s own populist arguments (standing against the “top end of town”) by using an alternative populism that mobilised the people against big-spending, big-taxing Labor governments. He argued that Labor would rip off ordinary citizens, run up big debts and ruin the economy, costing jobs in the process.

Morrison’s election persona of “ScoMo”, the warm and friendly daggy dad from the suburbs, might not seem authoritarian. However, even then, there were authoritarian tendencies creeping in to his populism. This is not just in his attitudes to asylum seekers, but also to Australians. For example, Morrison’s slogan: “A fair go for those who have a go” implied that some welfare recipients didn’t deserve the benefits they were getting.

Indeed, the Morrison government’s authoritarian policy agenda also has a punitive element that has become more evident since the election. Not only has the government emphasised it won’t increase Newstart (despite even business groups calling for an increase), but welfare recipients have been increasingly demonised.

The social services minister reportedly rejected increasing Newstart on the grounds that many welfare recipients would just spend the money on drugs and alcohol. The government has instead revived punitive mandatory drug-testing proposals for welfare recipients.

The government has also supported an expansion of the cashless welfare card, despite trenchant criticisms from the Australian Council of Social Service.

Meanwhile, Peter Dutton has suggested climate change protesters should face mandatory imprisonment and lose their unemployment benefits.

Morrison has dismissed calls for greater media freedom with the populist argument that journalists should not be “above the law”. (In doing so, he implies journalists are an elitist group demanding special privileges denied to ordinary people.)

Yet it is governments that make the law, including authoritarian and punitive laws that can shield them from proper democratic scrutiny. Suggesting that the attorney-general should have the final say on whether police proceed with prosecutions against journalists compounds, rather than reduces, the problem.

It is not just powerful media organisations facing the government’s authoritarian streak. Attacking higher energy prices is a popular move (and easier for the Liberals than developing a full energy policy, given internal divisions).

But businesses have expressed their concern at the “big stick” potentially being wielded against them. Predictably, though, it is unions that face the government’s most authoritarian measures, with the ACTU arguing the proposed new laws are designed to bust them.

Admittedly, as I have argued elsewhere, none of these authoritarian tendencies are totally new. The Howard government had a history of tough legislation against unions and of defunding advocacy groups.

Australian governments have introduced increasingly authoritarian measures that the United Nations and human rights organisations have criticised previously for undermining Australian democracy, including under Turnbull’s watch.

Many moderate Liberals who remembered Turnbull from his libertarian spycatcher days, opposing British government secrecy, were sadly disappointed by his failure to stand up to the right-wingers in his party on such issues. (Admittedly, Labor often capitulated on so-called national security issues as well.)

Nor is it unusual for conservatives in the party to demonise protesters. Indeed, a NSW Liberal premier once reportedly urged a driver to run them over.

Read more: Win or lose the next election, it may be time for the Liberals to rethink their economic narrative

However, the attitudes towards Newstart, for example, are very different from the days when Robert Menzies was proud of increasing unemployment benefits. The authoritarian industrial relations measures are also a far cry from the social liberal traditions that used to influence the Liberal Party. The eroding of civil liberties will be concerning to many small-“l” Liberal voters, as well as to more left-wing voters.

Some Turnbull supporters would have felt relieved when he was replaced by Morrison rather than the Coalition’s hard man, Dutton.

However, perhaps “ScoMo” is just a more personable Dutton in some respects. Whether his government’s punitive measures will eventually undermine Morrison’s warm and friendly election image remains to be seen.

– ref. Is the Morrison government ‘authoritarian populist’ with a punitive bent? – http://theconversation.com/is-the-morrison-government-authoritarian-populist-with-a-punitive-bent-126032

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Nielsen, Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Monash Addiction Research Centre, Monash University

In Australia last year, 1,123 people died from opioids – illicit drugs such as heroin, and pain relievers such as codeine, oxycodone and morphine. If used regularly, physical and psychological dependence can develop.

In recent years most deaths have been due to pharmaceutical opioids – that is, overdoses of strong pain medicines. Though heroin-related deaths are increasing rapidly, so we need evidence-based responses for both.

One key approach to reducing these deaths is treatment for opioid dependence. Although the evidence shows treatments such as methadone and buprenorphine are effective, people who are dependent on opioids continue to face barriers to accessing them.

These include cost, stigma, restrictiveness of the treatment regime, and a lack of places to go to receive treatment.

Read more: Weekly Dose: Naloxone, how to save a life from opioid overdose

Opioid dependence treatment

The dependence treatment backed by the strongest evidence is called “opioid agonist treatment”. An opioid “agonist” means a drug that produces opioid effects in the body.

Opioid agonist treatment is when a known and legal opioid medicine (the opioid “agonist”) is provided in a therapeutic setting, like a clinic or pharmacy, in a regular dose. This removes the need for using additional opioids by reducing craving and withdrawal.

Staying in treatment longer is associated with better outcomes, with best results seen when treatment is continued for 12 months or more. So this is a longer-term treatment providing an opportunity to make sustainable changes, as opposed to a short-term detox.

The two most common medicines used in Australia are methadone and buprenorphine. Both are available through general practitioners and community pharmacies, as well as specialist clinics. Newer forms such as long-acting buprenorphine have also recently entered the market.

Read more: How we can reduce dependency on opioid painkillers in rural and regional Australia

Methadone is what we call a “full opioid agonist”. It mimics the effects of other opioids, such as codeine or morphine, and it can remove the need to take other opioids by preventing opioid withdrawal and craving. Taken in daily oral doses methadone does not produce euphoria, or a “high”. At higher doses, methadone also blocks the effects of other opioids, helping to prevent return to other opioid use.

Buprenorphine (often provided in combination with naloxone, a medicine used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose) is referred to as a “partial opioid agonist”. It’s less sedating and, unlike methadone and other opioids, is less likely to cause breathing difficulties and overdose.

Treatment is effective

High-quality evidence shows these treatments work. They help reduce opioid use, improve health, prevent the spread of blood borne viruses by reducing the likelihood people continue to inject, are cost effective, and reduce crime.

The most profound effects of these treatments is their ability to save lives. Risk of death while in treatment is substantially reduced, by around half compared to when a person is dependent on opioids and not receiving treatment.

These treatments have been shown to work just as well for people who develop dependence to prescribed opioids and people who use heroin.

In 2005 the World Health Organisation put methadone and buprenorphine on their list of essential medicines, recognising their importance in treating opioid dependence.

So it might be surprising to learn many people in Australia who could benefit from these treatments choose not to use them, or are not able to access them.

Read more: Weekly Dose: methadone, the most effective treatment for heroin dependence

4 barriers to treatment

Cost

Opioid agonist treatments attract some subsidies, but their dispensing fees are not covered by Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which subsidises prescription drugs. Where treatment usually adds up to A$35-A$70 a week, cost can be a key barrier to access.

Stigma

Some people choose not to access these treatments because they see them as being for people who use heroin, or don’t want to attend services seen as being for people who use illicit drugs.

Other people believe these treatments are just replacing one opioid with another, and are not aware of their strong scientific support.

Read more: Fixing pain management could help us solve the opioid crisis

Restrictiveness of the treatment regime

The need to attend a pharmacy daily for dosing at the start of treatment can affect work, study or family commitments.

Nowhere to go

Finally, treatment access is limited in some regions because there are not enough GPs who prescribe these treatments. This is despite a change from many state governments in recent years to reduce barriers to prescribing.

In Victoria and New South Wales, for example, all GPs can prescribe buprenorphine treatment without additional training. Nonetheless, prescriber numbers have been slow to increase, with some GPs remaining hesitant to offer these treatments.

People turning to short-term treatments instead

As a result of these barriers, many people who are dependent on opioids choose not to seek help, or are not able to access the treatment they need.

Some choose to access shorter-term treatments such as a “detox”, where over the course of seven to ten days they cease opioids while their withdrawal symptoms are treated with medications.

This is concerning because the rates of relapse from short-term treatment are high, and research shows the risk of non-fatal or fatal opioid overdose increases following short-term treatment. This means these short-term treatments contribute to opioid-related deaths rather than preventing them.

To stem the loss of life from opioid use in Australia, it’s critical we break down the barriers to the opioid dependence treatments we know are most effective.

Read more: Here’s what happened when codeine was made prescription only. No, the sky didn’t fall in

– ref. Opioid dependence treatment saves lives. So why don’t more people use it? – http://theconversation.com/opioid-dependence-treatment-saves-lives-so-why-dont-more-people-use-it-122537

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Dell, Post Doctoral Fellow, University of Tasmania

Stretching towards Antarctica lies a hidden natural oasis – a massive underwater plateau created when continents split more than 100 million years ago.

Straddling the Indian and Southern Oceans, the Kerguelen Plateau is three times the size of Japan. It’s farthest depths are four kilometres below the surface; its islands form one of the most isolated archipelagos on Earth. These include Heard Island and McDonald islands, Australia’s only active surface volcanoes.

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

Australia and France share a territorial border across the Kerguelen Plateau and work together to study it. The most recent findings, The Kerguelen Plateau: Marine Ecosystems and Fisheries, have been published by the Australian Antarctic Division.

The collaboration has fostered new knowledge of the Kerguelen Plateau as a unique living laboratory – and as the home of the world’s most expensive fish.

Tracking the Patagonian toothfish

Volcanic activity pumps vast amounts of minerals such as iron into the water, making the Kerguelen Plateau a biological hotspot.

The plateau hosts populations of Patagonian toothfish, or Dissostichus eleginoides, a predatory fish that lives and feeds near the bottom of the Southern Ocean. The brownish-grey fish grow up to 2 metres long, live for 60 years and can weigh 200kg. The species is often marketed as Chilean seabass.

Australia and France have worked together since the early 2000s to eliminate illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, to understand the toothfish’s population dynamics and surrounding ecology. As a long-lived top predator with a broad diet, they have a key role in the structure of communities inhabiting the seafloor.

The toothfish is also economically important. Its snow-white flesh is prized as rich, good at carrying flavour and rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Catches command high market prices: prepared fillets have sold for more than A$100 per kg in recent years.

Approved commercial fishing vessels catch Patagonian toothfish around the plateau. Over the past few decades, scientific observers on fishing boats have tagged and released more than 50,000 toothfish at the Australian islands. This, along with annual surveys, biological sampling and data collection, has shed light on the species’ biology and population ecology.

This informs management measures such as total allowable catches and “move on” rules, where vessels must cease fishing in an area once a predetermined weight of non-target fish has been caught.

Read more: If warming exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s melting ice sheets could raise seas 20 metres in coming centuries

The nations continue to manage toothfish populations, as well as fish, seabirds and marine mammals that interact with fishing activity.

The shallow banks of the plateau support a spectacular diversity of long-lived sponges, brittle stars, anemones, soft and hard corals and crustaceans. These fragile and slow-growing communities are vulnerable to disturbance. Fishing gear fitted with automated video cameras helps locate and protect sensitive areas, and Australia and France have established marine reserves and managed areas across the plateau.

A unique underwater oasis

The plateau’s islands are incredibly isolated and provide the only breeding and land-based refuge for birds and seals in this part of the Southern Ocean.

Submarine volcanoes, some of them active, surround the islands and are particularly abundant around the younger McDonald Islands.

The plateau cuts across the strong current systems that sweep around the South Pole. This thrusts deep, cold water, enriched with volcanic minerals, to the surface then back to the seafloor. In turn, this powers a food chain stretching from small zooplankton to fish and predators such as Patagonian toothfish, penguins and albatross, and diving marine mammals such as elephant seals and sperm whales.

Read more: A landmark report confirms Australia is girt by hotter, higher seas. But there’s still time to act

Carbon and nutrients returned to the seafloor support diverse communities of invertebrate and fish species that could not inhabit this location if not for the plateau.

The orientation and location of the Kerguelen Plateau make it a canary in the coalmine for understanding the southward shift in marine ecology due to climate change. As sea temperatures rise and ocean currents shift, plant and animal species will move south in search of cooler waters.

Recent modelling suggests those species most at risk from climate change in this region are those sedentary or slow-moving invertebrates, such as sea urchins.

Policy backed by science

Work continues to build comprehensive maps of the seafloor, deploy a network of ocean robots to collect physical and biological information, and use French and Australian fishing fleets for research.

The plateau’s waters are in the region overseen by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international treaty body. French-Australian research is presented to the commission at meetings in Hobart each year to guide management decisions.

The cross-country partnership is a model for international scientific cooperation and fisheries management. In the context of a changing climate, these efforts will provide insight into future impacts on natural systems throughout the Southern Ocean.

– ref. Australia’s only active volcanoes and a very expensive fish: the secrets of the Kerguelen Plateau – http://theconversation.com/australias-only-active-volcanoes-and-a-very-expensive-fish-the-secrets-of-the-kerguelen-plateau-123351

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lydia Woodyatt, Senior Lecturer, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University

With so many external pressures, I yielded to cheating on an exam. I feel absolutely terrible as it is not what I stand for at all, a lot of people seem to hate me and I totally respect their opinion as what I did was wrong … but I’m so scared that now it will define me; before I had a perfect record and outstanding achievements and I don’t know how I can get past it. – Anonymous

Key points

• everyone makes mistakes, but they don’t define us
• our brains are wired to make us feel shame after making a mistake
• forgive yourself!

You’re not the only person who has done something you wish you hadn’t. By the time we reach adulthood most, if not all, of us have. People cheat, lie, hurt others, or fail. It’s part of the human condition.

Many people have cheated in exams. For example, nearly 30% of university students who responded to a 2012 UK survey agreed they had “submitted work taken wholly from an internet source” as their own.

Read more: When does getting help on an assignment turn into cheating?

These mistakes don’t have to define us. If we work through them in a healthy way, mistakes can help shape who we are, what we care about, and how we treat others.

At the time, mistakes can be painful. It can seem to be this huge thing, occupying lots of our thoughts, impacting how we see ourselves and making it feel like everyone else will be focused on this failure forever.

But think of someone you know who has made a mistake. Do you spend all your time thinking about that person’s failure – is that failure all the person is to you? Probably not. Humans spend most of their time thinking about themselves, and humans have lots of ways of reconciling, forgiving and forgetting.

So why does our brain make us feel like it’s the end of the world when we fail?

Blame our brains

Humans are a group species. Our brains have evolved to pay attention to when people might exclude or judge us for being a bad or inappropriate group member.

When we do something wrong, our feelings act like an alert signal; a red flashing yucky feeling telling us there is a problem. These guilty feelings can be especially bad if we think about our mistake in certain ways. Thoughts like:

“This is going to affect how everyone sees me!”

or

“People are never going to trust me again!”

Blowing up the negative consequences in your mind, predicting the future in a negative way, or rehearsing how bad a person you are, are types of thinking that can send that red alert into overdrive.

Another way we keep the red alert on is if we avoid the issue and don’t take time to work through what happened. Research shows avoiding things that make us feel shame can actually just make us feel worse.

Instead, you can learn to forgive yourself. Start by taking responsibility – rather than trying to explain it away or avoid it, own up to it and say to yourself “yep, I did that”.

Read more: If someone hurt you this year, forgiving them may improve your health (as long as you’re safe, too)

Then, you need to work through what happened. Research shows reaffirming our values is one of the most effective ways of working through our wrongdoing and forgiving ourselves.

Forgive yourself. Here’s how

Reaffirm your values

Write a letter to yourself answering the following questions:

1. What value have I broken in this situation? (Values are what character traits you find important. These could be generosity, fairness or authenticity. If you have trouble identifying your values, this can help.)
2. Why is that value important to me?
3. What is a time in the past I have acted in a way that is consistent with that value?
4. What would it mean to act consistent with that value over the next day, week and month? (This may include confessing to someone, an apology or a commitment to do it right next time.)

Write three ideas of what you could do, and plan to do one of them this week. Remind yourself of these values and your commitment to them whenever you feel guilty.

Accept your emotions as feelings, not facts

Emotions are part of the way our body responds to a situation. But they are not perfect. They are like a torch in a dark room, focusing our attention on a small part of the room, but missing other things.

Write a thought diary of your feelings and thoughts. Then go back over what you have written and think:

Is this really the full picture of what is happening, or am I keeping my alert button on by practising unhelpful thinking?

Remember you’re a human

When we fail, we sometimes hold ourselves up against perfect standards. But we are human, which means we don’t always have perfect knowledge of the future, control of our own feelings, or wisdom about how to act in the moment.

Instead of beating yourself up about what you could or should have done, acknowledge you are not perfect – then choose to pursue your values moving forward.

Talk it out with others

Often we keep our failures private. But since our brain is monitoring for risk of rejection, it stays active in case others find out or are already judging us because they know.

Talking it out with others can help because we have also evolved a sense of compassion and can often be kinder to others than to ourselves.

Seek help

Underlying depression or other health or mental-health issues may be making our feelings of guilt, regret, shame, fear or embarrassment worse. If your feelings don’t change (especially if they continue for two weeks or more) then it is probably a good idea to chat to a psychologist, counsellor or your doctor.

Read more: ‘What is wrong with me? I’m never happy and I hate school’

You can also call Beyond Blue at any time on 1300 22 4636; or Kids Helpline, a service specifically for children and young people aged 5-25 on 1800 55 1800.

I Need to Know is an ongoing series for teens in search of reliable, confidential advice about life’s tricky questions.

If you’re a teenager and have a question you’d like answered by an expert, you can:

Please tell us your name (you can use a fake name if you don’t want to be identified), age and which city you live in. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

– ref. ‘I cheated on a school exam and I feel terrible. How can I get past this?’ – http://theconversation.com/i-cheated-on-a-school-exam-and-i-feel-terrible-how-can-i-get-past-this-122646

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Raul A. Barreto, Senior Lecturer, University of Adelaide

There is a reasonable expectation that autonomous vehicles will dominate the future of transport. Utopian visions suggest these driverless vehicles will lead to dramatic changes to our cities and their transportation.

Autonomous vehicles operating on a network would allow traffic to move safely and seamlessly through cities. They would use less space per vehicle. Traffic flow would be unhindered by traffic lights or other traditional driver signals.

More efficient transportation would use less fuel. Urban spaces could be repurposed as parking needs virtually disappear.

But this utopian vision depends on a range of factors. In particular, these predictions largely rely on how current car drivers respond to the advent of autonomous vehicles.

Our research suggests people’s attitudes to driving and their cars could limit the predicted benefits to traffic flow and city efficiency, at least during the initial transition to driverless vehicles.

What did the research look at?

The research uses the city of Adelaide as a test case. We surveyed commuter preferences for the acceptance and use of driverless vehicles, as compared with their current preferences.

We then developed two scenarios. One is for the medium to long term, when vehicles are fully autonomous. The other is for the short-term transitional phase, during which a mix of conventional and driverless vehicles share the roads.

Using traffic-flow data for Adelaide, we analysed the implications of a shift towards driverless vehicles for:

• traffic flow
• the number of vehicles needed to service commuter demands
• parking
• broader land use in the city centre.

Adelaide is unusual, as a result of its history as a planned city, in having a discrete number of entry and exit points. This allows us to map more accurately average daily traffic flows into and out of the city centre.

Our analysis focuses on three of the city’s gateways, as shown below.

We measured flows through these intersections on a typical day. Using minute-by-minute real-time data, monitored at traffic signals, we created a picture of typical traffic flows into and out of the CBD.

We also surveyed commuters to discern their current transport preferences versus their perceptions of the hypothetical future.

Combining this information, we then describe possible outcomes of the transition to automated vehicles.

What did the survey find?

Below is a summary of the survey of a representative sample of 526 regular commuters into the Adelaide CBD.

We queried respondents’ willingness to carshare by taking advantage of common knowledge of real-world company Uber.

We also investigated respondents’ attitudes by positing a scenario in which driverless vehicles are the norm and conventional driving is a luxury. We assessed likely resistance to autonomous vehicles by considering their willingness to pay to continue to drive traditional vehicles in this scenario.

Key results are shown below.

Attitudes and costs will shape transition

Two observations flow from the responses.

First, it seems likely drivers’ prevailing attitudes to vehicle ownership may be influencing their attitudes to autonomous vehicles. For many, their car represents a status symbol. They feel a strong personal attachment to it.

Second, cost may be a crucial factor in take-up of driverless vehicles. As costs fall, most commuters might bow to financial pressure to shift to autonomous vehicles. However, a minority might lobby to keep a mix of driverless and conventional vehicles on the road.

Our analysis suggests Adelaide could reduce its current vehicle fleet by as much as 76% in the utopian driverless future. This is due to current high car dependence and long commuting times and distances at peak periods.

Yet some predicted benefits, notably the very large reduction in vehicle numbers and better traffic flows, might not be achieved in the near to medium term. This is due to uncertainty about how the transition to a totally driverless city will be achieved and how long it will take.

Key factors are commuter attitudes to driving and autonomous vehicles, the price of the technology, and consumer attitudes to car sharing. Attitudes to car ownership and driving appear to be central to how the transition will play out.

The survey suggests the pleasure of driving themselves, which a substantial minority of Adelaide drivers are unwilling to forgo, could limit the benefits that much of the academic literature optimistically predicts.

Public transport may also be adversely affected as riders switch to driverlesss vehicles. This shift could increase vehicle flows in peak periods, making congestion worse during the transition to complete adoption.

We support the oft-suggested argument that large-scale adoption of driverless vehicles risks stimulating an increase in urban sprawl. In the city centre, parking demand is likely to reduce greatly, allowing more diverse land uses and intensification of economic activity. But parking outside the CBD might increase, as driverless vehicles need not park near their users’ or owners’ workplace, at the expense of amenity.

Our analysis strongly suggests urban policy will be needed to counter the potential negative effects of introducing driverless vehicles.

– ref. How we feel about our cars means the road to a driverless future may not be smooth – http://theconversation.com/how-we-feel-about-our-cars-means-the-road-to-a-driverless-future-may-not-be-smooth-125874

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

Thirteen leading economists have declared their hands in the stand off between the government and the Governor of the Reserve Bank over the best way to boost the economy.

All 13 back Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe.

They say that, by itself, the Reserve Bank cannot be expected to do everything extra that will be needed to boost the economy.

All think that extra stimulus will be needed, and all think it’ll have to come from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, as well as the bank.

All but two say the treasurer should be prepared to sacrifice his goal of an immediate budget surplus in order to provide it.

The 13 are members of the 20-person economic forecasting panel assembled by The Conversation at the start of this year.

All but one have been surprised by the extent of the economic slowdown.

Read more: No surplus, no share market growth, no lift in wage growth. Economic survey points to bleaker times post-election

The 13 represent ten universities in five states.

Among them are macroeconomists, economic modellers, former Treasury, IMF, OECD and Reserve Bank officials and a former government minister.

The Bank needs help

At issue is the government’s contention, spelled out by Frydenberg’s treasury secretary Steven Kennedy in evidence to the Senate last month, that there is usually little role for government spending and tax (“fiscal”) measures in stimulating the economy in the event of a downturn.

Absent a crisis, economic weakness was “best responded to by monetary policy”.

Monetary policy – the adjustment of interest rates by the Reserve Bank – is nearing the end of its effectiveness in its present form. The bank has already cut its cash rate to close to zero (0.75%) and will consider another cut on Tuesday.

It is preparing to consider so-called “unconventional” measures, including buying bonds in order to force longer-term interest rates down toward zero.

Read more: If you want to boost the economy, big infrastructure projects won’t cut it: new Treasury boss

Governor Lowe has made the case for “fiscal support, including through spending on infrastructure” saying there are limits to what monetary policy can achieve.

The 13 economists unanimously back the Governor.

Seven of the 13 say what is needed most is fiscal stimulus (including extra government spending on infrastructure), three say both fiscal and monetary measures are needed, and three want government “structural reform”, including measures to help the economy deal with climate change and remove red tape.

None say the Reserve Bank should be left to fight the downturn by itself without further help from the government.

There is plenty of room for fiscal stimulus, particularly infrastructure spending – Mark Crosby, Monash University

I agree with the emerging consensus that monetary policy is no longer effective when interest rates are so low – Ross Guest, Griffith University

It is time for coordinated monetary and fiscal policies to boost domestic demand – Guay Lim, Melbourne Institute

The surplus can wait

Eleven of the 13 believe the government should abandon its determination to deliver a budget surplus in 2019-20.

Economic modeller Renee Fry-McKibbin says the government should “ease its position of a surplus at all costs”.

Former Commonwealth Treasury and ANZ economist Warren Hogan says achieving a surplus in the current environment would have “zero value”.

Former OECD director Adrian Blundell-Wignall says that rather than aiming for an overall budget surplus, the government should aim instead for an “net operating balance”, a proposal that was put forward by Scott Morrison as treasurer in 2017.

The approach would move worthwhile infrastructure spending and borrowing onto a separate balance sheet that would not need to balance.

Political debate would focus instead on whether the annual operating budget was balanced or in deficit.

Former treasury and IMF economist Tony Makin is one of only two economists surveyed who backs the government’s continued pursuit of a surplus, saying annual interest payments on government debt have reached A$14 billion, “four times the foreign aid budget and almost twice as much as federal spending on higher education”.

Further deterioration of the balance via “facile fiscal stimulus” would risk Australia’s creditworthiness.

However Makin doesn’t think the government should leave everything to the Reserve Bank.

He has put forward a program of extra spending on infrastructure projects that meet rigorous criteria, along with company tax cuts or investment allowances paid for by government spending cuts.

Former trade minister Craig Emerson also wants an investment allowance, suggesting businesses should be able to immediately deduct 20% of eligible spending.

It’s an idea put forward by Labor during the 2019 election campaign. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has indicated something like it is being considered for the 2020 budget.

Emerson says it should be possible to deliver both the investment allowance and a budget surplus.

Quantitative easing would be a worry

Five of the 13 economists are concerned about the Reserve Bank adopting so-called “unconvential” measures such as buying government and private sector bonds in order to push long-term interest rates down toward zero, a practice known as quantitative easing.

Jeffrey Sheen and Renee Fry-McKibbin say it should be kept in reserve for emergencies.

Adrian Blundell-Wignall and Mark Crosby say it hasn’t worked in the countries that have tried it.

A quantitative easing avalanche policy by the European central bank larger than the entire UK economy has left inflation below target and growth fading. Quantitative easing destroys the interbank market, under-prices risk, and encourages leverage and asset speculation – Adrian Blundell-Wignall

Steve Keen says in both Europe and the United States quantitative easing enriched banks and drove up asset prices but did little to boost consumer spending, “because the rich don’t consume much of the wealth”.

The treasurer should step up

Taken together, the responses of the 13 economists suggest it is ultimately the government’s responsibility to ensure the economy doesn’t weaken any further, and that it would be especially unwise to palm it off on to the Reserve Bank at a time when the bank’s cash rate is close to zero and the effectiveness of the unconventional measures it might adopt is in doubt.

Measures the government could adopt include increasing the rate of the Newstart unemployment benefit, boosting funding for schools and skills training, borrowing for well-chosen infrastructure projects with a social rate of return greater than the cost of borrowing, further tax cuts that double as tax reform (including further tax breaks for business investment) and spending more on programs aimed at avoiding the worst of climate change and adapting to it.

The economists are backing the governor in his plea for help. They think he needs it.

The 13 economists surveyed

Read more: Buckle up. 2019-20 survey finds the economy weak and heading down, and that’s ahead of surprises

– ref. We asked 13 economists how to fix things. All back the RBA governor over the treasurer – http://theconversation.com/we-asked-13-economists-how-to-fix-things-all-back-the-rba-governor-over-the-treasurer-126283

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

In her landmark 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argues classical Hollywood style is built upon the fetishisation of the female body.

Female characters are frequently photographed in wide, full body shots, constructed to please an imaginary male viewer, and male protagonists tend to be situated closer to the camera, implying agency. Classical Hollywood style, Mulvey suggests, turns all popular film into a kind of striptease.

As the star-studded Hustlers struts across our screens, we can reflect on how strippers have been portrayed since the beginning of cinema and ask: is there anything left to take off?

Classic hard knocks stories

This celebration of the spectacle of female erotic energy is not limited to film, with its history going back to the earliest recorded art works including Venus of Willendorf. Though the term “striptease” was first used in 1931, the concept stretches back to Sumerian myth. Striptease was standardised in 18th century London brothels.

Early Hollywood stripper-protagonists were rare until the sleazey VHS boom of the 1980s (see Abel Ferrara’s Fear City featuring an oft-naked Melanie Griffith). One exception was Barbara Stanwyck in Lady of Burlesque (1943), directed by Hollywood great William Wellman.

In the 1960s, two films established the standard stripper narrative – Gypsy (1962) and The Stripper (1963), which follow failed actresses stripping to survive.

Such films are moralistic to a fault, going to absurd lengths to prove the stripper is virtuous but driven to strip by extreme hardship.

Cassidy in The Wrestler – for which Marisa Tomei received an Oscar nomination – is a single mum. Erin (Demi Morre) in Striptease is toughing it through a custody battle. In Flashdance, one of the 1980s most stirring dance films, heroine Alex (Jennifer Beals) strips by night and welds by day, while she waits to audition for a classical ballet school.

Watching and judging

The irony of these hard knocks melodramas that position stripping as a last resort is that stripping is used to attract viewers to the film in the first place. The imagined viewer is able to feel morally superior while still reaping the erotic fruits of nude dancing.

Due to novelty – and the reverence with which women are supposed to treat sex in movieland – films featuring male strippers, like Magic Mike and The Full Monty focus more on the joys and pitfalls of performance than on a sense of desperation (though both these films maintain the “tough times” structure).

Paul Verhoeven’s critically lambasted 1995 film Showgirls eschews such moralism.

With his signature ice-cold craftiness, Verhoeven takes a functional approach to stripping, looking at it as a kind of sensory technology in a broader system of corporate American entertainment. Verhoeven manages to de-eroticise the film’s bountiful nudity. Ironically, this was one of the complaints critics had against the film, with Roger Ebert lamenting it “contains no true eroticism”.

There is something detached about Verhoeven’s camera, and this side-stepping of any attempt at intimacy or empathy with the characters makes for a more interesting film than its stock-standard plot would suggest, involving a dancer trying to make it as a Vegas showgirl and stepping on the throats of colleagues along the way.

Hustlers

Lorene Scafaria’s acclaimed new film, Hustlers, focuses less on the morality of stripping, instead offering a satisfying heist movie in the context of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

The stripping in the film is depicted as akin to other high-risk vocations, the strip club a place of precarious employment. When the GFC damages business, a group of savvy strippers begin ripping off rich businessmen. While it’s easy to read the plot in terms of gender – empowered women getting their own against predatory men – it’s equally effective as a kind of class critique.

Roselyn Keo, on whose life Hustlers is based, states her story has more in common with the Wolf of Wall Street than Flashdance. It’s no surprise the film has been popular: the combination of an outlandish true story with a cast dominated by celebrity pop stars effectively taps into the zeitgeist.

Art of the strip

There are many strip sequences in Hollywood films that are incidental to the main narrative (Pussycat Doll romps in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, club hi-jinks in Beverley Hills Cop, Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, or Olive’s dance sequence in teen comedy Easy A).

One of the most legendary strip sequences in Hollywood history indeed does not involve a stripper, and contains no nudity. In Charles Vidor’s hard-boiled noir film Gilda, Rita Hayworth removes her black satin glove while lip-syncing Put the Blame on Mame.

As Mulvey writes, film is an erotically-charged medium, trading on our enjoyment of watching other people pretending they’re not being watched. The striptease simply offers an amplified version of that spectacular pleasure.

– ref. Strippers on film: battlers, showgirls and hustlers – http://theconversation.com/strippers-on-film-battlers-showgirls-and-hustlers-125882

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Johan Lidberg, Associate Professor, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University

Finally, some good news from the weirdo-sphere that is social media. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced that, effective November 22, the microblogging platform will ban all political advertising – globally.

This is a momentous move by Twitter. It comes when Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg are under increasing pressure to deal with the amount of mis- and disinformation published via paid political advertising on Facebook.

Zuckerberg recently told a congress hearing Facebook had no plans of fact-checking political ads, and he did not answer a direct question from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if Facebook would take down political ads found to be untrue. Not a good look.

A few days after Zuckerberg’s train wreck appearance before the congress committee, Twitter announced its move.

Read more: Merchants of misinformation are all over the internet. But the real problem lies with us

While Twitter should get credit for its sensible move, the microblogging company is tiny compared to Facebook and Google. So, until the two giants change, Twitter’s political ad ban will have little effect on elections around the globe.

A symptom of the democratic flu

It’s important to call out Google on political advertising. The company often manages to fly under the radar on this issue, hiding behind Facebook, which takes most of the flack.

The global social media platforms are injecting poison into liberal democratic systems around the globe. The misinformation and outright lies they allow to be published on their platforms is partly responsible for the increasingly bitter deep partisan divides between different sides of politics in most mature liberal democracies.

Add to this the micro targeting of voters illustrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and a picture emerges of long-standing democratic systems under extreme stress. This is clearly exemplified by the UK parliament’s paralysis over Brexit and the canyon-deep political divides in the US.

Read more: Why you should talk to your children about Cambridge Analytica

Banning political advertising only deals with a symptom of the democratic flu the platforms are causing. The root cause of the flu is the fact social media platforms are no longer only platforms – they are publishers.

Until they acknowledge this and agree to adhere to the legal and ethical frameworks connected with publishing, our democracies will not recover.

Not platforms, but publishers

Being a publisher is complex and much more expensive than being a platform. You have to hire editorial staff (unless you can create algorithms advanced enough to do editorial tasks) to fact-check, edit and curate content. And you have to become a good corporate citizen, accepting you have social responsibilities.

Convincing the platforms to accept their publisher role is the most long-term and sustainable way of dealing with the current toxic content issue.

Accepting publisher status could be a win-win, where the social media companies rebuild trust with the public and governments by acting ethcially and socially responsibly, stopping the poisoning of our democracies.

Mark Zuckerberg claims Facebook users being able to publish lies and misinformation is a free speech issue. It is not. Free speech is a privilege as well as a right and, like all privileges, it comes with responsibilities and limitations.

Examples of limitations are defamation laws and racial vilification and discrimination laws. And that’s just the legal framework. The strong ethical frame work that applies to publishing should be added to this.

Ownership concentration like never before

Then, there’s the global social media oligopoly issue. Never before in recorded human history have we seen any industry achieve a level of ownership concentration displayed by the social media companies. This is why this issue is so deeply serious. It’s global, it reaches billions and the money and profits involved is staggering.

Read more: The fightback against Facebook is getting stronger

Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, got it absolutely right when he in his New York Times article pointed out the Federal Trade Commission – the US equivalent to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission – got it wrong when they allowed Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp.

Hughes wants Facebook broken up and points to the attempts from parts of US civil society moving in this direction. He writes:

This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.

Yesterday, I posted on my Facebook timeline for the first time since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. I made the point that after Twitter’s announcement, the ball is now squarely in Facebook’s and Google’s courts.

For research and professional reasons, I cannot delete my Facebook account. But I can pledge to not be an active Facebook user until the company grows up and shoulders its social responsibility as an ethical publisher that enhances our democracies instead of undermining them.

– ref. Twitter is banning political ads – but the real battle for democracy is with Facebook and Google – http://theconversation.com/twitter-is-banning-political-ads-but-the-real-battle-for-democracy-is-with-facebook-and-google-126260

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

British-born scientist M. Stanley Whittingham, of Binghamton University, was one of three scientists who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing lithium-ion batteries.

Maybe you know exactly what a lithium-ion battery is but even if you don’t, chances are you’re carrying one right now. They’re the batteries used to power mobile phones, laptops and even electric cars.

When it comes to energy storage, they’re vastly more powerful than conventional batteries and you can recharge them many more times.

Their widespread use is driving global demand for the metal lithium – demand that Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese this week said Australia should do more to meet.

The University of Queensland’s Mark Blaskovich, who trained in chemistry and penned this article about Whittingham’s selection for the chemistry Nobel Prize, sat down with the award-winner this week.

They discussed what the future of battery science may hold and how we might address some of the environmental and fire risks around lithium-ion batteries.

He began by asking M. Stanley Whittingham how lithium batteries differ from conventional, lead-acid batteries, like the kind you might find in your car.

Read more: ‘Highly charged story’: chemistry Nobel goes to inventors of lithium-ion batteries

New to podcasts?

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Trust Me, I’m An Expert on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear us on Stitcher, Spotify or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Trust Me, I’m An Expert.

Read more: Trust Me, I’m An Expert: what science says about how to lose weight and whether you really need to

Additional credits

Recording and production assistance by Thea Blaskovich

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks.

Announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019

Images

Shutterstock

– ref. Nearly all your devices run on lithium batteries. Here’s a Nobel Prizewinner on his part in their invention – and their future – http://theconversation.com/nearly-all-your-devices-run-on-lithium-batteries-heres-a-nobel-prizewinner-on-his-part-in-their-invention-and-their-future-126197

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Belinda Gibbons, Senior lecturer, University of Wollongong

The recent student-led climate protests reflect the need for schools to provide opportunities to nurture their students’ global, environmentally conscious minds. Modern education isn’t only about teaching kids the traditional concepts of say, English and Mathematics – it is also about helping to develop confident adults and informed citizens.

The curriculum goes some way to doing this. The NSW geography curriculum for years 11 and 12, for instance, suggests kids learn about responsible values and attitudes towards sustainability. But it doesn’t specify how these attitudes and values should be taught, leaving it up to the schools and teachers to design the methods.

Read more: Ever wondered what our curriculum teaches kids about climate change? The answer is ‘not much’

Research shows kids are more engaged when they’re actively involved in their learning, rather than learning passively through listening or reading.

Schools can engage students in being environmentally conscious by taking steps to become more sustainable themselves.

Our faculty helps high schools develop initiatives to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. We recently spoke to principals of three schools in our region to see how they’re teaching their students sustainability while taking steps themselves to lower their energy generation, decrease waste and increase their recycling.

Students saving energy

Most schools in our region (the Illawara) have solar panels. In fact, more than 1,400 schools across NSW have had solar panels installed since 2010 to generate at least some of their electricity. Under a project that ended in 2013, around 60% of Australian schools had solar panels installed.

Dapto High School’s agriculture, science and maths classrooms were one of the first in Australia to pilot the Hivve sustainability classroom. This is an initiative by the Australian government and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and has been used by schools in NSW, QLD and the NT.

The sustainable classroom uses solar energy, and has a monitor in the classroom so kids and teachers can see how much energy they’re using. It also tells the staff and students how their school’s energy consumption compares with other similar schools.

The school’s principal and a team of so-called “green student warriors” can also get this information sent to an app on their phone. So they can see from home if air conditioning or lights have been left on in the gym after a game, for instance.

Accessing live energy data also helps the school manage events requiring a lot of energy, such as air-conditioning in summer. This way when students are not indoors, they can switch off the air-con to reduce waste and excess costs.

Waste management audits

At Edmond Rice College, students have been given the freedom to organise one of the first local student-led sustainability conferences. Students came together from local public and private schools to learn, discuss and tackle the environmental challenges in their communities.

This day involved presentations from young climate activists, as well as teams working on how to eliminate plastic water bottles. The day ended with school students sharing their top environmental actions.

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

The school’s environment team also recently conducted their second waste management audit. Students and teachers recorded and collected waste from the playground and general waste bins, as well as the newly implemented blue paper bins.

They did this to see if bins were used for their intended purposes and whether any of the bins were contaminated with waste that didn’t need to be there. Students were tasked with sorting and recording waste into categories and weighing and comparing it to previous years of waste.

They concluded less waste was being put into landfill and more was being recycled. They found due to the blue paper bins, the school had recycled 100kg of paper had that year.

Recycling action plan

Holy Spirit College engages in a variety of initiatives alongside their student environment group. The school put out a call for students interested in being part of the group. Since then, around 40 members have joined.

The environmental group has been in charge of installing Vinnie’s blue bins around the school to recycle plastic bottles and cans. They also aim to raise awareness of sustainability and recycling through different activities such as workshops for students to make reusable tote bags out of old t-shirts.

Bettina Grimston, the director of the environment group, said she was amazed with the students’ passion to “save the planet”. She agreed “there’s no planet B”, and it’s the duty of educators to help students be aware of their actions.

Read more: Students striking for climate action are showing the exact skills employers look for

– ref. Involving kids in making schools sustainable spreads the message beyond the classroom – http://theconversation.com/involving-kids-in-making-schools-sustainable-spreads-the-message-beyond-the-classroom-119470

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joseph Ibrahim, Professor, Health Law and Ageing Research Unit, Department of Forensic Medicine, Monash University

After many months of hearings across the country, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety has published its interim report.

Titled Neglect, the commissioners were courageous and accurate in laying out the fundamental issues facing the aged care system in Australia. They demonstrated an under-resourced system where the failures in delivering appropriate care are shocking and widespread. They noted the aged care industry fosters a culture where the voices of older people, their families and carers are not heard.

Finally, the commissioners highlighted the absence of accountability and the lack of transparency by governing, regulatory and provider organisations.

Read more: Aged care royal commission benefits Generation X: it’s too late for the silent generation

The interim report identified three areas where action should be taken now. These are important to address, though change will be slow and mostly benefit future generations.

And unfortunately, rectifying these three areas will not make the system better overall. The underlying causes of the problems plaguing Australia’s aged care system remain deeply entrenched and systemic.

1. Home care packages

Home care packages aim to support older people with complex care needs to stay at home, rather than entering residential aged care.

At June 30 2019, there were 72,062 people waiting on a home care package. The commission recommends increased funding to reduce the waiting list. This is an obvious policy strategy that has been identified for some time.

But notably, Australia doesn’t have a standing army of personal carers or health professionals waiting to step in to provide these additional services. Increasing the number of home care packages will require more health professionals and care workers who have the skill set and desire to provide services in the home.

Read more: As home care packages become big business, older people are not getting the personalised support they need

2. Reducing the use of chemical restraint

Chemical restraint is when residents are given sedative, antipsychotic and antidepressant medications to “control” their behaviour. The commission recommends reducing this practice, which is widespread across residential aged care.

They propose improving access to and strengthening the use of what’s called the “Residential Medication Management Review”. This provides for a pharmacist to examine and advise on the use of prescribed medications for aged care residents.

Read more: There’s almost always a better way to care for nursing home residents than restraining them

But this will be of limited benefit as it fails to address the fundamental factors which contribute to the use of restraint, including a culture where the practice is accepted, shortages of staff, and inadequately trained and skilled staff.

We can’t reduce the use of restraint with money alone; it will require a cultural shift in clinical and aged care practice. This includes having staff who understand the unique needs of a person with dementia and are trained to respond appropriately.

3. Getting young people out

The third area is stopping the flow of younger people with a disability entering residential aged care – and speeding up the process of relocating those younger people who are already in residential aged care into community living.

Advocacy for the plight of young people in residential aged care is not new. Over the past two decades neither two investigations by the Australian Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee, nor the roll out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, have been able to reduce the number of young people living in nursing homes.

The logistics of building new housing and developing services in areas of need take careful planning and time.

Read more: ‘It felt like a prison’ – too many young Australians are still stuck in nursing homes

These are all worthwhile goals, but…

These solutions are neither simple nor straightforward. Additional funding is needed, but at the same time, providing more money doesn’t solve these problems. In fact, releasing large amounts of money into the aged care sector without the proper oversights to ensure safe, effective, efficient and person-centred care could cause harm.

The two major barriers to achieving these goals are an absence of political will to act – evident in repeated failures to implement recommendations from multiple earlier inquiries into aged care – alongside a failure to recognise the cause of poor care is systemic.

The commission’s report is a call to action. Yet the minister for ageing cannot solve this crisis alone. We need to see a whole of government response:

• the treasurer should be asking tougher questions about how our taxpayer funds are allocated and spent
• the minister for population, cities and urban infrastructure should be examining how and where nursing homes are located and integrated into the community
• the attorney general should be addressing elder abuse and neglect
• the minister for health should be building better partnerships with acute hospitals and general practice to improve care
• the minister for education should be creating programs and incentives for new graduate programs to train the skilled staff needed now and into the future.

Read more: Nearly 2 out of 3 nursing homes are understaffed. These 10 charts explain why aged care is in crisis

There are no simple or quick fixes here. But a whole of government response, alongside a concerted effort from the aged care industry, would be a good start.

The commission’s final report is due in November 2020.

– ref. The aged care royal commission’s 3 areas of immediate action are worthy, but won’t fix a broken system – http://theconversation.com/the-aged-care-royal-commissions-3-areas-of-immediate-action-are-worthy-but-wont-fix-a-broken-system-126208

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

University of Canberra Deputy Vice-Chancellor Leigh Sullivan discusses the findings of the aged care royal commission’s interim report with Michelle Grattan. They also talk about the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt’s announcement of an Indigenous “voice to government”, and Anthony Albanese’s first of a series of ‘vision statements’.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the aged care royal commission report – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-aged-care-royal-commission-report-126269

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andy Stewart, Dean, College of Sport & Exercise Science and Chair of VU Sport Strategy, Victoria University

Not long ago, the Wallabies were a rugby powerhouse. But their recent quarter-final defeat to England at the Rugby World Cup has called into question the status of Australia as a leading rugby nation.

Overall, Australian rugby union still seems to be in a strong position when you take into account the results of other competitions.

There is a solid group of young players in the pipeline, most notably those on the Junior Wallabies team, which was runner-up at this year’s U20 Rugby World Cup. Also this year, the Australian Schoolboys beat their New Zealand counterparts for the first time in seven years, while at the domestic club level there has been a resurgence of crowds in the Sydney Shute Shield competition.

Participation is also growing in the women’s game. After the inaugural Super W season in 2018, there was a 20% bump in the numbers of players in Australia. The Australian women’s national team also captured a gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics in rugby sevens.

Read more: Points for tries? The Rugby World Cup shows how bonus schemes can come unstuck

Australia has one of the highest overall participation rates for rugby union in the world, with 230,000 registered players (below just France, South Africa and England).

But even if the game is doing well from these perspectives, there is still some angst about the Wallabies’ lack of recent success and the declining prominence of rugby union in the overall sporting landscape in Australia.

Competition with AFL and other sports

The biggest challenge for rugby in Australia may be its relative lack of popularity in the highly competitive domestic sports market. Australians still appear more interested in domestic sporting events than international competitions.

The AFL, in particular, has a rabid fan base in parts of Australia, but there is no real international outlet for the sport. In the NRL, the State of Origin and Grand Final attract more interest than the Kangaroos’ (national league side) results.

Soccer is the highest participation team sport in Australia (14.8% of children play soccer, compared to 8.5% for Australian rules football). Plus, as a global sport, it is appealing to an increasingly multicultural fan base. In a commercial sense, soccer is a sleeping giant in Australia.

The Wallabies are underpinned by the four professional franchises competing in Super Rugby, which is split between five countries (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina and Japan).

Read more: Four reasons rugby union in Australia is struggling – despite the Wallabies’ success

The international nature of this competition makes it difficult for the sport to grow a strong fan base at home. Compared to AFL and NRL, where the majority of the teams (and matches) are based in Melbourne and Sydney, respectively, Super Rugby matches are played interstate or overseas.

As such, rugby supporters only have easy access to a few home matches and have to rely on television for the other games. Unfortunately, due to broadcasting rights, Super Rugby matches can only be watched on pay-per-view television. And because of time zone differences, they are often broadcast at inconvenient hours.

Super Rugby matches in Australia attracted an average television audience of 71,000 per match last year, but in the five metropolitan cities, the average was just 50,000. This was less than the AFL’s 167,000, the NRL’s 164,000 and even the A-League’s 51,000.

Fewer pathways to the Wallabies

All Super Rugby countries face the same issues. Nonetheless, both South Africa and New Zealand have bigger rugby fan bases than Australia.

This is partly due to the way teams in those countries directly engage with their fans. Similarly to AFL teams in Australia, rugby teams in South Africa and New Zealand are deeply rooted and well-established parts of their communities, organising social events and supporting charities or local clubs.

Another difference is that both countries have a strong local rugby competition (one level below Super Rugby) that can be easily followed by supporters.

Australia has a similar competition (the National Rugby Championship), which could help increase the popularity of the sport. However, the competition has been poorly advertised and its broadcasting rights awarded to pay-per-view television.

Furthermore, the competition is scheduled around the AFL and NRL finals. In order to increase national interest, Rugby Australia should change the time of the year when the NRC is played.

Read more: Why talent transfer is key for a winning rugby Sevens team

Rugby’s popularity received another blow when one of the Super Rugby teams, the Perth-based Western Force was axed from the league.

The sacrifice of this team seemed at odds with the growth of the game. The Western Force created a pathway for players to join the Wallabies and popularised the sport in a state without a team in the NRL. WA now has the third-highest rugby participation rate in the country, behind NSW and Queensland.

Another issue for the Wallabies is the current policy of Rugby Australia not to pick any overseas-based player for teams unless they meet strict conditions (minimum number of international caps). South Africa recently relaxed its rules to include overseas-based players – and reached the final of this year’s World Cup.

Better leadership at the top

The sport may now be in a downward spiral in Australia. The lack of recent success for the Wallabies could lead to decreasing numbers of fans, attendance at matches, broadcasting deals and sponsorships. It could also lead more domestic professional players to move to Europe or Japan, where there are lucrative contracts on offer.

For the Wallabies to return to their former high standards, Rugby Australia must find ways to grow interest in the sport and increase the community engagement in rugby from the local to international level.

The athletes are definitely here. Now, it’s just up to the sport’s governing body to show the leadership and foresight sorely lacking at the moment.

– ref. Are the Wallabies’ struggles a sign of rugby union’s decline in Australia? – http://theconversation.com/are-the-wallabies-struggles-a-sign-of-rugby-unions-decline-in-australia-125711

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein (OAM), Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, University of Melbourne

It would be nice if the “facts” being thrown around in the debate over the Cashless Debit Card were peer-reviewed, or even just evidence-based.

Instead, there are anecdotes. And it’s these that are being used to justify the government’s decision to spend A$128.8 million over four years continuing the existing trial of the cashless debit card in five sites in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia and extending it to Cape York and all of the Northern Territory.

The extension will lift the number of people on the card from 11,000 to 33,000. Most will be Indigenous people – its disproportionate targeting has already attracted the attention of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and the Human Rights Commission.

The cashless card was recommended to Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a report from mining billionaire Andrew Forrest in 2014. He initially called it the “Healthy Welfare Card”.

It wasn’t a new idea. Some A$1 billion dollars had already been spent on income management programs in the past, many of which had failed to meet their stated objectives.

It’s been tried before

The biggest was the Basics Card introduced as part of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (the “Intervention”) which was only made possible through the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Research published by the Australian Research Council funded Life Course Centre of Excellence found its introduction was correlated with negative impacts on children, including reductions in birth weight and school attendance.

It points to several possible explanations, including increased stress on mothers, disrupted financial arrangements within households, and confusion about how to access funds.

The government has not addressed these serious issues. Instead, it now seeks to place those who have been left on the basics card for over ten years now, on to the cashless debit card.

What was ‘Basics’ has become ‘Indue’

The “Indue” Cashless Debit Card trials underway since 2016 direct 80% of each payment to the card (Forrest asked for 100%) where it can only be spent on things such as food, clothes, health items and hygiene products. Purchases of alcohol and withdrawals of cash are not permitted.

The trials are compulsorily for everyone living in the trial sites receiving a disability, parenting, carer, unemployment or youth allowance payment.

My own research in the East Kimberley found it makes those people’s lives harder.

Those targeted are a broad group needing support for a broad range of reasons, yet all are treated as if they have issues with alcohol or drugs or gambling.

Most of the people on it do indeed have a common problem: that is trying to survive on meagre payments in remote environments with a chronically low supply of jobs.

Read more: ‘An insult’ – politicians sing the praises of the cashless welfare card, but those forced to use it disagree

Of all the claims made for the card, the least believable is that it gets its users into jobs.

What it does do is limit access to cash needed for day to day-to-day living. It makes it hard to buy second-hand goods, transport and (at some outlets) food, and can make living more expensive.

For anyone actually struggling with addiction, it can’t substitute for treatment, a concern raised by medical specialists.

While the government says the trials have been community-led, in reality consultation has been limited to a small group of people not subject to the card.

When leaders in the East Kimberley who had agreed to the card withdrew their support, the government continued with the trial.

Its success has not been established

In addition to relaying on anecdotes, the government continues to cite a widely condemned report by Orima Research. Among others, the Australian National Audit Office found this report was inadequate to draw any conclusions from.

Profiting from the Cashless Debit Card has been Indue, a private company whose deputy chairman up until 2013 is now the present President of the National Party, Larry Anthony.

Read more: The Cashless Debit Card Trial is working and it is vital – here’s why

Indue’s involvement is helping to create a two tiered banking system in which most people have a choice of financial providers, but those subject to the card are restricted to one, which provides a very different product to the others.

Indue is also not a member of the Australian Banking Association, and so is not bound by the consumer protection provisions of its Banking Code of Practice.

The inquiry is due to report next week. Given the expensive and harmful consequences of the trial, it ought to find the extension is not justified. There are better ways to spend $128.8 million that would actually help vulnerable Australians.

– ref. There’s mounting evidence against cashless debit cards, but the government is ploughing on regardless – http://theconversation.com/theres-mounting-evidence-against-cashless-debit-cards-but-the-government-is-ploughing-on-regardless-123763

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Monica Whitty, Chair in Human Factors in Cyber Security, University of Melbourne

These days, it’s hard to know whom to trust online, and how to discern genuine content from fakery.

Some degree of trust in our devices is necessary, if we’re to embrace the growing number of technologies that could potentially enhance our lives. How many of us, however, bother trying to confirm the truth, and how many blindly approach their online communications?

In a study published this week, Texas Tech University researchers tested how university students reacted when unknowingly given incorrect calculator outputs. Some students were presented with an onscreen calculator that was programmed to give the wrong answers, whereas a second group was given a properly functioning calculator.

Participants could also opt not to use the calculator, but most chose to use it – even if they had good numeracy skills. Researchers found most participants raised few or no suspicions when presented with wrong answers, until the answers were quite wrong. In addition, those with higher numeracy skills were, unsurprisingly, more suspicious of incorrect answers than others.

Do the math

To understand these results, we need to acknowledge calculators were created to make our lives easier, by reducing our mental burden. Also, there were no real consequences for participants who did not realise they were being duped.

Perhaps if they were completing their income tax forms, or applying for a loan, they may have been more thorough in checking their results. More importantly, there’s no reason an individual ought to feel suspicious about a calculator, so the participants were acting in accord with what we might expect.

People can’t spend their time deciding if they should trust every tool they use. This would consume too much time and energy. This study, however, was carried out with university students in a lab. What are the consequences of this in the real world, when much more is at stake?

Read more: Lie detectors and the lying liars who use them

The Internet and digital technologies have changed our lives for the better in so many ways. We can access information at super speeds, communicate regularly (and in fun ways) with our friends and family, and carry out mundane tasks such as banking and shopping with ease.

However, new technologies pose new challenges. Is the person you’re talking to online a real person or a bot? Are you developing a real romantic relationship on your dating app, or being conned in a romance scam?

To what extent do people blindly accept their technologies are safe, and that everyone online is who they claim to be?

Hackers are often phishing for data

The Internet of Things is already changing our lives in and outside the home. At home, there’s the constant threat that we’re being listened to and watched through our devices. In August, Apple publicly apologised for allowing contractors to listen to voice recordings of Siri users.

Similarly, as autonomous vehicles become the norm, they too pose ethical concerns. Not only do we need to be worried about the programmed moral choices on whom to harm if an accident becomes inevitable, but also whether criminals can hack into these vehicles and alter programmed decisions.

Also, there have been reports of benign-looking USB cables being rigged with small WiFi-enabled implants which, when plugged into a computer, let a nearby hacker run commands. We even need to think about the safety of health devices, such as pacemakers, which can now be hacked.

Read more: With USB-C, even plugging in can set you up to be hacked

A major problem organisations and governments are trying to solve is stopping individuals from falling victim to phishing. A phish is an email or text which is made to appear authentic and trustworthy, but isn’t.

Cybercriminals use them to trick users into revealing secret information, such as bank account details, or clicking on a link that downloads malicious software onto their computer. This software can then steal passwords and other important personal data.

Clicking on a phishing message can have long-lasting detrimental effects on an individual or an organisation, as was the case with an Australian National University data breach last year.

We’re yet to effectively train people to recognise a phish. This is partly because because they’re often realistic and difficult to identify. However, it’s also because, as illustrated in the Texas Tech University study, people tend to place undue trust in technology and devices, without pausing to check the facts.

Knowledge is power, and safety

It’s incredibly difficult to have the right balance between scepticism and trust in the digital age. Individuals need to function in the world, and the mental effort required to constantly check all information is perhaps more than what we can expect of people.

That said, one positive takeaway from the calculator study is that training is critical if we want to improve people’s cybersecurity practices. This includes training individuals on what to do as online users, how to do it, and why it’s important.

As with all learning, this needs to be repetitive and the individual needs to be motivated to learn. Without effective learning methods, end-users, organisations, and state nations will remain vulnerable to cybercriminals.

Read more: PayID data breaches show Australia’s banks need to be more vigilant to hacking

– ref. Would you notice if your calculator was lying to you? The research says probably not – http://theconversation.com/would-you-notice-if-your-calculator-was-lying-to-you-the-research-says-probably-not-126027

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor | Program Director, Undergraduate Pharmacy, University of Sydney

Whether you need to take a drug at a specific time of day depends on the medication and the condition you are treating. For some medicines, it doesn’t matter what time you take it. And for others, the pharmacist may recommend you take it at the same time each day.

But we estimate that for around 30% of all medicines, the time of day you take it does matter. And a recent study shows blood pressure medications are more effective if you take them at night.

So, how do you know if the timing of your medication is critical?

Read more: Health Check: what should you do with your unused medicine?

When timing doesn’t matter

In most cases, it’s not important when you take your medicine. For instance, you can take non-drowsy antihistamines for hay fever, or analgesics for pain when you need them. It doesn’t matter if it is morning, noon or night.

What is more important is the time interval between each dose. For instance, paracetamol needs to be taken at least four hours apart, any closer and you run the risk of taking a toxic dose.

Read more: Australia has a paracetamol poisoning problem. This is what we should be doing to reduce harm

Even when a medication doesn’t need to be taken at a particular time, the pharmacist may still recommend you take it at the same time every day anyway.

This daily pattern helps remind you to take it. An example is taking the oral contraceptive at the same time each day, simply out of habit.

For the mini pill, taking it at the same time is actually necessary. But the actual time of day can be whatever works best for you.

When does it matter?

It may seem fairly obvious to take some medicines at particular times. For example, it makes sense to taking sleeping medications, such as temazepam, at night before you go to bed.

Some antidepressants, such as amitryptyline or mirtazapine, have drowsy side effects. So it also makes sense to take them at night.

For other medicines, taking them in the morning is more logical. This is true for diuretics, such as furosemide, which helps you get rid of excess fluid via your urine; you don’t want to be getting up in the night for this.

For other medications, it’s not obvious why they have to be taken at a particular time of day. To understand why, we have to understand our circadian rhythm, our own internal body clock. Some systems in our body work at different times of day within that rhythm.

For instance, the enzymes controlling cholesterol production in your liver are most active at night. So there may be some benefit to taking lipid (cholesterol) lowering drugs, such as simvastatin, at night.

Finally, sometimes it’s important to take medications only on particular days. Methotrexate is a medicine used for rheumatoid arthritis and severe psoriasis, and the timing of this medication is critical.

Read more: What is rheumatoid arthritis, the condition tennis champion Caroline Wozniacki lives with?

You should only take it on the same day once a week, and when taken this way it is quite safe. But if you mistakenly take it daily, as happened recently with a patient in Victoria, then it can cause serious illness or even death.

What about blood pressure medicines?

One of the ways the body regulates blood pressure is through a pathway of hormones known as the renin, angiotensin and aldosterone system.

This system responds to various signals, like low blood pressure or stressful events, and controls blood volume and the constriction of blood vessels to regulate your blood pressure.

Importantly, this system is more active while you’re asleep at night. And a recent study, which found blood pressure medication is more effective at night, may change the way we use medicines to treat high blood pressure.

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

Two types of drugs typically prescribed to lower blood pressure are angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, such as perindopril, and angiotensin receptor blockers (known as ARBs), such as irbesartan. These drugs dilate blood vessels (make them wider) to reduce your blood pressure.

Until now, doctors and pharmacists have often advised patients to take these medications in the morning, assuming it’s good to have a hit of the drugs when you’re up and about.

But this study found taking blood pressure medications at night produced a significant reduction (45%) in heart disease, including fewer strokes, heart attacks and heart failure compared to taking them in the morning.

Taking them at night also meant people’s blood pressure was better controlled and their kidneys were healthier.

So if you take one of these drugs to control your blood pressure and aren’t sure what you should do, talk to your pharmacist or doctor. While evidence is building to support taking them at night, this might not be appropriate for you.

Read more: Health Check: is it OK to chew or crush your medicine?

– ref. What time of day should I take my medicine? – http://theconversation.com/what-time-of-day-should-i-take-my-medicine-125809

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie M Cairns, Research fellow, UNSW

There is a widespread belief dingoes are as good as extinct in New South Wales and nearly all dog-like animals in the wild are simply wild dogs. This belief is bolstered by legislation and policies in NSW, which have removed the word dingo and refer only to “wild dogs”.

But our research, recently published in the journal Conservation Genetics, challenges this assumption. We performed DNA ancestry testing, much like the ancestry tests available to people, on 783 wild canines killed as part of pest control measures in NSW.

Read more: The dingo is a true-blue, native Australian species

Roughly one in four of the animals we tested were pure dingoes, and most were genetically more than three-quarters dingo. Only 5 of the 783 animals we tested turned out to be feral domestic dogs with no dingo ancestry.

Dingo hotspots

Studies carried out by the CSIRO in the 1980s and ‘90s examined the skulls of wild canines in southeastern Australia, and concluded they were largely hybrids of dingoes and dogs.

In NSW all wild dogs are classified as pest animals. Under the NSW Biosecurity Act 2015 all landholders have a duty to control wild dogs to minimise the risk of negative impacts on neighbouring land.

This policy requires all public and private landholders in NSW to display signs warning when poison baits have been laid to kill wild dogs.

But our DNA testing found three hotspots of high dingo ancestry within northeastern NSW: Washpool National Park; the coast north of Port Macquarie; and the Myall lakes region.

There were more pure dingoes in these areas. Despite these positive findings, dingo-dog hybridisation is still very prevalent in NSW. Three-quarters of wild animals carry some domestic dog ancestry.

Read more: Dingoes and humans were once friends. Separating them could be why they attack

This is not entirely surprising. Domestic pet and working dogs have lived alongside dingoes for centuries. Widespread killing of dingoes also increases the risk of hybridisation because it breaks family groups apart, giving domestic dogs the opportunity to mate with dingoes. Small populations also have a higher risk of hybridisation.

Hybridisation is generally considered detrimental to conservation because it alters the genome. In the case of dingoes, hybridisation is a problem because hybrids may be different to dingoes and “true” dingoes will eventually disappear.

While our results show dingoes still exist and their genes are predominate, their conservation will be greatly helped if we can prevent further interbreeding with domestic dogs.

Time to resurrect the dingo

Our study has important implications for both how we describe dingoes, and the future conservation of dingoes in NSW. Most of the animals labelled as wild dogs in NSW had predominantly dingo DNA, and fewer than 1% were actually feral dogs.

The term wild dog obfuscates the identity of wild animals whose genes are mostly dingo but sometimes carry dog genes. For all intents and purposes, these animals have dingo DNA, look like dingoes and behave like dingoes, and consequently should be labelled as dingoes rather than escaped pets gone wild.

Read more: Dingoes do bark: why most dingo facts you think you know are wrong

Hotspots with high dingo ancestry have significant conservation value and urgently need new management plans to ensure these pure dingo populations are protected from hybridisation. These populations could be protected by restricting the killing of dingoes in these areas and restricting access to domestic dogs on public land such as state forests.

Further ancestry testing should be conducted in more areas to determine whether there are other pockets of high dingo purity in NSW.

Undeniably, dingoes can negatively impact livestock producers, especially sheep farmers. Non-lethal strategies such as electric or exclusion fencing, and livestock guarding animals such as dogs, llamas and donkeys, may balance the need to conserve dingoes and protect vulnerable livestock.

Read more: Guardian dogs, fencing, and ‘fladry’ protect livestock from carnivores

In some circumstances, dingoes can benefit farmers because they reduce numbers of native and feral herbivores like kangaroos, feral goats, rabbits and pigs, boosting pasture growth for livestock.

If lethal control is justified, then targeted strategies such as shooting and trapping may be more suitable in high dingo conservation areas rather than landscape-wide poison aerial baiting.

It is time to resurrect the dingo. The term dingo needs to come back into official language, and we need practical strategies for limiting dingo-dog hybridisation and protecting dingo hotspots.

Read more: Dog owners could take the lead on dingo conservation with a ‘Fido fund’

– ref. Dingoes found in New South Wales, but we’re killing them as ‘wild dogs’ – http://theconversation.com/dingoes-found-in-new-south-wales-but-were-killing-them-as-wild-dogs-126184

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ho Wai Yip, Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong

Amid rising violence and vandalism in ongoing protests, the public’s role in cleaning up a mosque sprayed with blue dye last week by the police proves once again the distinctiveness of Hong Kong civil society. The public response to appeals to help with the clean-up show this is a society that voluntarily protects the Muslim community and cherishes the city’s multifaceted ethnic and religious traditions.

On the 20th weekend of protests, a police water cannon truck firing blue dye at the front gates had damaged the city’s largest mosque. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and Police Commissioner Stephen Lo Wai-chung went to the mosque and apologised in a sign of the sensitivity of the action. They described it as an accident.

But the police defended their use of the water cannon in the name of protecting the mosque from rioters’ vandalism. The blue dye makes it easier for police to identify and arrest protesters.

Immediately after the mosque was sprayed, social media appeals were made to protesters and residents to clean up the front of the blue-stained mosque. The Muslim community was comforted by the many Hong Kong people who volunteered to help. In doing so, they showed they cherish the mosque, defend the rights of Muslims and seek solidarity with the city’s ethnic minorities.

On social media, the Muslim Council in Hong Kong praised the city’s residents.

How did the mosque get caught up in protests?

Since June 9, Hong Kong citizens from all walks for life have been marching in the streets in protest against a Bill of Extradition. Many people fear the Chinese government may use it as a tool to arrest and extradite dissidents from Hong Kong to mainland China for trial.

Though the Hong Kong government formally withdrew the bill last week, the protests are seemingly unstoppable. This is mainly due to protesters’ disappointment at the government’s failure to respond to all of their “five demands”:

1. complete withdrawal of the Extradition Bill
2. retraction of the labelling of protesters as “rioters”
3. full amnesty for arrested demonstrators
4. an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality
5. universal suffrage for the Legislative Council and Chief Executive elections.

The Hong Kong government had condemned escalating vandalism, and before the Kowloon protest it was speculated Kowloon Mosque could be targeted. A few days earlier pro-democracy activist leader Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit had been brutally attacked by a gang that some reports said were of South Asian descent.

Police had banned a planned protest at Kowloon on Sunday, October 20. Thousands of protesters still turned out. As many had anticipated, it turned into another violent conflict between the police and protesters.

Mosque is an iconic landmark

What made this incident markedly different from other demonstrations in the past few months was that it involved Kowloon Mosque. It’s a treasured Islamic architectural icon that has long been hailed as a heritage landmark. The mosque has served the city’s largely South Asian Muslim community – about 4% of Hong Kong’s population – since the colonial era.

The mosque, the first on Kowloon Peninsula, was built in 1896 for the “Mohammedans of Upper India”. They had arrived in Hong Kong in 1892 to serve in the Hong Kong Regiment of the British Army. The mosque was supported financially by Muslim soldiers in the early 20th century.

After the original mosque was closed due to damage during construction of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR), a newly built mosque opened at its current site, Tsim Shau Tsui, in 1984.

Kowloon Mosque remains a vibrant place of worship. It is mostly frequented by Muslims who have their roots in the Indian subcontinent. Many of them live in the nearby Chungking Mansions area, home to many ethnic minorities.

The mosque is a vital cultural nexus for ethnic Muslims, a place where they assemble for religious and social life.

City of conscience protects minorities

The history and current role of the mosque explain why the police action risked provoking inter-ethnic tensions. It could stir mistrust between majority non-Muslims and the Muslim minority, potentially and most dangerously inciting Islamophobia. As one Muslim businessman sprayed in front of the mosque, Philip Khan, said:

It is not a personal thing, but they are doing it against my religion, and I am against it.

The increasing violence has stunned the international community. Nobody knows when the government’s measures to end the protests might be effective.

Yet, despite the turmoil of recent months, the civic quality of the ordinary people of Hong Kong shines through. Their actions in protecting the mosque and respecting the long-standing ethnic Islamic tradition distinguish their home as a city of conscience and a unique frontier for protecting the Muslim minority.

– ref. Mosque clean-up shows Hong Kong is a city that stands up for everyone’s rights – http://theconversation.com/mosque-clean-up-shows-hong-kong-is-a-city-that-stands-up-for-everyones-rights-126012

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University

Many of us joined the Global Climate Strike on Friday, 20 September, and together we constituted half a million Australians gathering peacefully and walking the streets of our cities and towns to protest at government inaction in the face of the gravest threat human civilisation has faced.

It was a global strike, but its Australian manifestation had a particular twist, for our own federal government is an international pariah on this issue. We have become the Ugly Australians, led by brazen climate deniers who trash the science and snub the UN Climate Summit.

Government politicians in Canberra constantly tell us the Great Barrier Reef is fine, coal is good for humanity, Pacific islands are floating not being flooded, wind turbines are obscene, power blackouts are due to renewables, “drought-proofing” is urgent but “climate-change” has nothing to do with it, science is a conspiracy, climate protesters are a “scourge” who deserve to be punished and jailed, the ABC spins the weather, the Bureau of Meteorology requires a royal commission, the United Nations is a bully, if we have to have emissions targets, well, we are exceeding them, and Australia is so insignificant in the world it doesn’t have to act anyway.

It’s a wilful barrage of lies, an insult to the public, a threat to civil society, and an extraordinary attack on our intelligence by our own elected representatives.

The international Schools4Climate movement is remarkable because it is led by children, teenagers still at school advocating a future they hope to have. I can’t think of another popular protest movement in world history led by children. This could be a transformative moment in global politics; it certainly needs to be. The active presence of so many engaged children gave the rally a spirit and a lightness in spite of its grim subject; there was a sense of fun, a family feeling about the occasion, but there was a steely resolve too.

A girl in a school uniform standing next to me at the rally held a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 in her hands. Many of the people around me would normally expect to see in the 22nd century. Their power, paradoxically, is they are not voters. They didn’t elect this government! They are protesting not just against the governments of the world but also against us adults, who did elect these politicians or who abide them. There was a moment at the rally when, with the mysterious organic coherence crowds possess, the older protesters stepped aside, parting like a wave, and formed a guard of honour through the centre of which the children marched holding their placards, their leadership acknowledged.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Orwell’s 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today

One placard declared: “You’ll die of old age; I’ll die of climate change”; another said: “If Earth were cool, I’d be in school.” One held up a large School Report Card with subject results: “Ethics X, Responsibility X, Climate Action X. Needs to try harder.” Another explained: “You skip summits, we skip school.”

In Melbourne, as elsewhere, teenagers gave the speeches; and they were passionate and eloquent. The demands of the movement are threefold: no new coal, oil and gas projects; 100% renewable energy generation and exports by 2030; and fund a just transition and job creation for all fossil-fuel workers and communities. There were also Indigenous speakers. One declared: “We stand for you too, when we stand for Country.”

There were 150,000 people in the Melbourne Treasury Gardens, a crowd so large responsive cheers rippled like a Mexican wave up the hill from the speakers. I reflected on the historical parallels for what was unfolding, recalling the Vietnam moratorium demonstrations and the marches against the first Gulf War, the Freedom Rides and the civil rights movement, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the suffragettes’ campaigns.

Inspired by this history, we now have the Extinction Rebellion, a movement born in a small British town late last year which declares “only non-violent rebellion can now stop climate breakdown and social collapse”. Within six months, through civil disobedience, it brought central London to a standstill and the United Kingdom became the first country to declare a climate emergency. We are at a political tipping point.

In Australia, the result of this year’s election tells us there is no accountability for probably the most dysfunctional and discredited federal government in our history, and now we are left with a parliament unwilling to act on so many vital national and international issues. The 2019 federal election was no status quo outcome, as some political commentators have declared. Rather, it was a radical result, revealing deep structural flaws in our parliamentary democracy, our media culture and our political discourse. For me it ranks with two other elections in my voting lifetime: the “dark victory” of the 2001 Tampa election, and the 1975 constitutional crisis. Like those earlier dates, 2019 could shape and shadow a generation. It is time to get out on the streets again.

Skolstrejk för klimatet

The founder, symbol and the voice of the School Strike movement is, of course, Greta Thunberg. It is just over a year since August 2018 when she began to spend every Friday away from class sitting outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign declaring “School Strike for the Climate”.

When she told her parents about her plans, she reported “they weren’t very fond of it”. Addressing the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2018, she said: “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.” Thunberg quietly invokes the carbon budget and the galling fact there is already so much carbon in the system “there is simply not enough time to wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge.”

In late September, Thunberg gave a powerful presentation at the UN Climate Summit; Richard Flanagan compared her 495-word UN speech to Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word Gettysburg Address. It’s a reasonable parallel that reaches for some understanding of the enormity of this political moment.

It is sickening to see the speed with which privileged old white men have rushed to pour bile on this young woman. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin quickly recognised her power and sought to neutralise and patronise her. Scott Morrison chimed in. Australia’s locker room of shock jocks laced the criticism with some misogyny. It’s amazing how they froth at the mouth about a calm and articulate schoolgirl. They are all – directly or indirectly – in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

Read more: Misogyny, male rage and the words men use to describe Greta Thunberg

Denialism

Denialism is worthy of study. I don’t mean the conscious and fraudulent denialism of politicians and shock-jocks such as those I’ve mentioned. That’s pretty simple stuff – lies motivated by opportunism, greed and personal advancement, and funded by the carbon-polluting industries. It is appalling but boring.

There are more interesting forms of denialism, such as the emotional denialism we all inhabit. Emotional denialism in the face of the unthinkable can take many forms – avoidance, hope, anxiety, even a kind of torpor when people truly begin to understand what will happen to the world of their grandchildren. We are all prone to this willing blindness and comforting self-delusion. Overcoming that is our greatest challenge.

And there is a third kind of denialism that should especially interest scholars. It is when some of our own kind – scholars trained to respect evidence – fashion themselves as sceptics, but are actually dogged contrarians.

Read more: There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one

One example is Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian and professor of history at Harvard University, who calls climate science “science fiction” and recently joined the ranks of old, white, privileged men commenting on the appearance of Greta Thunberg. I’m not arguing here with Ferguson’s politics – he is an arch-conservative and I do disagree with his politics, but I also believe engaged, reflective politics can drive good history.

Rather, Ferguson’s disregard for evidence and neglect of science and scholarship attracts my attention. His understanding of climate science and climate history is poor: in a recent article in the Boston Globe he assumed the Little Ice Age started in the 17th century, whereas its beginning was three centuries earlier.

How does a trained scholar, a professor of history, get themselves in this ignominious position? For Ferguson, contrarianism has been a productive intellectual strategy – going against the flow of fashion is a good scholarly instinct – but on climate change his politics and the truth have steadily travelled in different directions and caught him out. We can say the same of Geoffrey Blainey, another successful contrarian who has cornered himself on climate change. Like Ferguson he appears uninterested in decades of significant research in environmental history – and thus his healthy scepticism has morphed into foolish denialism.

Denialism matters because all kinds of it have delayed our global political response to climate change by 30 years. In those critical decades since the 1980s, when humans first understood the urgency of the climate crisis, total historical carbon emissions since the industrial revolution have doubled. And still global emissions are rising, every year.

The physics of this process are inexorable – and so simple, as Greta would say, even a child can understand. We are already committing ourselves to two degrees of warming, possibly three or four. Denialists have, knowingly and with malice aforethought, condemned future generations to what Tim Flannery calls a “grim winnowing”. Flannery wrote recently “the climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.”

Read more: The gloves are off: ‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children

The history of denialism alerts us to a disastrous paradox: the very moment, in the 1980s, when it became clear global warming was a collective predicament of humanity, we turned away politically from the idea of the collective, with dire consequences. Naomi Klein, in her latest book On Fire, elucidates this fateful coincidence, which she calls “an epic case of historical bad timing”: just as the urgency of action on climate change became apparent, “the global neoliberal revolution went supernova”.

Unfettered free-market fanaticism and its relentless attack on the public sphere derailed the momentum building for corporate regulation and global cooperation. Ten years ago, thoughtful, informed climate activists could still argue that we can decouple the debates about economy and democracy from climate action. But now we can’t. At the 2019 election, Australia may have missed its last chance for incremental political change. If the far right had not politicised climate change and delayed action for so long then radical political transformation would not necessarily have been required. But now it will be, and it’s coming.

A great derangement

We are indeed living in what we might call “uncanny times”. They are weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them.

The Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, published in 2016. The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the great derangement”, a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, in which we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of the Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. We have developed two powerful metaphors for making sense of it. One is the idea of the Anthropocene, which is the insight we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of the Earth and have now left behind the 13,000 years of the relatively stable Holocene epoch, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, putting us on a par with other geophysical forces such as variations in the earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid strikes.

The other potent metaphor for this moment in Earth history is the Sixth Extinction. Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century.

Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. The current extinction rate is a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature. There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth: five of them – sudden, shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting – and causing – the Sixth Extinction?

These two metaphors – the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction – are both historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into the Anthropocene; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller.

Earth is alive

I’ve been considering metaphors of deep time, but what of deep space? It has also enlarged our imaginations in the last half century. In July this year, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. I was 12 at the time of the Apollo 11 voyage and found myself in a school debate about whether the money for the Moon mission would be better spent on Earth. I argued it would be, and my team lost.

But what other result was allowable in July 1969? Conquering the Moon, declared Dr Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist turned US rocket maestro, assured man of immortality. I followed the Apollo missions with a sense of wonder, staying up late to watch the Saturn V launch, joining my schoolmates in a large hall with tiny televisions to witness Armstrong take his Giant Leap, and saving full editions of The Age newspaper reporting those fabled days.

The rhetoric of space exploration was so future-oriented that NASA did not foresee Apollo’s greatest legacy: the radical effect of seeing the Earth. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Frank Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty!

Bill Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and it became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the 20th century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Bill Anders declared: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

In his fascinating book, Earthrise (2010), British historian Robert Poole explains this was not supposed to happen. The cutting edge of the future was to be in space. Leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was seen as a stage in human evolution comparable to our amphibian ancestor crawling out of the primeval slime onto land.

Furthermore, this new dominion was seen to offer what Neil Armstrong called a “survival possibility” for a world shadowed by the nuclear arms race. In the words of Buzz Lightyear (who is sometimes hilariously confused with Buzz Aldrin), the space age looked to infinity and beyond!

Earthrise had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities. Within a few years, the American scientist James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold over 13 million copies. In their report, Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Earth systems science developed in the second half of the 20th century and fostered a keen understanding of planetary boundaries – thresholds in planetary ecology – and the extent to which they were being violated. The same industrial capitalism that unleashed carbon enabled us to extract ice cores from the poles and construct a deep history of the air. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon, it now emerged, were endangering our civilisation.

The American ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949 of the need for a new “land ethic”. Leopold envisaged a gradual historical expansion of human ethics, from the relations between individuals to those between the individual and society, and ultimately to those between humans and the land. He hoped for an enlargement of the community to which we imagine ourselves belonging, one that includes soil, water, plants and animals.

In his book of essays, A Sand County Almanac, there is a short, profound reflection called “Thinking like a mountain.” He tells of going on the mountain and shooting a wolf and her cubs and then watching “a fierce green fire” die in her eyes.

He shot her because he thought fewer wolves meant more deer, but over the years he watched the overpopulated deer herd die as the wolfless mountain became a dustbowl. Leopold came to understand the beautiful delicacy of the ecosystem, which holds “a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

Today, 70 years after Leopold’s philosophical leap, we are being challenged to scale up from a land ethic to an earth ethic, to an environmental vision and philosophy of action that sees the planet as an integrated whole and all of life upon it as an interdependent historical community with a common destiny, to think not only like a mountain, but also like a planet. We are belatedly remembering the planet is alive.

Climate science is climate history

Climate change and ecological crisis are often seen as purely scientific issues. But as humanities scholars we know all environmental problems are at heart human ones; “scientific” issues are pre-eminently challenges for the humanities. Historical perspective can offer much in this time of ecological crisis, and many historians are reinventing their traditional scales of space and time to tell different kinds of stories, ones that recognise the agency of other creatures and the unruly power of nature.

There is a tendency among denialists to lazily use history against climate science, arguing for example “the climate’s always changing”, or “this has happened before”. Good recent historical scholarship about the last 2000 years of human civilisation is so important because it corrects these misunderstandings. That’s why it’s so disappointing when celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson and Geoffrey Blainey seek to represent their discipline by ignoring the work of their colleagues.

Climate science is unavoidably climate history; it’s an empirical, historical interpretation of life on earth, full of new insights into the impact and predicament of humanity in the long and short term. Recent histories of the last 2,000 years have been crucial in helping us to appreciate the fragile relationship between climate and society, and why future average temperature changes of more than 2℃ can have dire consequences for human civilisation.

We now have environmental histories of antiquity, and of medieval and early modern Europe – studies casting new light on familiar human dramas, including the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death in the medieval period, and the unholy trinity of famine, war and disease during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.

These books draw on natural as well as human history, on the archives of ice, air and sediment as well as bones, artefacts and documents. And then there is John McNeill’s history of the 20th century, Something New Under the Sun, which argues “the human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on earth”.

These new histories encompass the planet and the human species, and provocatively blur biological evolution and cultural history (Yuval Noah Harari’s “brief history of humankind”, Sapiens, is a bestselling example). They investigate the vast elemental nature of the heavens as well as the interior, microbial nature of human bodies: nature inside and out, with the striving human as a porous vessel for its agency.

In Australia, we have outstanding new histories linking geological and human time, such as Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth and Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt.

Australians seem predisposed to navigate the Anthropocene. I think it’s because the challenge of Australian history in the 21st century is how to negotiate the rupture of 1788, how to relate geological and human scales, how to get our heads and hearts around a colonial history of 200 years that plays out across a vast Indigenous history in deep time.

From the beginnings of colonisation, Australia’s new arrivals commonly alleged Aboriginal people had no history, had been here no more than a few thousand years, and were caught in the fatal thrall of a continental museum. But from the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: Australia’s human history went back aeons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age. In the late 20th century, the timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just 30 years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

Read more: Friday essay: when did Australia’s human history begin?

It’s no wonder the idea of big history was born here, or environmental history has been so innovative here. This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm – and are now intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience.

Even the best northern-hemisphere scholars struggle to digest the implications of the Australian time revolution. They often assume, for example, “civilisation” is a term associated only with agriculture, and still insist 50,000 years is a possible horizon for modern humanity. Australia offers a distinctive and remarkable human saga for a world trying to come to terms with climate change and the rupture of the Anthropocene. Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. Our nation’s obligation to honour the Uluru Statement is not just political; it is also metaphysical. It respects another ethical practice and another way of knowing.

Earthspeaking

In 2003, in its second issue, Griffith Review put the land at the centre of the nation. The edition was called Dreams of Land and it’s full of gold, including an essay by Ian Lowe sounding the alarm on the ecological and climate emergency – which reminds us how long we’ve had these eloquent warnings. As Graeme Davison said on launching the edition in December 2003:

At the threshold of the 21st century Australia has suddenly come down to earth. […] Earth, water, wind and fire are not just natural elements; they are increasingly the great issues of the day.

It is instructive to compare this issue of the Griffith Review, with the edition entitled Writing the Country, published 15 years later last summer. In the intervening decade and a half, sustainability morphed into survival, native title into Treaty and the Voice, the Anthropocene infiltrated our common vocabulary, the republic and Aboriginal recognition are no longer separable, and land decisively became Country with a capital “C”. In 2003 the reform hopes of the 1990s had not entirely died, but by 2019 it’s clear the dead hand of the Howard government and its successors has thoroughly throttled trust in the workings of the state.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution in GR2 – and it was given the honour of appearing first – was an essay by Melissa Lucashenko called “Not quite white in the head”. This year’s Miles Franklin winner, Lucashenko was already in great form in 2003. Tough, poetic and confronting, the words of her essay still resonate. Lucashenko writes of “earthspeaking”.

“I am earthspeaking,” she says, “talking about this place, my home and it is first, a very small story […] This earthspeaking is a small, quiet story in a human mouth.”

“Big stories are failing us as a nation,” suggests Lucashenko. “But we are citizens and inheritors and custodians of tiny landscapes too. It is the small stories that attach to these places […] which might help us find a way through.”

I think earthspeaking is a companion to thinking like a planet. Instead of beginning from the outside with a view of Earth in deep space and deep time, earthspeaking works from the ground up; it is inside-out; it begins with beloved Country. So it is with earthspeaking I want to finish.

Four months ago I was privileged to sit in a circle with Mithaka people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of 33,000 square kilometres of the Kirrenderi/Channel Country of the Lake Eyre Basin in south-western Queensland. In 2015, the Federal Court handed down a native title consent determination for the Mithaka enabling them to return to Country. Now they have begun a process of assessing and renewing their knowledge.

I was invited to be involved because I have studied the major white writer about this region, a woman called Alice Duncan-Kemp who was born on this land in 1901 where her family ran a cattle farm, and grew up with Mithaka people who worked on the station and were her carers and teachers. Young Alice spent her childhood days with her Aboriginal friends and teachers, especially Mary Ann and Moses Youlpee, who took her on walks and taught her the names and meanings and stories that connected every tree, bird, plant, animal, rock, dune and channel.

From the 1930s to the 1960s Alice wrote four books – half a million words – about the world of her childhood and the people and nature of the Channel Country, and although she did find a wide readership, her books were dismissed by authorities, landowners and locals as “romantic” and “nostalgic” and “fictional”.

Her writing was systematically marginalised: she was a woman in cattle country, a sympathiser with Aboriginal people, she refused to ignore the violence of the frontier and she challenged the typical heroic western style of narrative. The huge Kidman pastoral company bought her family’s land in 1998, bulldozed the historic pisé homestead into the creek, threw out the collection of Aboriginal artefacts, and continues to deny Alice’s writings have any historical authenticity. Yet her books were respected in the native title process and were crucial to the Mithaka in their fight to regain access to Country.

It was very moving to be present this year when Alice’s descendants and Moses’ people met for the first time. It was not just a social and symbolic occasion: we had come together as researchers and we had work to do. Across a weekend we pored over maps and talked through evidence, combining legend, memory, oral history, letters and manuscripts, published books, archaeological studies, surveyors’ records, and even recent drone footage of the remote terrain, all with the purpose of retrieving and reactivating knowledge, recovering language and reanimating Country. We could literally map Alice’s stories back onto features of the land, with the aim of bringing it under caring attention again.

This process is going on in beloved places right across the continent. Grace Karskens and Kim Mahood write beautifully in GR63 about similar quests, and of their hope written words dredged from the archive “might again be spoken as part of living language and shared geographies.”

Earthspeaking and thinking like a planet are profoundly linked. As the Indigenous speaker at the Melbourne Climate Strike said, “We stand for you when we stand for Country.” In these frightening and challenging times, we need radical storytelling and scholarly histories, narratives that weave together humans and nature, history and natural history, that move from Earth systems to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely, living planet spinning through space to the intimately known and beloved local worlds over which we might, if we are lucky, exert some benevolent influence.

We need them not only because they help us to better understand our predicament, but also because they might enable us to act, with intelligence and grace.

This essay was adapted from the Showcase Lecture, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Queensland, Wednesday, 9 October 2019

– ref. Friday essay: thinking like a planet – environmental crisis and the humanities – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-thinking-like-a-planet-environmental-crisis-and-the-humanities-125489

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

As an Indigenous man in a senior government role, Ken Wyatt is ambitious but pragmatic, as he struggles to bridge the gap between Indigenous expectations and political realities.

Wyatt, minister for Indigenous Australians, aspires to deliver constitutional recognition of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in this term, though he must know the odds are against it. The government is committed to a referendum only if there is bipartisan support on the question and a good prospect of success.

He also wants to land a legislated “voice” for Indigenous people, and on Wednesday he unveiled a process.

Achieving even this will be hard. Wyatt is caught between those Indigenous figures who see the idea as now much watered down from their preferred model, and those on the right of politics who cast it as an exercise in separatism.

As the first Indigenous federal cabinet minister, and widely respected in first peoples’ communities, Wyatt is well placed to be listened to by Indigenous Australians. His standing gives him leverage. By the same token, the pressures on him are much more personal than they’d be on a non-Indigenous minister.

Read more: Ken Wyatt’s proposed ‘voice to government’ marks another failure to hear Indigenous voices

Some would say Morrison has accorded Wyatt a great opportunity. The cynics wonder if he has been set up.

To be optimistic about what can be done in terms of the voice, it is perhaps best not to remember too much history. Leaving aside the triumph of the 1967 referendum which gave the federal government power to legislate for Aborigines in the states, previous attempts to deal Indigenous Australians into the wider political process, to a limited or greater extent, have ended badly. The most ambitious, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), became the most unfortunate.

We won’t see another ATSIC, which had executive as well as representative functions.

In 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart, produced  by a broad cross section of Indigenous delegates, called for a voice that would be enshrined in the constitution.

How much does it matter that the voice now being pursued would not be in the constitution (Morrison would never contemplate that and Wyatt says he has never favoured it) and that the language being used is for a voice to “government” rather than to “parliament”, as originally envisaged?

Of course it matters quite a lot.

Failure to bed the voice into the constitution means it would lack long-term security – it could be legislated out of existence (as ATSIC was). Being pitched to “government” rather than to “parliament” would lessen the voice’s status, although that would partly depend on the detail – whether, for example, its recommendations had to be tabled in parliament.

The government – notably the prime minister – will make sure the voice is constrained.

That doesn’t mean, however, the voice isn’t worth having. Its influence would be determined not just by its form but also by the way it operated, the quality of its advice, and what sort of relationship it struck up with the minister.

The critics of the present modest initiative are already out, including from the government’s ranks.

Queensland Liberal senator James McGrath is among those featured on a video posted by the Institute of Public Affairs. “I’m a Queensland senator. I don’t want indigenous Queenslanders being separated from non-indigenous Queenslanders on the basis of their race,” McGrath says, describing the proposal as “nuts”.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Megan Davis on a First Nations Voice in the Constitution

Wyatt estimates there are about a dozen critics in the Coalition party room.

He likens the voice issue to that of same sex marriage, where there were some internal opponents but strong support in the community.

He is encouraged by reactions he gets as he moves around, from strangers on planes to businesses urging him to continue efforts on the voice and on recognition. “We shouldn’t underestimate the good will sitting there”.

Wyatt announced an advisory group to oversee the voice process, chaired by Indigenous leaders Tom Calma, chancellor of the University of Canberra and former race discrimination commissioner, and Marcia Langton, who has the Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at Melbourne University.

Under this group will be two other groups, one to work on proposals for the national voice and the other to examine how Indigenous input can be better fed in at the state, territory and local government level. Models will be developed, followed by consultation with Indigenous communities.

The appointment of Langton – an outspoken and sometimes inflammatory tweeter – is under fire from the right wing commentariat. It can, however, be regarded as positive that the government has chosen her, rather than someone tamer. Wyatt has said he and Langton have long been friends and “I respect her integrity”.

Langton says she remains a strong supporter of the Statement from the Heart – which she describes as “highly metaphorical” – although she has a particular interpretation of it. She told the ABC she takes it as suggesting a minimalist amendment to the constitution to provide for a body, rather like a parliamentary committee, that would advise on legislation. Anything like a representative body would be established by legislation, she said.

Read more: Constitutional reform made easy: how to achieve the Uluru statement and a First Nations voice

Labor is somewhat conflicted. It supports the Uluru statement and sees sees the government’s position as failing that. But it doesn’t want to be the naysayer.

Indigenous Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy said on Thursday: “We’re not going to wreck this.

“We’re not happy that they haven’t accepted [constitutional] enshrinement but we do acknowledge and respect the fact that consultations are going to occur with two esteemed leaders in professor Langton and Tom Calma and we will do our best to keep encouraging people to look at enshrinement”.

From Labor’s point of view, if an acceptable voice emerges from this process, it could always commit to putting it into the constitution later.

That’s assuming there is not referendum on recognition this term. Getting agreement among Coalition, opposition and Indigenous community on a recognition question that could pass the stringent referendum requirements would appear extraordinarily challenging. Even if there were agreement on the question, Labor might say it would only give the tick off if the referendum included the “voice”.

There is a case for scepticism about the government’s intentions on the voice, but there is a better one to see whether Wyatt can pull something potentially useful out of the process, even within the bounds that have been set.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Ken Wyatt juggles identity and politics – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-ken-wyatt-juggles-identity-and-politics-126205

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Tormey, Professor of Politics, University of Sydney

And so the UK will head to an election on December 12 to try to resolve the spectacular mess that is Brexit. It’s an outcome many of us had been predicting for some time.

Read more: UK general election is on: how it happened and what to expect now

The only surprise is that it came about as it did. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has, after all, just managed what seemed nearly impossible a mere few weeks back, which is to both achieve a compromise agreement with the European Union over the terms of withdrawal and convince the House of Commons that it should vote in favour of it, and by a princely majority of 30.

So why did Johnson seek an election? And why, at the third attempt, did Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn agree? More generally, will an election get us out of the royal mess the UK finds itself in?

It’s not if you Brexit, but how

As far as Johnson is concerned, he wants Brexit, but he doesn’t want any old Brexit. He wants a “proper” Brexit, a clean break from the EU that will, as his mantra insists, deliver the UK the ability to negotiate its own trade deals.

The only way Johnson can do that is by differentiating between the trade regime for Northern Ireland and for the rest of the UK. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) doesn’t like it. Most of the House of Commons doesn’t like it.

So rather than try to push through an agreement that would be sliced and diced on its way through the House of Commons until it was no longer recognisable as Brexit, Johnson prefers to roll the dice and trust the instincts of the electorate to deliver a larger majority. This will in turn permit him to ignore the DUP and isolate the softer elements of his own parliamentary party, assuming they haven’t been deselected in the run-up to the election.

What’s in it for Labour?

Why did Corbyn agree after turning down an election three times in recent weeks?

He didn’t want an election with the threat of a no-deal October 31 deadline. With an agreement in place with the EU for the terms of the UK’s exit, the objection is no longer valid.

Corbyn may be 15 or so points behind in the polls, but he was over 20 points down in the polls against Theresa May in 2017, and what happened? Labour fought an excellent campaign and shredded May’s majority to the point where her premiership became defunct.

He feels he can do this again running on a platform against austerity and inequality.

He may be right. This election is difficult to call, not least because of Labour’s own position on Brexit, which is a nuanced one, to put it mildly. Its pitch is that a Labour government will renegotiate the only-just-renegotiated withdrawal agreement and put the deal to the people in another referendum.

So they think they can do better than Johnson as far as negotiating with the EU is concerned, but they’re not prepared to campaign in favour of what it is they renegotiate. Let’s just say the subtlety of that position may be lost on some parts of the electorate.

Minor parties will play a major role

But this isn’t going to be a contest of Labour versus the Conservatives. There are new elements in the mix and some more familiar ones to make it even harder to see through the darkened glass.

The new elements are Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party standing for an even cleaner and harder Brexit than Johnson’s. There is also the Liberal Democrats, who have repositioned themselves under new leader Jo Swinson as a remain party – not a referendum party, but an out and out remain party. With around 50% of the electorate favouring remain over any iteration of Brexit, this is fertile soil for creating upsets in marginal seats, perhaps even Johnson’s own.

The more familiar elements that complicate matters further are the regional parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Welsh voted to leave in 2016, but with a patrician Tory in No. 10, will they back leave parties in the election? It has to be doubtful.

The remainer Scottish National Party (SNP) will no doubt do very well in Scotland. Northern Ireland may lean even more heavily to remain parties in the knowledge that unionism was sold out in Johnson’s compromise with the EU.

So what’s going to happen?

The honest answer is no one knows. Party loyalties will be near irrelevant in what is being billed as the “Brexit election”.

The one constant in all this is that the country remains as deeply split as it was in 2016. No big swings in opinion have taken place to suggest a clear victory is likely for either remain or leave-backing political parties. And there are narratives around austerity and inequality that may play out strongly, as they did in 2017.

Read more: Boris Johnson, ‘political Vegemite’, becomes the UK prime minister. Let the games begin

A hung parliament is, it would seem, the most likely destination. If it is, then what of Brexit? In this scenario, Brexit continues to be what it has been for the past three years, a kind of impossible object of desire: elusive, divisive, polarising.

Many pundits seem to think Johnson is a shoo-in for a majority and will therefore get his Brexit. But don’t be so sure.

Remainer forces are buoyant that they will in effect get a chance to rerun the 2016 referendum. They will be better organised and more focused on the possibilities for tactical voting presented by a single-issue election.

There is a chance – just a chance – that far from smoothing the UK’s exit from the EU, the election blows up in Johnson’s face and delivers a remain parliament.

– ref. Boris Johnson sends UK voters to the polls, hoping for the ‘right’ kind of Brexit. But it just might backfire – http://theconversation.com/boris-johnson-sends-uk-voters-to-the-polls-hoping-for-the-right-kind-of-brexit-but-it-just-might-backfire-123260

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Jorm, Professor emeritus, University of Melbourne

The Productivity Commission has revealed 3.9 million of us are living with mental illness, and it’s costing the country an estimated A$500 million per day.

The Commission, which the government tasked with looking at the impact of mental health on economic participation and productivity, has released its draft report today, ahead of a final report due in May next year.

Among a broad range of findings, it reports one million people with mental illness are not accessing services, 75% of people who have mental illness develop symptoms before they turn 25, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are more than twice as likely as non-Indigenous Australians to be hospitalised due to mental illness and to die by suicide. The report then outlines five key areas for reform.

Read more: Please don’t dismiss the PC inquiry into mental health as ‘just another inquiry’

It’s the latest of a long line of inquiries into mental health in Australia. While previous reports have all identified widespread community dissatisfaction with the quality of mental health care, the need for continued inquiries shows none have managed to produce the required degree of reform.

Although this latest report makes promising recommendations to improve services and treatment, its approach to prevention needs to be strengthened if we’re to see any significant improvements to these statistics.

What’s different about this inquiry?

Unlike its predecessors, the Productivity Commission inquiry covers all levels of government and all sectors of the economy. It looks at broader social issues, whereas previous inquiries have had a narrower focus on the health system. This broader perspective is important because the causes of and solutions to mental illness extend far beyond the health sector.

The draft report in many ways lives up to expectations. It recognises improving the nation’s mental health requires action far beyond the health system, and recommends changes covering education, workplaces, housing and justice.

It also recognises that mental illness has its major impact in young people, in contrast to physical illness, where the burden is more concentrated later in life.

Prevention in early life

The draft report recognises services need to focus on children and young people, and covers prevention and early intervention as a key area for reform.

In terms of prevention, the report recommends routine assessment of social and emotional development early in childhood to allow early intervention of at-risk children.

It also recommends expansion of parent education programs through child and family health centres, recognising parents’ behaviour can affect their kids’ mental health. Behaviours like showing affection to children, promoting their autonomy as they get older, and reducing criticism, punishment and conflict in the home have been demonstrated to reduce children’s risk of mental health problems.

Read more: More Australians are diagnosed with depression and anxiety but it doesn’t mean mental illness is rising

But even if they’re fully rolled out, these reforms may not be enough. Arguably, the report takes too little account of the major risk factors for mental ill health that operate early in life, such as emotional, physical and sexual abuse, poverty, family violence and bullying – mentioning them only in passing.

These early childhood adversities account for a substantial proportion of mental illness in the population (30% according to one estimate) and play a role in all types of mental illness right across the lifespan.

And these adversities commonly cluster together in families, magnifying their impact. To not give them a major focus in the draft report is like a report on cancer having little to say about smoking, alcohol use and UV exposure.

The report should have considered how we could go about reducing these major risk factors at a national level, with the sort of long-term commitment we’ve seen reducing the risk factors for chronic physical diseases.

It’s a start

The report’s recommendation for increased parent education could potentially contribute to reducing these risk factors, but too often the families at greatest risk don’t participate in these programs.

We need to see a gradual shift in social norms across the whole community to promote parenting behaviours that protect against mental illness, while reducing those that increase risk.

There has been a welcome increase in community awareness of the adverse mental health impacts of child sexual abuse, but it’s not widely known that emotional abuse of children can have similar effects.

We also need to strengthen economic supports for families. Former prime minister Bob Hawke’s famous pledge that “by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty” remains unfulfilled. The fact poverty is a key driver of mental illness is too often forgotten in the focus on reforming mental health services.

We need to broaden understanding of the links between adverse childhood experiences and mental disorders among both the public and health professionals. Health and welfare professionals working with children should be trained to routinely enquire about childhood adversities in order to initiate early intervention and lessen their impact.

Read more: If we’re to have another inquiry into mental health, it should look at why the others have been ignored

Towards the final report

There are a lot of sound recommendations in the commission’s draft report, largely covering service provision for people with mental illness. Nobody in the mental health sector would question the need for improvement in these services.

However, without greater attention to the key drivers of mental illness, the commission’s report won’t be optimally positioned to make a real difference.

If this article has raised issues for you or you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

– ref. 3 in 4 people with a mental illness develop symptoms before age 25. We need a stronger focus on prevention – http://theconversation.com/3-in-4-people-with-a-mental-illness-develop-symptoms-before-age-25-we-need-a-stronger-focus-on-prevention-126180

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, Data61

Artificial intelligence developer DeepMind has just announced its latest milestone: a bot called AlphaStar that plays the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II at Grandmaster level.

This isn’t the first time a bot has outplayed humans in a strategy war game. In 1981, a program called Eurisko, developed by artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Doug Lenat, won the US championship of Traveller, a highly complex strategy war game in which players design a fleet of 100 ships. Eurisko was consequently made an honorary Admiral in the Traveller navy.

The following year, the tournament rules were overhauled in an attempt to thwart computers. But Eurisko triumphed for a second successive year. With officials threatening to abolish the tournament if a computer won again, Lenat retired his program.

Read more: If machines can beat us at games, does it make them more intelligent than us?

DeepMind’s PR department would have you believe that StarCraft “has emerged by consensus as the next grand challenge (in computer games)” and “has been a grand challenge for AI researchers for over 15 years”.

In the most recent StarCraft computer game tournament, only four entries came from academic or industrial research labs. The nine other bots involved were written by lone individuals outside the mainstream of AI research.

In fact, the 42 authors of DeepMind’s paper, published today in Nature, greatly outnumber the rest of the world building bots for StarCraft. Without wishing to take anything away from an impressive feat of collaborative engineering, if you throw enough resources at a problem, success is all but assured.

Unlike recent successes with computer chess and Go, AlphaStar didn’t learn to outwit humans simply by playing against itself. Rather, it learned by imitating the best bits from nearly a million games played by top-ranked human players.

Read more: Google’s new Go-playing AI learns fast, and even thrashed its former self

Without this input, AlphaStar was beaten convincingly by 19 out of 20 human players on the StarCraft game server. AlphaStar also played anonymously on that server so that humans couldn’t exploit any weaknesses that might have been uncovered in earlier games.

AlphaStar did beat Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz, one of the world’s top professional StarCraft players, in December last year. But this was a version of AlphaStar with much faster reflexes than any human, and unlimited vision of the playing board (unlike human players who can only see a portion of it at any one time). This was hardly a level playing field.

Nevertheless, StarCraft does have some features that makes AlphaStar an impressive advance, if not truly a breakthrough. Unlike chess or Go, players in StarCraft have imperfect information about the state of play, and the set of possible actions you can make at any point is much larger. And StarCraft unfolds in real time and requires long-term planning.

Robot wars

This raises the question of whether, in the future, we will see robots not just fighting wars but planning them too. Actually, we already have both.

Despite the many warnings raised by AI researchers such as myself – as well as by founders of AI and robotics companies, Nobel Peace Laureates, and church leaders – fully autonomous weapons, also known as “killer robots”, have been developed and will soon be used.

In 2020, Turkey will deploy kamikaze drones on its border with Syria. These drones will use computer vision to identify, track and kill people without human intervention.

This is a terrible development. Computers do not have the moral capability to decide who lives or dies. They have neither empathy nor compassion. “Killer robots” will change the very nature of conflict for the worse.

As for “robot generals”, computers have been helping generals plan war for decades.

In Desert Storm, during the Gulf War of the early 1990s, AI scheduling tools were used to plan the buildup of forces in the Middle East prior to conflict. A US general told me shortly afterwards that the amount of money saved by doing this was equivalent to everything that had been spent on AI research until then.

Computers have also been used extensively by generals to war-game potential strategies. But just as we wouldn’t entrust all battlefield decisions to a single soldier, handing over the full responsibilities of a general to a computer would be a step too far.

Machines cannot be held accountable for their decisions. Only humans can be. This is a cornerstone of international humanitarian law.

Nevertheless, to cut through the fog of war and deal with the vast amount of information flowing back from the front, generals will increasingly rely on computer support in their decision-making.

If this results in fewer civilian deaths, less friendly fire, and more respect for international humanitarian law, we should welcome such computer assistance. But the buck needs to stop with humans, not machines.

Here’s a final question to ponder. If tech companies like Google really don’t want us to worry about computers taking over, why are they building bots to win virtual wars rather than concentrating on, say, more peaceful e-sports? With all due respect to sports fans, the stakes would be much lower.

Read more: Robots will be FIFA champions – if they keep their eyes on the ball

– ref. Robots can outwit us on the virtual battlefield, so let’s not put them in charge of the real thing – http://theconversation.com/robots-can-outwit-us-on-the-virtual-battlefield-so-lets-not-put-them-in-charge-of-the-real-thing-126104

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Henley, Research Fellow in Climate and Water Resources, University of Melbourne

The issue of whether Australia’s current drought is caused by climate change has been seized on by some media commentators, with debate raging over a remark from eminent scientist Andy Pitman that “there is no link between climate change and drought”. Professor Pitman has since qualified, he meant to say “there is no direct link between climate change and drought”.

A highly politicised debate that tries to corner scientists will not do much to help rural communities struggling with the ongoing dry. But it is still worthwhile understanding the complexity of how climate change relates to drought.

Read more: Is Australia’s current drought caused by climate change? It’s complicated

So, why the contention?

It may seem like splitting hairs to focus on single words, but the reality is drought is complex, and broad definitive statements are difficult to make. Nevertheless, aspects of drought are linked with climate change. Let us try to give you a taste of the complexity.

First, it’s important to understand that drought is a manifestation of interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, and land. In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology uses rainfall deficiencies to identify regions that are under drought conditions. Anyone on the land doesn’t need to be reminded, but the current drought is seriously bad. These maps show the patterns of rainfall deficiency over the past 36 and 18 months, highlighting the severity and extent of what we call meteorological drought.

But along with the main driver – low rainfall – droughts can also be exacerbated by water loss through evaporation. This depends not only on temperature but also humidity, wind speeds, and sunshine. Temperature will clearly continue to rise steadily almost everywhere. For the other factors, the future is not quite as clear.

Water loss also varies according to vegetation cover. Plants respond to higher carbon dioxide levels and drought by closing the tiny holes in their leaves (the stomata) and this can actually reduce water loss in wet environments. However, in water-stressed environments, projected long-term declines in rain may be compounded by plants using more water, further reducing streamflow. Actually, we can glean a lot from studying hydrological drought, which is measured by a period of low flow in rivers.

The point here is droughts are multidimensional, and can affect water supply on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. A seasonal-scale drought that reduces soil moisture on a farm, and a decade-long drought that depletes reservoirs and groundwater supplies, can each be devastating, but in different ways.

Is climate change affecting Australian droughts?

Climate change may affect drought metrics and types of drought differently, so it can be hard to make general statements about the links between human-induced climate change and all types of drought, in all locations, on all timescales.

Southern Australia, and in particular the southwest, has seen a rapid decline in winter rainfall and runoff that has been linked to climate change. In the southeast there has also been a substantial decline in winter rainfall and total runoff in recent decades. Although the reductions are consistent with climate change projections, the trend so far is harder to distinguish from the year-to-year variability.

There is some evidence to suggest that widespread and prolonged droughts, like the Millennium Drought, are worse than other droughts in past centuries, and may have been exacerbated by climate change.

Read more: Recent Australian droughts may be the worst in 800 years

But the role of climate change in extended drought periods is difficult to discern from normal variations in weather and climate. This is particularly true in Australia, which has a much more variable climate than many other parts of the world.

What does the future hold?

Climate models project increasing temperature across Australia and a continuing decline in cool-season rainfall over southern Australia over the next century. This will lead to more pressure on water supplies for agriculture, the environment, and cities such as Melbourne at the Paris Agreement’s target of 2℃, relative to the more ambitious target of 1.5℃ of global warming.

Read more: 2℃ of global warming would put pressure on Melbourne’s water supply

Rainfall is projected to become more extreme, with more intense rain events and fewer light rain days. Declining overall rainfall is predicted to reduce river flows in southeastern Australia. While we can expect the largest floods to increase with climate change, smaller floods are decreasing due to drier soils, and it is these smaller floods that top up our water supply systems.

Action needed

We might not know enough about droughts to be certain about exactly how they will behave in the future, but this does not affect the message from the science community on climate change, which remains crystal clear.

Rainfall intensification, sea level rise, ocean acidification, hotter days, and longer and more intense heatwaves all point to the fact that climate change presents a major threat to Australia and the world.

In response to these threats, we need deep and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts and proactive adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change. This includes a focus right now on the practical measures to help our rural communities who continue to feel the pinch of a dry landscape.

Read more: Why 2℃ of global warming is much worse for Australia than 1.5℃

– ref. The science of drought is complex but the message on climate change is clear – http://theconversation.com/the-science-of-drought-is-complex-but-the-message-on-climate-change-is-clear-125941

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Larissa Hjorth, Professor of Mobile Media and Games. Director of the Design & Creative Practice Platform., RMIT University

Sometimes life appears incomprehensible, of another world. The supernatural has been evoked in many cultures and religions as a way to make sense of the thresholds of mortal and immortal worlds through images and stories.

For some, the supernatural can help make sense of the irrationality of life. For others, it gives context for the textures of grief. And for others still, it provides continuity in the afterlife.

Japan supernatural, a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, surveys the complex, playful and inventive ways Japanese culture has visualised these themes from the 1700s to today.

Connection to the everyday

Defining the supernatural is a difficult task — reflecting our contested mortal and moral understandings. Japan has a compelling history of bringing the mystical to life — from the evocative woodcut prints of scholar, poet and artist Toriyama Sekien (1712–88), to the powerful storytelling of Hayao Miyazaki (of Spirited Away animated film fame) and the “superflat” popular character reinventions of Takashi Murakami.

In Japan — informed by Shinto beliefs around notions of animism — a soul (“reikon”) lives within all existence and phenomena. Everyday things — from objects to plants to mountains — can be defined as “kami” or deities.

This connection between the natural and spiritual worlds creates a complex understanding and respect for the everyday. Cups can be vessels for long lost ancestors. Would you throw out a cup if it could contain the spirit of your long lost grandmother?

Indeed, both personal and global lessons can be learnt from the animism appreciation of the environment in the face of current Anthropocene challenges.

Powerful spirits

The Japan supernatural exhibition begins from the Edo Period (1603–1868) and spans three centuries to contemporary manifestations. Stories highlighting the enduring power of the supernatural to understand the limits and potential of humanity are included.

Concepts such as yōkai — which in English translates roughly to monsters, goblins, demons and spirits — often take the form of everyday animals or objects. The prolific and prescient work of Sekien’s 18th century prints and books gives yōkai a creolised character face that manages to inspire both delight and fear.

In Japan, the yōkai have long been deployed in art and culture as a way to reflect upon morality and mortality. As anthropologist Komatsu Kazuhiko notes in the exhibition catalogue, the yōkai has gained long overdue scholarly attention in recent decades.

“Japan’s yōkai culture is extraordinarily rich,” he writes. “One aspect of yōkai culture relates to religious and spiritual history, another to the arts, including literature, the visual arts, theatre and popular entertainment”.

Japanese supernatural forms frequently change and transform. Only some of these transformative concepts translate into English: bakemono means “changing thing”, mononoke means “things that transform”, and yurei is the Japanese word for ghosts.

Yet art can unlock different cultural perceptions and understandings of otherworldly shapeshifters that go beyond language.

Fluid histories

The haunting presence of the spectral across the centuries creates and curates a different sense of time throughout this exhibition.

The work of Seiken can be found in director Isao Takahata’s woodblocks for the 1994 Studio Ghibli animation Pom Pok. And the exhibition includes key masters of the Ukiyo-e Period from the 17th to 19th century, such as Katsushika Hokusai who is famous for the timeless print The Great Wave.

The supernatural in Japan is all-pervasive, playing out in curious ways. For instance, anthropologist Anne Allison has been exploring the emerging Shinto-inspired death industries in Japan.

Funerals and cemeteries for people without families are emerging. Elderly Japanese people are meeting the strangers they will be buried near — some moving across Tokyo to live with their “grave friends” in this lifetime.

This continuity with life, death and afterlife could teach us plenty about the supernatural in our everyday lives; how to better understand one another, the environment around us, and perhaps even to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Japan supernatural runs 2 November to 8 March at the Art Gallery of NSW.

– ref. In Japan, supernatural beliefs connect the spiritual realm with the earthly objects around us – http://theconversation.com/in-japan-supernatural-beliefs-connect-the-spiritual-realm-with-the-earthly-objects-around-us-125726

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shireen Daft, Lecturer, Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University

In the dramatic account of the raid and killing of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, one thing captured widespread attention. A military working dog was singled out for praise, reportedly chasing al-Baghdadi down a tunnel before the IS leader detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and his three children.

The Joint Chiefs acknowledged the dog was “slightly wounded and fully recovering” and still on active duty.

Dogs used by militaries around the world are seen as vital assets to military operations, with close bonds created between dogs and their handlers. Many descriptions of military working dogs describe them as fellow soldiers, no different in treatment, status and respect, than their human counterparts.

Read more: For a nation of dog lovers Britain treats its canine veterans shamefully

So it’s interesting that the legal frameworks governing militaries and the operation of armed conflict have so little to say about the use, protection, or treatment of animals during war. This gap is particularly notable as the use of animals as soldiers is nothing new.

War dogs in history

This isn’t the first dog to become famous with such raids. Cairo was a lauded member of Operation Neptune Spear, the US Navy SEALs operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

But the history of the use of animals in warfare goes back further. Dogs were recorded in warfare as early as 600 BCE, and mentioned in the works of Homer, Herodotus, and Polynaeus. And while technological advancements have reduced the need for many species to be used by militaries, dogs are still seen as vital to their work.

The Australian Defence Forces extensively use dogs in their operations, and for many purposes. This includes sniffing out explosive devices, detecting narcotics, locating the wounded, and patrolling and protecting missions and bases.

The RAAF has been trialling a welfare dog program, placing dogs with chaplains to serve as therapy animals for deployed soldiers, in association with the Young Diggers Dog Squad.

In 2017, the Australian Defence Force commissioned the Canine Operational Service Medal, becoming the first military in the world specifically to honour the contributions made by military working dogs.

The medal is emblazoned with the image of Quake, an army combat assault dog, who died on operation in Afghanistan in 2012.

Military dogs are ‘equipment’, at best

The close bonds formed between military dogs, their handlers, and their units – and the hero status the public is eager to give these dogs – is not reflected in their legal status during armed conflicts.

In the United States, military dogs are labelled as “equipment”. A bill was introduced in 2012 to reclassify them as “canine members of the armed force”, but this bill ultimately lapsed without being passed into law. In practice, they are treated as noncommissioned officers, and given higher ranks than their handlers to ensure respect. But this is symbolic and brings with it no legal protection when in the theatre of war.

In Australia, the status of military working dogs is not addressed in legislation. But on the public-facing website of the Air Force, they’re placed under the category of “technology”, alongside bushmasters and fire trucks.

This classification as “things” comes at a time when much attention is being given to the status and rights of animals in many parts of the world, and a move away from classifying animals as property. The ACT has just passed law recognising animal sentience, acknowledging their ability to feel pain and to perceive the world around them.

The international law governing war – known as international humanitarian law or the laws of war – says even less. Despite the long history of animals used in warfare, there is not a single reference to the use of dogs or any other animal during war.

This silence does have consequences for military working dogs, beyond just outdated perceptions of non-human species.

Canine combatants

International humanitarian law is largely premised on a fundamental distinction between combatants and civilians.

Combatant status brings with it the right to be involved in hostilities, but also the burden of being a legitimate target for attack by the other side. Civilians are granted fundamental protections of not being a legitimate target, but lose this protection if they start participating in the hostilities.

The laws of war also provide protections for combatants to not be targeted in circumstances where they are surrendering, wounded, and provide for special protections for prisoners of war.

If dogs are nothing more than military equipment, then neither the protections of combatant or civilian status apply – they can be targeted and destroyed as if any piece of inanimate military gear.

If equipment or technology, then there is no obligation to treat them with respect if captured or wounded.

For example, there is no international law in place prohibiting the use of dogs, as they were used by the Soviets in World War II and beyond, as suicide bombers.

Dogs need legal protection

The solution isn’t as simple as recognising dogs having the same combatant status as humans.

Combatants must comply with the rules of international humanitarian law. This means they commit, at all times, to distinguish between civilians and combatants, to not attack the wounded, and more.

Read more: ACT’s new animal sentience law recognises an animal’s psychological pain and pleasure, and may lead to better protections

Military working dogs are unlikely to be able to fully and independently comply with this large body of law. What’s needed are protections specifically targeting their role in armed conflicts.

The animal rights movement still has a long way to go when it comes to a universal recognition of the personhood of animals generally, and the laws of war are just a small facet of the bigger picture.

But the simultaneous treatment of dogs who are used on battlefields and in operations as heroes, while offering none of the legal protections given to their human counterparts, shows an irreconcilable dilemma in our current approach.

– ref. Dogs of war: are military dogs war heroes or just tools? It’s time the law protected our furry troops – http://theconversation.com/dogs-of-war-are-military-dogs-war-heroes-or-just-tools-its-time-the-law-protected-our-furry-troops-126029

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barry Judd, Professor, Indigenous Social Research, Charles Darwin University

Last weekend marked 34 years since the land title to Uluru was handed back to the local Yankunytjatjara-Pitjantjatjara peoples. It was also when joint management of the Uluru-Katja-Tjuta National Park began between the traditional owners (Anangu people) and Parks Australia.

The arrangement recognised Anangu title to the land and ensured the direct involvement of Anangu in the development of tourism in the area.

The agreement also coincided with the relocation of tourism facilities from the southeast base of Uluru to the purpose-built resort town of Yulara. The old hotels and other tourist sites were discarded and became the base for the Anangu community of Mutitjulu.

However, if joint management aimed to deliver improved economic and social outcomes for Anangu residents, it has proven to be a spectacular failure.

Read more: Closing Uluru to climbers is better for tourism in the long run

Today, Yulara and Mutitjulu stand in stark contrast. Yulara is filled with cashed-up, bucket-list travellers from all over the world, while Mutitjulu is an outpost of lingering disadvantage where overcrowding, underemployment, poverty, high rates of suicide and preventable diseases remain pervasive problems.

Mutitjulu was also the epicentre of the controversial Northern Territory National Emergency Response in 2007, commonly referred to as the intervention, when the federal government took control over more than 70 Indigenous communities in response to allegations of child sexual abuse.

Over a decade later, the intervention has done little to close the gap in these communities.

Mutitjulu is emblematic of what academic Jon Altman refers to as the persistent need to reestablish trust between Indigenous Australians and the institutions that for so long failed to ensure their basic human rights were protected.

An end to climbing brings new opportunities

The end of climbing at Uluru provides an opportunity to reset the relationship between the traditional owners and the tourism sector, and look for new ways for Anangu to be integrated into the industry.

Central to this is how the Anangu can meaningfully develop their cultural assets within the park to ensure the long-term benefit of their people, particularly through direct employment.

Read more: Why we are banning tourists from climbing Uluru

There would appear to be ample opportunities for the people in Mutitjulu to take advantage of the 1,000-plus tourism jobs in Yulara, which are currently staffed largely by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from outside the community.

The closure of Uluru to climbing also necessitates the development of alternate visitor experiences, particularly more educational and immersive experiences that would entail learning from and interacting respectfully with traditional owners.

Obstacles to developing an Indigenous tourism economy

Yet, structural impediments prevent this from becoming a reality at Uluru, as well as other remote parts of Australia.

These obstacles include a lack of education and training options specific to Indigenous needs to help them set up and run their own businesses. Another issue is that land rights and native title claims have tended to benefit a few legally recognised landowners and haven’t been conducive to whole-of-community development.

Both the Anangu and key tourism stakeholders in central Australia, including Voyages Indigenous Tourism and Tourism NT, are keenly aware of the need to reform the local tourism industry.

Read more: How Indigenous tourism can help bring about reconciliation in Australia

Enabling greater access to commercial bank loans is critical to Indigenous business development, as is collaborative planning between Indigenous groups and the government. Likewise, scientific and traditional Indigenous knowledge could be combined in new ways to drive tourism growth in areas like land and wildlife management.

The Anangu must also be empowered to start micro-enterprises grounded in Knowledge of Country that would strengthen their community, culture and language. One example of this is the Indigenous Ranger and Protected Area program, which involves Indigenous rangers managing their own lands based on traditional cultural practice.

Read more: Indigenous rangers don’t receive the funding they deserve – here’s why

Another approach that has shown promise is embracing Indigenous knowledge systems as part of the tourist educational experience. This is gaining currency in the NT as remote community arts centres seek to become visitor destinations in their own right.

These approaches to bottom-up initiatives have the greatest potential for growth and long-term empowerment in Uluru.

A model for other Indigenous communities

A major tourism rethink also requires addressing the structural impediments that prevent Indigenous peoples from starting businesses.

For example, new incentives could be built into the Australian tax code for those who invest in businesses on Aboriginal-owned land. However, such measures will only succeed if they are supported by bespoke educational and training programs for Anangu wanting to work in tourism.

The closure of Uluru to climbing should not simply focus on the limits the Anangu have imposed on visitors, but rather on the new possibilities this presents to leverage tourism for a more sustainable and resilient future.

This could also provide a model for traditional owners elsewhere who want to reclaim decision-making authority over tourism and other cultural activities on their lands.

And it signals to the broader Australian public that a greater respect for the rights of Indigenous people might just be the catalyst that helps drive a brighter Indigenous future.

– ref. After the climb: how new tourism opportunities can empower the traditional owners of Uluru – http://theconversation.com/after-the-climb-how-new-tourism-opportunities-can-empower-the-traditional-owners-of-uluru-125929

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Lecturer in Digital Media at the School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology

This is the second article in a series looking at the attention economy and how online content gets in front of your eyeballs. Read part 1 here.

People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Over the past few years, the video sharing platform has come under fire for its role in spreading and amplifying extreme views.

YouTube’s video recommendation system, in particular, has been criticised for radicalising young people and steering viewers down rabbit holes of disturbing content.

The company claims it is trying to avoid amplifying problematic content. But research from YouTube’s parent company, Google, indicates this is far from straightforward, given the commercial pressure to keep users engaged via ever more stimulating content.

But how do YouTube’s recommendation algorithms actually work? And how much are they really to blame for the problems of radicalisation?

The fetishisation of algorithms

Almost everything we see online is heavily curated. Algorithms decide what to show us in Google’s search results, Apple News, Twitter trends, Netflix recommendations, Facebook’s newsfeed, and even pre-sorted or spam-filtered emails. And that’s before you get to advertising.

More often than not, these systems decide what to show us based on their idea of what we are like. They also use information such as what our friends are doing and what content is newest, as well as built-in randomness. All this makes it hard to reverse-engineer algorithmic outcomes to see how they came about.

Algorithms take all the relevant data they have and process it to achieve a goal – often one that involves influencing users’ behaviour, such as selling us products or keeping us engaged with an app or website.

At YouTube, the “up next” feature is the one that receives most attention, but other algorithms are just as important, including search result rankings, homepage video recommendations, and trending video lists.

Read more: This isn’t Helter Skelter: Why the internet alone can’t be blamed for radicalisation

How YouTube recommends content

The main goal of the YouTube recommendation system is to keep us watching. And the system works: it is responsible for more than 70% of the time users spend watching videos.

When a user watches a video on YouTube, the “up next” sidebar shows videos that are related but usually longer and more popular. These videos are ranked according to the user’s history and context, and newer videos are generally preferenced.

This is where we run into trouble. If more watching time is the central objective, the recommendation algorithm will tend to favour videos that are new, engaging and provocative.

Yet algorithms are just pieces of the vast and complex sociotechnical system that is YouTube, and there is so far little empirical evidence on their role in processes of radicalisation.

In fact, recent research suggests that instead of thinking about algorithms alone, we should look at how they interact with community behaviour to determine what users see.

The importance of communities on YouTube

YouTube is a quasi-public space containing all kinds of videos: from musical clips, TV shows and films, to vernacular genres such as “how to” tutorials, parodies, and compilations. User communities that create their own videos and use the site as a social network have played an important role on YouTube since its beginning.

Today, these communities exist alongside commercial creators who use the platform to build personal brands. Some of these are far-right figures who have found in YouTube a home to push their agendas.

It is unlikely that algorithms alone are to blame for the radicalisation of a previously “moderate audience” on YouTube. Instead, research suggests these radicalised audiences existed all along.

Read more: YouTube star PewDiePie rails against ‘the media’, but he’s a part of it too now

Content creators are not passive participants in the algorithmic systems. They understand how the algorithms work and are constantly improving their tactics to get their videos recommended.

Right-wing content creators also know YouTube’s policies well. Their videos are often “borderline” content: they can be interpreted in different ways by different viewers.

YouTube’s community guidelines restrict blatantly harmful content such as hate speech and violence. But it’s much harder to police content in the grey areas between jokes and bullying, religious doctrine and hate speech, or sarcasm and a call to arms.

Moving forward: a cultural shift

There is no magical technical solution to political radicalisation. YouTube is working to minimise the spread of borderline problematic content (for example, conspiracy theories) by reducing their recommendations of videos that can potentially misinform users.

However, YouTube is a company and it’s out to make a profit. It will always prioritise its commercial interests. We should be wary of relying on technological fixes by private companies to solve society’s problems. Plus, quick responses to “fix” these issues might also introduce harms to politically edgy (activists) and minority (such as sexuality-related or LGBTQ) communities.

When we try to understand YouTube, we should take into account the different factors involved in algorithmic outcomes. This includes systematic, long-term analysis of what algorithms do, but also how they combine with YouTube’s prominent subcultures, their role in political polarisation, and their tactics for managing visibility on the platform.

Before YouTube can implement adequate measures to minimise the spread of harmful content, it must first understand what cultural norms are thriving on their site – and being amplified by their algorithms.

The authors would like to acknowledge that the ideas presented in this article are the result of ongoing collaborative research on YouTube with researchers Jean Burgess, Nicolas Suzor, Bernhard Rieder, and Oscar Coromina.

– ref. Don’t just blame YouTube’s algorithms for ‘radicalisation’. Humans also play a part – http://theconversation.com/dont-just-blame-youtubes-algorithms-for-radicalisation-humans-also-play-a-part-125494

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity

American televangelist Pat Robinson once claimed children who celebrate Halloween were unknowingly “worshipping Satan”.

Despite the absurdity that a child dressing up as a witch is devil worship, the idea that Halloween is linked to something satanic continues to have purchase among some conservative Christians. However, the traditions behind this increasingly popular holiday are far more complex. It has less to do with anything satanic and more to do with superstition and our relationship with death.

For approximately the past 1,200 years, Halloween has been defined, in part, by the Christian festival celebrated on November 1 each year known as All Saints’ Day or “All Hallows” in old English. “All Hallows Eve” became “Hallowe’en” – the eve of All Saints’ Day.

Read more: What is hell, exactly? We might joke it’s other people, but the Bible has a more complicated answer

All Saints’ Day is the day Christians remember and give thanks for those who have died, particularly those who have inspired faith.

In the Roman Catholic tradition, saints are a specific category: someone recognised for extraordinary faith and service, recognised through a formal canonisation process. However, in the Protestant tradition, “saints” refers more generally to all believers. So All Saints’ Day is time to remember all those who have died, often with a focus on those who have died in the previous year (Catholics, Orthodox Christians and some Anglicans celebrate this larger group on All Souls’ Day).

The point of these Christian festivals is to remember and honour the dead. On All Souls’ Day at the church I attend, we read aloud the names of dead loved ones submitted by attendees. The list can be long, but it can be a deeply moving experience. It is a rare time to name the dead, comfort one another in grief, and keep alive the memories of loved ones by giving thanks for their lives. And this is the connection to the much older traditions that lie behind Halloween.

Honouring the dead takes a range of forms around the world, as it has throughout history. Ancient Romans left gifts on the graves of their ancestors at Feralia to appease the spirits. Mexican customs associated with the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) similarly include leaving gifts at graves.

In Australia, the more recent tradition of Anzac Day dawn services and the placement of wreaths on monuments echoes this desire to remember and honour a particular category of those who have died in service to their country.

The Celtic origins of Halloween, known as Samhain, also included gifts for the dead. Out of superstitious concern that the spirits or ghosts of the dead could enter the space of the living on Halloween night and perhaps even take the living with them, Celts wore costumes to disguise themselves from ghosts and burned bonfires to ward off bad spirits. Small bowls of food placed outside homes sought to appease the ghosts. This may well be the origins of the more recent trick-or-treat tradition.

A festival of the dead might seem a strange and ghoulish thing in a culture that is otherwise so death-denying. It stands as a sharp contrast to our modern obsession with anti-ageing, life-extending technology. Yet, despite an ambivalent history with Halloween, it is becoming more popular each year in Australia. Spending on costumes, sweets and decorations has sky-rocketed in recent years.

While the environmental impact of these cheap plastic decorations and individually wrapped candy raises its own set of ethical issues, the relationship between the dead and the living raises a deeper set of questions.

How do we continue to remember the dead? How do we honour and keep alive memories of those who have gone before us? How do we talk about death with our children in a way that makes it less scary yet without denying or trivialising its seriousness?

Divorced from religious traditions of various kinds, we are in danger of being a culture that lacks the rituals that help us pause, remember, give thanks and take stock of both death and life.

Read more: Halloween films: the good, the bad and the truly scary

In our modern age, we are less likely to be worried about ghosts rising from graves on Halloween. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether the attraction of Halloween is that it taps into a part of our collective psyche that continues to be intrigued by questions about death, the afterlife and the spiritual realm, despite being less likely to practise formal religion.

While very conservative Christians will view anything not explicitly Christian as anti-Christian (and therefore satanic, or “of the devil”), Halloween, like so many other cultural festivals, reflects a complex set of traditions and beliefs. Rather than doing harm, perhaps dressing up like a ghost, zombie, devil, angel or some other undead being is actually a way to celebrate life.

After all, remembering the dead (or dressing up like them) reminds us to be grateful for life.

– ref. Hell, no! Halloween is not ‘satanic’ – it’s an important way to think about death – http://theconversation.com/hell-no-halloween-is-not-satanic-its-an-important-way-to-think-about-death-118391

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Grieger, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Adelaide

In years gone by, women would rely on the calendar on the wall to work out when their next menstrual cycle might occur. They would look to physical signs to tell them when they might be ovulating, and therefore when they’d be most likely to fall pregnant.

More recently, we’ve seen the proliferation of mobile phone applications helping women track their current cycle, predict their next cycle, and work out when the best time is to try for a baby.

There are more than 400 fertility apps available, and over 100 million women worldwide are using them.

Read more: For many women, tracking their fertility can be an emotional whirlwind

The personalisation and convenience of apps makes them empowering and attractive. But they require some caution in their use.

While fertility apps use individualised information to estimate the most fertile period, they are not completely reliable. And even if an app indicates when a woman is most fertile, it doesn’t mean a pregnancy will follow if a couple has sex during this window.

The menstrual cycle

A woman’s menstrual cycle consists of three phases: menstrual bleeding, the follicular phase (when an egg-containing follicle is growing) and the luteal phase (the two weeks after ovulation prior to the next period).

It’s traditionally been thought the follicular phase varies in length between women, whereas the luteal phase is relatively constant between women – generally around 14 days. All phases together are thought to amount to a cycle lasting 28 days.

The actual time of ovulation, which occurs at the end of the follicular phase, is marked by the rise in a hormone called the luteinising hormone. This can be measured by a blood test, or more conveniently by urine dipsticks (the same mechanism used for at-home pregnancy tests).

Read more: Women’s fertility: does ‘egg timer’ testing work, and what are the other options?

Physical changes during ovulation include altered vaginal secretions and a subtle drop and then rise in basal body temperature.

A woman can become pregnant during the five days before ovulation or on the day of ovulation. However, the most fertile days are the three days leading up to and including ovulation. By 12-24 hours after ovulation, a woman is no longer able to conceive during that menstrual cycle.

How the apps work

When a woman logs the beginning of her menstrual cycle, fertility apps attempt to predict, using inbuilt algorithms, when ovulation might occur. The app then recommends the timing of intercourse accordingly to optimise the user’s chance of becoming pregnant.

Calendar-based apps rely entirely on menstrual cycle length and an assumption ovulation occurs 14 days before the next period.

Many of the more sophisticated apps collect data on basal body temperature, while some also call for a woman to examine her cervical mucus secretions, or include results from at-home ovulation test kits.

There may be ancillary options to track mood and feelings, diet and exercise, and sexual intercourse.

Read more: An app to prevent pregnancy? Don’t count on it

Are they effective?

Australian researchers recently looked at 36 fertility apps most commonly downloaded by Australian women. The research, yet to be published, indicated less than half (42.7%) of the apps predicted the correct ovulation date.

A published study looking at 12 fertility apps found the calendar-based apps did not correctly determine the ovulation date when the average length of previous cycles was different to the estimated current cycle length. The prediction of fertile days based solely on previous cycle lengths is a clear limitation of calendar-based apps.

For apps collecting temperature data, the prediction of highly fertile days was also commonly missed due to the use of data from previous rather than current cycles.

It’s likely the apps which request more information will have better accuracy. But their effectiveness also relies on the user entering information correctly and consistently.

Read more: How to pick the good from the bad smartphone health apps

Importantly, a recent study looking at more than 600,000 menstrual cycles from 124,648 women tracked by the Natural Cycles app showed the luteal phase is often considerably longer or shorter than 14 days. This calls into question the fundamental premise of a standard 28 day cycle on which many apps are based.

We have confirmed this using the Flo app, demonstrating differences in cycle length based on body mass index (BMI), age and ethnic background.

In women who had logged at least three cycles on the Flo app (1.5 million women), we found just 16.3% had a median 28 day cycle. A higher percentage of older women (aged 40+) had shorter cycles; whereas Asian women and women with a very high BMI tended to have longer cycles.

An algorithm can’t capture all factors that affect fertility

Although we need more research in this area, the evidence so far suggests if you’re trying to have a baby, you shouldn’t rely too heavily on an app – particularly if you’re finding it hard to conceive.

Various factors such as diet, exercise, body weight, and ethnicity can play a role in a woman’s menstrual cycle and a couple’s chance of conceiving. While many apps allow users to input this information, changes such as an increase or decrease in body weight, or times of high stress, which may lead to irregular menstrual cycles, are not incorporated into the algorithms that predict when a woman will be most fertile.

This may contribute to a delay in conception and lead to distress, particularly if a couple has already been trying to conceive for many months.

Read more: I have PCOS and I want to have a baby, what do I need to know?

On the plus side, consistency in using fertility apps may assist women in getting to know their bodies better, and with evidence-based educational components in some apps, their use may support fertility awareness and knowledge about reproductive health.

Fertility apps can be beneficial for documenting monthly cycles and help women identify when their cycles may be irregular. When this is the case, this may be a sign of other reproductive health issues, and women should see a doctor.

In women who have reproductive health issues such as polycystic ovary syndrome or endometriosis, the ability to become pregnant is already reduced. An app estimating ovulation or suggesting the most fertile period in these women may therefore be limited in its effectiveness.

– ref. Planning a baby? A fertility app won’t necessarily tell you the best time to try – http://theconversation.com/planning-a-baby-a-fertility-app-wont-necessarily-tell-you-the-best-time-to-try-123779