Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Power, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University

Jonathan Van Ness, the high-profile star of Queer Eye, has revealed he is living with HIV, having been diagnosed seven years ago at the age of 25.

Media headlines have described the outpouring of support received by Van Ness since coming out as HIV positive to be indicative of changing social attitudes toward HIV.

However, understanding and acceptance of people living with HIV is far from assured.

Disentangling HIV and homophobia

Van Ness is among the most famous queer and gender non-binary people in the world. Yet he found revealing his HIV status presented a level of fear and risk above coming out as queer.

“I’ve had nightmares every night for the past three months because I’m scared to be this vulnerable with people,” he told the New York Times about the release of his memoir, Over the Top.

HIV-related stigma has always been entangled with homophobia and social fears about immorality and deviance. Growing acceptance of the LGBTI community has muted some of the moral panic about HIV, but most people know very little about what it means to be living with HIV in 2019.

Since the mid-1990s, improved antiretroviral treatment (ART) has enabled HIV be managed as a chronic condition, and often people with HIV can assume normal life expectancy. ART can also suppress HIV in a person’s body, which means it cannot be transmitted to a sexual partner — colloquially known as U=U (undetectable = untransmissible).

Despite this, HIV is still marred by high levels of stigma and misunderstanding which make it incredibly challenging for people to “come out” as HIV positive.

Changing faces of HIV

For many Australian adults, the darkly disturbing imagery of the 1987 Grim Reaper media campaign still stands as the dominant cultural image of HIV. The Grim Reaper fuelled a sense of panic with the message that HIV “could kill more Australians than World War Two” and firmly grounded HIV stigma in public sentiment.

At this time, one of the most visible Australian faces of HIV was that of Eve van Grafhorst, a child from NSW whose family was forced into hiding due to harassment they received when Eve was outed as HIV positive in 1985.

In 1990, Time Magazine published the now infamous image of David Kirby dying from AIDS, lying semi-conscious on his bed surrounded by his grieving family. Similar images of deathly thin, young gay men were the prevailing cultural stereotype of HIV at the time, but they in no way told the whole story.

Since the early 1980s, many thousands of activists have publicly disclosed their HIV status in an act of resistance to discriminatory images of people living with HIV and to provide leadership in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

In 1991, LA Lakers star point guard Magic Johnson publicly revealed his HIV status. As a heterosexual sporting hero, Johnson’s coming out disrupted some of the homophobic narrative around HIV, but he also had to confront a shocked public and ongoing media revelations about his sexual history.

This narrative has remained sadly consistent. In 2015, Charlie Sheen announced that he was HIV positive in an effort to stop threats to “out” him. At this point, Sheen had already spent upwards of US$10 million on extortion payments.

Media reporting on Sheen’s HIV status commented on his sexual morality and demeaned the character of sex workers he had engaged.

While the mainstream media around Van Ness has been celebratory of his willingness to share his story so openly, this does not necessarily mean it will be easier for others to reveal their status.

Ongoing stigma and isolation

Last week, the results of an Australian national survey of people living with HIV run by La Trobe University, the HIV Futures 9 study, were released, revealing the extent to which HIV stigma can lead to invisibility and isolation.

One in three respondents indicated that almost no-one in their life was aware of their HIV status. A similar number reported that they knew no other people living with HIV with whom they could speak about their experiences.

The survey findings also showed HIV status had a significant impact on the way people approached relationships with friends, family and potential partners: nearly half the heterosexual women surveyed indicated they had avoided intimate relationships or sex since their HIV diagnosis.

Read more: HIV in Australia: we’ve come a long way but there’s more to do

Coming out to build community

Van Ness came out about his HIV status by describing himself as a “member of the beautiful HIV positive community.”

The sense of support and solidarity that comes with community is an important buffer against the negative impact of stigma and discrimination. For this reason, adequately funded peer programs and community organisations that connect HIV positive people with each other remain a vital part of the social response to HIV.

These programs rely on the willingness of people living with HIV to be open about their status – despite the risks – as a means to offer advocacy and care for others.

Public support for Van Ness has been powerful, and Van Ness’ fame provides a platform from which he can extend this legacy of building community around HIV. But it should not mask the reality that many people living with HIV continue to be silenced and isolated by stigma.

For that to change, we need to build much greater awareness about the contemporary experience of living with HIV.

– ref. ‘The beautiful HIV-positive community’: Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness shines a spotlight on the changing face of HIV – http://theconversation.com/the-beautiful-hiv-positive-community-queer-eyes-jonathan-van-ness-shines-a-spotlight-on-the-changing-face-of-hiv-123993

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

Anthony Albanese has attacked Scott Morrison for sending a message to Beijing while in the United States, and also split with him over the economic status of China.

Albanese accused Morrison of using “a loud hailer” to talk to China during a visit in which he was seen to be very close to the American President, including “being a partner in what would appear to be some of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign there in Ohio”. This was a reference to their joint appearance at billionaire Anthony Pratt’s new paper recycling factory.

The opposition leader’s comments open a partisan rift at a time when Australia-China relations are at a low point.

In his address on foreign policy in Chicago, Morrison described China “as a newly developed economy”, and said it needed to reflect this new status in its trade arrangements and meeting environmental challenges.

But Albanese told the ABC China quite clearly was “still developing”.

“It is still an emerging economy”, he said, pointing to the disparity between China’s per capita income and that of advanced economies such as the US and Australia.

Albanese, who made a series of comments, suggested it was not constructive “to send a message to China from the US in the way that it has occurred”.

Read more: Highly touted UN climate summit failed to deliver – and Scott Morrison failed to show up

While there was a legitimate debate around the World Trade Organisation system, “the conflict between China and the United States [over trade] is one that is not in Australia’s interests. We want that to be resolved rather than be overly partisan about it,” he said.

“Of course our alliance with the United States is our most important relationship. That won’t change. But we need to, I think, be very measured in our comments particularly comments from the United States in the context in which they’ve been given.”

If Morrison was sending a message to China “it would have been better sent from Australia so that there was no confusion that the Prime Minister was advancing Australia’s national interests.”

Morrison had changed “the characterisation of the entire Chinese economy from Chicago,” Albanese said. “Does he think that will be well received and will reduce tension between China and the United States over trade?”

In fact, while Morrison’s language on China’s economic status went further than before, he had gone a considerable way down this path previously. In a major address in June he said: “China’s rise has now reached a threshold level of economic maturity”, with its most successful provinces sometimes exceeding the economic sophistication of global competitors. Yet they enjoyed concessions on trade and environmental obligations not available to other developed economies, he said.

In his Chicago speech Morrison said there was a need to reduce trade tensions that had developed in recent years.

“China’s economic growth is welcomed by Australia and we recognise the economic maturity that it has now realised as a newly developed economy,” he said.

It was important this was reflected in its trade arrangements, participation in addressing important global environmental challenges, transparency in its partnerships and support for developing nations.

“All of this needs to reflect this new status and the responsibilities that go with it as a very major world power,” Morrison said.

He also said: “The world’s global institutions must adjust their settings for China, in recognition of this new status. That means more will be expected of course, as has always been the case for nations like the United States who’ve always had this standing.”

Asked at a news conference what he wanted China to do that it was not doing now, Morrison said the objective was that “similar rules will apply to countries of similar capabilities”.

Read more: Yes, the US-Australia alliance is important, but Scott Morrison needs to take a careful approach with Donald Trump

Meanwhile in a speech in Beijing this week Richard Marles, Labor’s deputy leader and defence spokesman, urged a deepening of Australia’s relations with China, including even at the defence level.

“I firmly believe it is possible for Australia to maintain our strong alliance with the United States while also deepening our engagement with China. In fact, not only is this possible, it is vital,” Marles said.

“And that must be obvious. Because from the perspective of Australia, the world looks a lot safer when the United States and China are talking to each other and improving their relations.

“And if this is our view, then it stands to reason that Australia’s interest lies in having the best possible relations we can with both the United States and China.

“And from the perspective of Australia the world also looks a lot more prosperous when China and the United States trade with each other.”

“Our starting point has to be that we respect China and deeply value our relationship with China. We must seek to build it. And not just in economic terms, but also through exploring political co-operation and even defence co-operation.

“To define China as an enemy is a profound mistake. To talk of a new Cold War is silly and ignorant,” Marles said.

Asked about the defence reference, Albanese played it down.

Read more: View from The Hill: To go to China you have to be invited: Morrison

In a Tuesday speech in Jakarta, Labor’s shadow minister on foreign affairs Penny Wong said: “It is clear that the United States and China now treat each other as strategic competitors.

“The strategic competition in our region means we need to think carefully and engage actively to avoid becoming collateral. Great powers will do what great powers do – assert their interests. But the rest of us are not without our own agency,” she said.

“What our region is looking for is less a contest about who should be or will be number one, than how we foster partnerships of enduring connection and relevance”.

Wong said the US should “present a positive narrative and vision about the future, by articulating and presenting what it offers not only what it is against.”

“A greater focus on the likely settling point will enable the United States to recognise – and embrace – the fact that multi-polarity in the region is likely to get stronger.

“And in the context of Beijing’s ambitions, this growing multi-polarity – with countries like Indonesia, India and Japan playing increasingly important leadership roles in the region – is beneficial to Washington’s interests.

“Defining a realistic settling point will also help the United States recognise and accept that decisions relating to China will vary depending on the issues and interests at stake.”

Albanese also criticised Morrison for not attending the United Nations leaders summit on climate.

Morrison said that when he addresses the UN General Assembly this week: “I’ll be focusing very much on Australia’s response to the global environmental challenges. Which isn’t just climate change … it’s about plastics, it’s about oceans, it’s about recycling”.

– ref. Albanese slams Morrison for using a “loud hailer” to talk to China from US – http://theconversation.com/albanese-slams-morrison-for-using-a-loud-hailer-to-talk-to-china-from-us-124097

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

Fear. Shame. Blame.

Silence.

Young women are often made to feel sexual shame before they have a language capable of articulating what they think and feel about their bodies and themselves.

One of the most deeply moving themes in Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment and Survival, a new comics anthology edited by Diane Noomin, is its subtle recognition of the ways in which shame functions as a means of exerting control over the bodies of young women. Women are made to feel they must remain silent about sexual violence or face the additional burden of public judgement and disbelief.

Drawing Power brings together the visual testimonies of 60 graphic artists who are survivors of gender-based violence including domestic violence, sexual harassment, child sex abuse, rape and assault. It gives emotional weight and resonance to such experiences in a way words alone might not.

It is an often chilling read. Regardless of the diverse ages of the contributors, the stories the artists choose to tell overwhelmingly focus on the harm inflicted on women and girls at age 12, 17, or 23, which functions to teach them that pain is a “natural” part of growing up as a woman in the world.

It is not.

Lifelong scaring

In Borders Broken, Edges Blurred, Sabba Khan tells an extraordinarily powerful story about child sex abuse, rendering a maelstrom of experience in delicately drawn panels that are almost whimsically washed in pastel pink and blue.

In one panel, Khan draws a map of a doll’s house-like home, tucked inside an intricately drawn neighbourhood, where “a little one, not yet a teenager” is sexually assaulted in the midst of a family gathering.

It is soon apparent the child’s parents are more worried about the shame that may be brought on the family than concerned for their child.

“But how can this be? We are family! Family does not do these things,” they say. “How will we show our faces in our circles?”

In panel after panel, shattered bricks follow the lonely figure of the child, piling up to form a wall. Inexorably the wall becomes a silo and then a pit. “A hell. A hole.”

“I’ll stay quiet,” says the child. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Read more: Rape culture: why our community attitudes to sexual violence matter

Silence and fear are visual motifs that weave their way through every work in this collection.

It is Always There, as the title of Nicola Streeten’s story about the inter-generational experience of violence makes clear.

It is “like a coat you can get too comfortable in,” writes Avy Jetter in Hurt Not Broken, a personal story about domestic violence.

It is not just the ferocity of the physical violence that instils fear, but the depth of the terror conveyed by Jetter’s tense black ink drawings.

Violence is kept secret. A sense of lifelong scaring is conveyed through panels that flick backwards and forwards in time. We sense the impact on children, and the sheer despair of ever leaving when there’s nowhere to go.

The protagonist attempts to report to the Minnesota Police as early as 1962. “But they just laughed.”

‘A joke’

Disempowerment of this sort has clear and measurable social and economic costs.

In Sausage Fest, Australian artist Sarah Firth tells a frightening story about sexual harassment in the workplace, and the serial victimisation of young women too often deemed to be disposable by employers.

Firth shows the joy of landing a coveted job abruptly giving way to stress and terror. In a sharp, jarring sequence, a series of symbolic objects are left on the young woman’s office chair including a carrot, a cucumber, and a broken light tube – followed more menacingly by a hammer, a photograph defaced by a penis and testicles, an open Stanley knife and then the word “slut” spelled out in copper pipes across the floor.

The perpetrator – in an eerily familiar scenario – explains away his actions as “a joke”. The victim is instructed to mediate. Eventually, the perpetrator is given two weeks paid leave and the woman is forced to negotiate the termination of her work contract.

Read more: Women don’t speak up over workplace harassment because no one hears them if they do

Again, the brightly coloured panels belie the glaring horror – and sad familiarity – of the story. It is clear this young woman is not the first to leave.

Searing consequences of silence

Drawing Power is filled with powerful works by creators of diverse ages, sexual orientations and cultural backgrounds. Ajuan Mance shows the reader how “being the only woman in a room full of people of colour can feel more like safety” than “being the only person of colour in a room full of women”.

Marian Henley deploys an image of a tank as a metaphor for the violence inflicted on rape victims by the criminal justice system. Marcela Trujillo uses the image of her mother’s lacquered hairstyle as a means to talk about gang rape, self-imposed silence and self-protection.

In Miriam Libicki’s He Said, She Said, the young female protagonist is too frightened to fight off the sexual depredations of a taxi driver, and too frightened to run from the taxi in an unsafe city in the middle of the night.

Australian creator Rachel Ang conjures up the pain of an abusive relationship, with spectral effects, until there is nothing but rage and pain spilling out across the black washed panels.

Throughout each of the 60 comics, what stays with the reader is the searing consequences of so much silence. And the desperate need to speak.

Pain of this sort is not – or should not be – seen as just a natural part of growing up female in the world. Drawing Power shows women sharing and reshaping their own narratives, in the desperate hope that by drawing and speaking they can let other women know they are not alone, this is not normal, and they can change the story for new generations.

– ref. Drawing Power review: a searing comics anthology on sexual violence – http://theconversation.com/drawing-power-review-a-searing-comics-anthology-on-sexual-violence-124089

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Terese Henning, Director of the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute, University of Tasmania

After serving more than 30 years in prison, the man who committed what’s often described as Tasmania’s most horrific crime is up for parole. The surviving victim is speaking out against it, but not under her real name, despite wanting to be publicly identified.

This is because of a provision – section 194K of the Evidence Act 2001 – in Tasmanian law that prevents anyone who has been sexually abused from publishing details about the matter even if they wish to do so.

It has also been claimed this section is a “gag law” and would prevent participation in the Me Too campaign in Tasmania. But section 194K is currently under review, in part thanks to the #LetHerSpeak campaign, and the Tasmanian government is expected to change the law early next year.

Read more: If you’ve been sexually assaulted, here’s what doctors and nurses do next

While controversy has surrounded section 194K, it’s important to clarify the provision’s aim is to protect victims of sexual assault from any possible external pressure – such as from the media – to reveal their identities.

So what does the law say?

Section 194K provides that, in relation to any court proceedings, a person must not publish the “the name, address, or any other reference or allusion likely to lead to the identification” of victims of sexual offences.

This prohibition also applies to information likely to identify other witnesses in sexual offence cases, with the exception of the defendant. However, courts can make orders permitting identifying information to be published, including in the media.

Section 194K serves a number of purposes. It protects sexual offences victims’ privacy, encourages reporting offences to the police, and protects victims from harms caused by identification, especially those resulting from prurient media interest in details of victims’ lives and the offences against them.

When these victims do choose to reveal their identity, they become exposed to significant harms that can arise from outdated stereotypes and stigma attaching to sexual offence victims.

Both historically and currently, it’s claimed sexual offence victims lie about offences committed against them and they were somehow to blame for the commission of those offences.

Identification can cause great distress to victims. It can lead to disclosures about their prior sexual history which may exacerbate their suffering. The media may report details of the offences inaccurately, ruthlessly and salaciously with little regard to victims’ well-being.

Read more: Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment: what’s the difference?

These harms all support the protection of victims’ privacy and the existence of the prohibition in section 194K.

Why the provision stops victims revealing their own identity

The prohibition doesn’t prevent the media from attending court and reporting on the facts of cases or the conduct of the trial. What’s more, it doesn’t prevent reporting on cases that aren’t the subject of court proceedings.

So, it is not accurate to say section 194K would prevent the Me Too campaign gaining traction in Tasmania.

Similar legislation exists in all other Australian jurisdictions, in New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. But generally, enactments elsewhere permit publication of identifying details with victims’ consent, where the victim is not a child or is over a specified age.

This feature is absent from section 194K in Tasmania, and from similar provisions in the Northern Territory.

There are strong arguments for permitting publication with complainants’ consent. It may help overcome the stigma associated with these offences. It may encourage other victims to come forward. And it may assist victims by empowering them and vindicating their experience.

But it’s also important to ensure complainants are not feeling pressured to reveal their identities to satisfy media.

In one case, a Tasmanian Supreme Court judge pointed to the risk of the media pestering victims to consent to publication, particularly when they may be experiencing emotional turmoil and high levels of stress.

Also, problems may arise where there are multiple victims, only one or two of whom are willing to have their identities disclosed.

The provision under review

In 2013, the Tasmania Law Reform Institute (TLRI) reviewed the operation of section 194K.

It examined how well the law protects victims of sexual offences, and considered the position of victims who don’t wish to remain anonymous, but who prefer their voice be heard.

The TLRI also examined whether the law requires clarification in terms of its scope and whether it strikes the right balance between protecting the interests of victims of sexual assault and the paramount public interest in open justice.

Read more: How to talk to your children about sexual consent

Eight major recommendations for reform were made. To date the Tasmanian government has not enacted any of those recommendations, but has announced it will reform the provision in early 2020. But it’s not known what form that reform will take.

A lack of clarity

Still, the provision has been criticised for not providing enough protection. This criticism is based on the view the section lacks clarity, because it’s uncertain precisely what conduct it forbids.

This was also in the 2013 TLRI report, which recommended the scope of section 194K be clarified, so it’s made clear what behaviour it prohibits. The current government review asks whether the TLRI recommendations should be enacted.

The TLRI also recommended clarifying what the media is allowed to publish. In this regard, it recommended publication should be permitted with the permission of the court where complainants consent.

Age restrictions should apply in such cases (18 years of age). Further, non-publication orders should only be made taking into account complainants’ views.

But importantly, the TLRI didn’t recommend consent alone without the court’s permission should legitimise publication.

The recent controversies surrounding the operation of section 194K only serve to highlight the need for reform in this area. To this end, the TLRI continues to endorse the recommendations contained in its 2013 report.

If this article has raised issues for you or someone you know, contact https://www.1800respect.org.au or call 1800 737 732, the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service.

– ref. Why can’t rape survivors in Tasmania reveal their name, even when they want to? – http://theconversation.com/why-cant-rape-survivors-in-tasmania-reveal-their-name-even-when-they-want-to-123995

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Mintzes, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Sydney

It’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t been touched by cancer. People who haven’t had cancer themselves will likely have a close friend or family member who has been diagnosed with the disease.

If the cancer has already spread, the diagnosis may feel like a death sentence. News that a new drug is available can be a big relief.

But imagine a cancer patient asks their doctor: “Can this drug help me stay alive longer?” And in all honesty the doctor answers: “I don’t know. There’s one study that says the drug works, but it didn’t show whether patients lived longer, or even if they felt any better.”

This might sound like an unlikely scenario, but it’s precisely what a team of UK researchers found to be the case when it comes to many new cancer drugs.

Read more: We don’t need to change how we subsidise ‘breakthrough’ cancer treatments

A look at the research

A study published last week in the British Medical Journal reviewed 39 clinical trials supporting approval of all new cancer drugs in Europe from 2014 to 2016.

The researchers found more than half of these trials had serious flaws likely to exaggerate treatment benefits. Only one-quarter measured survival as a key outcome, and fewer than half reported on patients’ quality of life.

Of 32 new cancer drugs examined in the study, only nine had at least one study without seriously flawed methods.

The researchers evaluated methods in two ways. First, they used a standard “risk of bias” scale that measures shortcomings shown to lead to biased results, such as if doctors knew which drug patients were taking, or if too many people dropped out of the trial early.

Second, they looked at whether the European Medicines Agency (EMA) had identified serious flaws, such as a study being stopped early, or if the drug was compared to substandard treatment. The EMA identified serious flaws in trials for ten of the 32 drugs. These flaws were rarely mentioned in the trials’ published reports.

From clinical trials to treatment – faster isn’t always better

Before a medicine is approved for marketing, the manufacturer must carry out studies to show it’s effective. Regulators such as the EMA, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) then judge whether to allow it to be marketed to doctors.

National regulators mainly examine the same clinical trials, so the findings from this research are relevant internationally, including in Australia.

Read more: Spot the snake oil: telling good cancer research from bad

There’s strong public pressure on regulators to approve new cancer drugs more quickly, based on less evidence, especially for poorly treated cancers. The aim is to get treatments to patients more quickly by allowing medicines to be marketed at an earlier stage. The downside of faster approval, however, is more uncertainty about treatment effects.

One of the arguments for earlier approvals is the required studies can be carried out later on, and sick patients can be given an increased chance of survival before it’s too late. However, a US study concluded that post-approval studies found a survival advantage for only 19 of 93 new cancer drugs approved from 1992 to 2017.

So how is effectiveness measured currently?

Approval of new cancer drugs is often based on short-term health outcomes, referred to as “surrogate outcomes”, such as shrinking or slower growth of tumours. The hope is these surrogate outcomes predict longer-term benefits. For many cancers, however, they have been found to do a poor job of predicting improved survival.

A study of cancer trials for more than 100 medicines found on average, clinical trials that measure whether patients stay alive for longer take an extra year to complete, compared to trials based on the most commonly used surrogate outcome, called “progression free survival”. This measure describes the amount of time a person lives with a cancer without tumours getting larger or spreading further. It’s often poorly correlated with overall survival.

A year may seem like a long wait for someone with a grim diagnosis. But there are policies to help patients access experimental treatments, such as participating in clinical trials or compassionate access programmes. If that year means certainty about survival benefits, it’s worth waiting for.

Approving drugs without enough evidence can cause harm

In an editorial accompanying this study, we argue that exaggeration and uncertainty about treatment benefits cause direct harm to patients, if they risk severe or life-threatening harm without likely benefit, or if they forgo more effective and safer treatments.

For example, the drug panobinostat, which is used for multiple myeloma patients who have not responded to other treatments, has not been shown to help patients live longer, and can lead to serious infections and bleeding.

Inaccurate information can also encourage false hope and create a distraction from needed palliative care.

And importantly, the ideal of shared informed decision-making based on patients’ values and preferences falls apart if neither the doctor nor the patient has accurate evidence to inform decisions.

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

In countries with public health insurance, such as Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), patients’ access to new cancer drugs depends not just on market approval but also on payment decisions. The PBS often refuses the pay for new cancer drugs because of uncertain clinical evidence. In the cases of the drugs in this research, some are available on the PBS, while others are not.

New cancer drugs are often very expensive. On average in the US, a course of treatment with a new cancer drug costs more than US$100,000 (A$148,000).

Cancer patients need treatments that help them to live longer, or at the very least to have a better quality of life during the time that they have left. In this light, we need stronger evidence standards, to be sure there are real health benefits when new cancer drugs are approved for use.

– ref. Do new cancer drugs work? Too often we don’t really know (and neither does your doctor) – http://theconversation.com/do-new-cancer-drugs-work-too-often-we-dont-really-know-and-neither-does-your-doctor-123768

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt McDonald, Associate Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland

Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg had an angry message for world leaders at the United Nations climate summit in New York overnight.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” she said.

“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?”

The summit was touted as a chance for the world to finally get its climate action on track. But by almost any standard, the event was a disappointment.

Read more: The good, the bad and the ugly: the nations leading and failing on climate action

There was a handful of positive stories. Almost 80 countries and more than 100 cities promised to achieve net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Some (mainly developing) nations pledged an end to coal use. And a few developed nations committed more money to the Green Climate Fund, which helps poor nations deal with climate change.

But for the most part, the urgent action needed to avert a global warming catastrophe looked a long way off.

High hopes but low expectations for the summit

Days out from the summit, millions of protesters marched at global climate strikes to call for strong climate action.

The task was given even greater urgency by a new report by the World Meteorological Organisation, coinciding with the summit, which said emission reduction efforts must at least triple to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

In his opening remarks, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on world leaders to take swift, dramatic climate action.

“Nature is angry. And we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature, because nature always strikes back and around the world, nature is striking back with fury,” Guterres said.

Read more: Why our response to climate change needs to be a just and careful revolution that limits pushback

Guterres convened the summit to ensure countries are developing concrete, realistic pathways to enhance their pledges under the Paris climate treaty. He wanted world leaders to outline plans to become carbon-neutral by 2050, tackle subsidies for fossil fuels, implement taxes on carbon, and end new coal power beyond 2020.

Few predicted the summit would deliver the global change required. For the most part, world leaders lived up to these low expectations.

The summit did not deliver

Under President Donald Trump, the United States had already pulled out of the Paris agreement – and its emissions continue to rise. China, arguably disincentivised to act without American participation, also failed to announce new targets and insisted developed nations should lead climate action efforts.

India outlined new plans for reaching emissions targets, but remains committed to coal projects well beyond 2020. And even the European Union, a traditional international leader on climate change ambition and action, did not announce a plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

In a few bright spots, Slovakia confirmed that its subsidies to coal mines will end in 2023. Finland says it will be carbon-neutral by 2035, and Greece will reportedly close its brown coal plants by 2028.

But the disappointing showing by the world’s largest emitters means the summit was effectively a failure.

Australia: a climate summit wallflower

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not attend the summit – despite being in the US at the time. Foreign Minister Marise Payne attended but did not speak.

Morrison’s non-attendance largely reflected the position Australia took to the summit: ever-increasing emissions, no new mitigation targets beyond those announced in Paris, and no new strategies to reach the targets.

Read more: Why our response to climate change needs to be a just and careful revolution that limits pushback

Morrison was in good company. His host, Trump, also did not attend, except for a brief entry to hear Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel speak.

Australia was not alone in failing to announce new climate action. But its wallflower status at the summit cemented its global reputation as a climate action laggard. Australia was also roundly criticised by our vulnerable neighbours at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu weeks before, confirming the growing gap between Australia’s climate action and its view of itself as a responsible global citizen.

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison was not in the crowd to hear Thunberg demand that the leaders keep global warming below 1.5℃. Nor was he there to hear Gutteres tell leaders that the world remains on track for catastrophic global warming, and they must commit to new and concerted action on climate change.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Andrew Highman, chief executive of global climate lobby group Mission 2020, said representatives from other countries had noticed Australia’s lack of participation.

“It is really very obvious who is absent from the room,” he reportedly said.

“Everyone is well aware that Australia has not made good on its promises in Paris to scale up its commitment to climate action.”

Where to now?

The World Meteorological Organisation said the five years to 2019 will likely be the hottest on record. We are in the midst of a climate crisis, and urgent action is clearly required.

Internationally, the challenge will be to create momentum in the face of US obstructionism and Chinese ambivalence. Guterres indicated he will continue to host these summits and will expect nations to pledge more specific and ambitious targets. Global protest action and mounting scientific reports of accelerating climate change may ramp up pressure for international action.

What about implications for Australian climate politics and policy? The US’ planned withdrawal from the Paris deal may have given Australia some cover for its own lack of climate action. But criticism from other international peers, including our Pacific neighbours, suggests that substantive action may be needed to achieve our foreign policy goals and restore our international reputation.

Pressure is also likely to build on the Morrison government at home. Opinion polls since 2012 have consistently shown growing public support for climate action, in the face of reduced government ambition. In the face of this, the federal government may eventually be prodded into meaningful action. But the climate clock is ticking fast.

– ref. Highly touted UN climate summit failed to deliver – and Scott Morrison failed to show up – http://theconversation.com/highly-touted-un-climate-summit-failed-to-deliver-and-scott-morrison-failed-to-show-up-123979

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ken Doust, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Management , Southern Cross University

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au.

Why can’t we build a pipe or find some other way to move fresh water from state to state, from areas with plenty to areas that are experiencing drought? – the pupils of Livingstone Primary School, Victoria, Australia.

It is true we could build a pipe or canal to move water around. In fact, a 1930s plan called the Bradfield Scheme suggested using dams, pumps and pipes to move flood waters from Australia’s north to drier inland areas.

Some politicians still support this plan but some environmental experts have said it wouldn’t really work and would be very expensive.

It has been reported that the NSW government is considering exploring a similar idea.

Before moving water around like this, we’d need to think really hard about whether we might be upsetting the balance of water – both in the place of drought and the area of plenty.

The Australian landscape is very old and the soils in inland areas can be very fragile.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do we have a drought?

Moving water around can affect soil, plants and animals

Let’s say we took a lot of water from the coast and piped it to a dry inland area.

Adding a lot of extra water to the dry inland area may end up damaging the soil there by upsetting the natural balance of salts and chemicals. Plants and animals that live in that area may also be affected by all the extra water suddenly arriving.

And the coastal area that water is taken from? It may also suffer. Suddenly having less water in a flood plain, for example, may upset the natural health of the soil and the environment in those places.

We also need to think about how taking water from one area might affect the agriculture and fishing industries from that place, or put extra pressure on those industries in time of drought.

Another factor is the impact the pipes or canals may have on the landscape. They can create problems for plants and wildlife.

Finally, we’d need to consider the cost of big projects like this. It would be expensive and there may be cheaper ways to help address the problems.

Working together to find solutions

Scientists think that climate change will increase how severe weather events are and make droughts worse.

Good design takes into account things that are important to the traditional owners of various places, to people who live in those places, and to the land itself.

Science, together with long-term knowledge from Aboriginal traditional owners and more recently, farmers, can help us better understand how these sorts of schemes might affect the landscape.

Thank you for your great question! I hope you keep exploring ideas and looking for solutions.

Read more: Curious Kids: how is water made?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

– ref. Curious Kids: why can’t we just build a pipe to move water to areas in drought? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-cant-we-just-build-a-pipe-to-move-water-to-areas-in-drought-123454

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

Last week, a very special event took place in Parliament House. The daughters of Sir Robert Menzies and Arthur Calwell – Heather Henderson and Mary Elizabeth Calwell – came together to reflect on their fathers’ legacies, and to offer their perspectives on a different era in Australia’s political history. Michelle Grattan moderated the conversation.

The event was organised by the Menzies-Calwell Group, made up of members of parliament from both sides of the political divide. Inspired by the friendship between Menzies and Calwell, the group aims to inject a degree of bipartisanship into our present hyper-partisan politics.

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 Politics with Michelle Grattan on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear it 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 Politics with Michelle Grattan.

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

Image:

Office of Maria Vamvakinou MP

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: daughters of Robert Menzies and Arthur Calwell say parliament wasn’t always a “fort” – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-daughters-of-robert-menzies-and-arthur-calwell-say-parliament-wasnt-always-a-fort-123598

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery and Higher Degree Director, Western Sydney University

Becoming a parent is a wonderful experience but it can also be incredibly daunting. There is no qualification or test you can take to make sure you’re ready; you have to rely on life experience, advice from friends, family and experts, and trial and error.

But while most of the time we get parenting right, some people need more support than others.

Our research, published today in the journal BMJ Open, found that while every baby is different, some factors increase the likelihood new mothers will experience difficulties with early parenting. These include the mother’s mental health, birth intervention or emergencies during labour, and lack of support.

Read more: ‘I didn’t know who I was anymore’ – myths vs realities of early parenthood

Australia has a unique health system

More than 30% of new mothers in Australia report severe problems getting their baby to sleep and settle. This often results in exhaustion, and poorer mental and physical health.

Poor physical and mental health during pregnancy and after birth can also have significant short- and longer-term impacts on the health and development of the child. So treatment is vital.

Australia has a unique health system in place to support new parents who struggle to cope and their babies, including residential parenting services – sometimes referred to as “sleep schools” – such as Tresillian in New South Wales and Tweddle Child and Family Health Service in Victoria.

These services provide structured programs to help develop parenting skills. Parents attend and stay in the facility for three to four days and are guided through sleep, settling and feeding skills and strategies.

These services are mostly publicly funded and there are often waiting lists due to high demand.

Our research

We studied why some women and their partners end up requiring admission to residential parenting services in the first year after birth.

We looked at all births in NSW over 12 years and randomly analysed 300 medical records from women and babies who had a stay in residential parenting services in NSW. We then did in-depth interviews with women who used the services and focus groups with staff who worked there.

The primary reason women sought support in residential parenting services was for sleep and settling (83%).

Over half had a history of mental health issues.

During their stay, women used a number of services, including social workers (44%), psychologists (52%) and psychiatrists (4.5%).

Intervention in birth can leave women with negative feelings about the birth, leading to struggles with early parenting and depression. This can alter the way women engage with their baby, which can impact on the baby’s development.

One in ten women said they had mental health issues related to the birth and many were traumatised by their births, especially where unexpected intervention had occurred, such as a caesarean section, forceps or vacuum, or the baby needing resuscitation or intensive care.

Read more: So your birth didn’t go according to plan? Don’t blame yourself

Around one in three babies (36%) admitted to residential parenting services had a history of reflux. We have found a strong link between reflux and intervention in birth, babies being born early and maternal mental health issues, particularly anxiety.

We also found women admitted to the service were more likely to:

• be admitted as a private patient
• be born in Australia
• have had their first baby
• have experienced intervention during the labour and birth (induction, forceps or vacuum birth, caesarean section, epidural and episiotomy)
• have twins
• have a boy
• have a baby who needed to be resuscitated at birth, go to intensive care, or who experienced birth trauma (particularly to the scalp)
• be aged in their 30s
• have little support.

How the health system can support new parents

Screening and support for psychological and social vulnerabilities needs to be routine.

Depending on the state or territory, most women in the public sector receive a “psychosocial” assessment from midwives when they first book in for care during pregnancy and again from child and family health services after they have had the baby. This screens for depression, anxiety, childhood abuse, domestic violence, support and stress.

But this is still not done routinely in the private sector where 25% of women give birth. This urgently needs to be prioritised, so all women can receive appropriate support.

Women need support to prepare for birth, which may include having a birth plan and quality childbirth education. This gives couples tools to manage the pain of labour, avoid unnecessary intervention and prepare for parenthood.

They also need health providers they know and trust. Women who have a midwife they know through the pregnancy, birth and postnatal period have fewer interventions, better outcomes and greater satisfaction than those who are allotted whoever is on duty that day.

Relationship-based care gives women the opportunity to discuss what happened afterwards and debrief.

Read more: Call the Midwife: playing catch up with Australia’s maternity care

It takes a village to raise a child

Parents have lost the village it takes to raise a child and increasingly feel isolated and unsupported.

We need to have conversations with parents about how important this village will become and to start putting this support in place before the baby comes. This may be moving closer to your parents, finding a good parenting network, connecting with positive online support networks, and not feeling pressured to go back to work before you’re ready.

Sharing the parenting and work arrangements as a couple can also help.

– ref. 1 in 3 new mums struggle to get their baby to sleep, but some women have a tougher time – http://theconversation.com/1-in-3-new-mums-struggle-to-get-their-baby-to-sleep-but-some-women-have-a-tougher-time-102269

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Md Abdul Alim, Postdoctoral researcher on sustainable development (Energy and Water), Western Sydney University

Despite being such a sunkissed country, Australia is still lagging behind in the race to embrace solar power. While solar panels adorn hundreds of thousands of rooftops throughout the nation, we have not yet seen the logical next step: buildings with solar photovoltaic cells as an integral part of their structure.

Our lab is hoping to change that. We have developed solar roof tiles with solar cells integrated on their surface using a specially customised adhesive. We are now testing how they perform in Australia’s harsh temperatures.

Our preliminary test results suggest that our solar roof tiles can generate 19% more electricity than conventional solar panels. This is because the tiles can absorb heat energy more effectively than solar panels, meaning that the tiles’ surface heats up more slowly in sustained sunshine, allowing the solar cells more time to work at lower temperatures.

Australia’s greenhouse emissions continue to rise, making it harder to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement.

Globally, commercial and residential buildings account for about 40% of energy consumption. Other countries are therefore looking hard at reducing their greenhouse emissions by making buildings more energy-efficient. The European Union, for example, has pledged to make all large buildings carbon-neutral by 2050. Both Europe and the United States are working on constructing buildings from materials that can harness solar energy.

Here in Australia, buildings account for only about 20% of energy consumption, meaning that the overall emissions reductions on offer from improved efficiency are smaller.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t go for it anyway, especially considering the amount of sunshine available. Yet compared with other nations, Australia is very much in its adolescence when it comes to solar-smart construction materials.

Read more: New solar cells offer you the chance to print out solar panels and stick them on your roof

Taking Australia’s temperature

In a recent review in the journal Solar Energy, we identified and discussed the issues that are obstructing the adoption of solar power-generating constructions – known as “building-integrated photovoltaics”, or BIPV – here in Australia.

According to the research we reviewed, much of the fear about adopting these technologies comes down to a simple lack of understanding. Among the factors we identified were: misconceptions about the upfront cost and payback time; lack of knowledge about the technology; anxiety about future changes to buildings’ microclimates; and even propaganda against climate change and renewable energy.

Read more: Are solar panels a middle-class purchase? This survey says yes

Worldwide, BIPV systems account for just 2.5% of the solar photovoltaic market (and virtually zero in Australia). But this is forecast to rise to 13% globally by 2022.

Developing new BIPV technologies such as solar roof tiles and solar façades would not only cut greenhouse emissions but also open up huge potential for business and the economy.

According to a national survey (see the entry for Australia here), Australian homeowners are still much more comfortable with rooftop solar panels than other systems such as ground-mounted ones.

In our opinion it therefore stands to reason that if we want to boost BIPV systems in Australia, our solar roof tiles are the perfect place to start. Our tiles have a range of advantages, such as low maintenance, attractive look, easy replaceability, and no extra load on the roof compared with conventional roof-mounted solar arrays.

Challenges ahead

Nevertheless, the major challenges for this technology are the current high cost, poor consumer awareness, and lack of industrial-scale manufacturing process. We made our tiles with the help of a 3D printing facility at Western Sydney University, which can be attached to an existing tile manufacturing machine with minor modifications.

The current installation cost of commercial solar tiles could be as high as A$600 per square metre, including the inverter.

What’s more, we have little information on how the roof tiles will perform in long-term use, and no data on whether solar tiles will have an effect on conditions inside the building. It is possible that the tiles could increase the temperature inside, thus increasing the need for air conditioning.

Read more: There’s a looming waste crisis from Australia’s solar energy boom

To answer these questions, we are carrying out a full life-cycle cost analysis of our solar tiles, as well as working on ways to bring down the cost. Our target is to reduce the cost to A$250 per square metre or even less, including the inverter. Prices like that would hopefully give Australian homeowners the power to put solar power into the fabric of their home.

The lead author thanks Professor Bijan Samali for valued supervision of his research.

– ref. We can make roof tiles with built-in solar cells – now the challenge is to make them cheaper – http://theconversation.com/we-can-make-roof-tiles-with-built-in-solar-cells-now-the-challenge-is-to-make-them-cheaper-123775

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Hasking, Associate Professor of Psychology, Curtin University

Non-suicidal self-injury is the deliberate damage of body tissue without conscious suicidal intent. It’s more specific than self-harm, a broader term that can also include suicide attempts.

Self-injury is reasonably common, particularly among young people. In community samples, 17% of adolescents and 13% of young adults had engaged in self-injury.

Self-injury is associated with underlying psychological distress, and increased suicide risk. People who self-injure are typically doing so to cope with intense emotions.

Read more: Why do people intentionally injure themselves?

Although we continue to understand more about self-injury, there remains significant public stigma towards people who self-injure.

This stigma can make people who self-injure reluctant to seek help or disclose their experiences to others. Research shows only half the people who are already seeing a therapist for mental health concerns will tell even their therapist about it.

One way to combat stigma, and support disclosure and help-seeking, is to debunk the common myths and misconceptions that surround self-injury.

Myth 1: only teenage girls self-injure

Self-injury is often thought of as a “teen fad”, and as especially prevalent among teenage girls. It’s true self-injury usually starts during adolescence, but people of all ages and genders self-injure. Recent research shows the second most common time to start self-injury is in a person’s early 20s.

Consistent with this, self-injury is common among university students; up to one in five report a history of self-injury, with about 8% self-injuring for the first time during university.

Although more women in treatment settings report self-injury, it’s likely that in community settings, self-injury is equally common among males and females. This may be because women are more likely than men to seek help.

Myth 2: people who self-injure are attention-seeking

One of the more pervasive myths about self-injury is that people self-injure to seek attention. Yet, self-injury is usually a very secretive behaviour, and people go to great lengths to hide their self-injury.

Instead, in the majority of research, people report the main reason they self-injure is to cope with intense or unwanted emotions.

Read more: Talking about suicide and self-harm in schools can save lives

Other common reasons people self-injure are to punish themselves or to stop an escalating cycle of painful thoughts and feelings. People may self-injure to communicate how distressed they are, particularly if they have trouble verbally expressing their feelings. In other words, their self-injury is a cry for help.

A recent study found influencing and punishing others was the least likely reason for self-injury.

Myth 3: people who self-injure are suicidal

By definition, non-suicidal self-injury is not motivated by a desire to end life. In addition to serving a different function, the frequency of suicidal and non-suicidal behaviours differs. That is, suicide attempts are generally infrequent, whereas non-suicidal behaviours can occur more often.

The methods used, the outcomes of the behaviours, and appropriate treatment responses also all differ. People at risk of suicide may require immediate and more intensive intervention; although both non-suicidal self-injury and suicidal behaviour need to be taken seriously and responded to compassionately.

For these reasons, it’s important to be clear when we are talking about self-injury and when we are talking about suicidal thoughts or behaviour.

Myth 4: there is a self-injury ‘epidemic’

While many people report at least one instance of self-injury, fewer people engage in repeated episodes.

Further, there is little evidence rates of self-injury have increased in recent years. Hospital records indicate an increase in presentations for “deliberate self-harm”, but these are predominantly poisonings, not self-injury.

Other studies show more people reporting self-injury, but it’s unclear whether this is because people are more comfortable disclosing their self-injury, or because self-injury is increasing.

Research suggests when the methodologies of the studies are taken into account, rates of self-injury have not increased over time.

Read more: Does more mental health treatment and less stigma produce better mental health?

Myth 5: social media contributes to self-injury

Internet and social media are highly relevant to many people who self-injure as they offer a means to obtain social support, share their experiences with others who have been through similar things, and obtain coping and recovery-oriented resources (for example, stories about other people’s experiences).

This is not surprising given the stigma attached to self-injury, which leaves many people who self-injure feeling isolated from others.

Despite these benefits, there are concerns online material, including graphic images and videos depicting self-injury, may trigger people to engage in self-injury. While only a few studies explicitly examine this, there is some evidence viewing graphic imagery is associated with self-injury. However, images of scars may not be as triggering.

There are also concerns exposure to messages that carry hopeless themes (for example, “it’s impossible to stop self-injuring”), may contribute to continued self-injury and impede help-seeking.

But at the same time, exposure to more positive messages may offer hope about recovery.

Fostering understanding

Self-injury is a common behaviour engaged in by a broad spectrum of people. Given its association with psychological difficulties and suicide risk, it’s critical self-injury be taken seriously and not dismissed or glossed over.

Read more: Australian teens doing well, but some still at high risk of suicide and self-harm

People who engage in self-injury need to know it’s okay to seek support (from friends, family, and health professionals) and that people can and do recover.

For anyone who knows someone who self-injures, it’s important to respond to that person in a non-judgemental and compassionate manner. Just knowing there is someone supportive who is willing to listen can make a big difference to a person who self-injures.

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

– ref. It’s not only teenage girls, and it’s rarely attention-seeking: debunking the myths around self-injury – http://theconversation.com/its-not-only-teenage-girls-and-its-rarely-attention-seeking-debunking-the-myths-around-self-injury-120214

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Tietz, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design, UNSW

With two-thirds of a global population of 9.4 billion people expected to live in urban areas by 2050, we can expect a change in the domestic living arrangements we are familiar with today.

In high-density cities, the static apartment layouts with one function per room will become a luxury that cannot be maintained. The traditional notion of a dedicated living room, bedroom, bathroom or kitchen will no longer be economically or environmentally sustainable. Building stock will need to work harder.

The need to use building space more efficiently means adaptive and responsive domestic micro-environments will replace the old concept of static rooms within a private apartment.

Read more: Urban density matters – but what does it mean?

These changes will reframe our idea of what home means, what we do in it, and how the home itself can support and help inhabitants with domestic living.

So how will these flexible spaces work?

Sidewalk Labs and IKEA are collaborating with Ori, a robotic furniture startup that emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to transform our use of increasingly sparse urban living space. They have developed ways to enhance existing apartments with pre-manufactured standardised products to make living spaces flexible.

Leading product designers have produced tantalising concepts of how these newly developed products could enhance our lives in cities where space is at a premium. One example is based on a floor plan measuring just 3m by 3.5m.

The more intensive use of building space with hyper-dense living will have impacts on circulation spaces. It will require more services in tighter spaces and a vigilant eye on emergency evacuation pathways. Public space will be much more crowded and play a more important role in our well-being.

Read more: People-friendly furniture in public places matters more than ever in today’s city

The robotic furniture that is available now could also help people with some form of impairment negotiate their home environment. An example is a bed that tilts up into a position that makes it easier to get out.

Some furniture now on the market has similar mechanically assisted functions to help people get out of a chair. This can be expanded into a broader range of facilitated living aids for people with physical and other impairments.

Ease of transformation is the key

Mobile furniture is not a new idea. The late 1980s and early 1990s spawned a whole range of mobile furniture, such as tables on wheels and sideboards with castors.

We have always tried to make rooms adaptable. Japanese screens or room dividers were one way. We have space-saving and transforming furniture from IKEA such as folded-up hallway tables that can become dining tables.

The idea of being able to transform our living space made these mobile furnishings enticing. But they all required a range of manual actions and this effort meant that, after a few initial experiments with them, they ended up in one static position. These mobile items became integrated and firmly located within the accumulations of things that make up our private sphere and who we are.

Read more: Reinventing density: co-living, the second domestic revolution

Industrial designers such as the late Luigi Colani designed pre-manufactured dwellings with rotating interiors – but the ease of transformation is what really makes a difference now. It’s likely to have reverberating effects.

The term robotic furniture conjures up Jetsons-like images, but what this means is we will have adaptive spaces. Rooms will transform from bedroom into living room or from study into entertainment space at the touch of a button, a gesture, or a voice command.

While the videos (above) of beautifully designed spaces make the idea tantalisingly attractive, we need to bear in mind these are initial concepts, even though well-developed. But this heralds the beginning of an entirely new way of conceiving and inhabiting space. We have reached a time where everything is in flux.

It introduces another element into our daily routine. The time it takes for the transformation to be completed plays a big role. Too slow and we think twice about it, too fast and it might knock a few things about. In the examples shown (above) they are workable and safe.

If we take this development a step further, the way our cupboards store and provide access to our things might be next in line for robotic optimisation.

It’s not just rooms that will be transformed

There are still questions to be answered. For example, will the speed of the spatial transformation taking place influence the speed of our personal routines, like the time we allow for our morning coffee routine before heading out the door?

How will these new flexible spaces affect our sense of belonging and feeling at home, when everything can change with a voice command?

Read more: Control, cost and convenience determine how Australians use the technology in their homes

Robotically optimised homes might change culture in similar ways to how digital communications altered our conversations, social conduct, personal relationships, and behaviour.

The way we think about building and living in high-rise apartments, which we have done for hundreds of years, is about to take a turn. It could transform how we conceive of and inhabit vertical space.

Existing building typologies and the ways and means of how buildings are designed and developed will change entirely. This has the potential to have a massive and disruptive impact on real estate development, building design and regulation, construction methods, housing and social policy.

– ref. ‘Transformer’ rooms and robo-furniture are set to remake our homes – and lives – before our eyes – http://theconversation.com/transformer-rooms-and-robo-furniture-are-set-to-remake-our-homes-and-lives-before-our-eyes-123682

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heather Bray, Lecturer in Science Communication, University of Western Australia

Soy milk. Almond milk. Rice milk. To some dairy farmers these products are like a red rag to a bull.

They want governments to decree the word “milk” should be reserved for milk from mammals. They argue letting plant-based products be called milk is potentially misleading consumers.

Australia’s National Party has joined the call, passing a motion urging the federal government to ban plant-based and other alternative products calling themselves milk.

If this were a matter of strict biological definition, they might have a very good point, but both science and history are against them.

Scientific definitions

Biology defines milk as the white fluid from the mammary glands of female mammals used to nourish their young. It’s this ability (lactation) that in fact defines and distinguishes mammals from other animals. Given our own status as mammals, it’s not surprising that milk also carries significant cultural meaning.

But biology isn’t the last scientific word. Botany defines milk as a kind of juice or sap, usually white in colour, found in certain plants.

Read more: Almonds don’t lactate, but that’s no reason to start calling almond milk juice

Calling plant-derived liquids “milk” goes back at least a millennia.

Almond milk, for example, was introduced into Europe by the Moors in about the 8th century, and was popular across both the Christian and Islamic world as an alternative when religious discipline required abstaining from animal products.

An early form of soy milk became popular in China in about the 14th century.

Throughout Asia and other areas of the world where humans had higher rates of lactose intolerance, plant-based milks were the rule rather than the exception. It’s impossible to think of Thai food and many other regional cuisines without the essential component of coconut milk.

Labelling standards

The international food standards body, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, defines milk as “the normal mammary secretion of milking animals obtained from one or more milkings without either addition to it or extraction from it, intended for consumption as liquid milk or for further processing”.

The Codex is a voluntary reference standard and there is no obligation to adopt its guidelines, though milk labelling regulations in Australia adhere closely to it. The Food Standards Code for Australia and New Zealand assumes “milk” refers to cow’s milk. Anything else must be specifically described in terms of its source – for example, sheep’s milk, goat’s milk or almond milk.

One of the arguments of those wanting even greater strictures is that customers might be misled into thinking alternatives have the same protein content as cow’s milk. (The Code says regular milk must contain at least 3.0% protein and 3.2% fat. Skim milk must contain at least 3.0% protein and no more than 0.15% of fat.) Some plant-based beverages do contain less protein than dairy milk but are required to indicate on their labels that the product is not suitable as a complete milk replacement for children under 5 years old

However, the Australia Competition and Consumer Commission, which scrutinises all food products for potentially false, deceptive or misleading claims, has never identified this as an issue of concern.

Another argument is that use of the word milk and other dairy-related terms should be restricted in a similar vein to the prohibitions placed on food producers using terms considered geographical indicators.

Probably the best-known “GI” is champagne, which was once used by makers of sparkling wine around the world but which the European Union (through trade deals) has successfully quarantined to local wine makers in the Champagne region of France.

The European Union has been lobbying the Australian government to enforce GIs for large number of dairy products, banning Australian producers using more than 50 cheese names including feta and gruyere. Yet some of the dairy farmer organisations pushing to “reclaim” the milk label as their sole preserve are also deeply opposed to losing the right to call their products by names claimed by European producers.

In a word, protectionism

This is not the first time the dairy industry has sought to use regulation to prevent competition from plant-based products. In the first half of the 20th century, quotas were placed on margarine production in Australia to protect butter makers.

Margarine makers were also prevented from making margarine look like butter. In Australia the dairy industry was protected not just by by prohibitive duties on imported margarine but also the provision that margarine must be coloured pink.

This milk tilt seems similarly motivated. But in the unlikely event the dairy purists got their way, it probably wouldn’t achieve much. It is clear people are choosing plant-based beverages for reasons that are not connecting to the name used.

It wouldn’t change the choice of people who avoid animal products because of animal welfare concerns.

Read more: Why people become vegans: The history, sex and science of a meatless existence

It wouldn’t make a difference to people avoiding cow’s milk due to lactose intolerance or other dietary restrictions.

These markets are the most important niches for non-dairy milks. Producers go out of their way to ensure consumers know their brands are not produced from cows and other animals.

Plant-based milks also rely on farmers, and thus this debate pits one type of farmer against another.

It is unlikely anyone is being deceived by drinking plant-based milks thinking that they are in fact dairy, or that dairy farmers would claw significant market share back by having a monopoly over the word.

– ref. Crying over plant-based milk: neither science nor history favours a dairy monopoly – http://theconversation.com/crying-over-plant-based-milk-neither-science-nor-history-favours-a-dairy-monopoly-123852

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicolas Herault, Academic, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne

If we asked people in New Zealand what they think the best income tax reform would be, we would expect a range of responses. People will no doubt have different views about which of the four income tax rates and corresponding income thresholds should be lowered or increased.

In our new study, we examine how tax rates should be changed to improve social welfare in New Zealand.

At 33%, the current highest marginal income tax rate in New Zealand is relatively low compared to other major advanced economies. For instance, it’s 45% in both the UK and Australia.

We find that, under a range of assumptions, lifting the highest income tax rate and using the proceeds to lower one of the two lowest tax rates achieves the greatest improvement to welfare.

Read more: To tackle inequality, we must start in the labour market

The tax reforms trade-off

Social welfare is a composite measure of inequality and average income. Tax reforms generally imply a trade-off between the two.

Highly progressive taxes can contribute to reducing income inequality, but this improvement in equity generally comes at a cost as taxes can reduce average incomes and generate “deadweight losses”.

In other words, taxes can reduce the size of the economic pie, for instance by reducing the total amount of hours worked in the economy, and waste resources in the process.

Of course economists, like anyone else, should not impose their own value judgements about how much a society would be willing to “pay” in terms of income loss to reduce income inequality. Instead, we seek to quantify this trade-off under different assumptions about peoples’ preferences. These include levels of “willingness to pay to reduce inequality”, or inequality aversion.

To make the tax reforms comparable, we restrict the analysis to revenue-neutral reforms, meaning that if a tax rate is lowered another one must be increased to offset the lost revenue.

Tax reform package at no cost to government

We assess potential tax reforms using a behavioural microsimulation model. This model is based on a household survey that is representative of the population and incorporates the details of the highly complex income tax and transfer system. The model allows us to quantify the trade-offs of tax reform.

This is how it works. Let’s consider, for instance, an increase in the highest income tax rate from 33% to 34%. Such a tax reform, by reducing take home pay for some workers, would typically lead to a reduction in total hours worked in the economy, and thus in a reduction in average income (and in government revenue).

In the case of the highest tax rate in New Zealand, the model indicates this effect would be small. But tax reforms like this could lead to other responses besides changes in hours worked such as tax evasion and avoidance, which are ignored in our model, even though they may be important in New Zealand.

A first approximation of the welfare loss for households impacted by this reform could be the reduction in net income due to reduced hours of work and higher taxes. But this would clearly be an overestimate because it ignores the corresponding increase in leisure time, which most people value positively.

Our model addresses this issue by putting a monetary value on leisure time, while accounting for the fact that different households value leisure differently. Thus, the increase in the highest tax rate reduces welfare, but by less than the reduction in net income.

Read more: Unions do hurt profits, but not productivity, and they remain a bulwark against a widening wealth gap

What about equity

Because it mostly affects high-income households, an increase in the highest tax rate typically leads to a reduction in inequality. As there is generally some degree of preference for lower inequality (inequality aversion), this partly offsets the decline in average income.

Obviously, there is no consensus in society as to how much of an improvement in equity is required to offset a given reduction in average income. Our approach is to consider a wide set of views ranging from low to high inequality aversion.

We examine a wide range of tax reforms in a search of revenue-neutral and welfare-improving reform packages.

We find the tax reform that would increase social welfare the most consists of a reduction in one of the two lowest tax rates, funded by an increase in the highest tax rate. Such a reform would lead to more rate progression in the tax system, come at no revenue loss to the government, and increase social welfare. This conclusion applies whether one gives a high or low priority to reduction in inequality.

– ref. How raising tax for high-income earners would reduce inequality, improve social welfare in New Zealand – http://theconversation.com/how-raising-tax-for-high-income-earners-would-reduce-inequality-improve-social-welfare-in-new-zealand-123161

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

Leila Waddell (1880-1932) was a country girl from Bathurst, NSW, who entered the world stage as an acclaimed violinist – and left it having influenced magical practice into the 21st century.

Her early life focused on music. She studied violin and joined the Sydney music scene, teaching genteel girls at some of Sydney’s most prestigious schools. Her concert performances earned her a devoted following. She favoured composers such as Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps, and soon gained a reputation as one of Australia’s leading violinists.

Waddell left Australia as part of a touring orchestra in 1908, and found herself in London. Here she was introduced to New Zealand author (and cellist) Katherine Mansfield at a concert. They became firm friends, and regulars in a Bohemian society centred around the Cafe Royal.

As well as musicians, poets and artists, the cafe attracted members of London’s magical orders. It was likely here that Wadell first met the magician Aleister Crowley, who liked to distribute samples of the hallucinogenic drug peyote at parties. The meeting opened the door into another world.

Sex, drugs and violins

Within a short time Waddell and Crowley became lovers. Waddell began studying magic as part of Crowley’s order, the A .‘.A .’. (Astrum Argentum), in which she was known as Sister Agatha. Crowley, however, called her Laylah, his Scarlet Woman. In his magical universe, the role of the Scarlet Woman was a sort of anti-Virgin Mary who transgressed the boundaries of feminine virtue by wallowing in excess.

Waddell is often relegated to a character in Crowley’s life. But if we assess her life on its own terms, we see a brilliant musician, a philosopher of magic, and a rebel who was unafraid to take risks and be true to herself.

Crowley was experimenting with using sex in rituals. He was interested in how heightened emotions could be harnessed for magical outcomes, such as achieving transcendental states or summoning otherworldly beings.

The moment of orgasm, he believed, focused the magician’s will and increased their power. As a poet and playwright, Crowley was also exploring rituals as theatrical performances, where the audience were co-practitioners.

Crowley was entranced by Waddell’s musical prowess. Together, they began devising magical rituals which combined music, poetry and dance. The idea came about during a weekend at the house of Crowley’s disciple Guy Marston (who believed that married English women could be induced to masturbate by the sound of tom-tom drums).

Waddell’s extensive experience as a performer was a key part of bringing this idea to fruition. The result was the Rites of Eleusis: musical theatre redefining magic for the new era of modernism

Democratising ecstasy

The Rites had seven parts, each associated with a planet or celestial body. Waddell composed original music for them, as well as drawing on her favourite composers. The purpose was to enable the audience to attain spiritual ecstasy.

The first performances were tested before small groups, enhanced by drug-laced “libations”. A journalist, describing Waddell’s playing, wrote:

Once again the figure took the violin, and played […] so beautifully, so gracefully, and with such intense feeling, that in very deed most of us experienced that Ecstasy which Crowley so earnestly seeks.

In October 1910, the Rites were ready for the public. The venue was Caxton Hall in London. The audience was encouraged to dress in the appropriate colour for each Rite, such as violet for Jupiter, russet for Mars.

Waddell played her violin, Crowley’s disciple Victor Neuburg danced, and Crowley intoned his turgid paeans to the god Pan. The hall was in semi-darkness. The performances were filled with sexual symbolism, but no sex magic took place on stage.

The critics were not very kind to the public Rites of Eleusis, but most agreed Waddell’s virtuosity was a highlight.

‘Consciousness exalted into music’

The Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman had a prolific creative life. Both contributed to The Equinox, a publication devoted to Crowley’s circle. Other contributors included Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Susannah Pritchard and the Irish writer Frank Harris.

After the Rites of Eleusis, Crowley embarked on writing a book which many consider his most significant work. Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4 was a collaborative effort between Crowley, A.‘.A.’. member Mary Desti, and Waddell. In Part III, they reflected on the lessons learnt from the Rites of Eleusis.

They concluded that an audience of initiates would more effectively channel magical power than the general public. As for the music, it should be composed specifically for the ritual – indicating that Waddell’s own compositions had hit the mark. The book was published in The Equinox in 1912.

Waddell booked a concert tour to the US. She had planned to buy her passage on the ill-fated Titanic, but just missed out on a ticket. Her narrow escape was widely reported in Australian newspapers. After completing this engagement, she returned to Europe to tour with the Ragged Ragtime Girls, a violin group managed by Crowley. She continued her magical studies in the Ordo Templi Orientis, an order with a strong focus on sex magic.

Revolution

The First World War interrupted the idyll of sex, magic and music. Ireland was under British rule, and many Irish nationalists saw the war as an opportunity to fight for independence. As the daughter of Irish famine refugees, Waddell was sympathetic. In New York she joined a secret revolutionary group under the name of “L. Bathurst”.

Crowley arrived in New York in 1914, purportedly on a mission to discredit Germany by spreading absurd propaganda. This was the impetus for an extraordinary stunt.

At dawn on the morning of 3 July 1915, Waddell, Crowley and a party of Irish revolutionaries sailed down the Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty, with the intention of declaring Irish independence and war on England.

But the guards wouldn’t let them land. Crowley made an impassioned speech, which no-one could hear from the prow of the boat, then tore up his passport and threw it in the river. Waddell played the rebel anthem The Wearing of the Green to accompany the Declaration of Independence.

The following year the Easter Rising, an armed rebellion which aimed to overthrow English rule in Ireland, was brutally suppressed in Dublin.

Crowley left New York for the West Coast, while Waddell continued to tour, write and socialise. She was friends with writers like Rebecca West and Theodore Dreiser, and regularly attended salons held by Frank Harris, who had not yet attained notoriety as the author of the sexually explicit My Life and Loves.

While touring US cities, she played lunch time concerts in factories, organised by the YMCA. The venues were barns, sheds, and gardens, and the audiences were mostly male migrant workers. The men sang along with the arias and would give her wildflower posies. She loved this experience and considered it the greatest work of her career.

Already a seasoned writer, Waddell came to wider notice with her memoir of Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923. Details are murky, but it seems this led to contracts for a novel and a book of short stories with a London publisher. Crowley, meanwhile, had set up a magical Abbey in Sicily with his new Scarlet Woman. It was time to move on.

Return to the Antipodes

In 1924 Waddell returned to Australia as her father was very ill. The prodigal violinist was greeted enthusiastically, and quickly became immersed in concerts, touring, and radio appearances. She resumed her earlier career teaching violin to affluent schoolgirls. If Sydney society remembered her association with Crowley, dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” by the press, it did not dim their eagerness for her music.

However, soon she became ill herself from uterine cancer. Her books were never finished. She died in 1932 and was buried next to her parents in Sydney.

The Rites of Eleusis are still performed today by Crowleyites across the world, including the Ordo Templi Orientis in Australia. In 2015, Wadell was celebrated as one of Bathurst’s favourite daughters at the town’s 200th anniversary. From country to city to world and other-world, her life was truly a magical journey.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Leila Waddell, Australian violinist, philosopher of magic and fearless rebel – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-leila-waddell-australian-violinist-philosopher-of-magic-and-fearless-rebel-122402

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marissa Parrott, Reproductive Biologist, Wildlife Conservation & Science, Zoos Victoria, and Honorary Research Associate, BioSciences, University of Melbourne

Australia’s water rats, or Rakali, are one of Australia’s beautiful but lesser-known native rodents. And these intelligent, semi-aquatic rats have revealed another talent: they are one of the only Australian mammals to safely eat toxic cane toads.

Our research, published today in Australian Mammalogy, found water rats in Western Australia adapted to hunt the highly poisonous toads less than two years after the toads moved into the rats’ territory.

Read more: We’ve cracked the cane toad genome, and that could help put the brakes on its invasion

The rats, which can grow to over 1kg, are the only mammal found to specifically target large toads, neatly dissecting the toads to eat their hearts and livers while avoiding the poisonous skin and glands.

Water rats

Water rats are nocturnal and specially adapted to live in waterways, with webbed feet and soft water-resistant fur. Their fur is so impressive there was once a thriving water rat fur industry in Australia.

They can be found in lakes, rivers and estuaries, often living alongside people, in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, far north and southwest Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and Victoria, where they can even be seen along St Kilda Pier.

Water rats are also highly intelligent, as shown by their rapid adaptation to hunting and eating one of Australia’s most toxic introduced species – the invasive cane toad.

Cane toads were introduced to Australia in 1935 in an ill-fated attempt to control the cane beetle. They have spread across the north of the country at up to 60km per year, leaving devastation in their wake. Many native species, such as northern quolls, yellow-spotted monitors, and crocodiles, have suffered widespread declines, and in some cases local extinctions, as a result of eating cane toads.

The toads secrete a toxin in their parotoid glands (on the back, neck and shoulders) that can be fatal even in very small doses.

Eat your heart out

Cane toads arrived at our field site in the Kimberley, Western Australia, in 2011-12, leading to a crash in the populations of predators including numerous lizards and northern quolls.

However, in 2014 we found a creek dotted with the bodies of cane toads that had clearly been attacked. Every morning we discovered up to five new dead toads with small, near-identical incisions down their chest in just a five-metre stretch of creek. What was using almost surgical precision to attack these toads?

Post-mortem analysis showed that in larger toads the heart and liver had been removed, and the gall bladder (which contains toxic bile salts) neatly moved outside the chest cavity. In medium-sized toads, besides the removal of the heart and liver, one or both back legs had been stripped of their toxic skin and the muscle also eaten.

The finding intrigued us enough to dissect waterlogged and rotting toad bodies in 40℃ heat. Using remote infrared camera footage and analysis of the bites left on the muscle, we found our clever attacker – the native water rat!

What kind of toads are rats eating?

While there have been anecdotal reports of water rats eating toads in Queensland and the Northern Territory, there were no published reports of this in Western Australia, where the toad was a more recent arrival.

We also didn’t know whether rats could tolerate the toad toxins, or were targeting non-toxic parts of the body. And we wanted to find out whether the rats were targeting small (and less toxic) toads, as some other rodent species do, or were deliberately going after larger toads which are a better source of food.

During our study we captured and measured more than 1,800 cane toads in just 15 days in the vicinity of the water rats’ creek. The vast majority, 94%, were medium-sized; 3.5% were small (less than 4cm long); and just 2.5% were large (greater than 10cm long).

But despite medium toads being far more common, three quarters of the dead toads we found were large, and the remainder were medium. No small toad bodies were found or observed being attacked.

While some species, such as keelback snakes and several birds (including black and whistling kites, and crows) can eat cane toads, there has been less evidence of mammals hunting this new type of prey and living to tell the tale.

Some rodents can eat small juvenile toads, but no rodents have been documented specifically targeting large toads. In our case, water rats preferred to eat large toads, despite medium-sized toads outnumbering them by 27 to 1.

We’re not sure whether water rats have very rapidly learned how to safely attack and eat cane toads, or if they are adapting a similar long-term hunting strategy that they may use to eat toxic native frogs.

Water rats are very well placed to pass on hunting strategies, as they care for their offspring for at least four weeks after they finish producing milk. This could help spread the knowledge of toad hunting across streams and creeks over time.

Read more: The economics of ‘cash for cane toads’ – a textbook example of perverse incentives

While this behaviour seems to be confined to local populations, if these tactics spread, water rats may be able to suppress toad populations when they reach water bodies – another small line of defence against this toxic killer.

– ref. Eat your heart out: native water rats have worked out how to safely eat cane toads – http://theconversation.com/eat-your-heart-out-native-water-rats-have-worked-out-how-to-safely-eat-cane-toads-123986

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lara Farrell, Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Griffith University

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au.

Where do phobias come from? – Olivia, age 12, Strathfield, Sydney.

Phobias are an intense fear of very specific things like objects, places, situations or animals. The most common phobias for children and teens are phobias of specific animals such as dogs, cats or insects.

When someone suffers from a phobia, they tend to avoid these places or things at all costs. That can be very hard to do and often leads to a lot of other problems.

There are many different factors that might make it more likely for someone to develop a phobia.

However, research tells us that to some degree specific phobias are learned. In addition, factors such as life experiences, your personality, and even how the people around you cope all contribute to developing a phobia or not.

Read more: Curious Kids: should I be scared of lightning?

How people may develop phobias

Specific phobias are very common, especially among children and adolescents. Research tells us that approximately 10% of children will experience a specific phobia, making this type of anxiety one of the most common anxiety disorders affecting young people.

Here are three main learning scenarios that may influence whether or not you develop a phobia.

1. Seeing other people (such as parents or friends) get really scared in a specific situation, or around a particular object or animal. This is called “modelling”. When you see someone else “model” a fear reaction to certain things, you may learn to be afraid of the same thing.

2. Hearing or reading scary stories about a situation, object or animal. For example, a parent who always tells you, “dogs are dangerous”, “never approach a dog”, “beware of dogs”, teaches you that ALL dogs are dangerous, ALL of the time, which may contribute to you developing a fear or phobia of dogs.

3. Having a frightening experience with a particular object, animal or situation. We call this “direct conditioning”. For example, you may have been growled at or even bitten by a dog; or be swept up in a rip in the ocean; or have had a tree fall on your house in a bad storm. These experiences are often very scary, and some children may then feel afraid whenever they are in that situation again.

It is important to remember, however, that not all children who see, hear or experience bad things develop a specific phobia. There are other things that might contribute. Research suggests phobias often run in families, so there may be a genetic link. Personality (or what doctors call “temperament”) may even play a role.

The good news

The good news is that there are many other factors that might help to protect children or adolescents from developing a phobia, even if you have had a very bad experience. For example, support from family and friends can help and comfort you when something scary happens.

Some research suggests that being optimistic can protect you from fear. Being someone who thinks about the world and themselves in a really positive way – seeing the glass half full instead of half empty – may reduce the impact of or development of anxiety and fears.

And finally, the most powerful way to stop a fear turning into a phobia is to face your fears – even when you feel nervous or scared. For example, you might feel really scared about giving a speech. But if you practise and do some public speaking, you might realise it’s not as bad as you imagined!

You may learn you are braver and stronger than you know.

Read more: Curious Kids: why are some people affected by sleep paralysis?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

– ref. Curious Kids: where do phobias come from? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-where-do-phobias-come-from-121738

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Rogers, Senior lecturer, School of Law and Justice, Southern Cross University

The phrase “climate emergency” became part of the political lexicon this year. Governments at all levels made declarations of a climate emergency, as did various organisations such as the Australian Medical Association. Even the Pope joined in.

But what has this meant in practical terms? Very little so far, given the continuing rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more: Why declaring a national climate emergency would neither be realistic or effective

For instance, the Canadian government’s decision to triple the capacity of an oil pipeline one day after acknowledging the climate emergency suggests the declarations have rhetorical and symbolic, rather than practical, significance.

Nevertheless, such official declarations make it clear climate change is, in fact, an emergency. And in light of its current and projected global impacts – including drought, catastrophic bushfires, increasing coastal inundation and erosion, flooding, melting ice caps, the demise of shallow tropical coral reefs, food and water shortages and massive relocation of populations – the emergency is both unprecedented and extraordinary.

Like all extraordinary emergencies, climate change requires an urgent and drastic response. As the emergency develops, our current understanding of what is reasonable and what is lawful will inevitably change.

Climate activists are making this argument by deploying a statutory defence in Queensland courtrooms: the extraordinary emergency defence in section 25 of the Queensland Criminal Code.

Read more: Extinction Rebellion: disruption and arrests can bring social change

Greg Rolles, a climate change activist who erected a tripod over a railway line in north Queensland, unsuccessfully argued the defence during his May trial. And four Extinction Rebellion activists, including Rolles, intend to raise it in their trials in Brisbane on October 22.

What does the law say?

The defence permits law-breaking in circumstances of “sudden or extraordinary emergency” if:

an ordinary person possessing ordinary power of self-control could not reasonably be expected to act otherwise.

It’s a version of the common law “necessity defence”, which allows law-breaking to avoid greater harm or irreparable evil. This defence has been argued by climate activists in the US and UK for over a decade.

But unlike the common law defence, the extraordinary emergency defence is only activated by a sudden or extraordinary emergency.

Using climate change as a legal defence worked in the UK in 2008 when Greenpeace protesters painted graffiti on the chimney of a British power station. A jury acquitted them of property damage charges on the basis of necessity.

And earlier this year, another UK jury acquitted Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam and a fellow activist of similar charges. While the judge ruled climate change was irrelevant, the jury was persuaded by the defendants’ argument that their actions were a proportionate response to the climate crisis.

Read more: Altruistic or self-serving? Four things judges consider when sentencing politically-motivated crimes

In the US, judges have been largely reluctant to let climate activists use this defence, and no climate activist has yet been acquitted of criminal charges when they do use it.

However, in 2018, a US judge downgraded the charges against pipeline protesters to civil infractions and then found them not responsible on the basis of necessity. And, in 2019, “Valve Turner” protester Ken Ward succeeded in having his conviction overturned, on the basis he should have been allowed to argue necessity as a constitutional right.

In Australia, no climate activist has been acquitted on the basis of the necessity defence.

But framing the “necessity defence” as an “extraordinary emergency defence” in jurisdictions like Queensland allows Australian climate activists to take advantage of the growing acceptance of climate change as emergency.

Still, they face difficulties in persuading judges that peaceful, non-violent acts of civil disobedience are a reasonable response to that emergency.

Climate change emergency makes legal norms unworkable

The extraordinary emergency of climate change could make existing legal norms unworkable. It’s already reshaping legal understandings of governments’ duties to their citizens.

Youth litigants are highlighting issues of intergenerational inequity, such as in the Juliana lawsuit against the US government. The nature of corporate responsibilities is also under scrutiny, and there are ongoing legal attempts to hold the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers to account.

Read more: ‘Lock-on devices’ are a symbol of non-violent protest, but they might soon be banned in Queensland

These developments foreshadow a tsunami of legal conundrums thrown up by climate change, as I discuss in my recent book.

We will have to confront the implications of widespread statelessness as territory disappears with rising sea levels. International law falls short in assigning criminal responsibility for the death and suffering to come from climate impacts such as more frequent and intense natural disasters.

What’s more, some human rights – including property rights, freedom of movement and the right to reproduce – exacerbate the climate crisis. At the same time, climate change jeopardises many of these rights.

If runaway climate change occurs, eminent commentators, including Justice François Kunc of the New South Wales Supreme Court and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, have predicted the collapse of the rule of law itself.

So what is reasonable conduct in the face of the mounting climate crisis? The importance of asking this question cannot be overstated.

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

As novelist Amitav Ghosh has speculated, our time may come to be known as the Great Derangement: a time when reason failed to prevail, and through inertia, ignorance, apathy and avoidance we rushed heedlessly towards planetary catastrophe.

Attempts to avert this catastrophe through non-violent acts of civil disobedience will come to seem reasonable.

– ref. Activists are using the climate emergency as a new legal defence to justify law-breaking – http://theconversation.com/activists-are-using-the-climate-emergency-as-a-new-legal-defence-to-justify-law-breaking-122949

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Luigi Spiller, Associate Professor (Urban Planning) – honorary , University of Melbourne

Labor’s Rudd-era National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) has come under attack just when it might be needed.

The Abbott government stopped funding new deals under the scheme in 2014, but existing arrangements continued and will run for some time.

Labor promised to reintroduce a version of it during the 2019 election campaign. The Coalition is being pressured to do the same.

But the Grattan Institute has condemned the scheme as a A$1 billion windfall to developers that failed to benefit most in need of rental assistance.

Read more: Rudd’s rental affordability scheme was a $1 billion gift to developers. Abbott was right to axe it

We must learn from past mistakes, says institute researchers Brendan Coates and Jessie Horder-Geraghty. They are right, but nor should we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There may have been problems with the NRAS, but the idea behind it – a scheme to leverage private sector investment – remains one of three key policy legs on which a strategy to address rental affordability rests

Mobilising private investment

The NRAS was introduced in 2008. It paid an annual subsidy of about $11,000 for 10 years to an owner of a newly built dwelling if they rented out the property at a 20% discount to the market rate. Eligibility to rent and live in such properties depended on earning below certain income thresholds ($51,398 for one adult, for example).

The scheme had three objectives: provide relief for low and moderate income earners suffering significant rental stress; encourage new housing; and mobilise institutional investment in affordable rental housing.

It was inspired by the much vaunted Low Income Housing Tax Credit in the United States. The idea was that by bridging the gap between the investor’s expected market return and what they could make from an “affordable” rent, the scheme could harness private capital to benefit low and moderate income households.

The Rudd government paid this “return gap” subsidy in the form of an annual grant, on the basis it was more transparent, accountable and efficient than a tax credit or tax break.

Coates and Horder-Geraghty reckon the NRAS failed on all three objectives. The scheme’s eligibility requirements, they say, were too loose, and most properties were still too expensive for low-income households even with the discount. They see no evidence it encouraged new housing.

The major outcome, they calculate, was a A$1 billion windfall to developers – because the average annual subsidy paid ($11,000) was much more than the rent discount (about $4,000) owners had to give.

The Grattan Institute’s analysis makes it seem pretty conclusive that no such scheme should be part of the policy architecture for affordable housing in the future.

But things a bit more complicated than that.

The tortoise and hare dilemma

It’s a fact any government effort to encourage the private sector to provide affordable housing will, in the long run, be more expensive than a government directly investing in building, owning and operating housing itself, or doing so through the not-for-profit sector.

Private landlords expect a return on their investment – a profit, in other words. In a scheme like the NRAS it’s the government that’s effectively paying that profit. If the government provides housing itself, it saves itself that cost.

Simple, right?

Here’s the policy dilemma.

Direct government investment would require spending up to $500,000 per dwelling. Leveraging private capital can supply the same dwelling for one year at a fraction of the capital cost to the government – $11,000 per dwelling in the case of NRAS.
If the federal government had spent the $3 billion it paid out through the NRAS on instead building its own affordable housing, it might have been able to provide about 6,000 affordable dwellings for rent.

With the NRAS it instead provided rent relief to about 35,000 households for 10 years.

There’s a tortoise and hare dilemma to this policy choice; should the government have a much bigger impact on the affordable housing problem in the short term, or slowly build up its own stock of social and affordable housing to ultimately help more people in the long term?

Few aspects of government housing policy are simple. For example, Coates and Horder-Geraghty recommend increasing Commonwealth Rent Assistance for stressed households. But without action to also boost supply, this will most likely push up rents.

The crisis in housing affordability is now so monumentally large that the full troika of policy measures is required: income support, direct government investment and private sector leveraging.

Read more: Australia’s social housing policy needs stronger leadership and an investment overhaul

Attracting institutional investors

Something like NRAS needs to be part of the mix. But it will require tweaking.

The bridging subsidy for private investors needs to be set at just the right level to attract super funds and other institutional investors, just as it has in the US.

Australia has some peculiar challenges in this respect because of the tax treatment of housing investment.

Yields from private rental housing are quite low compared to the returns typically sought by institutional investors. In part, this is because the sector is largely a cottage industry, dominated by “mum and dad” landlords.

Read more: ‘Build to rent’ could be the missing piece of the affordable housing puzzle

They are primarily driven by the prospect of capital gains, which are tax advantaged. The availability of negative gearing also means investors are not always motivated to maximise yield.

Institutional investors, however, are concerned with yield (net rental income). By and large the NRAS subsidy was not enough for them to participate. They were also deterred by the risks of managing large-scale residential portfolios.

These issues would need to be tackled in a future version of NRAS, but they are not insurmountable.

– ref. Don’t tear it down: the idea behind Labor’s National Rental Affordability Scheme is worth saving – http://theconversation.com/dont-tear-it-down-the-idea-behind-labors-national-rental-affordability-scheme-is-worth-saving-123519

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simone Casey, Research Associate, Future Social Service Institute, RMIT University

In all Australia’s capital cities, average share-house rents in the inner suburbs (where jobs are concentrated) leave people without enough money for food and other basics, new research shows.

This research, for a forthcoming report by the authors, proves there is a rental housing crisis for people on Newstart (and other low-income earners) everywhere in Australia.

The analysis was based on Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA) data, using common indicators such as housing affordability and stress. Housing stress for people on low incomes is defined as when rent costs more than 30% of their income.

Read more: Private renters are doing it tough in outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne

For example, the dataset for Victoria (the third-most-expensive rental market and broadly representative of the nation) shows rent for a share house in Melbourne averages 70% of income for a single person receiving Newstart (A$277.50 per week) and Commonwealth Rent Assistance (A$45.74 per week). This leaves people with A$98 a week to live on. That’s less than half the A$216 a week that experts calculate is a healthy base level of income for a single unemployed person.

After paying rent, people on Newstart have just A$14 a day to cover food, utilities and the costs of job seeking such as mobile phone plans and travel cards (A$4.40 a day in Melbourne).

While it was assumed rent for people on low incomes eats up much of their benefits, this analysis shows just how bad the situation has become in all capital cities. It is worst in Sydney. As the chart below shows, median weekly rent in Sydney is A$550, which when split between two renters amounts to A$275 each. This leaves a renter on Newstart with the princely sum of just A$48.24 a week – A$6.89 a day – to live on.

Read more: Tracking the rise of room sharing and overcrowding, and what it means for housing in Australia

What about living in cheaper areas?

Another worrying aspect of the data is it suggests high rents are compelling people on Newstart payments to relocate from inner cities to the outer suburbs and satellite towns with worse labour markets and higher transport costs. And even in these towns, the data paint a bleak picture.

In Victorian regional cities like Bendigo and Ballarat the rent for sharers exceeds the commonly accepted 30% benchmark for housing stress. Here they would be paying A$130 a week – almost half their Newstart payments. With Rent Assistance, that would leave them with A$192 – still A$24 less than the healthy benchmark.

There are only two regions in all of Australia where single unemployed people would have any hope of meeting rents. These are northern Tasmania and outer Hobart, where the youth unemployment rate is 16%. You can add about another 10 points to the unemployment rate to get a real sense of the challenges of getting jobs in these places.

Benefit increases are essential

So what is affordable for people on Newstart? For single people receiving Newstart and Rent Assistance, share-house rents would have to be A$87.

While the table below shows A$97, that would be the affordable rent if maximum Rent Assistance were paid. But it does not actually kick in until weekly rent exceeds A$61. So low-rent places do not attract as much of a subsidy from Rent Assistance as higher-rent properties.

This points to the need for Rent Assistance to kick in at a lower income point. It also needs to be increased to avoid housing stress.

The federal government’s response to this kind of evidence always relies on an argument that Newstart is intended as a “transitional” payment. The unemployed are told they should “get a job”.

But it is very clear this is not as easy as it sounds. That is because there are increasing numbers of people on Newstart with disabilities and over 55 years old – the majority of long-term unemployed are now mature-age job seekers.

There are also far more applicants than job vacancies. It’s worse in regional areas where there are fewer jobs to begin with.

Read more: These ‘job snob’ claims don’t match the evidence

Many welfare agencies are preparing submissions to a Senate inquiry into Newstart and related payments in time for the September 30 deadline. These submissions are expected to contain even more compelling analysis showing it is impossible to survive on Newstart.

The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and several other agencies are demanding that Newstart be raised by at least A$75 a week. Even this badly needed increase will not fully alleviate housing stress, which is the main cause of homelessness among low-income people.

Read more: Homelessness soars in our biggest cities, driven by rising inequality since 2001

– ref. City share-house rents eat up most of Newstart, leaving less than $100 a week to live on – http://theconversation.com/city-share-house-rents-eat-up-most-of-newstart-leaving-less-than-100-a-week-to-live-on-123772

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liam Lenten, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics and Finance, La Trobe University

Tonight is the AFL’s annual night of nights, the red-carpet spectacular known as the Brownlow Medal vote count.

The Brownlow is awarded to the season’s “fairest and best” player. But is the way the medal gets decided really the fairest?

Research I’ve done with Aaron Smith of Loughborough University suggests footballers don’t compete for the Brownlow on a perfectly level playing field. There’s a slight bias towards team leaders.

As a sports economist, I’m fascinated by what the Brownlow Medal count can tell us about the science of evaluating performance in any organisation. In any job, all other things being equal, a performance appraisal may be better (all else equal) once you have worked your way up the corporate ladder. In a perfect meritocracy this would not be the case.

Evaluation bias

Aaron and I have long been interested in the extent to which people in leadership positions receive undeservedly high performance evaluations just because of the managerial networks that arise from the status those positions provide.

Generally we think this occurs because of inevitable human-relationship factors. The more interesting question is whether it happens in cases where the evaluation process is entrusted to external agents (such as HR consultants) supposedly independent of such influences.

This is a difficult question to investigate. Business organisations are not inclined to hand over employee evaluation data to pesky academics. The Brownlow offers a rare analogous opportunity to analyse empirical data.

Brownlow Medal votes are allocated by field umpires (who are, of course, similarly “external” to the competing firms). After each game of the regular season they confer and nominate the three top players. The best player gets three votes, the second two and the third one. This is actually a very rare case within the pantheon of global best-player awards in major sporting leagues where umpires cast the votes.

And come medal count night, the votes are in the public domain.

The data goes back to 1984 (before that, votes were not recorded to the match in which they were cast), and is available on the AFL Tables website. We have used different statistical tools to analyse the data, as well as a comprehensive database of match statistics for about 100,000 player-within-match records from all 2,254 home-and-away AFL matches played from seasons 2006 to 2017. These statistics cover the number of goals, kicks, handballs, tackles and so on by each player.

Significant statistics

Testing for bias towards team leaders has an intuitive underlying justification. Umpires have more contact with captains, such as through the pre-match coin toss. This may unconsciously influence umpires’ perceptions.

The raw data did tell us captains earn, on average, a lot more more Brownlow votes. But this alone does not imply a voting bias. Other factors must be considered. For one thing, captains are likely to be credentialed and talented players. That’s why they’re captains.

We sought to take this into account by figuring into our model a large range of player statistics indicating individual performance within each match.

Our results show that, when controlling for player performance, team captains poll between 1.3% and 2.1% more votes than all other players. There is a strong statistical significance here.

Read more: Mind your confidence interval: how statistics skew research results

The effect for vice-captains was smaller, from 0.6% to 1.5%. There was no significant vote boost for acting captains who normally have no leadership position.

Mitigating factors

In explaining the results, we cannot rule out possible actions not captured within our statistics at which captains have excelled and that have been noticed by umpires.

It may be, for example, that captains have kicked a crucial goal with a higher than average degree of difficulty or made a decisive tackle that has helped turn a game. Statistics alone don’t tell the whole story. Identical player data doesn’t necessarily have the same vote “impact”.

But based my own experience as a former umpire for 15 years (at suburban level for Melbourne’s Northern League), I am convinced captaincy status does really matter in junior games when the umpires are often not previously familiar with any of the players.

In previous research I’ve identified similarly significant umpire biases when choosing “fairest and best” players, such as in favour of Indigenous players and those playing milestone matches.

Field of favourites

But it’s a game of percentages. No captain has won the Brownlow since Carlton’s Chris Judd in 2010. Essendon captain Jobe Watson did poll the most votes in 2012, but he was later stripped of the award due to the club’s doping scandal.

Read more: The Japanese art of kintsugi and how it can help with defeat in sport

So I am noncommittal about tonight’s Brownlow Medal outcome, though our research does seem especially relevant given the favourites this year.

Most obviously there is Carlton’s Patrick Cripps, recently awarded the Leigh Matthews Trophy given by the AFL Players Association to the league’s “most valuable player”. Cripps also became Carlton co-captain this year.

Also among the bookies’ favourites (though at longer odds) are Fremantle captain Nathan Fyfe and Collingwood captain Scott Pendlebury.

– ref. Fairest and best? Status counts in the Brownlow Medal – http://theconversation.com/fairest-and-best-status-counts-in-the-brownlow-medal-123858

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gianluca Demartini, Associate professor, The University of Queensland

The information we encounter online everyday can be misleading, incomplete or fabricated.

Being exposed to “fake news” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can influence our thoughts and decisions. We’ve already seen misinformation interfere with elections in the United States.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly proposed artificial intelligence (AI) as the solution to the fake news dilemma.

However, the issue likely requires high levels of human involvement, as many experts agree that AI technologies need further advancement.

Read more: We made deceptive robots to see why fake news spreads, and found a weakness

I and two colleagues have received funding from Facebook to independently carry out research on a “human-in-the-loop” AI approach that might help bridge the gap.

Human-in-the-loop refers to the involvement of humans (users or moderators) to support AI in doing its job. For example, by creating training data or manually validating the decisions made by AI.

Our approach combines AI’s ability to process large amounts of data with humans’ ability to understand digital content. This is a targeted solution to fake news on Facebook, given its massive scale and subjective interpretation.

The dataset we’re compiling can be used to train AI. But we also want all social media users to be more aware of their own biases, when it comes to what they dub fake news.

Humans have biases, but also unique knowledge

To eradicate fake news, asking Facebook employees to make controversial editorial decisions is problematic, as our research found. This is because the way people perceive content depends on their cultural background, political ideas, biases, and stereotypes.

Facebook has employed thousands of people for content moderation. These moderators spend eight to ten hours a day looking at explicit and violent material such as pornography, terrorism, and beheadings, to decide which content is acceptable for users to see.

Consider them cyber janitors who clean our social media by removing inappropriate content. They play an integral role in shaping what we interact with.

A similar approach could be adapted to fake news, by asking Facebook’s moderators which articles should be removed and which should be allowed.

AI systems could do this automatically at a large scale by learning what fake news is from manually annotated examples. But even when AI can detect “forbidden” content, human moderators are needed to flag content that is controversial or subjective.

A famous example is the Napalm Girl image.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph shows children and soldiers escaping from a napalm bomb explosion during the Vietnam War. The image was posted on Facebook in 2016 and removed because it showed a naked nine-year-old girl, contravening Facebook’s official community standards.

Significant community protest followed, as the iconic image had obvious historical value, and Facebook allowed the photo back on its platform.

Using the best of brains and bots

In the context of verifying information, human judgement can be subjective and skewed based on a person’s background and implicit bias.

In our research we aim to collect multiple “truth labels” for the same news item from a few thousand moderators. These labels indicate the “fakeness” level of a news article.

Rather than simply collect the most popular labels, we also want to record moderators’ backgrounds and their specific judgements to track and explain ambiguity and controversy in the responses.

We’ll compile results to generate a high-quality dataset, which may help us explain cases with high levels of disagreement among moderators.

Currently, Facebook content is treated as binary – it either complies with the standards or it doesn’t.

The dataset we compile can be used train AI to better identify fake news by teaching it which news is controversial and which news is plain fake. The data can also help evaluate how effective current AI is in fake news detection.

Power to the people

While benchmarks to evaluate AI systems that can detect fake news are significant, we want to go a step further.

Instead of only asking AI or experts to make decisions about what news is fake, we should teach social media users how to identify such items for themselves. We think an approach aimed at fostering information credibility literacy is possible.

Read more: Most young Australians can’t identify fake news online

In our ongoing research, we’re collecting a vast range of user responses to identify credible news content.

While this can help us build AI training programs, it also lets us study the development of human moderator skills in recognising credible content, as they perform fake news identification tasks.

Thus, our research can help design online tasks or games aimed at training social media users to recognise trustworthy information.

Other avenues

The issue of fake news is being tackled in different ways across online platforms.

It’s quite often removed through a bottom-up approach, where users report inappropriate content, which is then reviewed and removed by the platform’s employees..

The approach Facebook is taking is to demote unreliable content rather than remove it.

In each case, the need for people to make decisions on content suitability remains. The work of both users and moderators is crucial, as humans are needed to interpret guidelines and decide on the value of digital content, especially if it’s controversial.

In doing so, they must try to look beyond cultural differences, biases and borders.

– ref. Users (and their bias) are key to fighting fake news on Facebook – AI isn’t smart enough yet – http://theconversation.com/users-and-their-bias-are-key-to-fighting-fake-news-on-facebook-ai-isnt-smart-enough-yet-123767

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Howard Manns, Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University

Not to put a damper on things, but Australian food hasn’t always made us happy little Vegemites.

One needn’t look further than the humble meat pie to see how our love/hate relationship with Aussie tucker has evolved. In the early 20th century, the dog’s eye was just a cheap staple on our menus and was peddled by roaming pie-carts.

So low was the lowly meat pie that it became a pejorative term for second-rate boxers, racehorses and bookies. The Australian meat pie western took its place alongside the spaghetti western as a low-quality US cowboy flick not actually filmed in the US (the latter were filmed in Italy).

Read more: Why would anyone shiver their timbers? Here’s how pirate words arrr preserving old language

But Australians love an underdog, and things began to look up for the meatie from the second world war. When American soldiers arrived, their “Pocket Guide to Australia” noted that meat pies were

the Australian version of the hot dog.

And since at least the 1970s, we’ve had the high mark of patriotism being as Australian as a meat pie.

Of course, modern Australian (mod Oz) cuisine is much more than meat pies and steak and cake (in the words of author Patrick White). So, we thought we’d play babbler (babbling brook “cook”) and cook up a tale of Aussie tucker and its words — a kind of degustation with gobbets of linguistic and culinary history. .

Classy eating, bush tucker and the wallaby trail

From the time of settlement, Australian eating was a story of haves and have nots.

The first Australian cookbook was released in 1864 under the title An Australian Aristologist. The aristologist was the foodie of the 19th century, but the word never took off, pushed out by others like gourmet — French has always given the dining experience a certain je ne sais quoi.

The Australian Aristologist (prominent Tasmanian, Edward Abbott) extolled the virtues of herb gardens, yeast and 30 or so types of bread, but his privilege led him to largely ignore the core staple of many everyday Australians —damper.

This simple, unleavened bread baked in ashes comprised (along with tea and mutton) the bushman’s dinner. It was the linguistic offspring of the original British damper “anything that took the edge off an appetite” with a verbal twist (to damp down “cover a fire with coal or ashes to keep it burning slowly”).

Life could be rough for the bushman and the itinerant worker. Those lucky enough to make tucker (“earn enough to eat”) might tuck in to (“eat”) some banjo (“a shoulder of mutton”), the Old thing (“damper and mutton”) or the bushman’s hot dinner (“damper and mustard”). Those less lucky might be reduced to their billy, a duck’s breakfast (“water”) and the wallaby trail (“the search for food or work”).

The bush diet could be quite muttonous (“sheep-based”), but meat-eating was fraught with gastronomic red herrings (John Ayto’s term). Underground mutton wasn’t mutton, but rather “rabbit”. Colonial goose actually was mutton (“boned leg stuffed with sage & onions”) and so was colonial duck (“boned shoulder with sage and onions”). But Burdekin duck was neither duck nor mutton, but rather “sliced meat fried in batter”. And we reckon seafood fans best steer clear of bush oysters (“testicles”).

Sausage wars and snake’s bum on a biscuit

The Australian food lexicon is often driven by our relationships with one another and the world.

German migration, especially to South Australia, led to the German sausage or the Fritz. However, first world war anti-German sentiment led to attempts to relabel this sausage the Austral. Such renaming efforts were to no avail in South Australia, where Fritz remains Fritz, but were more successful elsewhere.

When the British Royal family changed their surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in 1917, Queenslanders followed suit and the German sausage became the Windsor.

Perhaps our most honest assessment of sausages (but also snags, snaggles, snorks, snorkers, starvers, Hitler’s toe in its many varieties) comes from Australian homes and housewives: mystery bags.

Nancy Keesing’s “Lily on the Dustbin” is a treasure trove of such food slang and metaphor among Australian women and families. Keesing highlights heaps of fun ways of expressing hunger:

I could eat a hollow log full of green ants.

I could eat a horse and chase the rider.

I could eat the bum out of an elephant.

I could eat a baby’s bottom through a can chair.

And there are equally fun and cheeky answers for that perennial question, “what’s for dinner?”:

Snake’s bum on a biscuit.

Wait and see pudding.

Standby pudding.

Open the dish and discover the riddle.

Though humorous, Keesing notes that many of these sayings have sombre origins in the Depression era, when dinner really might have been an unfolding mystery from day to day.

Multiculturalism beyond the “culinary cringe”

South Australian Premier Don Dunstan’s 1970s cookbook begins with the following:

For the most part, before the Second World War, our cuisine reflected the decline into which the average English cook of the nineteenth century had sunk. After the war, the influence of migrant groups […] influenced Australian food habits for the better.

The delightfully named (and delightful) Australian food writer Cherry Ripe announced in the 1990s that we were saying goodbye to the culinary cringe – and ours was among the best food in the world.

Our acceptance of multicultural delights have played no small role in this.

For many years, Chinese and Greek pub cooks were relegated to cooking standard Australian fare (such as steak and eggs). But the dim sim/dim sin has long been a bellwether for the culinary delight to come. In fact, American servicemen in Australia during the second world war were informed in their “Pocket Guide to Australia” that the “dim sin” was the Australian replacement for the hamburger.

Read more: Oi! We’re not lazy yarners, so let’s kill the cringe and love our Aussie accent(s)

But since then, we’ve seen a proliferation of multicultural food items — our cook’s tour has barely scratched the surface. Lots of words are like the cocky on the biscuit tin (“left out”).

We’d love to tell you more about how the chiko roll evolved from observations that chop suey rolls kept falling out of footy fans’ hands. And we’d love to tell you how the lives of the bushmen might have been easier — if they had only taken to the delicacies offered by Australian Indigenous people.

But alas, dear reader, we can but invite you to contribute your favourite food words and stories below!

– ref. How Australians talk about tucker is a story that’ll make you want to eat the bum out of an elephant – http://theconversation.com/how-australians-talk-about-tucker-is-a-story-thatll-make-you-want-to-eat-the-bum-out-of-an-elephant-121492

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirrie J Ballard, Professor, Speech Pathology, University of Sydney

Sam is a high school drama teacher — articulate, funny, smart. It’s an ordinary day and she isn’t feeling great, but pushes through. At morning tea, she spills coffee down her shirt; at lunch she notices a strange sensation in her lips and tongue. Then her speech starts to sound odd, slurred, indistinct.

Sam is having a stroke. In the following months, her speech is still painstakingly slow, full of mistakes, hard to understand.

Read more: How to recognise a stroke and what you should know about their treatment

Sam is still funny and smart but no-one can see that. She can’t work. Her friends are impatient or embarrassed, condescending at times, and they gradually disappear.

Fortunately, help is available. But the path to recovery will test Sam’s mettle and redefine her identity.

How common are conditions like Sam’s?

Speech disorders like Sam’s can affect people at any age. But people aren’t generally aware these problems can arise as an adult.

In Australia, someone has a stroke every nine minutes. That means about 153 people have a stroke every day. Up to 70% of people who survive a stroke cannot speak clearly and intelligibly. For about a quarter of these stroke survivors, these effects persist for months to years.

While stroke is most common in the elderly, 30% of stroke survivors are under the age of 65.

Acquired speech disorders are even more common in other conditions. About 50% of people with Parkinson’s disease, up to 50% with multiple sclerosis, and as many as 65% with a traumatic brain injury have them.

Read more: Explainer: what is traumatic brain injury?

What’s causing Sam’s difficulties?

Sam’s stroke damaged the area of the brain that controls her mouth movements, causing a motor speech disorder. There are different types. But Sam has the type called apraxia of speech. Her muscles still work fine for eating but, when it comes to speech, she can no longer control precisely where they move and when.

Read more: How to tell if your child has a speech or language impairment

Other types of motor speech disorders are called dysarthrias and can make the muscles too tense, too relaxed, or limited in their range of movement.

Motor speech disorders are different to language disorders, called aphasia. Aphasia affects your ability to find the right words and sentences to convey your ideas or to understand what others say to you. However, motor speech disorders and aphasia can occur together.

The effects can go beyond losing your speech

Sam told me, as part of yet-to-be published research, out of all the difficulties after her stroke:

[…] speech was by far the most alienating one.

If you lose your speech, you can lose your job, your social network, your independence, your identity. Some have likened it to being in a foreign country and not being able to communicate at all.

Read more: Stroke survivors and their carers often have poor mental health. Here’s how we can help them

But it’s not quite the same. People with motor speech disorders often can understand everything you say. They want to respond and contribute to the conversation, but their disorder means people don’t understand what they say or they speak too slowly.

In this example, someone with a motor speech disorder, like the one Sam has, finds it difficult to say longer, more complex words. The person is saying “the municipal judge sentenced the criminal”.

If you lose your speech, what can you do?

People rarely realise learning to speak required thousands of hours of practice. By the time children turn four, they produce on average 1,900 speech vocalisations a day. These not only include words, but also phrases produced on one breath.

But you can’t remember this, so developing your speech seemed effortless. In fact, most of us take our speech for granted.

Read more: Explainer: Why the human voice is so versatile

The good news is, speech is like any other complex motor skill. It is like swimming or playing the piano, or relearning to walk after a stroke. If you use it, you can improve it.

As Sam realised:

If I work as hard as I can, there’s no way I can’t get a little better.

What type of therapist do I need?

So, what type of help is available? A good place to start is a speech pathologist.

You can find one in hospitals, rehabilitation centres and in the community. They work with you to build a program of practice and activities to improve your speech.

While relearning to speak is not easy, we now know people respond to carefully structured therapy that stimulates activity in the undamaged parts of the brain that control movements needed for speech.

This therapy looks and feels like training programs for other complex motor skills: practising multiple times a week, at moderate intensity, using the targeted skills and behaviours in a range of activities and contexts.

For instance, a typical session might involve practising useful words or phrases (by yourself or out in the community), making sure you use all the right sounds, over-enunciating, and gradually speeding up to sound more natural.

Not everyone can access therapy

But there’s a problem. Most people can’t afford one-on-one sessions with a “trainer” or therapist for multiple practice sessions a week. And it’s uncommon for a speech pathologist to work with a patient for months at a time.

According to Speech Pathology Australia’s submission (submission 224) to a Senate committee into speech pathology services, specialist services for adults with speech disorders are “extremely limited”.

While health-care systems and funding may support people in the early stages after a stroke or injury, the submission continues “long term help available in the community, and support for communication are severely lacking”.

This situation is perplexing given a communication disorder has a “huge impact on an individual’s productivity and participation”.

What happened to Sam?

This was Sam’s experience of working with a speech pathologist. She told me:

First you have […] contact but then it’s expensive.

Sam and her family soon realised the ball was in their court:

That’s how it all started – taking accountability for my own recovery. The most important thing for me was knowing it’s possible – instilling hope.

Sam used what she had learned in her speech therapy sessions. Combined with her intelligence, common sense, tenacity, and her family and friends, she created her own rehabilitation program.

It included a range of exercises to target specific skills, such as challenging words, speech rhythm, and fluency in conversation. She practised every day in different environments — at home, out with friends, in noisy and quiet environments. She used different supports, sometimes a notepad, other times a phone app.

Like a personal training program at the gym, she has done this every day, ever since.

It is now nine years since Sam’s stroke. She’s back working. Her speech, most of the time, doesn’t attract attention. She trips over the occasional longer word (legitimatise is one recent example) and her speech can sound a little drunken if she gets over-tired. She says, it was perhaps the greatest challenge of her life but worth the fight.

What could we do better for people like Sam?

Sam is just one example of how the current health-care model of rehabilitation services for people with long-term communication difficulties is not fit for purpose.

Sam embraced the challenge to create her own program but for many this is overwhelming.

The predominant model of therapy, heavily supervised by an expert clinician, needs to change. Instead, we need to encourage a person’s “ownership” of their own recovery, encourage people to share accountability for therapy goals and outcomes with clinicians, have programs available in the community, and support people to build a strong network of family, friends and colleagues.

A speech pathologist is a critical member of the team. But people with speech disorders will be disadvantaged until we embrace models of care like Sam’s.

Find an Australian speech pathologist near you. Paid and free resources about motor speech disorders are also available.

– ref. In a chatty world, losing your speech can be alienating. But there’s help – http://theconversation.com/in-a-chatty-world-losing-your-speech-can-be-alienating-but-theres-help-121943

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Carroll, Researcher in Public Health, Massey University

Our research project explored the everyday lives of disabled young people, aged from 12 to 25 years, with mobility, vision and hearing impairments. We measured and asked them about factors that enabled or constrained their opportunities to fully participate in community life, including education, employment and recreational activities.

With support from participants and our research advisory group of young disabled people and their whānau (extended families), we have collaborated with graphic artist Toby Morris on a comic to highlight participants’ accounts of everyday ableism they encounter. We hope this comic will invite and challenge able-bodied people to think and act differently.

The benefits of participation in community life are well documented. It promotes a sense of belonging and identity, develops networks of support, and enhances social and economic opportunities. Lack of participation has profoundly negative implications for well-being and opportunities.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, one in four people are disabled. As elsewhere, they have lower levels of participation compared to their non-disabled peers. Urban environments are structured from ableist perspectives to work well for “ableds” who fit hypothetical norms of movement, sight and hearing. They presented numerous obstacles to participation. But participants identified discriminatory ableist attitudes as a greater constraint on their community participation than physical barriers.

– ref. Comic explainer: young disabled New Zealanders on the barriers to a better life – http://theconversation.com/comic-explainer-young-disabled-new-zealanders-on-the-barriers-to-a-better-life-122226

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jagannath Adhikari, Sessional Lecturer, UNSW

Reducing emissions from deforestation and farming is an urgent global priority if we want to control climate change. However, like many climate change problems, the solution is complicated. Cutting down forests to plant edible crops feeds some of the world’s hungriest people.

Read more: UN climate change report: land clearing and farming contribute a third of the world’s greenhouse gases

More than 820 million people suffer from hunger, and about 2 billion people face moderate food insecurity – meaning they do not always know when their next meal will come.

After a decade of slow decline, climate change is driving this number up again, particularly in Africa and Asia, where competition over land for both farming and forest conservation is acute.

But villagers in the Himalayas are turning to a traditional practice that can slow land clearing and feed people: growing and collecting food from the forests.

Food in the forest

My research in the Himalayan region, where high population density means farmland is very scarce, investigated how people used their forests as a food source.

An “edible forest” is one in which people have planted trees and crops that can produce food in the forest, as well as harvesting what naturally grows. In fact, this is a traditional practice in the Himalayan region. A farmer I interviewed in Siding village, at the base of Mardi Himal – one of the peaks in Annapurna Himalayan range – told me:

I go to [the] forest when food is scarce at home. I collect vegetables, fruits, nuts, medicinal herbs, spices, roots and tubers. Sometimes I also collect wild honey, bamboo shoots and mushroom, which is consumed at home and also sold in the market. Occasionally, we also get wild meat.

Traditionally, these villagers see forest and farms as an extension of each other rather than distinct categories, and manage them so they support each other.

Generally, people plant trees useful for households – for their wood, for example, or fruit – in the forest close to the villages, and preserve those grown naturally.

The community itself protects the forest, in the past even pooling grains and cash to hire a guard if needed.

This forest food is supplementary, becoming more important in scarce times and as a buffer during famine. Taking wood for fuel or timber is strictly regulated, but there are no restrictions on gathering food, to the great benefit of the poorest.

Collecting food is mainly the work of women, who gather a few things whenever they go into the forest for firewood or animal fodder. They have a great deal of knowledge about edible plants. Men take part by hunting for honey and wild animals. Children, too, go to the forest in their free time to gather berries and tubers.

Sometimes villagers collect these foods to sell in nearby markets as a seasonal source of cash.

Modern bureaucracy

The centralised forest management and curtailment of traditional rights of the communities that came with modern forest bureaucracy in the Himalayan region distanced people from the forest. This also led to rapid deforestation between the mid-1960s to 1980s.

This trend was reversed in the early 1990s, when community rights came to the forefront and communally managed forestry gained a strong foothold. This helped reduce poverty. Yet it is still hard for locals to grow food in the forests as they once did. One farmer told me,

We do not destroy forest when collecting these things, but conservation regulation is making this collection difficult.

We need power to move from centralised governments to local stewardship and local knowledge. Government oversight would still be required to protect the local interests, but any new mechanism needs to be developed in consultation with local communities. Research institutions could play a role in finding better ways to meet the interest of local communities when they manage their forest.

A new category of land use

Edible forests are a departure from standard schemes to reduce emissions from deforestation and land degradation, in which developed countries pay less developed countries to preserve or replant their forests.

Read more: Two years after the earthquake, why has Nepal failed to recover?

If people are actively planting and harvesting in a forest, it may not qualify as protected or conserved land. Conversely, if a local community depends on their forest for food, they may hesitate to register for a formal scheme, for fear they will lose a valuable resource.

If reforestation schemes can be expanded to take into account planting that doesn’t compromise tree coverage, we can encourage rapid growth of edible forests and speed up our response to climate change. It will help meet goals like food security, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, and reducing desertification and land degradation that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recommended for sustainable land management in the light of climate change.

Climate migration

Climate change and food insecurity are the main drivers of migration away from rural areas in developing countries, which brings its own challenges for sustainable land management.

Wages sent home by those who move away is a huge part of food security and reducing poverty for many people. In 2018 about US$530 billion was transferred to low- and middle-income countries between family members, compared with US$162 billion in development aid.

Read more: Want to beat climate change? Protect our natural forests

This flow of money means families with marginal land – like farmland on hill slopes in Nepal’s case – can afford to slowly convert it to plantations or forests. Migration and remittances – which contribute some 28% of Nepal’s gross domestic product – helps increase forest coverage, especially in marginal lands vulnerable to erosion and landslides.

There is an opportunity to increase planting in these lands, which have been abandoned for farming. If official reforestation policies can acknowledge and support edible forests, we could see the Himalayan region lead the pack on a new way of thinking about forests and food.

– ref. ‘Edible forests’ can fight land clearing and world hunger at the same time – http://theconversation.com/edible-forests-can-fight-land-clearing-and-world-hunger-at-the-same-time-122540

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margaret Kristin Merga, Senior Lecturer in Education, Edith Cowan University

Reading aloud can help young children learn about new words and how to sound them. There’s great value too in providing opportunities for children to enjoy regular silent reading, which is sustained reading of materials they select for pleasure.

But not all schools consistently offer this opportunity for all of their students. We regularly hear from teachers and teacher librarians who are concerned about the state of silent reading in schools.

Read more: Read aloud to your children to boost their vocabulary

They’re worried students don’t have enough opportunity to enjoy sustained reading in school. This is important, as many children do not read at home.

For some young people, silent reading at school is the only reading for pleasure they experience.

Silent reading silenced

Research suggests silent reading opportunities at school are often cancelled and may dwindle as students move through the years of schooling.

Where silent reading opportunities still exist, we’re often told that the way it is being implemented is not reflective of best practice. This can make the experience less useful for students and even unpleasant.

Yet regular reading can improve a student’s reading achievement. Reading books, and fiction books in particular, can improve their reading and literacy skills.

Opportunity matters too, as the amount we read determines the benefits we get from reading. Regular reading can help with other subjects, such as maths.

So, what should silent reading look like?

Here are ten important things we need to do to make the most of silent reading in our schools.

1. Enjoyment is the focus

Enjoyment of reading is associated with both reading achievement and regular reading.

If we want young people to choose to read more to experience the benefits of reading, then silent reading needs to be about pleasure and not just testing.

2. Students choose the books

Young people should not be prevented from choosing popular or high-interest books that are deemed too challenging. Books that are a bit too hard could motivate students to higher levels of achievement.

Students have reported enjoying and even being inspired by reading books that were challenging for them, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings.

Silent reading of text books or required course materials should not be confused with silent reading for pleasure.

3. The space is right

Like adults, children may struggle to read in a noisy or uncomfortable space.

Schools need to provide space that is comfortable for students to enjoy their silent reading.

4. Opportunities to chat (before or after)

Discussion about books can give students recommendations about other books and even enhance reading comprehension.

But silent reading should be silent so all students can focus on reading.

5. Inspired by keen readers

If students see their teachers and teacher librarians as keen readers this can play a powerful role in encouraging avid and sustained reading.

School principals can also be powerful reading models, with their support of silent reading shaping school culture.

6. Students have access to a library

Even when schools have libraries the research shows students may be given less access to them during class time as they move through the years of schooling.

Not all students are given class time to select reading materials from the library.

7. It happens often

This is particularly important for struggling readers who may find it hard to remember what they are reading if opportunities for silent reading are infrequent.

These students may also find it difficult to get absorbed in a book if time to read is too brief.

8. Paper books are available

Reading comprehension is typically stronger when reading on paper rather than a screen.

Screen-based book reading is not preferred by most young people, and can be associated with infrequent reading. Students can find reading on devices distracting.

9. There is a school library and a teacher librarian

Teacher librarians can be particularly important in engaging struggling readers beyond the early years of schooling. They may find it hard to find a book that interests them but which is also not too hard to read.

Librarians are also good at matching students with books based on movies they like, or computer games they enjoy.

10. We need to make the school culture a reading culture

Reading engagement is typically neglected in plans to foster reading achievement in Australian schools.

Practices such as silent reading should feature in the literacy planning documents of all schools.

Allowing students to read for pleasure at school is a big step toward turning our school cultures into reading cultures. Students need opportunities to read, as regular reading can both build and sustain literacy skills.

Read more: There’s a reason your child wants to read the same book over and over again

Unfortunately, literacy skills can begin to slide if reading is not maintained.

We need people to continue to read beyond the point of learning to read independently, though research suggests this message may not be received by all young people.

Where children do understand reading is important, they may be nearly twice as likely to read every day. So silent reading is important enough to be a regular part of our school day.

This article was co-authored by Claire Gibson, a librarian who’s studying a master in education by research at Edith Cowan University.

– ref. 10 ways to get the most out of silent reading in schools – http://theconversation.com/10-ways-to-get-the-most-out-of-silent-reading-in-schools-123531

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lili Pâquet, Lecturer in Writing, University of New England

In Dervla McTiernan’s book, The Scholar, published earlier this year, women are consistently used as the “fall guys” for men with high aspirations. Two young women are killed when they uncover fraud. Another female colleague is then framed for the murders.

Before writing crime fiction, McTiernan worked as a lawyer for 12 years, for international companies like the one in The Scholar. Her background lends her book authority, even though it’s fiction.

McTiernan joins a batch of crime writing women bringing professional clout to their books. Others are Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Clark, Alafair Burke, Anne Holt, and Lisa Scottoline. This list is a tiny fraction of the trailblazing authors.

Crimes close to home

Last week, Elizabeth Farrelly wrote that “crime fiction is the morality drama of our time” that can “heighten and dissect the battle of good against evil enacted daily in our living rooms, cities and streets”. She compared crime books about violence against women with Australia’s deplorable record on domestic violence and rape.

In books written by ex-justice professionals, we are asked to examine our cultural and moral compasses. These authors don’t just write about serial killers – who are thankfully more common in the pages of crime books than in real life – they more often focus on murders by spouses, family members or colleagues of the victim. Some push for changes to how rape trials are prosecuted. They focus on the justice system problems that women face, as victims and as professionals.

The stories also ask us to question how we perceive professional women. These authors’ characters, who often have much in common with their creators, face a barrage of harassment on the job. Lisa Scottoline’s fictional all-women law firm is consistently targeted by abusive prank callers. In her latest book, Feared, the firm is sued for “reverse” sexual discrimination.

What’s the appeal?

Australians are avid readers of crime fiction. In a 2017 study, 48.5% of respondents read crime fiction, making it the most popular genre for enjoyment.

While researching my book on the topic, I had the opportunity to read Dorothy Uhnak’s fan letters, held at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Readers (many of whom were prison inmates) repeatedly told Uhnak that her books touched on inequalities in the justice system that rang true for them, and reading her work was therapeutic.

Cosy vs hardboiled

Female crime writers have historically been pigeonholed as writing “cosy crime” novels as opposed to more graphic masculine representations of “hardboiled” detectives.

We are used to reading about women as amateurs, from Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth, Miss Marple, to Janet Evanovich’s bumbling and untrained bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum. Since the 1970s, more authors have written about women as hardboiled private detectives.

Now, we are increasingly seeing women characters in professional roles. When the author is also a professional, she has even more authority. She has “insider knowledge.” Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones surveyed women who read feminist crime series and found that readers identify with the struggles of characters who are realistic professional women. Often, the fictional investigations have similarities to real ones the author has worked on. Central Park 5 prosecutor turned crime author Linda Fairstein received pointed criticism about these similarities.

The force

In Australia, ex-police officer Y.A. Erskine’s debut The Brotherhood tells the story of rookie cop Lucy Howard who is blamed when a senior sergeant is killed on a routine call-out. She can’t join the brotherhood of the Tasmanian police force, because, in her words, she doesn’t have the “standard-issue penis”. She is an outsider inside the system.

In Erskine’s follow-up, The Betrayal, Lucy is raped by a colleague. When she makes a complaint, she is vilified and blamed for tarnishing the reputation of the police. The complaint is briefly investigated before being dropped.

Another Australian ex-cop writing crime is P.M. Newton. Her debut, The Old School (notice the theme in the titles?), follows Australian-Vietnamese officer, Nhu “Ned” Kelly. She deals with the racism and corruption of her male colleagues before being shot by one of them.

Newton’s following book, Beams Falling (a reference to Dashiell Hammett’s Flitcraft parable within The Maltese Falcon), tracks Ned’s struggle with post traumatic stress disorder. While fictional detectives usually bounce back quickly after violence, Ned never fully gets over the trauma, and her work offers little support.

Ex-cop Karen M. Davis, has also created a character damaged by her policing experience. Davis’ Lexie Rogers has been stabbed in the neck, and fears facing her attacker in court – a fear exacerbated by her insider knowledge of the justice system. Davis has spoken about how she retired from the police because of trauma, and began writing as a kind of catharsis. Erskine has spoken out about how the rape of Lucy in her books is based on her own unreported rape by a colleague.

These authors have seen the inside of the criminal justice system, its flaws and the experience of women within it. They bring this cachet of lived experiences to their crime fiction. Bestsellers by Marcia Clark or Anne Holt could spark moral reflection, validate women’s experiences, and be part of the cultural shift needed to end violence against women.

– ref. From crime fighters to crime writers – a new batch of female authors brings stories that are closer to home – http://theconversation.com/from-crime-fighters-to-crime-writers-a-new-batch-of-female-authors-brings-stories-that-are-closer-to-home-123770

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

Scott Morrison was frank, when quizzed at a news conference during his visit to Washington, on whether he would be seeking to travel to China in the next year.

“Well, you have to be invited to go,” he said.

With Australia-China relations at a low point – due to Australia’s foreign interference legislation, the banning of Huawei from 5G network and other issues – there’s no indication when an invitation might come.

Not that the Prime Minister wants to seem anxious.

He referred to his encounters with the Chinese leadership in the margins of summits, as well as senior level meetings in the areas of foreign affairs, defence and trade.

Pressed on whether he would like to be invited, Morrison said: “Well of course we would go if there was an invitation to attend.

“But it’s not something that is overly vexing us because we have this partnership. We continue to work closely with China,” he said. “So it’s not an issue that’s troubling me at all.”

Amid the glamour and glitter and the mutually admiring exchanges of rhetorically hype between Donald Trump and Morrison, China and Iran were the central policy issues of interest.

Morrison made clear that Australia and the United States brought differing economic perspectives on China. He was keen to encourage a deal to end the US-China trade war, but also to show understanding of Trump position.

He praised Trump’s “natural instinct of restraint” on Iran, despite the President making reference to his nuclear arsenal. Morrison also stressed Australia’s present commitment was strictly limited to the protection of the sea lanes.

He did not explicitly rule out further involvement if the situation escalated, rather saying nothing like that had been asked and people should not get ahead of themselves.

Read more: As Scott Morrison heads to Washington, the US-Australia alliance is unlikely to change

The theme of the Morrison visit is repeated over and over – renewing and modernising the deep connection between the two countries, which is now cast as looking from one century of “mateship” to a second century of it. Leaders of more powerful nations would visit America, Morrison said, “but you won’t find a more sure and steadfast friend, a better political mate, than Australia”.

From where Trump sits, Australia and its PM could hardly tick any more boxes.

The US has a trade surplus with Australia. Australia, as Morrison emphasised, would be spending 2% of GDP on defence – that is, an ally putting its weight. And, as Trump emphasised, it is buying a great deal of defence equipment from the US.

Then there is the fact that Morrison is right up Trump’s alley as a leader – a conservative who has won an election against the odds.

No wonder Trump had a ready reply when reminded of George W Bush dubbing Howard “a man of steel” – Morrison is “a man of titanium”.

On China, the President dwelt on the pain the US was imposing. “They’re having a very bad year, worst year in 57 years. … We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars of tariffs. … They’ve lost over three million jobs there. Supply chain is crashing. And they have a lot of problems. And I can tell you, they want to make a deal.”

Morrison highlighted Australia’s strategic partnership with China. “We have a great relationship with China. China’s growth has been great for Australia.

“But we need to make sure that we all compete on the same playing field,” he said.

On the Middle East, when asked “are you open to further military action against Iran or is the Australian commitment solely contained to a freedom of navigation patrol exercise?” Morrison replied: “As the President said … there are no further activities planned or requested for assistance from Australia, so the question to that extent is moot”.

He praised the “calibrated, I think very measured response” of the US, as the administration announced further sanctions.

“Obviously at any time when issues are raised with us as an ally, we consider them on their merits at the time in Australia’s national interests,” Morrison said at their joint news conference.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Being a Trump ‘bestie’ comes with its own challenges for Scott Morrison

Speaking at his news conference for the travelling media Morrison said there were no discussion of anything beyond the present commitment.

“I think people need to be careful about getting ahead of themselves and in running off on where these things might go. I mean these matters … are dealt with I think in a very iterative way, and I think that’s what you’re seeing.”

Morrison announced a five year $150 million investment for the Australian Space Agency to “foster the new ideas and hi-tech skilled jobs that will make Australian businesses a partner of choice to fit out NASA missions” to return to the Moon and travel to Mars.

He said the investment would bring more jobs, new technologies and more investment.

“We’re backing Australian businesses to the moon, and even Mars, and back,” he said.

“We’re getting behind Australian businesses so they can take advantage of the pipeline of work NASA has committed to. There is enormous opportunity for Australia’s space sector which is why we want to triple its size to $12 billion to create around 20,000 extra jobs by 2030.”

The announcement prompted Malcolm Turnbull to tweet:

Morrison repeatedly dismissed as “gossip” – but did not deny – a Wall Street Journal report that he had wanted his close associate Hillsong founder Brian Houston invited to the state dinner but the Americans had vetoed him.

Houston said: “I have had no invitation to the White House and I have had no discussion with the prime minister or anyone else about this”.

Houston received an adverse finding from the royal commission into child sexual abuse. It found that “in 1999 and 2000, Pastor Brian Houston and the National Executive of the Assemblies of God in Australia did not refer the allegations of child sexual abuse against Mr Frank Houston [ Brian’s father] to the police”.

– ref. View from The Hill: To go to China you have to be invited: Morrison – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-to-go-to-china-you-have-to-be-invited-morrison-123978

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

University of Canberra Deputy Vice-Chancellor Leigh Sullivan discusses Scott Morrison’s new family law inquiry with Michelle Grattan. They also speak of the developments in the Tamil family from Biloela’s case, and the UN barring Australia from speaking at the upcoming climate change summit.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the family law inquiry – and the UN climate change summit – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-family-law-inquiry-and-the-un-climate-change-summit-123928

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dries Verstraete, Senior Lecturer in Aerospace Design and Propulsion, University of Sydney

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

Electric cars, trains, trams and boats already exist. That logically leads to the question: why are we not seeing large electric aircraft? And will we see them any time soon?

Why do we have electric cars and trains, but few electric planes? The main reason is that it’s much simpler to radically modify a car or train, even if they look very similar to traditional fossil-fuel vehicles on the outside.

Land vehicles can easily cope with the extra mass from electricity storage or electrical propulsion systems, but aircraft are much more sensitive.

Read more: Zero-carbon electric transport is already in reach for small islands

For instance, increasing the mass of a car by 35% leads to an increase in energy use of 13-20%. But for a plane, energy use is directly proportional to mass: increasing its mass by 35% means it needs 35% more energy (all other things being equal).

But that is only part of the story. Aircraft also travel much further than ground vehicles, which means a flight requires far more energy than an average road trip. Aircraft must store onboard all the energy needed to move its mass for each flight (unlike a train connected to an electrical grid). Using a heavy energy source thus means more energy is needed for a flight, which leads to extra mass, and so on and on.

For an aircraft, mass is crucial, which is why airlines fastidiously weigh luggage. Electric planes need batteries with enough energy per kilogram of battery, or the mass penalty means they simply can’t fly long distances.

Read more: Why battery-powered vehicles stack up better than hydrogen

Short-range planes

Despite this, electric aircraft are on the horizon – but you won’t be seeing electric 747s any time soon.

Today’s best available lithium ion battery packs provide around 200 watt-hours (Wh) per kilogram, about 60 times less than current aircraft fuel. This type of battery can power small electric air taxis with up to four passengers over a distance of around 100km. For longer trips, more energy-dense cells are needed.

Short-range electric commuter aircraft that carry up to 30 people for less than 800km, for instance, specifically require between 750 and 2,000Wh/kg, which is some 6-17% of kerosene-based jet fuel’s energy content. Even larger aircraft require increasingly lighter batteries. For example, a plane carrying 140 passengers for 1,500km consumes about 30kg of kerosene per passenger. With current battery technology, almost 1,000kg of batteries is needed per passenger.

To make regional commuter aircraft fully electric requires a four- to tenfold reduction in battery weight. The long-term historical rate of improvement in battery energy has been around 3-4% per year, doubling roughly every two decades. Based on a continuation of this historical trend, the fourfold improvement needed for a fully electric commuter aircraft could potentially be reached around mid-century.

While this may seem an incredibly long wait, this is consistent with the timescale of change in the aviation industry for both the infrastructure and aircraft design lifecycles. A new aircraft takes around 5-10 years to design, and will then remain in service for two to three decades. Some aircraft are still flying 50 years after their first flight.

Read more: We can’t expand airports after declaring a climate emergency – let’s shift to low-carbon transport instead

Here come the hybrids

Does this mean long-distance flying will always rely on fossil fuels? Not necessarily.

While fully electric large aircraft require a major, yet-to-be-invented shift in energy storage, there are other ways to reduce the environmental impact of flying.

Hybrid-electric aircraft combine fuels with electric propulsion. This class of aircraft includes design without batteries, where the electric propulsion system serves to improve the thrust efficiency, reducing the amount of fuel needed.

Hybrid-electric aircraft with batteries are also in development, where the batteries may provide extra power in specific circumstances. Batteries can then, for instance, provide clean take-off and landing to reduce emissions near airports.

Electric planes are also not the only way to reduce the direct carbon footprint of flying. Alternative fuels, such as biofuels and hydrogen, are also being investigated.

Biofuels, which are fuels derived from plants or algae, were first used on a commercial flight in 2008 and several airlines have performed trials with them. While not widely adopted, significant research is currently investigating sustainable biofuels that do not impact freshwater sources or food production.

Read more: Explainer: what are biofuels?

While biofuels do still produce CO₂, they don’t require significant changes to existing aircraft or airport infrastructure. Hydrogen, on the other hand, requires a complete redesign of the fuelling infrastructure of the airport and also has a significant impact on the design of the aircraft itself.

While hydrogen is very light – hydrogen contains three times more energy per kilogram than kerosene – its density is very low, even when stored as a liquid at -250℃. This means that fuel can no longer be stored in the wing but needs to be moved to relatively heavy and bulky tanks inside the fuselage. Despite these drawbacks, hydrogen-fuelled long-distance flights can consume up to 12% less energy than kerosene.

This article is part of The Covering Climate Now series

This is a concerted effort among news organisations to put the climate crisis at the forefront of our coverage. This article is published under a Creative Commons licence and can be reproduced for free – just hit the “Republish this article” button on the page to copy the full HTML coding. The Conversation also runs Imagine, a newsletter in which academics explore how the world can rise to the challenge of climate change. Sign up here.

– ref. Climate explained: why don’t we have electric aircraft? – http://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-dont-we-have-electric-aircraft-123910