Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tebeje Molla, Research Fellow, Deakin University

For disadvantaged people with disrupted educational trajectories, such as refugees, vocational qualifications can widen access to paid jobs and enhance economic independence. But many still consider vocational education and training (VET) qualifications not as prestigious as university degrees. This is a widespread issue, especially in African communities.

Many African parents push their children to go to university regardless of their preparedness or interest. The outcome is dispiriting. Most of them leave university without a degree. They drop out.

But African youth I have interviewed for as-yet unpublished research have found VET in Australia to be a supportive environment, where they have been successful. More should be encouraged to consider VET, and policies must be in place to help them get there.

Unequal trends of higher education participation

For African Australians, higher education attainment is closely associated with migration status. Compared to their non-refugee counterparts, refugee background African youth are less likely to transition to university within five years of their arrival in Australia. The trend has not changed much over the last 25 years.

This difference between the two groups can in part be explained by the fact African refugee youth arrive with limited educational attainment. For instance, in 2016, 19% of people (aged 15 years and over) born in the main countries of origin of African refugees had no qualifications. The corresponding rate for the non-refugee African population was 10%; for the total Australian population, it was 8.5%.

But the persistence of the problem warrants policy attention.

VET is an equaliser

People from the main countries of origin of African refugees (Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan) have considerably benefited from the VET sector.

The VET sector provides them with an equity pathway to university. For many students from refugee background, low academic results at school mean a direct transition to university remains challenging. In 2016, there were close to 1,000 Africans from refugee background in the VET sector compared to fewer than 500 in the university sector.

The majority of African youth I interviewed in the last two years came to the university sector through VET, using the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) pathway. They said passing through TAFE helped them develop their “navigational capacity” — their ability to plan and work towards future goals. They specifically noted the supportive learning environment in TAFE institutes prepared them for independent learning. It set them up for success in university.

VET courses also give African Australians a second chance. Africans from refugee backgrounds attend vocational courses as mature age students, with the largest age group being 30 to 39 year olds. For the general Australian population, the largest age group enrolled in VET courses was 15 to 19 year olds.

Despite limited educational attainment at arrival, refugee-background African Australians are over-represented in VET courses. In the 2016 census, people born in the eight main countries of origin of African refugees accounted for less than 0.3% of the total population of Australia. But the group represented about 1.3% of the total enrolment in funded VET programs and courses in the last five years (2015-2019).

Between 2015 and 2019, there were more than 91,000 refugee-background African Australians enrolled in VET courses, and over that same time period, 20,000 completed VET courses.

In the university sector, a total of close to 11,000 African refugee youth enrolled for undergraduate degrees between 2001 and 2017. But fewer than 2,000 of those successfully completed their courses over the same period.

Public investment is necessary

In the post-COVID world, Australia’s success will largely depend on the adaptability and responsiveness of the education system. It will be critical to ensure disadvantaged members of society do not slip through the policy cracks.

Refugees in particular require extra support to succeed in education and training. For instance, African refugees arrive with a level of disadvantage not experienced by other cohorts of refugees.

We need to acknowledge the unique situation of African refugees and provide them with targeted policies. For refugee youth who spent years in refugee camps with little or no education, it can be difficult to fit in a school system that operates on age cohorts. There is a need for expanding the “catch-up schooling” that is offered for young refugees and diversifying the existing pathways to tertiary education.

Refugee status should also be recognised as a category of disadvantage in the higher education sector. Recognising refugees as an equity group enables tertiary education institutions to provide the necessary support for success.

Without access to lifelong learning opportunities, refugees are likely to remain vulnerable to fast-paced changes in the world of work.

Educational attainment is instrumental for integration and economic independence. African American civil right activist Ella Baker’s truism “Give people light and they will find the way” aptly encapsulates the self-reliance that comes with learning.

– ref. Young African migrants are pushed into uni, but more find success and happiness in vocational training – https://theconversation.com/young-african-migrants-are-pushed-into-uni-but-more-find-success-and-happiness-in-vocational-training-145026

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Vredenburg, Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing, Auckland University of Technology

So-called brand activism is evolving fast. When Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the US national anthem in 2016, professional football turned its back on him. Now, consumer and sports fan expectations are forcing brands to see activism as good for business.

According to a recent Nielsen survey, 72% of sports fans believe athletes are an important influence in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. A whopping 59% expect athletes to engage personally with BLM activism.

In short, if brands aren’t taking a stand (or a knee), consumers notice.

Sporting codes have woken up to the benefits of strategically targeting a younger, more racially-diverse demographic. As National Hockey League (NHL) executive vice president for social impact Kim Davis put it:

People understand that doing the right thing is also right for the business.

After the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police, however, that activism ramped up. Players from most major professional sports protested by refusing to play at all.

Brand activism cuts both ways

It began with local NBA team the Milwaukee Bucks, whose own player Sterling Brown had been brutally beaten by police in 2018. Having refused to take the court for a playoff game, the team’s actions were picked up by social media and the no-play protest spread to other sports.

The backlash and praise were immediate, with the Bucks becoming the most mentioned brand on social media that week.

Read more: Woke washing: what happens when marketing communications don’t match corporate practice

There were asymmetric effects for the team brand: a clear drop in brand sentiment from those who disagreed with their stand, and a surge of brand love driven by the backlash.

Whereas brands might once have avoided controversy, there is now a clear case for taking a stand — as the NHL discovered when it continued to play while other sports “went dark”. The backlash from fans and players alike forced the cancellation of two days’ play.

Similarly, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) took a stand by not playing for one day after player Naomi Osaka threatened not to compete in the Western & Southern Open semifinals in Cincinnati. She explained:

Before I am an athlete, I am a black woman. And as a black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand that need immediate attention, rather than watching me play tennis.

Osaka went on to win the US Open, and was praised for donning protective face masks with the names of seven black people killed by police. There was also criticism that a one-day break in play, without further commitment, did little to further the BLM cause.

Read more: Brands may support Black Lives Matter, but advertising still needs to decolonise

But accusations of virtue signalling and woke washing put the ATP between a rock and a hard place. If tennis officials hadn’t engaged in some way with the moment, they risked being called out for insensitivity (as were the NHL and some cricket teams).

In business we trust

It may not be surprising that brand activism is increasingly being driven by consumers demanding they take a stand (and condemning those who don’t), as some studies now show businesses are more trusted than government.

We may be reaching a point where it is more surprising to consumers when brands don’t take a stand on social issues than when they do.

In 2018, consumers responded extremely positively to Nike’s now-iconic Black Lives Matter campaign with Colin Kaepernick. Now the brand has an established pro-social reputation, however, the response to recent anti-racism action has been more muted.

Nike’s You Can’t Stop Us campaign and its declaration of Juneteenth as an annual paid company holiday have been met with a positive but noticeably milder reaction from consumers.

Read more: Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, Trump: The risks and rewards of corporate activism

Surprise is no longer a strategy

Nike was just one of many brands to declare Juneteenth a holiday in the US (along with Google, Lyft, The New York Times, JCPenney, the NFL, Tumblr and Postmates). As our research suggests, such acts are simply not as surprising in 2020 as they once were.

As brand activism becomes more widespread, consumers’ appreciation of it also becomes more sophisticated — to the point where it is a key component of brand loyalty.

However, while consumers expect brands to take a stand, many also believe social issues are used too often as a marketing ploy.

The challenge for brands is clear: practice what you preach, make a real difference, pay more than lip service to causes. Staying relevant has never been harder.

– ref. Athlete activism or corporate woke washing? Getting it right in the age of Black Lives Matter is a tough game – https://theconversation.com/athlete-activism-or-corporate-woke-washing-getting-it-right-in-the-age-of-black-lives-matter-is-a-tough-game-146301

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Makin, Professor of Economics, Griffith University

The financial response of Western governments to the COVID-19 crisis has been gargantuan, with boosts to health expenditure, enhanced JobSeeker-like payments, and JobKeeper-like wage subsidies to keep workers attached to jobs.

While a strong response has been necessary, it has come with costs.

These have been huge budget deficits and sky-high government debt.

The International Monetary Fund is expecting global budget deficits of around 14% of world gross domestic product this year, up from 4% last year, and almost three times the peaked reached after the global financial crisis.

Additionally, governments are providing the same amount again in “off-balance sheet” support, most notably loans to banks, and government guarantees for bank loans.

To the extent these off-balance sheet loans become contingent liabilities of governments and are not repaid, they will add more to government debt.

Global gross public debt was already high before the crisis, at about 80% of one year’s world GDP. It has since ballooned to more than 100% and exceeds the previous peak recorded after post World War II.

This budget, Keynes is back…

Keynesian thinking, which ignores public debt because it never figured in John Maynard Keynes’ original 1930s theory, was relatively dormant in the decades before the global financial crisis, but has come back with a vengeance.

Before the financial crisis the preferred means of managing the economy was monetary policy, run by the central bank and involving interest rates.

Now it’s fiscal policy, run by governments and involving tax and spending.

It doesn’t come without a cost, although we are often told that it costs little, because with interest rates so low, the required payments are also low.

Believing that this means we can keep borrowing is like thinking we can keep bathing in sun while ignoring the risk of melanomas.

Gross public debt to GDP ratio, actual and forecast

…but debt comes with costs

High public debt can stymie economic growth in several ways. It increases the demand for funds that might otherwise be used for private investment.

Commercial banks are party to this when they buy government bonds (meaning they lend funds to governments) instead of lending funds to businesses for investment.

Australia’s budget deficits are mostly funded from overseas, which boosts foreign debt.

Read more: The spending splurge matters, regardless of what modern monetary theory says

Servicing that debt is a drain on Australia’s national as well as government income. The interest paid abroad, currently around A$15 billion, detracts from national income.

When lenders get worried about rising public debt, they demand a risk premium. In Europe, Italy has to pay in excess of two percentage points more per annum on its debt than Germany.

Boosting spending might dampen spending later

Debt creates uncertainty about what governments are going to do down the track to pay the debt down, whether it be spending cuts or tax increases. This unsettles business and household confidence.

It means that even though stimulus measures increase consumer spending at the time, they can act as a drag on consumer spending and business investment down the road.

Weak business investment means a weak expansion of the economy’s capital stock (machinery and equipment) which means lower incomes than otherwise for future generations.

Read more: Explainer: what is modern monetary theory?

A number of empirical studies find that a 10 percentage point increase in the public debt to GDP ratio is associated with a decrease in annual economic growth of 0.15 percentage points or more.

If this holds true in Australia, our looming 20 percentage point increase in public debt to GDP will drag down annual economic growth by 0.3 percentage points (and through offshore interest payments drag down national income growth by as much as 0.5 percentage points).

The phenomenon of compounding means that in 20 years time the next generation might be 10% worse off than it would have been.

To the extent that central banks continue to monetise public debt by buying government bonds (“printing money”), the future could be darker still, with high consumer price or asset price inflation.

This is usually thought to take 18 to 24 months to show up, meaning that what will boost this budget will make budgets harder to put together in years to come.

– ref. Yes government debt is cheap, but that doesn’t mean it comes risk-free – https://theconversation.com/yes-government-debt-is-cheap-but-that-doesnt-mean-it-comes-risk-free-145848

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Richardson, Adjunct Professor of Journalism, La Trobe University

Of all the words written about Rupert Murdoch, “boring” is not one of them. The media mogul has been the object of fascination for six decades, after he followed his father Sir Keith in to the newspaper business.

Family dynasties in newspapers are not new – there were the Harmsworths in the UK; the Hearsts, Grahams and Sulzbergers in the USA; and the Packers and Fairfaxes as well as the Murdochs in Australia.

But Murdoch has exercised a particular fascination: the almost irresistible core of a family with the gloss of celebrity, the heavy aroma of money and the unmistakable aura of power.

No wonder directors, screenwriters and producers continue to find inspiration in the Murdoch family.

Family sagas

The dynastic shenanigans of the Royal Family have generated volumes of stories, films and television. And, let’s face it, The Godfather is really a family story, even if it’s about a family that lies, extorts and murders.

But what makes the Murdoch story such a compelling template for television drama is the place the media – and in particular the Murdoch media – holds in our society. The media occupies one of the most contested roles in our democracies, and Murdoch has become a lightning rod for fierce opinions.

Read more: How can we restore trust in media? Fewer biases and conflicts of interest, a new study shows

Adding extra bite is the family jostling for their father’s benediction to inherit the company carrying their DNA. This becomes more urgent as the patriarch ages and the offspring start to give their ambition free rein.

It isn’t surprising screenwriters see the attraction of such grand themes.

Most recently on the small screen, we’ve seen the miniseries MotherFatherSon (2019) with Richard Gere as an American owner of a British newspaper with the full set of dysfunctional family relationships. Gere laments his son lacks ruthless drive, and tragedy follows when the son’s drug habit spirals out of control.

Then there’s Succession (2018–), which, by the potent assembling of family ambition around patriarch Logan Roy’s US media business, comes closest to mirroring what we think we know about the Murdoch family’s internal dynamics.

Roy is from Dundee in Scotland: the classic outsider, an inescapable parallel with Murdoch’s Australian roots. He has carved out a controversial place for himself in the US media but his real skill seems to be setting his deeply flawed children against each other for the right to run the company.

Dramas surrounding the Murdoch family follow the natural arc of so many compelling stories: how great wealth is built up over generations, how power steadily grows and demands to be recognised and rewarded.

The past two decades have seen some of Murdoch’s British newspapers implicated in a phone hacking scandal, a string of sexual harassment cases at his Fox US cable TV network (made in to their own screen drama in 2019’s Bombshell), and this year, the decision by son James to resign from the News Corp board because of “disagreements” on editorial content and strategic decisions.

The appeal of this family saga shouldn’t surprise us.

Business before family

The commercial decline of mainstream media, the fragmenting of audiences, the rise of social media, the erosion of trust in established news brands and the polarisation of debate are all bound up with the Murdoch business and the family story.

Murdoch has been a proponent, instigator and beneficiary of these seismic changes, while also being increasingly commercially diminished by those forces. As such, the Murdoch family story is a powerful testimony of our times.

There is one other irresistible ingredient in the mix: the search for a sense of family to normalise the rich and powerful.

In 1988, with circulation dropping and costs rising at afternoon broadsheet The Melbourne Herald, journalists became worried Murdoch would close the paper. The other staff and I naively reassured ourselves he wouldn’t do such a thing to the paper his father made great while his mother, Dame Elisabeth, was still alive.

We were wrong.

In 1990, The Herald was merged with the successful morning tabloid The Sun to become The Herald Sun. The old Herald’s identity slipped away — unlike Elisabeth, who remained robust and engaged with a range of notable philanthropic causes for another two decades.

This decision proved Murdoch is a pragmatist and a businessman who puts commercial interests first. There is no room for family sentiment.

Read more: Murdoch and his influence on Australian political life

“Rupert Murdoch has fuck all to do with it,” Brian Cox said after he accepted a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Roy. But whatever Cox might say, Murdoch’s call on The Herald sounds suspiciously like Logan Roy.

In fiction and in reality, villains are usually far more interesting than the virtuous. When it comes to modern villains, few have been demonised more than Murdoch.

For those who prefer their picture of a media mogul to be captured in reality, the latest telling is a documentary series, The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, now on the ABC.

But if you watched Succession, you’ll already know the plot.

– ref. Celebrity, money and power: TVs obsession with the Murdoch family dynasty – https://theconversation.com/celebrity-money-and-power-tvs-obsession-with-the-murdoch-family-dynasty-146113

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kcasey McLoughlin, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Newcastle

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has generated an outpouring of grief around the globe. Part of this grief reflects her unparalleled status as a feminist icon and pioneer for women in the legal profession and beyond.

There is already considerable interest in what her departure means for the future of the US Supreme Court, and indeed, the wider political landscape. But to understand that, we must reflect on her legacy.

In 1956, Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School, one of only nine women in her year alongside about 500 men. Reflecting the prevailing mindset of the time, which regarded the study and practise of law as the proper domain of men, the Harvard dean, Erwin Griswold, asked each of the nine women how they could justify taking the place of a man.

Ginsburg’s answer, that she wanted to better understand her husband Marty’s career as a lawyer (he was the year ahead of her at Harvard), belies the reality of the enormous contribution she would make to public life in the subsequent six decades.

The number nine would come to be significant in marking her success in a profession traditionally dominated by men. In 1993, she took her place on the nine-judge Supreme Court as the second woman appointed in its history.

In more recent years, in response to questions about when there will be “enough” women judges, Ginsburg replied there would enough when there were nine women on the Supreme Court. Acknowledging that people are shocked by this response, Ginsburg famously countered,

there’s been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.

This exchange points to just how ingrained the idea that judging is men’s work had become.

A formidable mind

Long before President Bill Clinton resolved to nominate Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had established a reputation as an academic (she was the second woman to teach law full-time at Rutgers University and the first woman to become a tenured professor at Columbia Law School). She was also known as a feminist litigator, leading the American Civil Liberties Union’s campaign for gender equality.

Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an uncontroversial appointment. She was regarded as a restrained moderate and was confirmed by the Senate 96 votes to three.

Although there were some concerns she was a “radical doctrinaire feminist”, her credentials were bolstered by her record on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980).

Ginsburg had spent the 1970s pursuing a litigation strategy to secure woman’s equality -— although she would describe her approach in broader terms as the

constitutional principle of equal citizenship stature of men and women.

In a series of cases, she sought to establish

sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.

By extension, she argued, legal classifications on the basis of sex should be subject to the “strict scrutiny” required in cases where there were distinctions or classifications on the basis of race. To put it more bluntly, pigeon-holing on the basis of sex should be unconstitutional. The nub of her argument, whether acting for men or women plaintiffs, was that treating men and women differently under the law helped to

keep woman in her place, a place inferior to that occupied by men in our society.

Outside the court – and inside, too

Feminist theorists have sometimes expressed reservations about the extent to which a legal system designed by men to the exclusion of women can ever be fully appropriated to achieve equality for women.

While some feminists have seen much promise in the possibility for law reform, others have been more circumspect. This tension is reflected in the two-pronged strategy proposed by Professor Mari Matsuda -— that there are times to “stand outside the courtroom” and there are times to “stand inside the courtroom”.

Ginsburg’s legacy in life and law reflects the latter approach. Her faith in the law is reflected in her approach to stand inside the courtroom (literally as a litigator and a judge) to transform existing legal categories. In this way, her approach was reconstructive rather than radical (which is not say that some of her thinking wasn’t radical for its time).

Ginsburg sought to reconstruct sex roles and emphasised that men and women alike were diminished by stereotypes based on sex.

Importantly, Ginsburg did not simply pursue formal equality (the idea that equality will be achieved by treating everyone the same). Rather, she advocated for affirmative action as a principle of equality of opportunity.

She favoured incremental rather than radical change, reflecting a view that such an approach would minimise the potential for backlash. Her critique of the strategy adopted in the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade (the case upon which US reproductive rights are based), and her departure from the feminist orthodoxy on this point, reflected her preference for incrementalism.

Legacy on the bench

Ginsburg’s jurisprudential contributions on the Supreme Court continued the legacy she began in the 1970s.

One of her most significant majority opinions in 1996 required the Virginia Military Institute to admit women. Importantly, this was because it had not been able to provide “exceedingly persuasive justification” for making distinctions on the basis of sex. Although this standard fell short of the “strict scrutiny test” required in cases involving classifications on the basis of race, it nonetheless entrenched an important equality principle.

But it was perhaps her judicial dissents, sometimes delivered blisteringly in the years where she was the lone woman on the bench (prior to President Barack Obama’s appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010), that seem to have really captured the wider public imagination and capitulated her into the zeitgeist.

It was in the wake of her 2013 dissent in a case about the Voting Rights Act that she reached the status of a global feminist icon. A Tumblr account was established in her honour, giving her the nickname “Notorious RBG” (a title drawn from the rapper Biggie Smalls’ nickname Notorious B.I.G). A 2018 documentary RBG chronicled her legacy and status as a cultural icon, and a 2018 motion picture On the Basis of Sex depicted her early life and cases.

Ginsburg’s celebrity certainly expanded during her time on the court -— but this is not to say to it has been without controversy or critique, even from more liberal or progressive sources.

She has been criticised for her decisions (for example, a particular decision about Native Americans and sovereignty), for her comments about race and national anthem protests, and for being too partisan – particularly in her criticism of President Donald Trump. (She called him a “faker” and later apologised.)

A great legacy

Did Ginsburg’s feminism or celebrity undermine her legitimacy as a judge? Questions of judicial legacy and legitimacy are complex and inevitably shaped by institutional, political and legal norms. Importantly, her contributions as a lawyer and a judge have done much to demonstrate how legal rules and approaches that had been previously regarded as neutral and objective in reality reflected a masculine view of the world.

Over 25 years ago, Ginsburg expressed her aspiration that women would be appointed to the Supreme Court with increased regularity:

Indeed, in my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the High Court Bench, women not shaped from the same mold but of different complexions. Yes, there are miles in front, but what distance we have travelled from the day President Thomas Jefferson told his secretary of state: ‘The appointment of women to [public] office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared.’

That Ginsburg came to share the Supreme Court with two women, Kagan and Sotomayor, must have given her some hope that women’s access to places “where decisions are being made” was at least tentatively secure even if hard-won feminist gains sometimes felt tenuous at best.

Ginsburg was a trailblazer in every aspect of her life and career. The women who follow her benefit from a legacy that powerfully re-imagined what it means to be a lawyer and a judge in a legal system that had been made in men’s image.

– ref. Ruth Bader Ginsburg forged a new place for women in the law and society – https://theconversation.com/ruth-bader-ginsburg-forged-a-new-place-for-women-in-the-law-and-society-146540

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jared Mondschein, Senior Fellow & Senior Advisor, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

As the two sides in US politics begin jockeying for position following the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the similarities to the 2016 presidential election are striking.

That year, the fierce battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was made all the more contentious because the Republican-controlled Senate refused to allow a vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who had died in February.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pledged instead to “let the American people decide” the fate of the Supreme Court vacancy. His gambit worked. Trump won the election and successfully appointed a conservative justice to the court, some 14 months after Scalia’s death.

In recent days, however, McConnell is saying something altogether different. He’s made clear the Trump administration will decide who Ginsburg’s replacement will be — not the American people on election day.

And Trump has also already announced he will nominate a woman to the court -— signalling his intention to move quickly to replace Ginsburg, with just over 40 days left before the vote.

The impending fight guarantees an already rancorous race will become even more acrimonious, with long-lasting implications.

Read more: Can Trump and McConnell get through the 4 steps to seat a Supreme Court justice in just 6 weeks?

Why the Supreme Court is so important

As the third branch of government in the US, the Supreme Court not only keeps the powers of the other two branches (the legislative and executive) in check, it makes landmark decisions can fundamentally transform the country, such as its 1954 ruling that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

With the Supreme Court now featuring three judges appointed by Democratic presidents and five appointments by Republicans, the potential replacement of the progressive Ginsburg by a conservative judge could have generational implications for issues like affordable health care and access to abortion.

The Supreme Court has even settled contested presidential elections in the past, and with legal challenges to the 2020 election already mounting, there’s every likelihood this could happen again.

Why Republicans are passionate about conservative judges

Unlike American politicians, who are subject to the ballot box and term limits, federal judges – including Supreme Court justices – serve lifetime appointments.

The importance of such judicial appointments to Republicans cannot be understated. Few, if any, issues are more sacrosanct to them.

A key reason for this is that demographics are not on the side of the Republicans. The US is gradually becoming more urban and non-white — two trends that favour the Democratic Party more than Republicans.

This could explain why McConnell, whose memoir is called The Long Game, has prioritised the appointments of conservative judges to federal benches. These judges would certainly outlast the seemingly inevitable decline of conservative political power.

Before Trump was elected in 2016, many Republicans questioned just how conservative he would be. In response, the Trump campaign made the unusual move of releasing a list of its intended candidates for the Supreme Court.

The list of established conservatives effectively quelled conservative concerns about the Trump candidacy. Indeed, exit polling in 2016 indicated 26% of Trump voters said Supreme Court nominees were the single most important factor in their decision to vote for him – compared to 18% of Clinton voters.

With Trump’s victory reliant on a combined margin of just under 80,000 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, even the smallest of advantages – in this case, those deciding who to vote for based on the Supreme Court – could have had outsized importance.

Read more: Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped shape the modern era of women’s rights – even before she went on the Supreme Court

Why Democrats are more passionate than ever

Some have posited a Supreme Court vacancy may help Trump’s chances in this year’s election because it shifts the focus of the race away from the president’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis and the poor economy.

But this ignores how much the issue could also energise the left. Indeed, in the hour after the announcement of Ginsburg’s passing, Democrats raised US$6.2 million on the Democratic digital fundraising platform ActBlue – more money in a single hour than the website had ever seen. This record was broken the next hour when donors gave over $100,000 a minute on average to total $6.3 million.

Altogether, some $42 million was raised in less than a day by Democratic online donors.

In 2016, many Republicans said they held their noses and voted for Trump because they were worried about the Supreme Court. Four years later, unenthusiastic Democrats may do the same with Joe Biden.

‘Nothing is off the table’

Constitutionally, McConnell and Trump face few barriers in their mission to confirm a conservative justice to take Ginsburg’s place. Even a “blue wave” on election day – in which Democrats take control of the Senate and the White House – couldn’t stop them because the winners are not sworn into office until January. This would ostensibly provide enough time for the Republican-led Senate to confirm a Trump nominee.

There is no doubt what McConnell and Trump are planning to do. The more pertinent question is whether 49 Republicans in the Senate will go along with them.

Even the most anti-Trump Republicans — like Senator Mitt Romney, who voted to impeach Trump earlier this year — have supported the president’s previous picks for the Supreme Court. (Only one Republican chose not to support Brett Kavanaugh following his contentious confirmation hearing.)

Read more: Republicans have used a ‘law and order’ message to win elections before. This is why Trump could do it again

But amid deep political polarisation, the likes of which America has not seen for generations, some Republicans are asking themselves about the long-term impact of rushing through a Supreme Court justice – most notably, what doors this opens for Democrats if they gain power.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said “nothing is off the table” if Republicans try to fill Ginsburg’s seat before the outcome of the election.

Some Democrats, already frustrated by Republicans having nominated 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices despite Republicans having lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, have already pledged to make fundamental shifts to the country if they win the power to do so.

This could include giving statehood to Democratic-leaning Puerto Rico and Washington, DC – thereby almost assuredly giving the Democrats four more senators.

Some Democrats have also proposed expanding the Supreme Court to dilute the conservative votes — an idea Biden has explicitly criticised in the past.

Regardless of the electoral outcome, the death of Ginsburg only further raises the stakes and the likelihood of unrest in an already contentious election. There is no winner in such an outcome.

– ref. This is why the fight over the Supreme Court could make the US presidential election even nastier – https://theconversation.com/this-is-why-the-fight-over-the-supreme-court-could-make-the-us-presidential-election-even-nastier-146541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW

Production of the reality TV show The Masked Singer was shut down last month after several crew members were infected with COVID-19.

It’s one of several examples of COVID-19 transmission associated with singing around the world since March, prompting some jurisdictions to ban group singing altogether.

In New South Wales, for example, choral singing is banned and there are no-singing rules at weddings and nightclubs.

Now our new study, which included filming droplets and aerosols emitted when someone sings, shows how singing might be an infection risk. This is especially if many people sing together, in a poorly ventilated room.

What we did and what we found

We took high-speed video of a person singing a major scale, as do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do (seen below, without audio). We then tracked the emissions of droplets and aerosols.

We found certain notes, such as “do” and “fa”, generated more aerosols than others. We also found the direction of emissions changed with different consonants.

Infection control guidelines assume respiratory droplets settle rapidly within one to two metres of the person emitting them.

However, most droplets we observed appeared not to settle rapidly, and tended to follow the ambient airflow.

Therefore, without adequate ventilation, these droplets may persist in aerosol clouds.

These observations may partially explain the higher infection rates of COVID-19 during group singing, even when people singing appear well.

Our findings are based on one person singing and individuals may generate aerosols differently. However, our findings apply to singing in any groups, such as churches, schools and social gatherings, all of which are vulnerable to outbreaks of COVID-19.

Read more: NSW hits pause on school choirs, but we can’t stop the music forever

What is it with choirs?

We’ve known since March of the potential for group singing to transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In this well-documented US example, 87% of 61 people who attended one 2.5 hour choir practice became infected, with two deaths. One singer had mild symptoms during rehearsal.

Now our research adds to the growing body of research looking at the transmission risk of singing and the role aerosols might play.

We know social distancing is effective in reducing the risk of spread during normal social interactions. However, singing in a group and in closed, poorly ventilated environments may generate more aerosols than speaking.

When we sing, we vocalise louder and often hold notes for longer. This, together with many singers close together in confined spaces for an hour or more, create conditions that may increase the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

When researchers analysed results from the US choir example, they estimated the infection risk could have been halved with a shorter choir practice.

Read more: Is the airborne route a major source of coronavirus transmission?

We tend to think of only coughs or sneezes as the primary source of generating aerosols. But even breathing generates aerosols, albeit at lower concentrations.

In fact, we breathe and speak much more than we cough or sneeze. So the cumulative aerosol exposure for a group of people singing and talking, without coughing or sneezing, in a closed environment may be higher than from a single cough.

How can we sing together, safely?

We’ve seen online choirs as a safe alternative to traditional ones.

Other options for safer group singing now and in the future include:

• singing outside or in a well-ventilated room with large open windows as this is likely to dissipate aerosols and further reduce the risk

• physical distancing of at least two metres while singing

• short performances to minimise exposure

• humming rather than singing during rehearsals, because we show consonants (such as “do”) generate the most aerosols

• singing softly (and using amplifiers) as this is likely to emit fewer aerosols

• using rapid test kits, if available, which would allow singers to be screened before performing

• assessing risk factors for individual singers based on age, chronic diseases and other risk factors for COVID-19. It is more important people at high risk of complications from COVID-19 avoid group singing while there is community transmission.

Some people recommend wearing face shields while group singing. But these allow you to breathe in aerosols through the gap underneath, which may be even more likely with the powerful inhalations during singing.

No one measure alone will be enough to mitigate the risk. We need multiple measures used together — physical distancing, shorter performances, open windows, outdoor venues, softer singing and risk-based screening — to allow safer group singing.

– ref. This video shows just how easily COVID-19 could spread when people sing together – https://theconversation.com/this-video-shows-just-how-easily-covid-19-could-spread-when-people-sing-together-144789

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Carter, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney

Facebook has announced the latest version of its successful standalone virtual reality (VR) headset, the Oculus Quest 2. The new device packs more computing power and a sharper screen than its predecessor, and is also US$100 cheaper.

The Oculus Quest 2 is the latest step in Facebook’s long-term strategy of making VR more accessible and popular. Facebook recently brought all its VR work under the umbrella of Facebook Reality Labs, it has announced new applications like the Infinite Office VR workplace, and will also require a Facebook login for future Oculus devices.

The compulsory link to Facebook has many consumers concerned, considering the social media giant’s chequered history with privacy and data. VR and its cousin, augmented reality (AR), are perhaps the most data-extractive digital sensors we’re likely to invite into our homes in the next decade.

Why does Facebook make virtual reality headsets?

Facebook acquired VR company Oculus in 2014 for an estimated US$2.3 billion. But where Oculus originally aimed at gamers, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wants VR for social media.

At the same event last year, Zuckerberg said Facebook sees VR as a pathway to a new kind of “social computing platform” using the enhanced feeling of “presence” that VR affords. For Facebook, the introduction of VR-based computing will be like the leap from text-based command line interfaces to the graphical user interfaces we use today.

This may well be right. VR affords a strong feeling of embodied presence that offers new possibilities for entertainment, training, learning and connecting with others at a distance.

But if the VR future is the one Facebook is “working in the lab” on, it will function via the company’s existing social computing platform and business model of extracting data to deliver targeted advertisements.

Virtual reality collects real data

A VR headset collects data about the user, but also about the outside world. This is one of the key ethical issues of emerging “mixed reality” technologies.

As American VR researcher Jeremy Bailenson has written:

…commercial VR systems typically track body movements 90 times per second to display the scene appropriately, and high-end systems record 18 types of movements across the head and hands. Consequently, spending 20 minutes in a VR simulation leaves just under 2 million unique recordings of body language.

The way you move your body can be used to identify you, like a fingerprint, so everything you do in VR could be traced back to your individual identity.

Facebook’s Oculus Quest headsets also use outward-facing cameras to track and map their surroundings.

In late 2019 Facebook said they “don’t collect and store images or 3D maps of your environment on our servers today”. Note the word today, which tech journalist Ben Lang notes makes clear the company is not ruling out anything in the future.

Virtual reality leads to augmented reality

Facebook wants to collect this data to facilitate its plans for augmented reality (AR).

Where VR takes a user to a fully virtual environment, AR combines virtual elements with our real surroundings.

Last year Facebook unveiled the Live Maps application, a vision of an expansive surveillance apparatus presumably powered by AR glasses and data collected from Oculus Insight. Live Maps will provide many minor conveniences for Facebook users, like letting you know you’ve left your keys on the coffee table.

Now Facebook have announced their first steps towards making this a reality: Project Aria. This will involve people wearing glasses-like sensors around Seattle and the San Francisco Bay area, to collect the data to build what Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly calls “the mirrorworld”, the next big tech platform.

Read more: Pokémon Go wants to make 3D scans of the whole world for ‘planet-scale augmented reality experiences’. Is that good?

People are rightly concerned about the ethical implications of this kind of data extraction. Alongside Project Aria, Facebook launched its Responsible Innovation Principles page, and they’re already quick to emphasise that faces and license plates will be blurred in this data collection.

As we have argued elsewhere, framing questions about VR and AR surveillance in terms of individual privacy suits companies like Facebook very well. That’s because their previous failings are actually in the (un)ethical use of data (as in the case of Cambridge Analytica) and their asymmetric platform power.

Read more: Why the business model of social media giants like Facebook is incompatible with human rights

We need more than just ‘tech ethics’

Groups like the XR Safety Initiative recognise these emerging issues, and are beginning work on standards, guidelines and privacy frameworks to shape VR and AR development.

Many emerging technologies encounter what is known as the Collingridge problem: it is hard to predict the various impacts of a technology until it is extensively developed and widely used, but by then it is almost impossible to control or change.

We see this playing out right now, in efforts to regulate Google and Facebook’s power over news media.

As David Watts argues, big tech designs its own rules of ethics to avoid scrutiny and accountability:

Feelgood, high-level data ethics principles are not fit for the purpose of regulating big tech … The harms linked to big tech can only be addressed by proper regulation.

What might regulation of Facebook’s VR look like? Germany offers one such response – their antitrust regulations have resulted in Facebook withdrawing the headset from sale. We can only hope the technology doesn’t become too entrenched to be changed, or challenged.

But regulation has not always stopped Facebook in the past, who paid out US$550 million to settle a lawsuit for breaching biometric privacy laws. In the multi-billion dollar world of big-tech, it’s all a cost of doing business.

Another question we might ask ourselves is whether Facebook’s virtual-reality future and others like it really need to exist. Maybe there are other ways to avoid forgetting your keys.

– ref. Facebook’s virtual reality push is about data, not gaming – https://theconversation.com/facebooks-virtual-reality-push-is-about-data-not-gaming-145730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Hayen, Professor of Biostatistics, University of Technology Sydney

A preliminary study, posted online this week by researchers at the Australian National University and elsewhere, estimates 71,000 Australians had COVID-19 by mid-July — 60,000 more than official number of cases diagnosed by that stage.

The study involved testing 2,991 elective surgery patients in ten hospitals across four states, to see whether they had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The study initially found 41 positive patients (1.4%), but then adjusted for the false positives that would arise due to the imperfect specificity of the antibody test, which the researchers estimate would produce 11 false positives for every 1,000 tests. This yielded an estimated prevalence of 0.28% — or eight “true” positives from the 2,991 people sampled.

The researchers then extrapolated this estimate, including its uncertainty parameters, to the Australian population as a whole. They ultimately concluded the number of Australians with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies — and who have therefore presumably been infected with COVID-19 — is somewhere between zero and 181,050, and most likely about 71,000.

This begs two main questions: should this alter our view on how best to contain the spread of COVID-19, and are there any limitations to the study that we should be aware of?

Let’s begin with the latter question. Here are four key things to consider when interpreting the results.

1. False positives

In countries with very low COVID-19 rates, such as Australia, the key requirement of an antibody test is to be highly specific — that is, to avoid false positives. This is even more important than being highly sensitive (avoiding false negatives).

The antibody test used in the new study reportedly has a specificity of 98.9%, and a sensitivity of 100%. This means, for every 1,000 tests, we can expect 11 false positives and no false negatives.

Imagine a place with high prevalence of the virus, such as New York City, where roughly 20% of people are estimated to have had COVID-19. A sample of 1,000 would, on average, contain 200 COVID-19 positive people, of whom the test would correctly identify all 200, with no false negatives. It would also find 11 people positive who were actually negative, giving an estimated prevalence of 211 out of 1,000, or 21.1% — which is close to the true figure.

Now imagine a sample of 1,000 Australians, with a COVID-19 prevalence of, say, 0.2%.

Just two people in this sample would correctly test positive, but again we would expect the test to deliver 11 false positives. This gives an estimated prevalence of 13 out of 1,000, or 1.3%, which is several times higher than the true figure.

Read more: Australia’s coronavirus testing rates are some of the best in the world – compare our stats using this interactive

Even if you revise your estimate to account for the expected false positives, as the authors did, we can see how hard it is to estimate low prevalences accurately. The small number of real cases is liable to be lost in the noise.

2. Sample size

A larger sample size could provide improved precision. The small sample size is why the study’s estimated range is so wide. In fact, it stretches all the way down to zero, even though we know there can’t possibly have been zero COVID-19 cases in Australia. But no matter the size of the study group, the false positive problem never really goes away as long as the prevalence is low.

3. Testing method

One solution would have been to retest the samples with currently available commercial antibody tests with specificities of 99.9%. This would have offered a way to overcome the problem with false positives.

The suspicion that the sample included a substantial proportion of false positives is supported by the fact only one COVID-19 positive patient had contact with a known COVID-19 case, and none of those who tested positive had reported any COVID-19-like illness.

Read more: Why can’t we use antibody tests for diagnosing COVID-19 yet?

4. Extrapolation

There are also questions over how reliably the results can be generalised to the entire Australian public. The study involved people undergoing elective surgery, who may have had different risks of exposure to the virus.

It is hard to say from the available data whether any adjustment was made for variables such as age, sex and state of residence when extrapolating to the wider Australian population.

So what can we say for sure?

What can we determine from this study about the number of people exposed to COVID-19 in Australia? Unfortunately, without a much larger sample, wider sampling of the population, and a more reliable test, we know little more about the prevalence of exposure to COVID-19 than we already did.

This means it would be unwise to use these new findings to claim COVID-19 is any less dangerous or deadly than we thought.

Rather than take these estimates at face value, what we really need is more comprehensive testing of the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, including studies that track this prevalence over time.

In any case, Australia can consider itself fortunate to have low enough case numbers that the issues of false positives becomes a major caveat in interpreting studies such as this. Sadly, in many other places, false positives are buried in a landslide of genuine COVID-19 cases.

Editor’s note: Ian Cockburn, one of the study’s lead authors, told The Conversation false positives are indeed more likely to be a significant factor when trying to estimate low prevalence rates, but described the study as a “best estimate” based on two separate statistical analyses, which both arrived at the same result. He added the research team plans to use further statistical methods to check the study’s results before it is accepted for full publication.

He said the study sample “is not a perfect cross-section” of the population, and the ideal study size would be 6,000-10,000 people, but obtaining blood samples from the general population poses significant logistical and cost obstacles.

He added it can be difficult to verify commercial companies’ claims to have antibody tests with higher specificities, and that patients who register a false positive may also test false positive with another test if it works in the same way.

– ref. Has Australia really had 60,000 undiagnosed COVID-19 cases? – https://theconversation.com/has-australia-really-had-60-000-undiagnosed-covid-19-cases-146303

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.

This week the pair discuss the numerous energy announcements made by the government, including a gas-led recovery, $1.9 billion for new and emerging energy technologies, as well as the likely outcomes from the national cabinet concerning the cap of returning international Australians, and the latest OECD report.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the government’s energy policy, a gas-led recovery, unemployment, and the economy – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-governments-energy-policy-a-gas-led-recovery-unemployment-and-the-economy-146483

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Speck, Professor, Art History, University of Adelaide

Review: If the future is to be worth anything, curated by Patrice Sharkey and Rayleen Forester, ACE Open

“If the future is to be worth anything” rings true as a question for many in Australia’s art world today. It is an apt title for this ambitious survey exhibition measuring the pulse of contemporary art in South Australia.

Partway through the gestation process for the artists making work for this survey, COVID-19 hit and artists retreated to their studios. But this has given a sharper focus to Patrice Sharkey and Rayleen Forester’s curatorial probe.

This is the fourth survey exhibition of contemporary South Australian artists over the last two decades, following much larger survey exhibitions at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2000 and 2013, and the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (one of the two precursors to ACE Open) in 2010.

ACE Open’s gallery space is more confined, and gives an overview based on just ten artists and collectives. The resulting show feels more selective than its predecessors, but this exhibition displays an exciting and vibrant look at South Australia’s artists.

Diversity in themes and techniques

In 22 photo portraits, Carly Tarkari Dodd, a young Kaurna/Narungga and Ngarrindjeri artist, addresses head-on the offensive practice of categorising Aboriginality by skin colour.

Placed between the compelling photos are mirrored panels speaking back to the viewers with cruel racist text. The subjects of the portraits are overlaid with a signature Aboriginal iconography of dots, their faces showing a mix of emotions: from pride and optimism at a better future, to strength marred by weary endurance.

this photo cap doesn’t quite make sense

Senior Ngarrindjeri artist Sandra Saunders considers the destruction of wildlife from the recent bushfires in her meticulous oil painting, the Museum of Sorrow.

The impact of colonisation, climate change and environmental destruction have been her subjects in recent years in paintings produced in a naive, untutored style.

Here, Saunders has appropriated a European quasi-Vermeer style to speak back to colonialism’s litany of damage. Her painting of an entrance to a museum of natural history, populated by a small number of endangered animals, suggests the pressing issue of mammalian extinction and the museumification of Aboriginal culture.

Read more: Explainer: what is decolonisation?

A more spare aesthetic underpins Sundari Carmody’s and Kate Bohunnis’s sculptural installations. For Carmody, it is the creation of a precise architectural space for contemplation; for Bohunnis, the oppositional forces on her body from metal and latex are resolved in the rhythmic movement of a pendulum.

Emmaline Zanelli’s video explores her Nonna’s life in domestic and industrial workplaces.

The intergenerational legacy of memory is a conduit for shape-shifting images oscillating between realism and abstraction, drawing on the embrace of movement as the basis for a visual language from Italian futurisism.

The candy colours of Matt Huppatz’s trio of prints continue his investigation into the transgressive and liminal world of queer masculinity.

Overlaid on each image of a nightclub scene is text: Lights and Music (Communicate), Lights and Music (Release), Lights and Music (Express). These allude to the affectionate language of a club scene oozing with sensory overload.

Experimentation runs through the exhibition, and writing from fine print magazine under editors Forester and Joanne Kitto adheres to this, their performative style of criticism and text becoming an exhibit itself.

Another work steeped in experimentation is Yusuf Ali Hayat’s interactive, interlocking perspex doors in Baab Al-Salaam, the name referencing a gate at Mecca. Each door is anchored in an Islamic geometry of five diamonds, and covered in a dichroic filter, altering visibility.

Read more: Hajj: how globalisation transformed the market for pilgrimage to Mecca

Hayat approaches his work from a migrant’s outsider perspective. In inviting audience members to pass through the doors, he explores the universality in his personal experience.

Tutti artists show an eclectic range of work, some drawing on found materials as in James Kurtze’s The Kooky Time Machine, while Aida Azin’s arresting street culture painting Toodles Galore is an in-your-face confrontation with racism, sexism and cultural imperialism.

The conundrum of the human condition

It is surprising, given the shift to globalism, there have been four narrowly focused survey exhibitions of contemporary South Australian artists over the last two decades. It seems there are more artists per capita in this state than elsewhere in the nation.

This may explain the intense scrutiny of contemporary practice in these shows, or it may reflect a geographical anxiety, but it differs from the accepted practice in Australia where survey exhibitions tend to be national rather than state-based.

A few more mid-career and senior artists would have added depth, balance and a sense of comprehensive coverage to the exhibition. Nevertheless there is vibrancy, experimentation and risk, supported by a philosophy of decolonisation and transcultural ethics.

The exhibition reflects the lively breadth of practice and exploration of ideas in contemporary practice in South Australia. As the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor reminded us, artists “try to find ways in which their ideas and art can explore the eternal conundrum of the human condition”.

In this moment of COVID, this reflection has been heightened by artists working more within their own radius of daily life.

If The Future Is To Be Worth Anything is at ACE Open, Adelaide, until December 12

– ref. Vibrancy, experimentation and risk in ACE Open’s survey of South Australian art – https://theconversation.com/vibrancy-experimentation-and-risk-in-ace-opens-survey-of-south-australian-art-143748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Larisa Labzin, Research Fellow, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland

People infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can spread the virus when they speak, sing, cough, sneeze or even just breathe. Scientists think face masks help limit virus spread by protecting everyone else from the infected wearer. As a result, face maks are now mandatory in many cities, states and countries to limit the spread of COVID-19.

People typically wear surgical, cloth or other face coverings that don’t completely prevent the virus from infecting the wearer, though medical grade surgical masks do appear to offer more protection. Nonetheless, these don’t have the same level of protection as N95 or P2 “respirator” masks worn by many health-care workers. Additionally, how we wear the mask matters, as touching it often and not completely covering the nose and mouth renders it ineffective.

While these face coverings may not completely prevent us from getting infected with COVID-19, they probably reduce the number of virus particles we inhale — the “viral dose”. Scientists think a lower viral dose can reduce the severity of the disease we get. Indeed, where universal face masking is implemented, a much higher proportion of new infections with COVID-19 are asymptomatic.

Could this lower viral dose help us build some immunity to the disease? Two researchers from the University of California have raised this possibility, writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Although the theory hasn’t been proven yet.

The dose makes the poison

How much virus we are initially infected with is a key determinant of how sick we get, according to evidence from other viruses and animal studies. We also know this is true in hamsters that have been experimentally infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Imagine if you touch a door handle that happens to have one virus particle on it, and then touch your nose and breathe that particle in. You will be infected with that one virus particle. One estimate, published in the Lancet, suggested one SARS-CoV-2 virus particle will have replicated to make nearly 30 new virus particles in 24 hours. Those 30 new particles can then go on to infect 30 more cells, giving rise to 900 new particles in the next 24 hours or so.

Now imagine someone sneezes right in your face and you inhale 1,000 virus particles. After one round of replication you could have 30,000 particles, and then 900,000 in the round after. In the same period of time your body could be dealing with 1,000 times more virus, compared to the first scenario.

Once the immune system detects the virus, it has to race to get it under control and stop it replicating. It does this in three main ways:

• telling our cells how to disrupt viral replication

• making antibodies that recognise and neutralise the virus to stop it infecting more cells

• making T cells that specifically kill virus-infected cells.

While the first step is relatively quick, creating specific antibodies and T cells takes days or even weeks. Meanwhile, the virus is replicating over and over again. So the initial dose of virus really determines how much of the body the virus has infected before the immune system kicks fully into gear.

What about for long-term immunity?

The more virus there is, the bigger the immune response has to be to control it. And it’s the immune response that actually causes the symptoms, like fever. In an asymptomatic infection, we think the immune system has probably managed to get the virus under control early on, so the immune response itself is possibly smaller, and so we won’t see any symptoms.

We also think many cases of very severe COVID-19 might really be a result of the immune system overreacting. This is why the steroid treatment dexamethasone, which suppresses the immune response, shows promise in treating severe cases (but not mild ones).

Read more: Dexamethasone: the cheap, old and boring drug that’s a potential coronavirus treatment

After we clear an infection, we keep some immune cells around in case we get infected again. These are B cells, which produce antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2, and T cells, which kill virus-infected cells. This is also the premise behind vaccination: we can trick the immune system into making those SARS-CoV-2 specific cells without having been infected.

Because face masks might allow a small number of virus particles through, wearers might be more likely to get asymptomatic infections. This might be enough to protect them from future infection with SARS-CoV-2. So if we are in a situation where there is high community transmission, and we can’t always maintain physical distance, wearing a face mask might be a factor that helps us in the long run.

It’s another argument in favour of masks

While this sounds promising, there’s still a lot we don’t understand. We don’t know yet whether an asymptomatic infection would generate enough immunity to guard against future infection — or if this is even measurable.

Viral dose is likely to be just one factor among many that determines how sick someone gets with COVID-19. Other factors include age, sex, and other underlying conditions. Finally, even with asymptomatic infections, we don’t know yet what the long term effects of COVID-19 are. It’s best to avoid getting COVID-19 altogether if possible.

Nevertheless, this is yet another reason to keep wearing face masks. As many cases of COVID-19 are asymptomatic, we could still be transmitting the virus even without symptoms. That’s why wearing a mask is a responsible thing to do, even if we feel fine.

Read more: A man in Hong Kong caught COVID-19 a second time. Here’s why that’s not surprising (and there’s no need to panic)

– ref. How could wearing a mask help build immunity to COVID-19? It’s all about the viral dose – https://theconversation.com/how-could-wearing-a-mask-help-build-immunity-to-covid-19-its-all-about-the-viral-dose-146201

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Louise Uitdenbogerd, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, RMIT University

You might have seen a recent article from The Guardian written by “a robot”. Here’s a sample:

I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

Read the whole thing and you may be astonished at how coherent and stylistically consistent it is. The software used to produce it is called a “generative model”, and they have come a long way in the past year or two.

But exactly how was the article created? And is it really true that software “wrote this entire article”?

How machines learn to write

The text was generated using the latest neural network model for language, called GPT-3, released by the American artificial intelligence research company OpenAI. (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.)

OpenAI’s previous model, GPT-2, made waves last year. It produced a fairly plausible article about the discovery of a herd of unicorns, and the researchers initially withheld the release of the underlying code for fear it would be abused.

But let’s step back and look at what text generation software actually does.

Machine learning approaches fall into three main categories: heuristic models, statistical models, and models inspired by biology (such as neural networks and evolutionary algorithms).

Heuristic approaches are based on “rules of thumb”. For example, we learn rules about how to conjugate verbs: I run, you run, he runs, and so on. These approaches aren’t used much nowadays because they are inflexible.

Read more: From Twitterbots to VR: 10 of the best examples of digital literature

Writing by numbers

Statistical approaches were the state of the art for language-related tasks for many years. At the most basic level, they involve counting words and guessing what comes next.

As a simple exercise, you could generate text by randomly selecting words based on how often they normally occur. About 7% of your words would be “the” – it’s the most common word in English. But if you did it without considering context, you might get nonsense like “the the is night aware”.

More sophisticated approaches use “bigrams”, which are pairs of consecutive words, and “trigrams”, which are three-word sequences. This allows a bit of context and lets the current piece of text inform the next. For example, if you have the words “out of”, the next guessed word might be “time”.

This happens with the auto-complete and auto-suggest features when we write text messages or emails. Based on what we have just typed, what we tend to type and a pre-trained background model, the system predicts what’s next.

While bigram- and trigram-based statistical models can produce good results in simple situations, the best recent models go to another level of sophistication: deep learning neural networks.

Imitating the brain

Neural networks work a bit like tiny brains made of several layers of virtual neurons.

A neuron receives some input and may or may not “fire” (produce an output) based on that input. The output feeds into neurons in the next layer, cascading through the network.

The first artificial neuron was proposed in 1943 by US neuroscientists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, but they have only become useful for complex problems like generating text in the past five years.

To use neural networks for text, you put words into a kind of numbered index. You can use the number to represent a word, so for example 23,342 might represent “time”.

Neural networks do a series of calculations to go from sequences of numbers at the input layer, through the interconnected “hidden layers” inside, to the output layer. The output might be numbers representing the odds for each word in the index to be the next word of the text.

In our “out of” example, number 23,432 representing “time” would probably have much better odds than the number representing “do”.

Read more: Friday essay: a real life experiment illuminates the future of books and reading

What’s so special about GPT-3?

GPT-3 is the latest and best of the text modelling systems, and it’s huge. The authors say it has 175 billion parameters, which makes it at least ten times larger than the previous biggest model. The neural network has 96 layers and, instead of mere trigrams, it keeps track of sequences of 2,048 words.

The most expensive and time-consuming part of making a model like this is training it – updating the weights on the connections between neurons and layers. Training GPT-3 would have used about 262 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to run my house for 35 years.

GPT-3 can be applied to multiple tasks such as machine translation, auto-completion, answering general questions, and writing articles. While people can often tell its articles are not written by human authors, we are now likely to get it right only about half the time.

The robot writer

But back to how the article in The Guardian was created. GPT-3 needs a prompt of some kind to start it off. The Guardian’s staff gave the model instructions and some opening sentences.

This was done eight times, generating eight different articles. The Guardian’s editors then combined pieces from the eight generated articles, and “cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places”, saying “editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed”.

This sounds about right to me, based on my own experience with text-generating software. Earlier this year, my colleagues and I used GPT-2 to write the lyrics for a song we entered in the AI Song Contest, a kind of artificial intelligence Eurovision.

We fine-tuned the GPT-2 model using lyrics from Eurovision songs, provided it with seed words and phrases, then selected the final lyrics from the generated output.

For example, we gave Euro-GPT-2 the seed word “flying”, and then chose the output “flying from this world that has gone apart”, but not “flying like a trumpet”. By automatically matching the lyrics to generated melodies, generating synth sounds based on koala noises, and applying some great, very human, production work, we got a good result: our song, Beautiful the World, was voted the winner of the contest.

Co-creativity: humans and AI together

So can we really say an AI is an author? Is it the AI, the developers, the users or a combination?

A useful idea for thinking about this is “co-creativity”. This means using generative tools to spark new ideas, or to generate some components for our creative work.

Where an AI creates complete works, such as a complete article, the human becomes the curator or editor. We roll our very sophisticated dice until we get a result we’re happy with.

Read more: Computing gives an artist new tools to be creative

– ref. Can robots write? Machine learning produces dazzling results, but some assembly is still required – https://theconversation.com/can-robots-write-machine-learning-produces-dazzling-results-but-some-assembly-is-still-required-146090

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer Management, Western Sydney University

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has long tried to insulate itself from politics in society, but wider issues have always been a part of sport – including the Olympics.

Sometimes political statements have been subtle and accommodated by the IOC, such as Cathy Freeman’s victory lap at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, with the Aboriginal and Australian flags draped on her shoulders — a symbol of hope for reconciliation.

The Olympics have, of course, also been subject to more confronting actions: Nazi salutes at the 1936 Berlin Games, political boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Games and a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Games.

While the IOC advocates for political neutrality, the Olympics are inherently contested terrain — a celebration of athleticism and, by virtue of national teams, a stage for geopolitical triumphs and tensions.

Athletes are obviously individuals and, increasingly, many are seeking a voice on matters that transcend sport, such as racism and sexism. Last month, athletes used their collective power to bring every US professional league to a standstill for a day to protest the police shooting of a Black man.

In this new era of political activism, the IOC is being provoked to reevaluate its staunchly apolitical stance. Just how the movement will allow activism — in what forms and what types — remains a big question.

Read more: Athletes won’t stay silent on politics anymore. But will leagues support their protests if it costs them real money?

Proposed guidelines on political expression

At the centre of the debate is Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which purports to “protect the neutrality of sport and the Olympic Games”, stating

no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in the Olympic areas.

Protests and demonstrations are therefore forbidden at all Olympic venues and ceremonies.

As athlete activism has become more visible in recent years, the IOC sought to revise its guidelines around protests for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Read more: Sit on hands or take a stand: why athletes have always been political players

This followed several medal podium protests by athletes outside the games, including Australian swimmer Mack Horton refusing to stand beside China’s Sun Yang at the world championships.

The new guidelines are intended to set parameters for what is allowed and what isn’t. Olympic athletes are entitled to “express their opinions”, but not during competitions or at the Olympic Village, medal ceremonies and other official ceremonies. This is allowed elsewhere: press conferences, team meetings and social media.

So, on the face of it, athletes have more liberties: their use of social media, for example, is less constrained than in the past.

No clear line in the sand

As ever, though, the devil is in the detail. The new guidelines also outline what constitutes unacceptable dissent: displaying political messaging (such as signs or armbands), gestures of a political nature (hand gestures or kneeling) and refusing to follow ceremony protocol.

From the perspective of the IOC, there is a clear demarcation between what constitutes a protest and expressing one’s views.

But athletes have been left confused — and continue to feel constrained by the new rules. For example, the rule would seem to allow an athlete to express support for Black Lives Matter at a press conference — but not wear a BLM t-shirt. Is one considered an expression of solidarity against racism, the other a political protest?

And what if athletes kneel or raise a fist during a medal ceremony — a very common form of protest in sports today? The IOC is asserting that actions like these will be punished.

Frustratingly, the revised guidelines are not only imprecise, the penalties arising from breaches are vague – to be decided on a “case-by-case basis as necessary”.

Read more: The Olympics have always been a platform for protest. Banning hand gestures and kneeling ignores their history

Of course, one must also consider the flip side. Freedom to speak on a global stage may also mean athletes advocating for causes that do not align with themes the IOC endorses, such as racial or gender equality.

As Chelsey Gotell, chairperson of the International Paralympic Committee’s athletes’ council, put it,

We all know that athlete protests at the games is something of a Pandora’s box. The last thing we want to do is create a free-for-all at the games where [Paralympic] athletes are free to protest on any subject they like, including ones the wider world will find repulsive.

Punishing or removing athletes who speak up

Perhaps not surprisingly, the revised guidelines have received a mixed reaction from athletes. Global Athlete, an alliance advocating for athletes’ rights, claims Rule 50 breaches article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference.

Taking this cue, Canadian human rights lawyer and Olympian Nikki Dryden argues bans on protest constitute an unreasonable denial of freedoms, which should be vigorously resisted.

US Olympians have been especially outspoken, saying in a letter

The IOC … cannot continue on the path of punishing or removing athletes who speak up for what they believe in, especially when those beliefs exemplify the goals of Olympism.

In a slight departure from that view, an Australian Olympic Committee survey of athletes revealed most agreed with barring protests from competition and the podium, but there was an appetite for political expression beyond that.

The Olympics as a force for positive change

The IOC Athletes’ Commission is now consulting with athletes globally on different ways Olympians can express themselves in a “dignified way”, with a recommendation on Rule 50 expected in early 2021.

Whatever the IOC decides, one thing is clear: the “athlete voice” is more potent than ever. The recent athlete support for Black Lives Matter is a case in point. Sport should be aligned with causes like the fight against racism.

The Olympics — like sport generally — can also be a place where advocacy actually leads to positive change.

For example, under Saudi Arabian law, women were once not permitted to participate at the Olympics. However, the IOC pressured the Saudi Olympic Committee to send female athletes to the Olympics, and in 2012 its ban on women competitors was lifted.

We only need to think back to Freeman’s victory lap at the 2000 Sydney Olympics as an example of the power of the Olympic stage to make a positive statement. Without this type of wider community engagement, sport has limited meaning. Freeman gave premium value to that Olympic moment — and other athletes can, too.

– ref. The Olympics strive for political neutrality. So, how will they deal with surging athlete activism? – https://theconversation.com/the-olympics-strive-for-political-neutrality-so-how-will-they-deal-with-surging-athlete-activism-144951

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Curato, Associate Professor, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra

Developments in gene editing are often met with moral panic. Every new announcement raises outrage over the audacity of scientists “playing God”. The existence of mutant mosquitoes and designer babies are often framed as threats – evidence that science fiction has crossed over into real life.

There are clear dangers when the language of fear and scandal hijack public conversations on complex matters. But this doesn’t mean we should leave the discussion on genome editing – the process of altering an organism’s genetic sequence to produce favourable characteristics or remove unwanted ones – solely to scientists.

That danger was sharply underscored in 2018, when a young Chinese researcher announced he had engineered the birth of what may very well be the first genetically modified humans. “I feel proud,” he told the public, a year before he was jailed for forgery.

And so we reach an impasse. As global leaders face pressure to regulate genome editing, questions about who drives these ethical debates persist. Should leaders listen to scientists, who may be vulnerable to moral blindness, or to the public, some of whom may be convinced their last Whopper contained a Frankenfood patty because an Instagram influencer told them so.

The impasse doesn’t have to be permanent

In recent years, ordinary citizens have become more empowered to collectively learn, deliberate, reflect, and put forward recommendations on divisive and technical policy issues. The OECD calls this the “deliberative wave”. Processes like citizen juries or online town halls have been used to provide public input not only on topical issues such as e-health or waste management, but also on issues that affect future generations, like mitochondiral donation.

Citizens’ assemblies are forums in which a randomly selected, demographically diverse group of laypeople come together, typically for several days at a time, to deliberate over a policy issue. This allows them to learn more about the issue, scrutinise expert information, engage the arguments of advocates representing different sides, and deliberate with their fellow participants about possible ways forward.

These assemblies can be viewed as a counterbalance to the growing prevalence of public conversations shaped by disinformation, clickbait culture, hyper-partisanship, and distrust of experts.

A citizens’ assembly is a fitting approach to clarify controversies on genome editing, particularly around its ethics.

A groundbreaking global experiment

We are among 25 experts on deliberative democracy and genome editing who have published an article today in the journal Science, making a case for a Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing

We envisage a process that would convene at least 100 people from all over the world, none of whom can claim expertise or a history of advocacy on this issue. After learning about the issue from a national perspective, they would gather for five days to deliberate over whether there should be a set of global principles for the regulation of genome editing technologies. The challenge of getting a representative sample of the world is not lost on us, although we are committed to ensuring a broad spread of participants representing different nationalities, ages, religions, levels of education, genders and cultures.

This would be a groundbreaking global experiment. It would be the first example of a global citizens’ assembly, and it remains to be seen whether national governments and institutions such as the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation would seriously consider its recommendations.

But there are good reasons to think our global citizens’ assembly would be a meaningful undertaking.

Evolving evidence

A decade ago, the idea of citizens’ assemblies may have been dismissed by sceptics as pie in the sky. Here in Australia, the idea of a citizens’ assembly may have been tarnished by its identification with a partisan agenda, such as when former prime minister Julia Gillard called for a citizens’ assembly on climate change. But today, citizens’ assemblies have begun to establish a credible track record.

Read more: A novel idea on climate change: ask the people

Last year, French President Emmanuel Macron invited 150 randomly selected citizens to consider ways to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by at least 40% within a decade. Over nine months, the assembly listened to more than 100 climate experts, with communications experts also on hand to help answer technical questions.

An assembly that included a 16-year-old student, a bus driver and a former fireman engaged in rigorous deliberation on the complex issues involved in ecological transition, even as a pandemic was unfolding. In the end, among other recommendations, the assembly endorsed making ecocide a criminal act. Macron promised to put this recommendation to a national referendum.

There are many other examples of citizens’ assemblies that have contributed to enriching public conversations and policy-making. The Canadian province of British Columbia set up a Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform that successfully preceded a referendum. And the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on abortion and same-sex marriage informed a divisive debate about constitutional reform.

Read more: Fearmongering is scary, not genetic technologies themselves

The stakes are high in the Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing. On the line are the legitimacy of policies and regulations based on the extent to which they reflect the values of ordinary citizens whose lives will potentially be affected by these technologies.

Beyond its impact on regulation, however, this democratic experiment can show the way on how citizens, scientists, and policymakers can talk about a fast-moving technology with more care, better information, and democratic deliberation.

– ref. Why we need a global citizens’ assembly on gene editing – https://theconversation.com/why-we-need-a-global-citizens-assembly-on-gene-editing-146398

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have successfully warded off a nine-year rebellion against his government, but he is being tested with economic turmoil and civilian protests amid the coronavirus pandemic and looming conflict in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The civil war in Syria has been overshadowed as the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic and its grim economic and social ramifications.

In March 2020, before the pandemic’s first wave reached its peak, the war was in full swing. Turkey and Russia locked horns over the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib, the last stronghold of the Syrian opposition. There were fears Turkey would actively fight the Syrian government.

As predicted, a last-minute deal was struck when Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan visited his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow in March 2020.

The deal established a security corridor 6 kilometres each side of Idlib’s M4 motorway. This is a key route linking Aleppo and Latakia, two major cities held by the Syrian government, which also retained its territorial gains during the crisis with Turkey.

Civil war takes a break amid the pandemic

Since March, there has not been any significant development in the Syrian conflict, which has been largely driven by the Syrian government’s offensive since it captured Aleppo in 2016. Opposition has been largely eliminated, with those remaining in Idlib seemingly happy to be on the defensive rather than launch any offensive to the Russian-supplied Assad forces.

There are several reasons why the Assad government has just about halted its offensive. These include the coronavirus pandemic, the impact of the economic turmoil in Lebanon, and the economic and political crisis within Syria. Moreover, Turkey, a key player in Syria, has been busy in the eastern Mediterranean.

Read more: Turkey and Russia lock horns in Syria as fear of outright war escalates

On March 30, the first coronavirus-related death was reported in Syria. There were fears the virus could spread rapidly through the highly vulnerable 6.6 million people displaced by the conflict, now living in overcrowded camps.

As the coronavirus spread deep into the country, the Syrian government introduced several measures to halt its progress. Borders were closed, travel between rural and urban areas was restricted, schools and restaurants were shut, and a nationwide curfew was implemented between 7.30pm and 6am. The effectiveness of these measures was highly uncertain.

Official reports suggest Syria is doing well, with 160 deaths and 3,614 cases at the time of writing. But, as with many authoritarian countries, these figures seem too low, given the conditions in the country.

In April, testing was as low as 100 a day, with half of those in the capital, Damascus. By August, that had risen to 300 a day in only five testing centres. Of the reported cases, a mere 500 are from government-controlled regions. Syria as a whole has reported far fewer cases than any other Middle Eastern country.

It is almost certain the numbers of coronavirus cases are grossly under-reported. The deputy director for health in Damascus estimates the real number is 112,500 cases in Damascus alone. Poorly equipped hospitals are running out of supplies and, unfortunately, body bags.

Economic meltdown and civil unrest

There is a reason for the under-reporting of coronavirus cases in Syria: the economic turmoil that is facing the country and threatening the Assad government far more than the years of armed rebellion.

In late April, the government began lifting some coronavirus restrictions, but these measures caused panic-buying and sharp increases in food prices. This was compounded by a rapid fall in the value of the Syrian pound, which traded at 3,000 to the US dollar on the black market (as opposed to 47 to the dollar before the civil war).

Inevitably, coronavirus measures have had a major economic impact on the war-torn country. The cost of living in Syria has increased by more than 100% year on year.

The economic crisis was deepened by the increasing US sanctions. New sanctions introduced in June target any foreign person who has knowingly provided significant financial, material, or technological support to the government of Syria.

Further, the worst economic meltdown in Lebanon since the 1975-90 civil war caused a further slump in the Syrian economy.

The compounding effect of these forces culminated in rare civilian protests in the Syrian capital. The protests began with economic demands but quickly turned into clashes, with supporters of Iran-backed Hezbollah calling for the downfall of the Assad government.

The government was not the only target of public anger. More than 80% of Syrians live below the poverty line. The economic crisis hit the opposition-controlled city of Idlib, leading to demonstrations against the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Many Syrians are in desperate circumstances. The pandemic has wiped out what meagre income they had, and they face mass starvation. The likely result is another mass exodus to Europe through Turkey.

Repercussions of Syrian conflict in eastern Mediterranean

The current crisis in the eastern Mediterranean is seemingly the result of dispute between two NATO allies, Greece and Turkey, over Turkey’s exploration of natural gas in waters claimed by Greece. There are three reasons why it has repercussions for the Syrian conflict.

Read more: Turkey-Greece conflict in eastern Mediterranean is less about gas than vaccuum left by Trump

First, Turkey is drifting away from the western and European bloc over its assertive Syria policy (and Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies within Turkey). Turkey was at odds with the US and European countries over its military operations and Syrian refugee policy, which allowed a flood of refugees to cross into Europe. In doing so, Turkey grew closer to Russia and, to some extent, Iran.

The second is the uncertainty of the US policy on Syria and the US pulling out of Syria under the Trump administration. This resulted in Russia dominating the course of the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, developments in the eastern Mediterranean forced European powers, particularly France, to step in to fill the void.

The third is Greece’s attempt to bolster its own diplomatic and economic interests by leveraging against Turkey’s alienation from its western allies. This is aided by the conflict between Turkey and Egypt over Turkey’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In early 2020, Greece signed a major 1,900 kilometre undersea pipeline deal with Israel and Cyprus, followed by a bilateral defence deal with France. Greece expanded its diplomatic push by signing an agreement with Egypt “designating an exclusive economic zone in the eastern Mediterranean‮‮ ‬‬between the two countries, an area containing promising oil and gas reserves”.

Unprepared, Turkey felt trapped, flexing its military muscles in unilateral moves in the Mediterranean Sea. French President Emmanuel Macron responded saying Turkey is “no longer a partner” in the region, further escalating tensions.

Russia has so far stayed quiet on the eastern Mediterranean crisis. But a dispute between Turkey, Greece and other NATO countries will further alienate Turkey within NATO, resulting in a stronger position for Russia and its military and political base in Syria.

The coronavirus and its repercussions may have contributed to the slowing of civil war in Syria, but the humanitarian crisis facing its people may yet grow even worse.

– ref. In war-torn Syria, the coronavirus pandemic has brought its people to the brink of starvation – https://theconversation.com/in-war-torn-syria-the-coronavirus-pandemic-has-brought-its-people-to-the-brink-of-starvation-144794

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suresh Mahalingam, Principal Research Leader, Emerging Viruses, Inflammation and Therapeutics Group, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University

The World Health Organisation lists about 180 COVID-19 vaccines being developed around the world.

Each vaccine aims to use a slightly different approach to prepare your immune system to recognise and fight SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

However, we can group these technologies into five main types. Some technology is tried and trusted. Some technology has never before been used in a commercial vaccine for humans.

As we outline in our recent paper, each technology has its pros and cons.

Read more: Vaccine progress report: the projects bidding to win the race for a COVID-19 vaccine

1. DNA/RNA-based

DNA and RNA vaccines use fragments of genetic material made in the lab. These fragments code for a part of the virus (such as its spike protein). After the vaccine is injected, your body uses instructions in the DNA/RNA to make copies of this virus part (or antigen). Your body recognises these and mounts an immune response, ready to protect you the next time you encounter the virus.

Pros

• these vaccines can be quickly designed based on genetic sequencing alone

• they can be easily manufactured, meaning they can potentially be produced cheaply

• the DNA/RNA fragments do not cause COVID-19.

Cons

• there are no approved DNA/RNA vaccines for medical use in humans, hence their alternative name: next-generation vaccines. So they are likely to face considerable regulatory hurdles before being approved for use

• as they only allow a fragment of the virus to be made, they may prompt a poor protective immune response, meaning multiple boosters may be needed

• there’s a theoretical probability vaccine DNA can integrate into your genome.

The speed at which these vaccines can be designed, needing only the genetic sequence of the virus, is why these vaccines were among the first to enter clinical trials.

An RNA vaccine, mRNA-1273, being developed by Moderna and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, advanced to clinical testing just two months after the virus was sequenced.

2. Virus vectors

These vaccines use a virus, often weakened and incapable of causing disease itself, to deliver a virus antigen into the body. The virus’ ability to infect cells, express large amount of antigen and in turn trigger a strong immune response make these vaccines promising.

Examples of viruses used as vectors include vaccinia virus (used in the first ever vaccine, against smallpox) and adenovirus (a common cold virus).

Pros

• highly specific delivery of antigens to target cells and high expression of antigen after vaccination

• often a single dose is enough to stimulate long-term protection.

Cons

• people may have existing levels of immune protection to the virus vector, reducing the effectiveness of the vaccine. In other words, the body raises an immune response to the vector rather than to the antigen

• low-scale production of some virus-vectored vaccines means they are less cost-effective.

One high-profile example is the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine AZD1222 (formerly known as ChAdOx1), one of the two vaccines the Australian government wishes to use should phase 3 clinical trials prove successful. This vaccine is based on a modified chimpanzee adenovirus.

Read more: The Oxford deal is welcome, but remember the vaccine hasn’t been proven to work yet

Two adenovirus based COVID-19 vaccines have been approved for early or limited use internationally. These were developed by the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences with CanSino Biologics and the Gamaleya Research Institute, part of Russia’s health ministry.

Read more: Russian coronavirus vaccine results have been published – here’s what they reveal

3. Inactivated

Inactivated vaccines are a tried and trusted method of vaccination. It’s the technology used in the vaccine against poliovirus and in some types of flu vaccines. Inactivated vaccines contain viruses treated with heat, chemicals, or radiation so they cannot replicate, but can still trigger an immune response.

Pros

Cons

• low immunogenicity, so requires multiple boosters.

The Chinese government has granted emergency approval for limited use of an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech.

4. Live-attenuated virus

Live-attenuated vaccines are among the most successful existing vaccine strategies, already used to protect against measles and polio. These contain virus weakened in the lab. The virus is still viable (live) but cannot cause disease. After vaccination, the viruses in these vaccines grow and replicate, stimulating an excellent immune response.

Pros

• strong protection as vaccine mimics the natural infection process

• cost effective for large-scale manufacturing with a familiar regulatory approval pathway

• single immunisation without needing extra molecules (adjuvants) to stimulate the immune system.

Cons

• very rare potential to revert to a disease-causing state

• limited use in people with weakened immune systems due to potential safety concerns

• can require cold storage, which may limit potential for distribution.

Several live-attenuated COVID-19 vaccine candidates are currently in preclinical trials.

Our group, at Griffith University, has partnered with vaccine manufacturer Indian Immunologicals Ltd to develop a live-attenuated COVID-19 vaccine.

Read more: Could BCG, a 100-year-old vaccine for tuberculosis, protect against coronavirus?

5. Protein subunit

Subunit vaccines do not contain live components of the virus, but are made from purified pieces of the virus (protein antigens) that trigger an immune response. Again, this is an existing technology, used for instance in hepatitis B vaccines.

Pros

• with no live components, subunit vaccines are generally thought to be safe

• can be used in people with weakened immune systems and other vulnerable populations.

Cons

• the protein antigens that best elicit an immune response must be investigated in detail

• can stimulate an insufficient immune response meaning that protection is likely to require multiple boosters or for the vaccine to be given with an immune system stimulant.

The University of Queensland has developed a protein subunit vaccine for COVID-19 that is being combined with an immune stimulant made by CSL. It is another one of the vaccines Australia wishes to use, should phase 3 clinical trials prove successful.

Read more: Putting our money on two COVID vaccines is better than one: why Australia’s latest vaccine deal makes sense

In a nutshell

Not all vaccines currently being developed to prevent COVID-19 will be successful. Safety issues or a lack of protection will halt some.

So, a broad portfolio of vaccine approaches and technologies is progressing through human trials is reassuring. We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket.

Ultimately, it is likely we’ll need a repertoire of COVID-19 vaccines to offer widespread protection. Different vaccine formulations will ensure vaccination is safe and effective for all members of society, including infants, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems.

Read more: 5 ways our immune responses to COVID vaccines are unique

– ref. From adenoviruses to RNA: the pros and cons of different COVID vaccine technologies – https://theconversation.com/from-adenoviruses-to-rna-the-pros-and-cons-of-different-covid-vaccine-technologies-145454

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yeshe Colliver, Lecturer in early childhood, Macquarie University

Archie! Don’t run away… you should be in bed already and we still need to brush your tee-eeeth!

Your four year old runs down the hallway without his pants on, knocking over that leaning tower of washing.

Around the world, the impacts of COVID-19 have left some parents with more time with their children, but fewer resources to make it interesting as children go stir crazy.

Luckily, there’s a fun and evidence-backed way to get your kids to try harder at the things you ask them to do, persist at them longer, and be stimulated — you just have to pretend.

Without a minute establishing an imaginary narrative beforehand, it is a struggle to get my three year old to pack away his toys after play. So we end up being excavators dumping those “rocks” into the box. And there almost always has to be some interesting plot twist to keep it challenging — a villain with a wrecking ball, or a cat that gets trapped.

Recent research shows why this works.

Imagination is challenging, and fun

If a child is acting out (doing the opposite of what they know they should be doing), they often need more of a challenge. According to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, a leading theorist on child development, imagination drives children’s development at precisely the age when reality can no longer keep up with their curiosity. This age is from around two to seven.

Evidence suggests pretence can help children take on others’ perspectives and stay on track more. For example, two out of three seven year olds had an imaginary friend at some point. These children understand others’ perspectives and emotions better, and tell more complex bedtime stories than their peers.

Read more: Are the kids alright? Social isolation can take a toll, but play can help

Research shows the more preschoolers pretend, the better they are at controlling their emotions, irrespective of their other abilities. That’s important because kids need to inhibit unrelated emotions and ideas to persist with a task and remember its overall goal — whether it be packing away toys, doing homework or brushing their teeth.

It’s even more important because self-controlled children end up with better health, relationships, savings, even criminal records through adolescence and into mid-life.

Experiments have shown when three to to six year olds are told to pretend to be Bob the Builder or Dora the Explorer rather than themselves, they persist longer in mundane, chore-like tasks and they are better at the chore.

Other experiments show teaching three to five year olds how to pretend more imaginatively for 15 minutes for five weeks results in better memory and ability to focus their attention than normal classes or even non-imaginary play (like ball games). They’ll be more likely to clean up their spilt lunch if they can persist through boredom and see it in a new perspective.

And no, just watching Ben 10 on TV won’t have these benefits — your child needs to take on the pretend character’s traits.

Why they need a character

We recently replicated the experiments where children pretend to be a character, but we tested out different character types. We found children randomly assigned to be goodies (like Batman) exhibited more self-restraint than baddies, but wise wizards and witches were the most restrained of all. It was as if children took on the skills of their imagined character.

So, pretending to be a patient guard is likely to help your three three old wait longer while you brush her teeth, but diligent Bob the Builder™ might be better to help wipe down the toilet seat – as she “paints” the toilet with dry toilet paper.

Characters can also help a child calm down or show them what they’ve done is wrong. Imaginary characters seem to work because they allow children to appreciate a perspective that’s not their own. Instead of having a conversation directly with your child about what happened, try starting the conversation with Dolly instead. If it’s complex for your little one, you can use another toy to act out the bad behaviour.

Then, discuss the consequences of the behaviour for Dolly. Your toddler or preschooler may just want to watch, even several times — this is them processing the different perspectives.

Read more: Child’s play in the time of COVID: screen games are still ‘real’ play

Challenging your child using pretence may help homework too. Researchers are now turning to play-based teaching to improve problem-solving, literacy, numeracyand attention span. An analysis of 22 studies showed that teacher instruction is more effective for children under eight when combined with playful teaching, of which pretence is a major part.

So, perhaps before embarking on the next mundane household task, ask: “What about this is something my child likes to play?”

Putting on Archie’s pants will be swifter if he pretends his leg is Thomas the Tank Engine travelling through a tunnel than reminding him how many hours past his bedtime it is.

– ref. Tinker Bell, Batman, Ben 10… if your kids are in character, they’re more likely to help around the house – https://theconversation.com/tinker-bell-batman-ben-10-if-your-kids-are-in-character-theyre-more-likely-to-help-around-the-house-139962

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

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed – for lack of a better word – is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind.

– Gordon Gekko, Wall Street 1987

Fifty years ago, well before the movie Wall Street, Chicago economist Milton Friedman set down what for many was the essence of the famous speech in Wall Street in an article for the New York times magazine entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”.

His point, which along with his other contributions was recognised when he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976, was that businesses serve society best when they abandon talk of “social responsibilities” and solely maximise returns for shareholders.

Incredibly influential (the past week has seen special conferences and anniversary analyses), the essay has been credited with ushering in the doctrine of “shareholder primacy,” and with it short-termism, hostile takeovers, colossal frauds and savage job cuts.

Its a doctrine not seriously challenged until the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.

But in an important respect it was misread.

Although not clear from the title of the essay, Friedman himself was quite concerned with broader social aims.

His essay was about how best to achieve them.

His point was that if companies made as much money as they could for their shareholders, those shareholders could spend it on social goals, “if they wished to do so”.

For the company to attempt to guess what goals its shareholders would want to support and to support them itself would be for the company to do its main job badly.

Although it made a certain sort of sense, the Friedman doctrine has turned out to be incomplete.

As Harvard University’s Oliver Hart (who also won the Nobel Prize for Economics) has points out, corporations are often much better than their shareholders at achieving the goals their shareholders care about.

Corporations can achieve more than individuals

Individual shareholders can’t do much to avert climate change, but the corporations they own can.

A mining company could either stop operating an environmentally-damaging mine or run the mine, make a bunch of money and pay it to shareholders who could use the money to mitigate the damage “if they wished to do so”.

Its hard to argue that, if shareholders do indeed “wish to do so”, the first option isn’t better.

To cite a recent instance, is hard to “un-blow-up” 46,000 years of Indigenous heritage.

Read more: Corporate dysfunction on Indigenous affairs: Why heads rolled at Rio Tinto

In contrast, Friedman was almost surely right about corporate charitable contributions, which was in many ways the impetus for the article.

In what way are corporations better at giving money to charities (and political parties) than individuals. In none that are obvious (and not potentially corrupt).

So where do we draw the line about what corporations do and don’t do?

Proponents of the “stakeholder view” now endorsed by an increasing number of superannuation funds think corporations should have a composite objective that takes into account the interests of shareholders, bondholders, workers, suppliers, the environment, and more.

Yet a point in every direction…

The problem with this, as recognised by the arrow-covered pointless man in the animated Harry Nilsson film What’s The Point? is that “a point in every direction is the same as no point at all”.

As Friedman put it, composite objectives suffer from “looseness and lack of rigour”.

Others, such as Hart and University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales think firms should find out what shareholders most want, and “pursue that goal.”

This has the virtue of permitting a social objective while creating a concrete, measurable goal.

It’s a way of giving shareholders (and super fund members) a voice that is more direct than simply electing directors every few years.

Friedman helped start an important discussion. Fifty years on, it isn’t finished.

– ref. Vital Signs: 50 years ago Milton Friedman told us greed was good. He was half right – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-50-years-ago-milton-friedman-told-us-greed-was-good-he-was-half-right-146294

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily van der Nagel, Lecturer in Social Media, Monash University

Sex is fascinating, important, and sometimes scary. Sex is a normal part of life. Yet, the multiplicity and richness of sexual practices on social media rarely make it into everyday conversations.

Nudes, it seems, are now part of everyday life. On social media, there are platform rules around what kinds of adult content is allowed. Some platforms heavily restrict displays of nudity or sexual activity; others allow it. But between these rules, people engage in a variety of tactics to control what facets of their identities can be seen by their audiences.

The sociologist Erving Goffman called this “audience segregation”: we make sure our different audiences – those to whom you are good daughter versus those to whom you are kinky sex goddess – do not mix.

Since our audiences are mostly invisible on social media, we need to imagine who they are. This imaginary then guides what we choose to say, show, share or otherwise express.

We have spent years studying people’s sexual practices on social media. Through interviews, online observation, and content analysis we have identified three main tactics of expressing sexual selfhood: setting up alternative accounts or incorporating alternative platforms; omissions – i.e. strategically leaving out details from the information one shares; and anonymity or using a pseudonym.

Read more: Health Check: what controls our sex drive? When and why do we feel like sex?

‘Networked sex accounts’

Choosing to express different facets of oneself on different platforms or through different accounts is a common practice, and not necessarily a sexual one. But how these multiple platforms are used when it comes to sex, varies enormously.

Some find it appropriate to post Not Safe for Work (NSFW) content on mainstream social media like Twitter or Instagram and do so from their given name or “main” account. This includes those in the sex industry, but also others including artists, activists, feminists, body-positive bloggers, educators, actors, models and nudists.

Other people create alternative accounts on platforms they’re familiar with, or accounts on another platform, to express sexual aspects of their self, but keep the audiences separate.

Some people create a secondary or “alt” account for their sexual identity on Twitter. They then use it to connect with like-minded people, talk about sex and share nudes, usually in a small, intimate circle of other alt accounts.

In this space made up of networked sex accounts, sexual images flow in abundance, even if the platform more broadly is better known for images of coffee art, political talk or aggressive arguments.

This is not to say that people show their full, entire self in these secondary accounts. These are still facets. However, the facets do vary considerably in depth and detail.

For instance, on Facebook, people show their face, but not their naked body. They talk using their real name, about their jobs and maybe their children.

On Tumblr, they might show their bodies, but not their faces. They post under a pseudonym and talk about both the profound – private thoughts, desires, anxieties – and the completely trivial (a favourite dish, a beloved cartoon character, a silly joke).

Read more: The safest sex you’ll never have: how coronavirus is changing online dating

What’s left out

Deciding what information to leave out is integral to Reddit Gonewild. This exhibitionist subreddit, a themed thread on the bulletin board Reddit, features posts of women in stages of undress and sexual pleasure. These women mostly choose to obscure their faces, avoid unique backdrops, blur out recognisable tattoos and use a pseudonym while posting.

The appeal of the posts lies in their everydayness; these are women who enjoy showing off sexually, revealing intimate parts of their bodies and lives while staying unidentifiable.

Reddit Gonewild itself encourages this, urging those posting to stay anonymous by making a “throwaway” or temporary, anonymous account; using a service that strips metadata from photos, (deleting automatically generated information like the device used, location details, and time the photo was taken); and making sure the photo obscures enough.

Its rules state:

You should blur out tattoos or maybe certain birth marks someone could recognise if they’ve seen you in a low cut or sleeveless shirt. Don’t stand next to the wacky lamp that everyone in your dorm knows you for. Don’t pose seductively on the hood of a car with your license plate showing […]

You CAN be creative even under these constraints. Take it up as part of the challenge. Dress up your room a little! Reverse the comforter on your bed. Clear off the bathroom counter. Do anything to make the picture look sexy and fun, but make yourself a little less recognisable – a little harder to place. This is your alter ego!

It is common also to evade some questions or fabricate information in sexual social media interactions or posts. Typically, this includes changing information about where one lives.

How comfortable someone is in saying which country, state or city they are from depends quite a lot on the size of that territory, but also on their goals and needs. Wanting to receive information or access to local events, groups and people requires you to reveal your location quite accurately.

In our research, we found American participants were usually happy to name their state, some even their (large) city on NSFW Tumblr. However, people from very small European countries preferred not to share this information, to avoid being known as that one Estonian naked on the internet.

On other platforms, where choosing one’s location from a drop-down menu is a mandatory part of setting up a profile, many people interested in consuming sexual information and not interactions choose Antarctica as their location (and being 98-years-old).

Sharing information about one’s occupation followed similar logic. The more specific the field or the position, the less likely it was to be shared.

Other information sharing rules people have for themselves are less about audience segregation and more about their purposes for using social media.

Those interested in cheating might not mention they had a partner, although building a relationship from shared commiseration regarding partners is very common. Others do not mention their children on principle.

Pseudonyms

Images of faces in profile pictures are an important source of identification on social media, but names and user names continue to be the main way people are identified.

Because of this, anonymity and pseudonyms are key to any compartmentalisation strategies.

When search engines, networks, connections and tags figure so prominently in the experience of social media, using a name other than the one identifying you publicly is often the main way of maintaining contextual integrity.

Pseudonyms have a rich history of being used to communicate politically, creatively, and playfully. They are often used to segregate audiences. Mathematician Charles Dodgson, for instance, wrote children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll.

A pseudonym for a sexy social media account, or to use as a porn performer or sex worker, does similar identity work of compartmentalising.

As porn star Conner Habib explains, creating a name is creating an identity, one that protects him as a porn performer from complicated and sometimes discriminatory entanglements. Habib’s porn name reflects his Irish and Syrian heritage, and introduces a Middle Eastern name to porn, an element he recognises as underrepresented.

Habib titled an essay “The name of your first pet and the street you grew up on”, a common method for identifying a pseudonym that would work for a porn star. He also has highlighted a common refrain. “What’s your real name?” is often asked of porn performers as a way of demanding intimacy.

Read more: The rise of the ‘porntropreneur’: even hustlers need side hustles in the gig economy

Choosing a name is an assertion of power: one highly successful Finnish porn performer is known as Rakel Liekki, which translates in English to “Rachel Flame”.

Her chosen name is a character, media persona and brand, as well as a way of separating her private life from her performing life. “Flame” conjures images of fire, heat, and a kind of primal, natural sexuality.

Using pseudonyms, porn performers and sex workers can be identifiable, and build a reputation while keeping their occupation private.

One insight that anonymous, intimate posts about sex provides us is that sharing sexual experiences and anxieties helps people feel less alone.

Last year, journalist Anna Borges published a list of anonymous insecurities about sex that people submitted to her through an online form in a BuzzFeed article: 37 confessions about sex that will make you feel less alone.

The article includes confessions about being a virgin, wanting to experience anal pleasure as a straight man in a heterosexual marriage, vaginismus and female sexual dysfunction, asexuality, being pressured to make moaning noises during sex, and the way one’s own genitals look:

I have been plagued for as long as I can remember with the fact that I don’t have a perfect little Barbie-type vagina. I have heard so many men make jokes (not about me directly) about “roast beef” vaginas, how long labia = loose/slutty vagina, etc. So for the most part, I avoid sex with new partners for fear of judgement or grossing them out completely.

Borges presented these confessions to reassure the reader they are not unique in worrying about sex: we all have personal issues and internalised media messages that can get in the way of positive sexual experiences.

Existing as posts to websites that sit outside, yet often flow through, social media, sex confession projects frame such confessions as a healthy way to find out what other people think and do in their intimate lives.

Read more: Sexual subcultures are collateral damage in Tumblr’s ban on adult content

Another corner of Reddit features people disclosing sexual abuse in order to seek support in order to heal. Our colleague Nazanin Andalibi and her co-authors found people posting about sexual abuse in subreddits designed for this purpose.

When people feel anonymous they are more likely to share personal and intimate information, and dedicated spaces for these disclosures coupled with a culture of pseudonyms have led to many people seeking support on these bulletin boards.

Many use a throwaway account rather than their persistent, pseudonymous Reddit username.

But pseudonymity is not foolproof. Even when people take care to hide their identity, others sometimes endeavour to find them out.

One NSFW Tumblr study participant told of a friend’s frightening experience. It is very common to post partial images of bodies on Tumblr – legs, a slice of torso, clavicles and breasts.

An obsessive follower had collected all of these slices of a woman’s body and assembled a bizarre Frankenstein image created from it. After figuring out the town where the woman lives from image metadata and other information, the follower sent the collage and this information to the Tumblr user.

While men posting images can also have obsessive stalkers and abusers, examples such as this one reflect widespread ideas of gendered shame.

The shame that is evoked when girls and women participate in sexy identity practices works to shift responsibility from the person (usually a man) who violated trust by taking the sexy selfies out of context. The shame is redirected towards the woman who dared to be sexy or naked to a select audience.

You, or not you

Whether or not a social media account is an “alter ego” depends on how its creator thinks about it.

For some, the online sexual self expresses a completely different persona to the Facebook account they use to friend their colleagues, high school buddies and netball group.

For others, it’s considered an extension of that person; the difference between what they do in the office and the bedroom.

One interviewee said:

I think a lot of people think that when they follow social media, they understand a person as a whole, but really, any social media thing is still a persona or a ratioed amount, or a curated element of a person. It’s not the entire person […] my whole self is not owed to a certain social media channel or to a certain following.

While “compartments” suggest neat boundaries, the reality is much leakier.

There’s plenty of play between public and private accounts – even when social media platforms would prefer people to sign up with one account for what they consider to be a singular, fixed identity.

This is an edited extract from Sex and Social Media by Katrin Tiidenberg and Emily van der Nagel, out now with Emerald.

– ref. Friday essay: shifting identities – performing sexual selves on social media – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-shifting-identities-performing-sexual-selves-on-social-media-145322

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

The government is extending the COVID health measures for a further six months, until the end of March, in its latest acknowledgement that pandemic assistance will be needed on various fronts for a longer period.

The extension, costing $2 billion, covers the telehealth services provided by doctors and a range of allied health professionals, home medicine delivery, and free COVID-19 pathology tests.

It also includes the cost of funding for further personal protective equipment for the national medical stockpile, GP-led respiratory clinics, half the cost of activities to respond to COVID-19 in hospitals, and continuation of the private hospital agreement to ensure access to beds.

Telehealth, which started in March, has proved highly popular with three out of every ten GP services at present done virtually. So far, over 30 million services have been provided to more than ten million patients, delivered by more than 77,000 practitioners. Some $1.55 billion has been paid in benefits.

Given the convenience and high usage of telehealth, the government will be under pressure to build it into the health system permanently.

Scott Morrison said telehealth and home delivery medicine services reduced the risk of exposure to COVID-19 in the community while supporting people in isolation.

“Importantly this also includes mental health services, delivered over the phone, by trained specialists and GPs,” he said.

The extension of the health funding comes as national cabinet meets on Friday, when it will discuss the increase in the cap — from 4,000 to 6,000 a week nationally – that the government has announced for people coming home from overseas.

Western Australia has been critical of the government for pre-empting the national cabinet with its announcement.

Morrison was adamant on Thursday the increased cap was a fait accompli, not a request to the states.

“The planes will land with people on them … It’s a decision. It’s not a proposal. The Commonwealth government has made a decision that those caps have been moved to those levels and planes will be able to fly to those ports carrying that many passengers a week,” he said.

Jane Halton, a former health department secretary who is on the government’s COVID-19 commission and has done an audit of quarantine arrangements around the country, will brief Friday’s meeting.

Meanwhile tensions remain over state border restrictions, especially in relation to the Queensland border. But with the Queensland election looming and the state government’s policy favoured by many voters, Morrison on Thursday was treading carefully.

“I’ve never said the Queensland border should be taken down,” he insisted. “What I’ve said is it should be managed sensibly. What I’ve said is it should be managed compassionately. What I’ve said is that they should explain to people what the rules for it are and the medical basis of it are,” he said.

“No doubt people in Queensland may feel that the borders are protecting their health situation. I understand that. But there’s also the impact that it is having more broadly on jobs and business and industry in Queensland.”

The 14-day quarantine rule operating in Queensland will mean neither Morrison nor Anthony Albanese will be able to campaign on the ground for the late October election.

Morrison said NSW and Victoria and South Australia were working to get their borders down.

“The border between New South Wales and Victoria is likely to come down before the one in New South Wales and Queensland,” he said.

– ref. Government extends COVID health initiatives at $2 billion cost – https://theconversation.com/government-extends-covid-health-initiatives-at-2-billion-cost-146430

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

If Labor were threatening to build a power station, the Liberals would likely be screaming “socialists”.

As for a Coalition government contemplating such a thing — well, to say the obvious, it hardly fits with the Liberals’ stated free market, private enterprise philosophy. But hey, neither does the hyper-Keynesian support package to cushion the economy through the pandemic.

Only a few within its own ranks would dispute the government’s COVID mega spending, whatever the ideological contradiction. And they’re keeping their voices to private whispers.

The gas power plant is another matter, and it will be fascinating to see how the debate plays out if the threat turns into reality.

Read more: Morrison government threatens to use Snowy Hydro to build gas generator, as it outlines ‘gas-fired recovery’ plan

The threat is part of the go-with-gas policy unveiled by Scott Morrison this week, spruiked as driving a “gas-fired” recovery, especially for manufacturing. This sounds suspiciously like a three word slogan that promises more than it is likely to deliver.

But Morrison has signed up to the church of gas, whose pastors include Nev Power, chairman of the prime minister’s COVID-19 commission and Andrew Liveris, the head of its (now defunct) manufacturing taskforce, which delivered a pro-gas report. Morrison this week referenced his discussions with Liveris at Kirribilli House.

Much of the gas plan is broad and aspirational at this stage. But the threat is specific enough, and Morrison adopted a grim, school teacher tone when he delivered it in his speech at Newcastle unveiling the policy.

He said the electricity sector must lock in by April investments to deliver 1,000 megawatts of new dispatchable energy to replace the Liddell coal fired power station before it closes in 2023. Or else. The government-owned Snowy Hydro was working on options, Morrison said.

Going back to Malcolm Turnbull’s time, the government conducted — and lost — a bitter battle with AGL over the planned Liddell closure. It exerted maximum pressure on the company to extend the life of the station, or alternatively, sell it, but to no avail.

The gas policy, especially the threat, hasn’t gone down well — with the energy sector or environmentalists. And it’s come under criticism from experts and even within Coalition ranks.

The Australian Energy Council, representing investors and generators, warned the spectre of a government gas generator could put off private investors.

Environmentalists are against gas anyway, whoever produces it, because it is a fossil fuel and therefore has emissions, albeit not as bad as coal.

The Nationals Matt Canavan, who not so long ago was resources minister, says if a new power station is to be built in the Hunter region it should be coal-fired.

And the director of the Grattan Institute’s energy program, Tony Wood, says the government’s claim that 1000 megawatts of new dispatchable capacity is needed isn’t supported by the advice from its own Liddell taskforce.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Angus Taylor on the ‘gas-fired’ recovery

More generally, Wood argues the idea of a gas–led recovery “is a mirage”.

He says east coast gas prices are unlikely to fall to very low levels and anyway, even very low prices would not stimulate major economic activity. “Investing in more gas infrastructure in the face of climate change looks more like a herd of stampeding white elephants,” is Wood’s blunt assessment.

“Gas is very likely to have a role for some time to balance solar and wind. This role will be important but diminishing in volume and the pace of change will be determined by the relative economics of gas versus storage technologies and hydrogen.”

Some see the government’s big takeup of gas as a way of walking away from coal, without fanfare. The government denies this, but it would fit with Morrison’s middle-course pragmatism.

That pragmatism is reflected in the week’s other major energy announcement, for $1.9 billion investment in new and emerging technologies to lower emissions.

Morrison explicitly spelled out the government’s view that renewables, notably solar and wind, have boomed commercially and can take care of themselves.

The policy looks both backwards and forwards.

Backwards, with its support for carbon capture and storage (CCS) which — leaving aside its problems as a technology — is an encouragement to fossil fuels.

Forwards, by extending support to a wide range of technologies of the future.

Critics don’t like the proposed expansion of the remit of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) beyond supporting renewables.

If the government can get the legislation through the Senate, these bodies would be able to back a wide range of projects, including CCS.

The government is also clinging to its Emissions Reduction Fund, which has had trouble attracting proposals. It plans to reform the fund’s processes.

Taken as a whole and leaving aside the arguments about their efficacy, this week’s decisions have a clear political element. They are relatively risk averse within the Coalition, the threatened power plant notwithstanding.

Energy has been such a fraught area for the government that Morrison is very aware of juggling the conflicting forces within his ranks.

Read more: Government targets emerging technologies with $1.9 billion, saying renewables can stand on own feet

The internal coal lobby, spearheaded by Canavan but wider than him, will continue to mutter. The crunch will come when the government’s feasibility study for a Queensland coal fired power station is finished. But putting gas at the centre of the picture will reassure some in the Coalition who remain deeply suspicious of renewables.

The Liberals in seats where climate change is a big preoccupation may or may not find enough to sell in this week’s packages. They can emphasise the “transition” nature of gas — Morrison described it as “a stable transition fuel” — and talk up the support for emerging technologies.

But they will confront the counter argument that the government is not doing enough or proceeding fast enough on climate change.

Meanwhile, Labor struggles with its own energy and climate policies, which caused it such problems last election, when it had dual or confusing messaging in the country’s south and north and lacked costings.

Post election, the spectrum of Labor thinking on these issues has been exposed, and resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon, who takes many of his cues from his NSW coal seat of Hunter, frequently speaks out.

Like Morrison, on energy and climate policy Anthony Albanese will be seeking to position himself somewhere in the middle ground for the election. He’ll look to being to the left of the PM — but not way out on a limb.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Morrison signs up to the gas gospel, but the choir is not in tune – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrison-signs-up-to-the-gas-gospel-but-the-choir-is-not-in-tune-146405

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute

With the number of COVID-19 cases in Victoria continuing to trend downwards, Premier Daniel Andrews yesterday announced a phased restart of elective procedures in public and private hospitals.

Regional Victoria moves to return to 75% of usual elective surgery activity from today, and 85% from September 28. In metropolitan Melbourne, hospitals can move towards 75% from September 28, and 85% from October 26. A return to full capacity across the state is slated for November 23.

But after two partial shutdowns totalling about six months, we’re left with a significant backlog of elective surgeries in Victoria.

To clear this backlog quickly and efficiently, the state government will need to make changes to the way it manages elective surgeries.

Stopping and starting

Elective procedures — particularly category 3 procedures, which are deemed non-urgent but should be done within a year of listing — were one of the early casualties of COVID-19.

Hospitals have only been undertaking category 1 (urgent elective procedures that should be completed within 30 days of listing) and some category 2 procedures (semi-urgent, within 90 days).

The aim was to ensure there was adequate personal protective equipment for staff and beds would be available for an anticipated influx of patients with COVID-19.

There was a brief restart between the first and second waves of the pandemic, but the “care debt” of needed-but-deferred procedures mounted during both slowdowns.

The number of patients waiting for elective surgeries in Victoria increased almost 14% from December 2019 to June 2020, from 49,341 to 56,039. It’s almost certainly increased even more since then. New South Wales is facing a similar problem.

Read more: Getting an initial specialists’ appointment is the hidden waitlist

That’s just the tip of the iceberg

Outpatient attendances have also slowed during the pandemic, meaning patients referred to public hospitals haven’t received the specialist assessments necessary to determine whether they need a procedure.

The number of new specialist appointments in public hospitals in Victoria dropped by more than 15% between April-June 2019 and April-June 2020. That’s equivalent to more than 2,000 fewer appointments each week in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

So a further hidden waiting list — of unknown proportions — is looming behind the waiting list of patients assessed as needing a procedure.

Hospitals can ramp up their work temporarily to reduce the backlog. They could contract private hospitals, although private hospitals are busy clearing their own backlogs.

When the 75/85% caps are lifted, public hospitals could introduce overtime shifts, extending operating times in the evenings or on weekends. But even adding one extra day a week, it would take a whole year to clear 50 days’ worth of backlog.

A better way

Restarting the tired, failing approach to managing elective procedures — which left thousands waiting too long for care even before the pandemic — will guarantee extended waits for those Victorians on the waiting list.

The Victorian government needs to make three immediate changes to address the problem.

1. Centralise waiting lists

Good management of lines — be it in supermarkets or for elective procedures — involves creating and managing a single queue. Multiple queues lead to inequity and long waits.

Hospital waiting lists in each specialty should be merged — potentially into three clusters in metropolitan Melbourne and three in regional Victoria. All orthopaedic patients in southeastern Melbourne, for example, should be on one list and offered a place at the first available location.

The government should provide extra funding for extra activity to help clear waiting lists — but that funding should prioritise hospitals that meet criteria of both good outcomes for patients and good efficiency.

2. Review waiting lists

Not everyone on a waiting list needs their elective procedure. We know low-value care occurs in public hospitals, and we shouldn’t restart that.

Non-surgical treatment should be considered where there’s good evidence it’s appropriate, such as in the case of spinal fusion surgery and some orthopaedic procedures.

Specialist clinical groups should review treatment pathways and admission criteria to ensure best contemporary practice is implemented as part of reopening elective procedures. This way, priority would go to patients most likely to benefit.

Read more: The coronavirus ban on elective surgeries might show us many people can avoid going under the knife

3. Modernise the system

Simply adding extra operating sessions won’t fix the extensive waiting list, let alone address the hidden backlog of people currently waiting for outpatient appointments.

Many patients having elective surgeries need to stay in hospital for several days, so the number of beds available can also limit capacity for admissions.

Hospitals should be funded to implement and evaluate changes in their approaches to treatment. For example, the current length of stay for elective hip replacements in Australia is about four to five days. But hospitals in Europe and the United States have been performing hip replacements on a same-day basis for selected patients for a decade, with comparable outcomes.

Patients on waiting lists should also be offered programs to improve the likelihood of better outcomes from their surgery, for example “prehabilitation”, a strategy that uses exercise to improve patients’ functional capacity before surgery, and quit smoking programs. Patients in better health will stay in hospital for a shorter time.

Let’s capitalise on this opportunity

The Victorian government’s announcement that elective procedures will restart is unquestionably welcome news for the tens of thousands of people waiting for a procedure. But it will be a missed opportunity if it doesn’t also involve rethinking the elective procedures system.

Fixing the backlog within a reasonable time will require major change to the way elective procedures are delivered in Victoria. This would benefit not only those currently waiting, but will have long-term effects after the pandemic has passed.

Read more: ‘Slow and steady’ exit from lockdown as Victorian government sets sights on ‘COVID-normal’ Christmas

– ref. How to clear Victoria’s backlog of elective surgeries after a 6-month slowdown? We need to rethink the system – https://theconversation.com/how-to-clear-victorias-backlog-of-elective-surgeries-after-a-6-month-slowdown-we-need-to-rethink-the-system-146298

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ivan Diaz-Rainey, Associate Professor of Finance & Director, Climate and Energy Finance Group, University of Otago

This week’s announcement of mandatory disclosures of climate-related risks for companies and financial institutions is arguably the New Zealand government’s most significant climate policy — even more so than the Zero Carbon Act itself.

The new policy will come into effect in 2023. It requires all banks, asset managers and insurance companies with more than NZ$1 billion in assets to disclose their climate risks, in line with the emerging global standard from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). This is a smart move, as it ties risk disclosure to international best practice, which is likely to evolve in the coming years.

There will be a collective gulp in bank boards and company risk management departments of the roughly 200 affected entities, but initiatives such as the Aotearoa Circle Sustainable Finance Forum show a growing proportion of the financial sector understands climate risk disclosures are necessary.

I have criticised this government’s climate policy in the past for being big on promise but short on concrete policies. But this financial disclosure policy has some real teeth.

Banking on a brighter future

New Zealand has a bank-based financial system. This means banks — rather than the stock or bond markets — are the primary source of finance for companies.

New Zealand’s Exchange (NZX) has a market capitalisation of around NZ$170 billion, while the four big New Zealand banks (all subsidiaries of Australian banks) have assets, consisting largely of loans, of around NZ$500 billion.

Including banks and insurance companies in the new mandatory disclosure rules means the whole of the economy will be seen through a climate risk lens, not just large companies listed on the stock market.

Read more: Super funds are feeling the financial heat from climate change

Banks will need to think seriously about transition, physical and liability risk when lending and offering insurance to households and small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). This matters most to domestic real estate, by far the largest item on the balance sheet of New Zealand banks, and agricultural and small businesses more generally.

It would be unreasonable to ask SMEs and households to disclose climate risks, so the task is being delegated to banks and insurers.

Figuring out what climate risks lie within banks is not a simple task. Banks will need to scale up their ability to estimate flooding risk from extreme rain, storms and sea level rise on residential housing.

New Zealand’s emissions profile is dominated by agricultural emissions. Banks will need to evaluate whether future loan applications for dairy intensification are consistent with the Paris Agreement, or if those farm loans might become stranded assets through future regulatory changes, such as the eventual entry of agriculture into New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

Read more: NZ’s environmental watchdog challenges climate policy on farm emissions and forestry offsets

The Kiwi tail wagging the Aussie dog

The policy could cause some interesting spillover effects for other countries. Around 20% of ANZ Banking Group assets are from its ANZ New Zealand subsidiary. Might this force greater disclosure by the Australian parent? Or will banks try to wriggle out of New Zealand’s disclosure requirements through “foreign exempt issuers status”?

The latter seems improbable, since the policy explicitly mentions banks with more than NZ$1 billion in assets. This threshold could cover 13 banks registered in New Zealand. It will be interesting to see how large international banks such as the Bank of China, which has a “small” presence in New Zealand, will respond.

The policy will also mean the half of NZX-listed companies currently not disclosing greenhouse gas emissions will have to do so. Our recent study reveals substantial climate transition risks for a number of listed companies.

The table below presents how climate change could hit the bottom lines of major companies in New Zealand, showing projected percentage decreases in revenue for 2018, 2030 and 2050. These calculations are based on carbon prices in the New Zealand Productivity Commission’s report on New Zealand’s transition to a low-emissions economy.

Our research shows it is generally smaller and less profitable firms that do not disclose.

Having all listed firms disclose will level the playing field. Importantly, it will allow investment managers (who also need to disclose their climate risks) to overcome past issues of insufficient data to create genuinely climate-friendly investment products.

The task of independent monitoring, reporting and enforcement of the rules will fall to the financial regulator, the Financial Markets Authority.

Reporting by the 200 or so affected entities will be on a “report or explain basis”. But companies with significant risks that choose the explain option will be disciplined by the market and potentially by the authority.

Disclosure will increase and companies, investment managers, insurers and banks will be comparable on a like-for-like basis — finally allowing consumers to make fully informed decisions about where their money goes. These new rules will unleash the market and drive it in a more climate-friendly direction — beginning the long process of delivering a genuinely sustainable financial system.

– ref. New Zealand will make big banks, insurers and firms disclose their climate risk. It’s time other countries did too – https://theconversation.com/new-zealand-will-make-big-banks-insurers-and-firms-disclose-their-climate-risk-its-time-other-countries-did-too-146392

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, University of Melbourne

The return of the Archibald Prize, albeit somewhat delayed, can be taken as a signal life in Sydney is returning to normal. Or maybe not.

The announcement of the finalists took place with a reduced media scrum, and likewise the eventual winners will share their moment of glory via a live stream camera. The traditional Archibald night reception will also be streamed to invitees who must provide their own champagne.

It may be that the enforced idleness of lockdown has concentrated artists’ minds, but this year there are not only a record number of entries (1,068) but 40% of the finalists are first time entrants. This includes Meyne Wyatt, the winner of the packing room prize.

The result is probably the most refreshing Archibald exhibition I can remember.

In the way of all things Archibald, some of the works have already been seen. Behrouz Boochani’s haunting, tortured eyes as painted by Angus McDonald, challenge Australia’s conscience.

His presence here is a reminder that the prize specifies “Australasia”, not Australia, so both New Zealand and Papua New Guinea are welcome. New Zealand is also represented by Jonathan Dalton’s portrait of fellow artist Angela Tiatia.

Wendy Sharpe, who won the Archibald in 1996, has captured both the comedy and the angst of Magda Szubanski, outlined against the bushfires that claimed last summer.

There are other media figures, most delightfully Yoshio Honjo’s portrait of Adam Liaw with Bream and James Powditch’s Once upon a time in Marrickville — Anthony Albanese, painted to look like the veteran fighter he is.

Because the prize announcement is made from a podium set up in the central court of the exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this is the space where the winner is most likely to be hung.

The trustees of the gallery, who are the judges, don’t hang the exhibition but as the curator is present throughout their initial selection she knows which works most excited them. Almost certainly one of the works hanging in this room will be the winner. The trick is to work out which one.

Four outstanding paintings

There are four outstanding paintings in the central court, each painted in a different style. Three of them are by Aboriginal artists. The non-Aboriginal artist is Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran whose richly coloured, heavily textured self portrait is as cheeky as the artist.

Kaylene Whiskey’s Dolly visits Indulkana is a magical fantasy. She has long had a love of Dolly Parton and pop culture.

Her delightful naive style is complemented by other equally innocent works hung nearby. There is Emily Crockford’s Self-portrait with Daddy in the daisies watching the field of planes, Sleeping Beauty, Marc Etherington’s mordant portrait of Michael Reid as the undead, Neil Tomkins and Digby Webster’s joint portrait of the Ernest brothers and Tiger Yaltangki’s exhuberant Self-portrait.

Vincent Namatjira has been a finalist several times, and has also won other major art prizes. His lush, painterly style is far removed from that of his great-grandfather Albert Namatjira, and he is also more openly political. This year his subject is a double portrait of himself with Adam Goodes, Stand Strong For Who You Are.

Goodes is shown in various guises — playing football, lifting his shirt to show he is black and proud, and with the Aboriginal flag. In any other year this would be the stand out entry and a shoo-in for the prize.

But this isn’t any other year. The room, and the exhibition, is dominated by Writing in the sand, by Blak Douglas (aka Adam Hill). The subject is Dujuan Hoosen, the young hero of the 2019 documentary In My Blood It Runs shot in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Sandy Bore Homeland and Borroloola Community, Northern Territory.

Hoosen’s head fills most of picture, staring out, but his eyes are strangely dead. Blak Douglas has painted them in the tiniest of dotted, concentric circles. The background implies traditional Aboriginal patterning, but on a closer look it contains written text containing Hoosen’s indictment of the white school system and the teaching that eradicates his culture. By any measure this is a major work.

Aboriginal subjects form a significant grouping this year. They include Thea Anamara Perkins’ portrait of the Gadigal elder Charles Madden, Julie Fragar’s portrait of the veteran activist artist Richard Bell and Craig Ruddy’s portrait of Bruce Pascoe. Both Ruddy and Louise Hearman, who has entered a portrait of Barry Jones, are previous winners.

Most years, the Archibald is worth seeing as an amusing exercise in social history. This year it is worth viewing for the art.

After next week’s judgement, the finalists will be on view at the AGNSW until January 10. They will then travel to the Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre, Cairns Art Gallery, Griffith Regional Art Gallery, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, and Penrith Regional Gallery.

– ref. ‘The most refreshing Archibald exhibition I can remember’: the 2020 portrait prize finalists – https://theconversation.com/the-most-refreshing-archibald-exhibition-i-can-remember-the-2020-portrait-prize-finalists-146295

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

In an unprecedented step, prestigious science publication Scientific American has launched a scathing attack on President Donald Trump and endorsed his opponent, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, in the upcoming US election. It’s the first presidential endorsement in the magazine’s 175-year history.

To this, we say: about bloody time! As we’ve noted before:

Science is political. The science we do is inherently shaped by the funding landscape of government and the problems and issues of society. This means that to have any influence on how science is organised and funded in Australia (or the US or any other country), we as scientists and science communicators must act in ways that matter in the arena of politics.

It’s now more critical than ever, as the editors at Scientific American clearly lay out, that the people who are actually knowledgeable about the world’s crises speak out and represent that knowledge (or “collective wisdom”) in public, out loud and with their names attached.

Under Trump, science isn’t just ignored. It is lampooned and directly attacked, especially on issues such as climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. This actively threatens the lives (and livelihoods) of not just millions of Americans, but countless others around the world.

Respect the messenger

In the past, it has been suggested scientists who comment beyond their specific, narrow sphere of reach by delving into politics are tainting their credibility – perhaps even behaving unethically.

But as we now stare down the barrel of an ongoing global pandemic (and relentless climate change continuing in the background), to remain quiet on the politics is not just unethical, but actively dangerous.

Read more: 5 big environment stories you probably missed while you’ve been watching coronavirus

The argument that science is somehow tainted by offering policy or political opinions is an idea whose time has long gone.

Who is better placed to add valuable weight to public debates about the key problems we’re facing, than those who represent the voice of evidence, reason and debate (such as Scientific American)?

As one of us has previously argued, in Australia we should encourage scientists and science communicators to:

Become more active in challenging the status quo, or to help support those who wish to by engendering a professional environment that encourages risk-taking and speaking out in public about critical social issues.

It’s the principle, not the votes

Scientific American is not entirely alone in pushing for the involvement of scientists in public policy and action. Other reputable publications have taken similar stances in the past.

In 2017, Nature argued “debates over climate change and genome editing present the need for researchers to venture beyond their comfort zones to engage with citizens”. Earlier in 2012, Nature explicitly endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

In Australia, our news publications have a tradition of endorsing political parties at federal elections, but our science publishing landscape has typically remained agnostic.

Peak bodies such as the Australian Academy of Science, and Science and Technology Australia, have commented on the political decision-making process, but have rarely been so forthright as the Scientific American’s recent editorial.

Not only should scientists take a stand, they should also be encouraged and professionally acknowledged for it.

Scientists as citizens have the right to advocate for political positions and figures that support the best possible evidence. In fact, when it comes to matters as serious as COVID-19 and climate change, we believe they have an obligation to.

Scientific American’s intervention may not impact votes, but that’s not the point. The point is it’s crucial for people who believe in knowledge and expertise to stand up and call out misinformation for what it is. To do less is to accept the current state.

Australia’s work in progress

Nonetheless, many scientists in Australia rely on government funding. This can make it difficult to speak up when legitimate evidence clashes with the orientation of the government of the day. Confronted with the possible loss of funding, what can a scientist do?

There’s no perfect solution. Many may feel the risks of speaking are too great. For many, they will be.

In such cases, scientists could perhaps look for intermediaries to make their case on their behalf – whether these are trustworthy journalists, or publicly visible academics like us.

Read more: Research reveals shocking detail on how Australia’s environmental scientists are being silenced

In the long term, defending those who have gone out of their way to act responsibly will help. The more this becomes normal, the more likely it will become the norm. But it’s also an unfortunate reality that change rarely occurs without discomfort.

When it comes to truly world-shaking crises like COVID-19 and climate change, scientists are political citizens like everyone else. And just like everyone else, they need to weigh the price of action against the price of inaction.

Speaking out can’t always be someone else’s job.

– ref. ‘Science is political’: Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden over Trump for president. Australia should take note – https://theconversation.com/science-is-political-scientific-american-has-endorsed-joe-biden-over-trump-for-president-australia-should-take-note-146394