Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

This is a long read. Enjoy!

Today I want to set out my case for the enduring relevance of the disciplines. I want to advocate for a content-rich curriculum. And I want to focus in particular on the importance of teaching maths, in sequence, through a structured program, and at the level of a student’s real ability.

But I want to get there by way of a parable.

The Light in the Cave

A few years ago, I travelled with my family to New Zealand. We decided to spend a few hours at the Te Anau caves, near the south-western tip of the South Island.

Every year, people flock there in their tens of thousands not so much for the caves – although they’re stunning – but for the glow-worms. Like a scene from The Phantom of the Opera, you step into a barge that glides silently through the water, shrouded by the subterranean darkness. Then you look up, and you’re in a grotto, and all you can see are thousands upon thousands of tiny blue pin-points of light.

Now I’m an engineer – and the author of the Finkel Review of the National Electricity Market. It’s hard to take off your hats when you’re on holiday. So when I looked at those lights, I thought to myself: what a brilliant mechanism for the efficient conversion of chemical energy into light energy!

It works like this: glow-worms live on mosquitoes and midges. To catch them, they dangle an invisible web of silken threads and switch on their lights. The light confounds the prey, then the silk entangles the victims. And the victims provide the energy to keep the lights on. Genius. So that’s what I saw in the cave: engineering inspiration.

Then there’s my wife, a life scientist. She can tell you that glow-worms are found only in Australia and New Zealand. And she’s also the very recently retired editor of Cosmos magazine. So she knows a lot about the natural phenomenon of bioluminescence.

The light in the cave in New Zealand comes from glow-worms. from www.shutterstock.com

Today, we can isolate the luminescent and fluorescent proteins in creatures like glow-worms and jellyfish. And we use gene editing techniques to modify – for example – the neurons in a fruit fly, so they flash in different colours depending on the level of electrical activity.

That means we can take images of complex structures like the brain in glorious technicolour. We move ever closer to answers to the cruellest conditions: dementia, motor neuron disease, schizophrenia. So that’s my wife’s perspective: great science, great pictures, and great material for Cosmos.

Then there’s my older son, Victor. He’s a management consultant. He deeply respects the Kiwi capacity to monetise what is, when you think about it, colonies of fungus gnats living on mosquitoes in a cave. And my younger son, Alex. He’s a software engineer who appreciates the way the tour operator keeps iterating and improving the experience.

And as I stepped off the barge I wondered, would an astronomer look up and see a living galaxy of stars? Would an airline pilot be reminded of the view from the cockpit, flying over a city at night? Would a historian be intrigued by all the myths and legends we’ve used to explain this phenomenon over the centuries?

I wish I’d had more time to ask. But just from my sample group of four, it was clear: every one of us, with a grounding in a discipline, stepped off that boat with something distinctive to say. We’d seen the world in different patterns. And we’d imagined its possibilities in many forms.

That’s the parable of the Light in the Cave.

The importance of specialising in something

When I was a student the importance of actually specialising in something – mastering a discipline – was more or less assumed. We thought about the skills mix of our future society in the same way we imagined an orchestra. You want a broad mix of people who excel in a range of speciality fields.

Yes, we do want those people to be able to play together. And we want them to sound like an orchestra, not several dozen simultaneous solos.

That means – if you’ll excuse the pun – that every one of those musicians needs to have at least two strings to their bow: a primary discipline – the instrument, and a secondary discipline – orchestral performance. But they can’t master the secondary discipline without reaching a level of proficiency in their instruments first.

If you think you can, I challenge you to give a clarinet to a ten year old and enrol her on the same day into the school band. Now, that student could have a genuine passion and talent for music – but until she can manage her fingers, and the breathing, and read music, and produce a noise that isn’t a brain-splitting shriek – she’s got to knuckle down and practice. Solo. Focus on your discipline – then you’ll see your options expand.

An orchestra shouldn’t sound like several dozen simultaneous solos. Paul Miller/AAP

And I internalised that logic. I now understand that a discipline is like a ladder. You have to put in the effort to climb it, step by step, with structure and sequence, accepting the guidance of your teachers. Learn the principle. Do the practice. Apply the skills. Repeat.

In particular, that’s the approach my parents and teachers took to my mathematical education. They didn’t leave it to me to decide. Of course, they didn’t know what I might one day want to do at university. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at university!

But right from the beginning, they knew maths was likely to be extremely important, and mastering it would maximise my choices. So they made sure I worked at it until I didn’t have to work at it – starting with the times table.

At first, I had to stop and think – all the time. It was tedious. But I wanted to do well. That made me determined. And soon enough I could see “11 times 12” or “nine squared” and the answer just sprang up in my mind unbidden, so that I wasn’t even conscious my brain was doing any work.

By the time I got to university I had reached a level of proficiency that allowed me to devote all my mental energy to mastering engineering. Again, I worked at it. I became an incurable engineer just like I’d become a human calculator: rung by rung, climbing the ladder.

The next step for me was setting up a company to commercialise a medical research tool I’d developed in the course of my study. I was uncertain of many things in my life at that time, including my bank balance, because there were many days when I was too nervous to look at it. But at least when it came to hiring, I knew exactly what was required. Discipline experts who could work together – not generalists who thought the same.

Since that time, I’ve seen a lot of teams, in business and in research, and I’ve sat on a lot of boards. I would still build my company exactly the same way.

Learn the principle. Practice. Apply the skills. Repeat. from www.shutterstock.com

I now have the life experience to confirm the wider application of the golden rule: yes, you will go badly astray if you pick ten people who collectively specialise in nothing at all. And I worry that we, as a nation, will go the same way, if we take away from the next generation of workers the disciplinary ladders that we climbed ourselves. In short: if we raise a generation who come out of the glow-worm cave perhaps ready to talk – but with nothing distinctive to say.

The future is uncertain

Why would we take that route? There are any number of rationales presented, and usually, by thoughtful people with the very best of intentions.

Don’t encourage students to limit themselves to a discipline, they say. Encourage everyone to be a capable generalist instead. Teamwork! Emotional intelligence! Public speaking! Creative thinking! That’s what will make them adaptable, so that’s what we ought to teach. And let students acquire those generic skill sets by following their passions.

Maximising choice

What does that look like in practice? It means putting the expectation on teenagers to pick from over a hundred different courses available to them in years 11 and 12. At the same time, training their minds on the importance of graduating with the highest possible ATAR, on the understanding the higher the number, the wider the choice. And giving them minimal guidance on the discipline-specific knowledge they might actually need to do well in a particular degree.

Yes, I am thinking in particular here about the removal of prerequisites from university course guides. And most of all, I am thinking of the messages we give to students about the importance of focus and mastery in maths.

Why do I focus on mathematics? Partly, because it’s a skill set that’s fundamental to science, to commerce, to economics, to medicine, to engineering, to geography, to architecture, to IT. And partly, because it’s the textbook example of why you need to learn things in sequence through hard work, with the guidance of an expert teacher – and the very clear message from schools that it’s a priority.

You can’t just trust your passions to help you meander through it. So it’s particularly vulnerable when we shift the focus from hard content to soft skills.

We have the year 11 and 12 course enrolment data to confirm it. These show a 20 year decline in the proportion of students taking intermediate and advanced maths at year 12. And it’s worse for girls. In 2016, just 7% of female year 12 students took advanced maths compared with 12% of male students.

Even the Chief Scientist had to practice times tables until proficient. from www.shutterstock.com

We also have a recent study from Western Australia. The heads of the maths departments in 50 high schools were surveyed on the reasons why students were turning away in droves from their more advanced maths classes.

And the three stand-out reasons were exactly what I’ve heard, and I’m sure you’ve heard, from teachers all over the country:

1. it’s not required for entry to university

2. other courses are easier

3. everyone says you can maximise your ATAR – and thereby, your choices – if you just drop down a level in maths.

The logic is beguiling – especially when it’s coupled with the message that the future is all about the soft skills.

The value of prerequisites

But we also know that the logic is false – because we know what happens to those students who opt for easier courses with more soft skill components in school. They arrive at university and discover they’re in the same unprepared position as the ten-year-old holding a clarinet in her hand for the first time the same day she was enrolled in the school band. They’ve got to grapple with a discipline like science, commerce, or architecture while simultaneously trying to fill the maths gap.

And at that stage, what choice do they have? They can drop out of university. They can find another course – after drawing a cross through all the courses involving maths. Or they can struggle through and find themselves at the end of the degree, competing for a job with students who were better prepared and thriving from day one.

Consider the data compiled by the University of Sydney, and presented this year. Students who took only elementary maths for the Higher School Certificate (HSC) were twice as likely to fail both first year biology and first year chemistry, compared to those who opted for intermediate or advanced maths.

Another study conducted at Western Sydney University in 2009 looked at first year university mathematics. Every one of the students who entered with advanced maths passed. 77% of those with only elementary maths failed. That’s four out of five, failed.

And yet cohort after cohort of school leavers keeps repeating the pattern, and we continue to allow it – even encourage it. Where is the duty of care?

We have another paper from the University of Sydney, published in 2013. Even at an institution with high ATAR requirements, 9% of students in science degrees had no mathematics study in senior secondary years, and 17% had only elementary mathematics, with no calculus. Fewer than half of the students in science degrees met the “assumed knowledge” of advanced maths to enrol in the first year differential calculus unit.

And the same study confirmed, once again, that higher levels of mathematics taken for the HSC are strong predictors of success in first year science, as well as first year maths.

Removing prerequisite courses for entry to university does students a disservice – they’re more likely to drop out of or fail first year university maths. QUT/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Now if you were a teenager in the UK, and you wanted to study at one of the elite universities – called the Russell Group – you would open up the group’s annual guide. There you would see, very clearly stated, what subjects are essential for entry into every university course, and which are useful. For example, students thinking of engineering would learn that advanced level maths is essential.

Discipline-based courses like maths, English, physics, biology, chemistry, geography and history are identified as “facilitating subjects” – the subjects most likely to be required or preferred for entry. Generic courses like critical thinking and general studies are less important and, quote, “usually better taken only as an extra”. So the message is very clear: generic courses cut your choices.

For some Australian universities, and some courses, intermediate or advanced mathematics might still be explicitly required – but the number of those institutions and courses has dwindled. Some have replaced “prerequisite” with “assumed knowledge”.

They are not the same. The word “prerequisite” means the subject is compulsory. The phrase “assumed knowledge” means the subject is nice to have. There is no possible way in English to interpret them to mean the same. It’s not clear to me why the universities even mention “assumed knowledge” if there is no formal requirement for students to have done the preparatory courses.

On the evidence from the University of Sydney, perhaps it might be more accurate to replace the phrase “assumed knowledge” with a longer phrase, “you will not comprehend or pass this course unless you take this subject but the choice is yours”.

We can do better

I believe we can do better. We have to do better than mixed signals. We have to get across the message maximising your choices is not the same as maximising your ATAR. And we have to ensure that the ladders to opportunity – the disciplines – are strong.

Mastering a discipline is mastering your destiny. So let’s ensure all our students come out of the glow-worm cave with something distinctive to say.

This article is an edited extract of a keynote speech delivered at the 5th International STEM in Education Conference on Wednesday 21 November 2018.

– ref. Finkel: students, focus on your discipline then you’ll see your options expand – http://theconversation.com/finkel-students-focus-on-your-discipline-then-youll-see-your-options-expand-107440

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tan Yigitcanlar, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Development, Queensland University of Technology

Many places around the world claim to be a “smart city”, but what that means is often unclear. A smart city is widely seen as an urban area that uses technology to enhance performance and the quality of its services. In other words, it’s a happy marriage of technology and the city.

Before we look at what is being planned in Australia and what is being done overseas, an important question is: How smart are our cities now? The answer enables our cities to benchmark where we are now and then track progress over time. We recently conducted a study to evaluate the smartness of all local government areas in Queensland.

Queensland and Australian cities are responding to a global trend, with the Australian government releasing a Smart Cities Plan in 2016.

Read more: Smart Cities Plan offers signs of hope, but are Turnbull and Taylor just dreamin’?

A snapshot of Australian initiatives in 2017 revealed over a dozen local governments had strongly embraced the smart city agenda. A couple of dozen are finalising strategies. More than 100 are considering undertaking a smart city journey.

Smart city has become a global city planning movement and received enormous policy and media attention. Well over 250 smart city projects are under way in 178 cities around the world.

India alone hosts 100 of those initiatives. Songdo in South Korea is recognised as the most advanced smart city in the making.

Read more: Early experiments show a smart city plan should start with people first

Read more: Smart or dumb? The real impact of India’s proposal to build 100 smart cities

The focus of smart city projects is to increase their city’s “smartness” through advanced technologies such as sensors, internet of things, data analytics, and networks. However, technology adoption alone does not make an urban area smart. A city needs a healthy mix of human, social, infrastructural, cultural, environmental, financial, knowledge, symbolic and relational assets or capital to be smart.

Taking a holistic view of smart cities helps us understand what is sustainable over time and what is not. An example of a holistic smart city framework is shown below.

Sustainable smart city conceptual framework. Authors’ own work

Measuring urban smartness performance

Local governments across the country have started to develop, or search for ways to develop, smart city strategies and solutions. Our research in Queensland based its analysis on four smart city indicator categories and 16 smartness indicators. The table below shows these.

Indicators of the assessment framework. Authors’ own work

We then categorised the smartness levels of the 78 local government areas in the three performance clusters: leading, following, and developing.

The study results revealed a mixed performance across Queensland. The figure below shows this, with higher smart city performance in metropolitan Southeast Queensland and some major regional urban centres.

Of 78 local government areas, only ten stood out as high performing. These are: Brisbane, Sunshine Coast, Cairns, Logan, Ipswich, Townsville, Moreton Bay, Gold Coast, Noosa and Scenic Rim.

Performance of local government areas, with the ten leading areas shown in green. Authors’ own work

The performances of these cities differ significantly in the four dimensional measures considered. These are:

• productivity and innovation
• liveability and well-being
• sustainability and accessibility
• governance and planning.

In general, Queensland local government areas perform more strongly in liveability and well-being, and governance and planning. Performance is rather weak across the state in productivity and innovation, and sustainability and accessibility.

Where is Queensland doing well, and why?

We can draw some insights from the findings. For example, good performances on liveability and well-being might be a result of relatively positive health, safety, housing and social conditions. A cost-of-living study found that Queensland is the most affordable Australian state when it comes to everyday expenses including rent, fuel, groceries, transport, utilities and education.

Similarly, the performance on governance and planning is relatively high across the state. This is most likely due to effective strategic development planning practice.

In some local governments, the policy focus includes smart city strategies. For example, about 15 cities in Queensland have recently developed their smart city strategies. Some have already incorporated these in their planning and development mechanisms. Brisbane, Ipswich, Sunshine Coast and Townsville are among those.

And why the struggle on other measures?

The study identified barriers to achieving urban smartness in Queensland.

The poor performance on productivity and innovation indicators may be a result of the state not being a notable contributor to the global knowledge and innovation economy. Fostering, attracting and retaining innovation industries and talented knowledge workers has been a major challenge for all urban localities in Queensland. State government efforts to advance Queensland in the global knowledge and innovation economy need sustained reinforcement to achieve this goal.

The weaker performance on sustainability and accessibility indicators relates to the lower level of adoption of sustainable solutions in energy, buildings, commuting and vehicles. While investing in technology is one approach to these challenges, societal behavioural change is also required.

Recent studies of Australian and UK cities revealed that technology uptake by citizens and cities does not necessarily lead to sustainable commuting patterns and urban outcomes. Hence, searching for solutions beyond technology adoption is critical for cities — particularly when the evident risks of climate change in Queensland are considered.

Ways to improve urban smartness

We found major regional disparities in Queensland. Along with much-needed state government investment and support, perhaps an expansion of Commonwealth funding and programs, particularly to regional cities, could help narrow the gap. The diagram below illustrates the current gap in the four performance categories.

Comparison of performance categories. Authors’ own work

The Commonwealth City Deals and Smart Cities and Suburbs programs might be an opportunity to consolidate existing smart city efforts in Queensland’s top-performing cities.

We argue that a smart city should be seen as more than a marriage of technology and the city. Firstly, the technocentric approach takes its toll on the environment.

Read more: Technology is making cities ‘smart’, but it’s also costing the environment

Secondly, it prioritises technology-based quick fixes, while neglecting deeper solutions that have nothing to do with the technology.

We advocate a smart city to be seen as:

an urban locality functioning as a healthy system of systems with sustainable and balanced practices of economic, societal, environmental and governance activities generating desired outcomes and futures for all humans and non-humans.

There is a demonstrated need for smart city projects to generate a range of desired outcomes – economic, societal, environmental and governance – in a sustainable, balanced and inclusive manner. An integrated, holistic approach is the way forward in Queensland and across Australia.

Read more: How does a city get to be ‘smart’? This is how Tel Aviv did it

– ref. Just how ‘city smart’ are local governments in Queensland? – http://theconversation.com/just-how-city-smart-are-local-governments-in-queensland-106601

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Veen, Lecturer (Academic Fellow) in Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney

Had Foodora’s Australian operations not already gone into voluntary administration, the November 16 decision of the Fair Work Commission might well have finished the food-delivery company off.

The commission upheld former courier Josh Klooger’s unfair dismissal complaint against Foodora. In doing so, it found Foodora had incorrectly classified him as an independent contractor, rather than an employee.

By treating workers as independent contractors, “gig economy” companies such as Foodora have avoided the cost of paying employee entitlements such as annual leave, sick leave and superannuation. The commission’s ruling made Foodora liable for paying such entitlements.

So does the ruling put other gig-economy companies on notice that they too will have to pay for employee entitlements? The short answer is no. It’s complicated because the decision reflects a range of reasons specific to Foodora’s operations.

Foodora-branded uniforms and equipment indicated a level of control akin to that of an employer over an employee. Andrea Delbo/Shutterstock.com

But the Foodora case still might have some significant ramifications for the future of the gig economy – based on a not-yet-public ruling by the Australian Tax Office.

Context matters

The Fair Work Commission’s decision about Klooger’s relationship with Foodora can be contrasted to its decision that Uber drivers are contractors not employees.

Labour law experts have pointed to the exceptional circumstances of the Foodora case. These include the control the company exercised over Klooger. Foodora determined, for example, when he had to start and finish his shifts. It also required all couriers to wear a uniform and use Foodora-branded equipment.

Because these factors were specific to Foodora, there is no certainty the commission would rule that other gig-economy workers classified as independent contractors should be treated as employees.

Read more: Finance drives everything — including your insecurity at work

As we have previously suggested, this may even result in other platforms creating greater arm’s-length relationships with workers – both contractually and by reducing work-related support.

Taxation and the gig economy

Although the direct implications of the Fair Work decision for other platform companies are limited, Foodora’s demise is significant.

Its voluntary administration process has revealed the outcome of an Australian Taxation Office determination that could be relevant to other gig companies.

We know this because of Foodora’s administrator’s report to creditors. The report notes ongoing warnings from the tax office to Foodora. Chief among the tax office’s concerns was that Foodora should have been collecting PAYG income tax and making superannuation contributions. It was on this basis that the administrator agreed Foodora had probably wrongly classified its riders as independent contractors.

It is the tax office’s determination that could have the most far-reaching consequences for other platforms operating in Australia.

The determination and reasons for it are not yet in the public domain – due to “obligations of confidentiality”. We can only speculate about the underlying rationale. However, based on existing case law and tax compliance priorities, we suggest two critical aspects potentially expose other platforms’ operational models to the tax office’s compliance regime.

The first relates to the platform setting rates of pay and creating invoices on behalf of workers, which the platform then pays. Prior tax office actions suggest recipient-created tax invoices lead to questions about the true nature of the contracting relationship. Foodora had such a mechanism. Deliveroo and Uber Eats have something similar.

The second is the demand that workers provide an Australian Business Number (ABN) and what this means for the contracting relationship. The tax office is quite clear the ABN does not change the fundamental employment relationship.

This means the ATO is likely to scrutinise the particular arrangements a platform uses to classify workers as contractors.

Platforms and profitability

That Foodora went into administration before the ATO and Fair Work rulings could bite tells its own story about the platform economy.

Despite the mushrooming of different platforms across a range of sectors – from ride sharing to food delivery, hospitality and care work – serious questions remain about the viability and sustainability of platform companies. Uber, for example, lost US$4.5 billion globally in 2017.

In an environment where platforms ruthlessly compete for market share, profitability remains a key challenge.

Read more: How to stop workers being exploited in the gig economy

Author Nick Srnicek in his book Platform Economy warns that the ‘network effects’ associated with platform capitalism may lead to monopolies. This is the result of users flocking to the most used platforms while others fail.

Foodora may just be one of the first victims of increased market concentration in the food-delivery industry. Its demise reflects the evolving nature of the platform economy in Australia.

Given the continued popularity of the platform economy with consumers it is unlikely the above developments will spell the end of work organised and facilitated by online apps. However, this space remains fluid. There will be rulings on other platforms. There is talk of potential legal and regulatory reforms to better protect workers in the gig economy. The issues of employment status and rights will not be settled any time soon.

In the meantime platforms are incentivised to do whatever they can to avoid the costs of employment relationships as that increases their chances of benefiting from, rather than falling victim to, the drift towards monopolisation.

– ref. Redefining workers in the platform economy: lessons from the Foodora bunfight – http://theconversation.com/redefining-workers-in-the-platform-economy-lessons-from-the-foodora-bunfight-107369

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Antonia Pont, Senior lecturer, Deakin University

Kahlil Gibran (original spelling at birth “Khalil”) is a strange phenomenon of 20th Century letters and publishing. After Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Laozi, Gibran’s work from 1923, The Prophet, has made him the third most-sold poet of all time.

This slim volume of 26 prose poems has been translated into over 50 languages; its US edition alone has sold over 9 million copies. Its first printing sold out in a month, and later, during the 1960s, it was selling up to 5,000 copies a week.

Kahlil Gibran. Gibran Museum

It has seemingly been able to speak to various generations: from those experiencing the Depression, to the 1960s counter culture, into the 21st century. It continues to sell well today.

What is fascinating about the Gibran/Prophet phenomenon is the bile of critics in the West in relation to the work. Outside of English-speaking countries, the Lebanese-born Gibran attracts far less disdain. Professor Juan Cole, from the University of Michigan, has noted that Gibran’s writings in Arabic are in a very sophisticated style.

The midwife of the New Age

The Prophet is interesting for a number of reasons, not only for its ability to sell. It is written in an archaic style, recalling certain translations of the Bible (Gibran was intimate with both the Arabic and King James versions) and has an aphoristic quality that lends itself to citation — for weddings, funerals, courtships — and accessibility. There are at least two high schools named after its author and it was quoted in a eulogy given at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.

The Prophet declares no clear religious affiliation, while at the same time operating in a quasi-spiritual or inspirational register. Many might even class it in that category of writing known as “wisdom texts”.

Image of the The Prophet by Kahill Gibran. Allen Clive Patrick Duval/flickr

Gibran has been referred to as the midwife of the New Age, due to the role The Prophet played in opening a space for spiritual or personal counsel outside organised religion and its official texts. The Prophet appears to embrace all or any spiritual tradition (or at least to exclude none explicitly), and this vagueness or openness (depending on one’s reading) may account for part of its widespread appeal.

The book, which presents advice on a number of core aspects of being human — such as love, parenting, friendship, Good and Evil, and so on — employs a simple narrative device.

An exiled man, Almustafa, who has been living abroad for 12 years, sees the ship that will carry him back “to the isle of his birth” approaching. Filled with grief at his imminent departure, the townspeople gather and beseech him to give them words of wisdom to ease their sorrow:

In your aloneness you have watched with our days, and in your wakefulness you have listened to the weeping and laughter of our sleep.
Now therefore disclose us to ourselves, and tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death.

Gibran himself had been in the US for 12 years at the time of writing and, it could be argued, was in a kind of exile from Lebanon, the country of his own birth.

The Prophet offers contemplations on marriage:

… stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

On children:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts
for they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

And pain:

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart must stand in the sun, so we must know your pain.

The woman behind the poet

Biographers have emphasised Gibran’s tendency to pretension, to self-aggrandising, to fictionalising his own history, and his relations with women such as his sister, Marianna (who supported him with menial work), and especially his patron and confidante, Mary Haskell.

The latter remained devoted to him her entire life and also financed much of his lifestyle, enabling his artistic projects up until and beyond his success with The Prophet. Haskell had a penchant for enabling the less fortunate (although she herself was not wealthy), and Gibran was not her first project of this kind.

She continued to edit his work discreetly well into her own marriage, to which she had resigned herself after their engagement stalled. Gibran had a tendency to get involved, as Joan Acocella writes in her detailed New Yorker piece, with older women who could be useful to him.

Kahlil Gibran, Nude Figures Lying at the Foot of a Mountain by a Lake, (1923-1931), Watercolour. © Gibran Museum

He was a beautiful “oriental” young man, who survived, after a childhood in the ghettos of Boston’s South End from age 12, by hoisting himself, or finding himself flung, into more privileged circles thanks to his looks, his talent (he could paint and write) and his “mysterious” appeal of being the “other”.

Anglo-Americans could, in other words, accessorise with him. And they did. He was “discovered” by Fred Holland Day, a teacher, who dabbled in the worlds of Blavatsky and the occultism that was de jour, and who liked to photograph young men, both in exotic garments and out.

In Gibran’s case, since evidence suggests that he evaded a sexual relation with Haskell, he at least did not leave her with the financial burden of children (not uncommon in his time). He ended his life primarily close to his sole-remaining sibling, Marianna and his secretary, and later biographer, Barbara Young.

Due to the extensive number of edits that Haskell offered on most of Gibran’s works across his career (including his first publication, a short poem), it is almost certain that “his” output — like many artistic achievements — might be more accurately deemed a collaboration. The enduring convention of signing works with a singular name has tended to result in the eclipsing of efforts of crucial contributors, often women.

Kahlil Gibran, Pain (1923), Illustration for The Prophet, Watercolour. © Gibran Museum

Death and dualism

Despite the indifference of Western critics to Gibran’s work, Gibran’s credentials were not shoddy; he was a trained artist (at the Académie Julian) had his first exhibition at 21, and produced over 700 works in his lifetime, including portraits of Yeats, Jung and Rodin.

Gibran died young, at age 48, from cirrhosis of the liver, due to a propensity for large quantities of arak, supplied to him by his sister, Marianna. One wonders whether Gibran was able to find any solace in his own words in his final days of frailty.

In The Prophet, he (and, we could speculate, Haskell) write(s):

Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity … For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

Gibran has been criticised for his style of playing confoundingly but reassuringly on opposites, which, some argue, can mean anything. (One must note, however, that this unsettling of binary structures is a feature of enduring wisdom texts such as the Tao Te Ching, as well as recalling writings of Sufism and other traditions.)

Furthermore, for the son of destitute immigrants, who rose to fame via his beauty, talent and a blind conviction of his own specialness (which he nourished along with a small obsession with Jesus Christ, the subject of a later, and arguably better work), perhaps life had presented to him its own stark dualities: abjection/acclaim; poverty/wealth; indifference/desire; disdain/popularity; exoticism/racism.

Momentary respite

Kahlil Gibran, The Face of Almustafa (1923) (Frontispiece for The Prophet), Charcoal. © Gibran Museum

For someone who undoubtedly “made it” (according to the grim criteria of the New World), Gibran may well have had more than a kernel of wisdom and know-how for those trying to survive its heartless, capricious climes. The fact is that millions of people have found momentary respite in his shifting, evocative words.

In a century where authority figures – whether political or representing various spiritual traditions – have seemed not only to fail their flocks, but to have actively betrayed them, Gibran’s perhaps fuzzy but lyrical advice has come to fill a vacuum of integrity and leadership. We need not badger readers of this work (who included, incidentally, the likes of John Lennon and David Bowie) who might use it to express their love, notate their grief, or ease their existential terrors.

The Prophet has worked as a widespread balm, as effectively as anything quick and concise can. Cheaper than an ongoing tithe to pharmaceutical companies, at $8.55, the going rate at Book Depository, it neither incites hatred, nor violence, nor religious divisiveness.

It says the kinds of things that we sometimes wish a trusted other might say to us, to calm us down. In these aggravated times, perhaps we can appreciate its sheer benignity and leave its boggling success be.

The exhibition, Kahlil Gibran: The Garden of the Prophet, opens at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, on November 28.

– ref. Guide To The Classics: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran – http://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-prophet-by-kahlil-gibran-107274

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Webb, Clinical Lecturer and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney

A range of shirts, pants, socks and accessories sold in specialist camping and fishing retailers claim to protect against mosquito bites for various periods.

In regions experiencing a high risk of mosquito-borne disease, insecticide treated school uniforms have been used to help provide extra protection for students.

During the 2016 outbreak of Zika virus in South America, some countries issued insecticide-treated uniforms to athletes travelling to the Olympic Games.

Some academics have even suggested fashion designers be encouraged to design attractive and innovative “mosquito-proof” clothing.

Read more: The best (and worst) ways to beat mosquito bites

But while the technology has promise, commercially available mosquito-repellent clothing isn’t the answer to all our mozzie problems.

Some items of clothing might offer some protection from mosquito bites, but it’s unclear if they offer enough protection to reduce the risk of disease. And you’ll still need to use repellent on those uncovered body parts.

First came mosquito-proof beds

Bed nets have been used to create a barrier between people and biting mosquitoes for centuries. This was long before we discovered mosquitoes transmitted pathogens that cause fatal and debilitating diseases such as malaria. Preventing nuisance-biting and buzzing was reason alone to sleep under netting.

Bed nets have turned out to be a valuable tool in reducing malaria in many parts of the world. And they offer better protection if you add insecticides.

The insecticide of choice is usually permethrin. This and other closely related synthetic pyrethroids are commonly used for pest control and have been assessed as safe for use by the United States Environmental Protection Authority, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority and other regulatory bodies.

Read more: A vaccine that could block mosquitoes from transmitting malaria

New technologies have also allowed for the development of long-lasting insecticidal bed nets, offering extended protection against mosquito bites, perhaps up to three years, even with repeated washing.

Mosquito repellent clothing

Innovations in clothing that prevent insect bites have primarily come from the United States military. Mosquito-borne disease is a major concern for military around the globe. Much research funding has been invested in strategies to provide the best protection for personnel.

Traditional insect repellents, such as DEET or picaridin, are applied to the skin to prevent mosquitoes from landing and biting.

While permethrin will repel some mosquitoes, treated clothing most effectively works by killing the mosquitoes landing and trying to bite through the fabric.

Clothing treated with permethrin has been shown to protect against mosquitoes and ticks, as well as other biting insects and mites. For these studies, clothing was generally soaked in solutions or sprayed with insecticides to ensure adequate protection.

Clothing made from insecticide impregnated fabrics may help reduce mosquito bites. Cameron Webb (NSW Health Pathology)

Fabrics factory-treated with insecticides, as used by many military forces, are purported to provide more effective protection. But while some studies suggest clothing made from these fabrics provide protection even after multiple washes, others suggest the “factory-treated” fabrics don’t provide greater levels of protection than “do it yourself” versions.

Overall, the current evidence suggests insecticide-treated clothing may reduce the number of mosquito bites you get, but it doesn’t offer full protection.

More research is needed to determine if insecticide-treated clothing can prevent or reduce rates of mosquito-borne disease.

Better labelling and regulation

All products that claim to provide protection from insect bites must be registered with the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. This includes sprays, creams and roll-on formulations of repellents.

Anything labelled as “insect repelling”, including insecticide treated clothing, requires registration. Clothing marketed as simply “protective” (such as hats with netting) doesn’t. This approach reflects the requirements of the US EPA.

Read more: Curious Kids: When we get bitten by a mosquito, why does it itch so much?

If you’re shopping for insect-repellent clothing, check the label to see if it states that it is registered by the APVMA. You should see a registration number and the insecticide used in the fabric clearly displayed on the clothing’s tag.

While some products will be registered, there are still some concerns about how the efficacy of mosquito bite protection is assessed.

There is likely to be growing demand for these types of products and experts are calling for internationally accepted guidelines to test these products. Similar guidelines exist for topical repellents.

Finally, keep in mind that while various forms of insecticide-treated clothing will help reduce the number of mosquito bites, they won’t provide a halo of bite-free protection around your whole body.

Remember to apply a topical insect repellent to exposed areas of skin, such as hands and face, to ensure you’re adequately protected from mosquito bites.

– ref. Mozzie repellent clothing might stop some bites but you’ll still need a cream or spray – http://theconversation.com/mozzie-repellent-clothing-might-stop-some-bites-but-youll-still-need-a-cream-or-spray-107266

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

Terrorism and crime played a huge part in the Victorian state election campaign leading up to polling day on November 24.

The Liberal-National opposition has been campaigning on it all year, helped along by its colleagues in the federal government. At one point, federal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said people in Melbourne were so terrified of the crime wave that they were frightened to go out to dinner.

His targets were gangs of young men, singled out as African.

Read more: Australian media are playing a dangerous game using racism as currency

Then three events occurred during the election campaign itself that gave impetus to the law and order issue.

On November 9, a widely loved café owner, Sisto Malaspina, was stabbed to death in Bourke Street and two other men received serious knife injuries before police shot their assailant, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali.

On November 13, James Gargasoulas was convicted on six counts of murder arising from his running down pedestrians by driving a stolen car along the footpath in Bourke Street in January 2017.

And on November 20, three men were arrested and later charged with planning a terrorist attack in Melbourne, after widely publicised police raids across the city’s northern and western suburbs.

Media reporting on all these incidents raises a difficult question: in what circumstances is it ethically justifiable to include information about a perpetrator’s ethnicity or religion?

Australia’s only national code of ethics for journalists is that promulgated by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). Clause 2 of that code says:

Do not place unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics, including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family relationships, religious belief, or physical or intellectual disability.

The key word, of course, is “unnecessary”. This raises the question: What constitutes necessity?

The standard ethical answer is based on a test of relevance: How relevant to the story is someone’s personal characteristics?

The rationale is that unnecessary references to these personal attributes can incite unjustified prejudice against whole groups of people, as well as individuals.

In the three high-profile cases mentioned here, much was made of Shire Ali’s ethnicity and religion, and of the ethnicity of the three men arrested on terrorism charges. By contrast, very little was made of the ethnicity or religion of Gargasoulas.

Yet all committed – or were alleged to be preparing for – acts of extreme violence against innocent people. Material on the ethnicity of all of them was available to the media. So were the proclaimed religious beliefs of Shire Ali and Gargasoulas.

Gargasoulas had claimed to be “the saviour” and in one of his early court hearings spoke about the Bible and the Koran, yelling that Aboriginal law was identical to Muslim law.

It was reported that he had posted on Facebook a series of rantings about God, Satan, heaven and hell, and claimed to be “Greek Islamic Kurdish”.

Yet media characterisations of him centred on his history of drug abuse, violence and psychological instability.

By contrast, the characterisation of Shire Ali centred on his religion and ethnicity. For example, The Weekend Australian’s report of the Bourke Street attacks stated that police would investigate whether Shire Ali had links to Islamic extremism and radicalised members of the Somali community.

Without waiting for the outcome of that investigation, however, the newspaper put a headline on the story saying it was an attack by “violent Islam”.

A week later, The Weekend Australian also carried an interview with Shire Ali’s father-in-law, who said he would never have allowed his daughter to marry a jihadist. He was quoted as saying:

We hate extremists. Islam is not about terrorism and killing people.

Other reports described Shire Ali as Somalia-born. On what we know about his family’s history, he would have arrived in Australia somewhere between the ages of two and 11, and he was an Australian citizen.

Further reports referred to his “delusional” mental state and the fact that his wife had recently left him. Yet the characterisation of him remained fixed on his ethnicity and religion.

The three men arrested on November 20 were reported to be Australians of Turkish descent whose passports had been cancelled earlier this year. Hanifi Halis and brothers Samed and Ertunc Eriklioglu are alleged to have been engaged in a terrorism plot inspired, but not directed, by Islamic State.

What the media report about major crimes is almost entirely dependent on the information provided by the authorities – mainly police and intelligence services.

How the media frame these events tends to follow closely the way that authorities frame those events.

Read more: Manchester and the media: what coverage of the terrorist attack tells us about ourselves

The pattern that emerges from the three cases described here is that where the authorities frame an atrocity as a crime, ethnicity and religion play little, if any, part in the way the perpetrator is characterised.

But where the atrocity is framed as terrorism, ethnicity and religion play a large part in the way the perpetrator is characterised.

Yet the relevance of ethnicity and religion to a story about terrorism is not always obvious.

There was strong evidence that Shire Ali was severely mentally ill and that whatever his record suggested about terrorism being his motive – including an abortive attempt to go to Syria in 2015 – it may well have been a consequence of his disordered mind.

In the case of the three men arrested on November 20, it is not clear yet what the relevance of their Turkish ethnicity might be.

It is unfair to blame the media for reporting what the authorities say in the immediate aftermath of big breaking news stories. At that point, who knows what is relevant and what is not?

At the same time, the media have an ethical obligation to at least question the authorities about the relevance of statements about ethnicity, religion or other personal attributes.

It might elicit more newsworthy information, and it would certainly help the media make fairer decisions about how to characterise perpetrators.

Fairer decisions would not only ensure that the public was better informed, but would also reduce the risk of inciting prejudice, provide an antidote to the political exploitation that often follows a shocking crime and, where mental illness is clearly implicated, shift political attention to that issue.

– ref. In crime reporting, we should ask better questions about the relevance of religion and ethnicity – http://theconversation.com/in-crime-reporting-we-should-ask-better-questions-about-the-relevance-of-religion-and-ethnicity-107421

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dimitri Perrin, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

Gene editing technology is revolutionising biology – and now twin human baby girls may be a living part of this story.

Today several media outlets report that a team of scientists in China has used CRISPR to modify the DNA of healthy human embryos to genetically “vaccinate” against HIV infection.

This is the first reported case of humans born with CRISPR-modifed DNA.

Read more: What is CRISPR gene editing, and how does it work?

The molecular scissors known as CRISPR (CRISPR/cas9 in full) allow scientists to modify DNA with high precision and greater ease than previous technologies. There are high hopes these molecular scissors may aid in curing diseases such as cancer or others conditions – but scientists around the world had agreed careful regulation was required before the technology was used in humans.

Now with this news, all eyes will be on the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing taking place this week in Hong Kong. This meeting will hopefully lead to a renewed consensus for tighter control of CRISPR editing in human embryos.

How has the babies’ genome been modified?

According to several reports, researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen (China) have created the first gene-edited babies.

It’s important to note here the science has not been posted on a preprint server or published in a peer-reviewed journal – the usual standard applied to confirm new research is valid and ethically sound. However, Chinese medical documents posted online support the notion that a trial had been set up, and the lead scientist involved (He Jiankui) has made a video statement.

Scientist He Jiankui of Shenzhen says he said he has altered DNA in human embryos, and that healthy twin girls are now at home with their parents.

In China the prevalence of HIV infection is high, and access to health care a serious public health concern. According to the medical document published online, the study recruited HIV-positive men with HIV-negative female partners, and who were willing to participate in an IVF program and allow embryos to be edited with CRISPR.

The team led by Jiankui He focused on removing a gene called CCR5, critical for the HIV virus to enter into the cells. The goal was to genetically “vaccinate” the babies against HIV infection. They modified the DNA of the embryos, verified the molecular scissors were truly on target and implanted edited embryos in the mother’s body.

Reports indicate that gene-edited twin girls have now been born. In one of the twins both copies of the CCR5 gene are said to be modified, and for the other one only one copy is modified.

We have little to no details on how this was performed and we must take these reports with a lot of caution.

Serious ethical concerns

CRISPR is easier to use and more precise than previous methods, but it is not a perfect technology. It can lead to unintended consequences, such as affecting others genes (“off-target” effects) or making multiple modifications of the gene we are aiming to modify (“on-target” effects). There is an ongoing discussion as to how widespread “off target” and “on-targets” modifications are, and what the unintended consequences of these effects may be.

Modifying embryos may have lasting consequences: not only would affected children have had their genome modified, but their future offspring could also carry these genetic modifications. To date we do not know what the long term effects of CRISPR-modification of human DNA are.

Read more: World’s first gene-edited babies? Premature, dangerous and irresponsible

Given the massive, multi-generational implications of editing embryos, we argue it should only be considered in cases where the modification would cure an existing disease and for which no other, lower-risk solution is available and when potential side effects are known.

Controversially, in the study being discussed, the edit does not cure a pre-existing disease, and we already have existing alternatives to prevent HIV infection and limit its clinical progression to AIDS.

The reports fall in the grey area between attempts to cure diseases, and the dreaded “designer baby” scenario, where humans could be modified for benefits unrelated to health (potentially expanding to include intelligence, aesthetics and more).

An important, broader discussion is taking place

As soon as CRIPSR technology was widely available, it was a matter of when, rather than if, it would be used on humans. The first modification of human embryos was reported by another Chinese team in May 2015. Those embryos were not viable, but it sparked an intense debate about the ethics of such modifications.

Read more: Human embryo CRISPR advances science but let’s focus on ethics, not world firsts

This led to the the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Royal Society (RS), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM) coming together to organise an International Summit on Human Gene Editing in December 2015 in Washington, DC.

Editing human embryos was the topic discussed at that meeting. At the time, a published conclusion stated that:

it would be irresponsible to proceed with any clinical use of human embryos editing unless and until (i) the relevant safety and efficacy issues have been resolved, based on appropriate understanding and balancing of risks, potential benefits, and alternatives, and (ii) there is broad societal consensus about the appropriateness of the proposed application.

The committee also noted:

these criteria have not been met for any proposed clinical use: the safety issues have not yet been adequately explored; the cases of most compelling benefit are limited.

CRISPR pioneers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier rightly noted the need for a rational public discourse on the use of the technology. However, this rational debate can only take place if all scientists play their part and ensure that all experiments are done in the public interest.

In Australia human embryo editing for reproductive purpose is strictly prohibited.

A race for attention

Based on the information currently available, it is difficult not to consider this latest experiment as anything but an attempt to win a “race” and grab attention.

The Southern University of Science and Technology has now released a statement that it gave no permission to Jiankui He for his experiment, that he has been on leave since February, and that they believe the experiment violates academic ethics and academic norms.

Rice University has also opened an investigation into Michael Deem (a bioengineering professor at Rice and previous supervisor of He) and his possible role in the study.

Whether He’s claims are true or not, this whole situation is a disservice to the entire field of research, and to potential future recipients of CRISPR-based therapies.

– ref. Researcher claims CRISPR-edited twins are born. How will science respond? – http://theconversation.com/researcher-claims-crispr-edited-twins-are-born-how-will-science-respond-107693

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dimitri Perrin, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

Gene editing technology is revolutionising biology – and now twin human baby girls may be a living part of this story.

Today several media outlets report that a team of scientists in China has used CRISPR to modify the DNA of healthy human embryos to genetically “vaccinate” against HIV infection.

This is the first reported case of humans born with CRISPR-modifed DNA.

Read more: What is CRISPR gene editing, and how does it work?

The molecular scissors known as CRISPR (CRISPR/cas9 in full) allow scientists to modify DNA with high precision and greater ease than previous technologies. There are high hopes these molecular scissors may aid in curing diseases such as cancer or others conditions – but scientists around the world had agreed careful regulation was required before the technology was used in humans.

Now with this news, all eyes will be on the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing taking place this week in Hong Kong. This meeting will hopefully lead to a renewed consensus for tighter control of CRISPR editing in human embryos.

How has the babies’ genome been modified?

According to several reports, researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen (China) have created the first gene-edited babies.

It’s important to note here the science has not been posted on a preprint server or published in a peer-reviewed journal – the usual standard applied to confirm new research is valid and ethically sound. However, Chinese medical documents posted online support the notion that a trial had been set up, and the lead scientist involved (He Jiankui) has made a video statement.

Scientist He Jiankui of Shenzhen says he said he has altered DNA in human embryos, and that healthy twin girls are now at home with their parents.

In China the prevalence of HIV infection is high, and access to health care a serious public health concern. According to the medical document published online, the study recruited HIV-positive men with HIV-negative female partners, and who were willing to participate in an IVF program and allow embryos to be edited with CRISPR.

The team led by Jiankui He focused on removing a gene called CCR5, critical for the HIV virus to enter into the cells. The goal was to genetically “vaccinate” the babies against HIV infection. They modified the DNA of the embryos, verified the molecular scissors were truly on target and implanted edited embryos in the mother’s body.

Reports indicate that gene-edited twin girls have now been born. In one of the twins both copies of the CCR5 gene are said to be modified, and for the other one only one copy is modified.

We have little to no details on how this was performed and we must take these reports with a lot of caution.

Serious ethical concerns

CRISPR is easier to use and more precise than previous methods, but it is not a perfect technology. It can lead to unintended consequences, such as affecting others genes (“off-target” effects) or making multiple modifications of the gene we are aiming to modify (“on-target” effects). There is an ongoing discussion as to how widespread “off target” and “on-targets” modifications are, and what the unintended consequences of these effects may be.

Modifying embryos may have lasting consequences: not only would affected children have had their genome modified, but their future offspring could also carry these genetic modifications. To date we do not know what the long term effects of CRISPR-modification of human DNA are.

Read more: World’s first gene-edited babies? Premature, dangerous and irresponsible

Given the massive, multi-generational implications of editing embryos, we argue it should only be considered in cases where the modification would cure an existing disease and for which no other, lower-risk solution is available and when potential side effects are known.

Controversially, in the study being discussed, the edit does not cure a pre-existing disease, and we already have existing alternatives to prevent HIV infection and limit its clinical progression to AIDS.

The reports fall in the grey area between attempts to cure diseases, and the dreaded “designer baby” scenario, where humans could be modified for benefits unrelated to health (potentially expanding to include intelligence, aesthetics and more).

An important, broader discussion is taking place

As soon as CRIPSR technology was widely available, it was a matter of when, rather than if, it would be used on humans. The first modification of human embryos was reported by another Chinese team in May 2015. Those embryos were not viable, but it sparked an intense debate about the ethics of such modifications.

Read more: Human embryo CRISPR advances science but let’s focus on ethics, not world firsts

This led to the the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Royal Society (RS), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM) coming together to organise an International Summit on Human Gene Editing in December 2015 in Washington, DC.

Editing human embryos was the topic discussed at that meeting. At the time, a published conclusion stated that:

it would be irresponsible to proceed with any clinical use of human embryos editing unless and until (i) the relevant safety and efficacy issues have been resolved, based on appropriate understanding and balancing of risks, potential benefits, and alternatives, and (ii) there is broad societal consensus about the appropriateness of the proposed application.

The committee also noted:

these criteria have not been met for any proposed clinical use: the safety issues have not yet been adequately explored; the cases of most compelling benefit are limited.

CRISPR pioneers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier rightly noted the need for a rational public discourse on the use of the technology. However, this rational debate can only take place if all scientists play their part and ensure that all experiments are done in the public intere

In Australia human embryo editing for reproductive purpose is strictly prohibited.

A race for attention

Based on the information currently available, it is difficult not to consider this latest experiment as anything but an attempt to win a “race” and grab attention.

The Southern University of Science and Technology has now released a statement that it gave no permission to Jiankui He for his experiment, that he has been on leave since February, and that they believe the experiment violates academic ethics and academic norms.

Rice University has also opened an investigation into Michael Deem (a bioengineering professor at Rice and previous supervisor of He) and his possible role in the study.

Whether He’s claims are true or not, this whole situation is a disservice to the entire field of research, and to potential future recipients of CRISPR-based therapies.

– ref. Researcher claims CRIPSR-edited twins are born. How will science respond? – http://theconversation.com/researcher-claims-cripsr-edited-twins-are-born-how-will-science-respond-107693

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paulo de Souza, Science Leader – Cybernetics, CSIRO

It’s touchdown again on Mars, with NASA’s InSight probe due to land today. This latest mission will continue our exploration of much that is still unknown about the planet.

As seen from Earth, the big red dot in the night sky has certainly caught the attention of humans since we started contemplating the universe.

The first observations with telescopes gave us a much clearer picture of Mars, with the poles covered in ice and different tones of red and black in the tropics.

NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission should tell us more about the interior of Mars and how the planet formed.

Read more: Evidence of aliens? What to make of research and reporting on ‘Oumuamua, our visitor from space

Beware of Martians

Perhaps the most curious account of Mars came from the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. He observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars which he called “canali” in Italian, meaning “channels”.

Giovanni Schiaparelli’s map of Mars, compiled over the period 1877-1886. NASA/Flammarion, La Planète Mars

But the term was misinterpreted by some English-speakers as “canals”, which implied they were made by Martians.

Our love and fear relationship with Mars escalated to another level in 1938, when Orson Welles broadcast an all-too-real adaption of HG Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds.

The Halloween night broadcast of the invasion of Martians to Earth apparently lead some listeners in the United States to panic, as they took the fiction as a fact (a story told in the 1975 movie, The Night That Panicked America). How much panic is still open to question.

HG Wells’ 1898 novel has inspired more than a few Hollywood movies, television series and a musical telling since then, including Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie War of the Worlds.

The chances of anything coming from Mars.

Mars close up

The first close-up images from Mars came in 1965 with the Mariner 4 spacecraft flying by the planet, and then with Mariner 9 entering orbit in 1971.

Mariner 4 takes the first close-up image ever taken of Mars. NASA

Both spacecraft showed Mars as a cold, barren, desert-like world. Before these missions we had only seen Mars through telescopes, and the question of whether the planet was habitable (or inhabited) was still open.

I still remember when I was a child watching a TV program showing images of the Viking mission which landed two probes on Mars in 1976.

Instead of talking about our first successful spacecraft to land on Mars and sending us images and scientific data from the surface of another planet, the program talked for a long time about a feature that looked like a face of a man on the surface of Mars, and structures that resembled pyramids.

NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter spacecraft photographed this region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 Lander. The eroded rock resembles a human face near the centre of the image. NASA/JPL

Those images certainly affected me, and were key in my fascination for Mars and space in general.

The legacy of the Viking landers was mostly their first geochemical characterisation from the surface, and a detailed atmospheric composition analysis from Mars.

Viking results were fantastic in many ways, but disappointing too as they indicated a dry planet, full of primary rocks that would have transformed into minerals if water was present.

This colour image of the Martian surface was taken by Viking Lander 1, looking southwest, about 15 minutes before sunset. NASA/JPL

Pictures from the surface showed no signs of life – no signs of little bushes, a bit of moss on some rocks, or a green man smiling to the cameras.

In a way we lost our interest for Mars until it attacked us with meteorites.

Rocks from Mars

Rocks from planets and the Moon, and meteors, hold chemical hints of where they came from. So it’s possible to tell if a meteorite is from our Moon, from Mars, or from elsewhere.

A meteorite found in Antarctica (dubbed ALH84001) is one that scientists affirm came from Mars.

A 4.5 billion-year-old rock, labeled meteorite ALH84001, identified from Mars. NASA/JSC/Stanford University

Martian meteorites can be found on Earth because a big meteorite probably fell on Mars, and in the process ended up ejecting pieces of the surface into space.

Some were big enough to enter our atmosphere and be found later. ALH84001 is made mostly of carbonate: a mineral that needs water to be formed. Therefore, indirectly we can conclude that Mars was once wet.

To make it even more interesting, this Martian postcard has some miniscule structures that look like some bacteria found on Earth.

This high-resolution scanning electron microscope image shows an unusual tube-like structural form that is less than 1/100th the width of a human hair in size found in meteorite ALH84001. NASA

Scientists are still debating whether those structures are Martian fossils or not. But the discovery and analysis of ALH84001 brought us back to Mars. Now it was time for us to counterattack.

Rover missions to Mars

NASA then announced the first rover mission to Mars called Pathfinder. The microwave oven sized rover it carried, called Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997.

Take a look around on Mars.

The rover produced results quite similar to those found by Viking, pointing to a very dry past and present on Mars. What followed was a considerable effort to get more images of the Martian surface from orbiters, and select the place to land with future payloads.

After debating more than 174 potential landing sites, scientists and engineers involved with Mars research discussed and they to two places to land on Mars with two large rovers: Spirit and Opportunity.

After seven months of interplanetary travel, the rovers landed in January 2004. The initial results obtained by Spirit were similar to those from Viking and Mars Pathfinder.

The first groundbreaking results came from Opportunity with the discovery of jarosite and hematite: two minerals that need water and acidic conditions to be formed.

After working way beyond their manufacture warranty (three months), the twin rovers transformed our knowledge about the past of Mars.

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

Before we landed there was the question of whether Mars was once wet. Now we know that there were once oceans on Mars as salty as the Dead Sea, plus there were hot springs and fresh water streams.

Read more: Discovered: a huge liquid water lake beneath the southern pole of Mars

Water on Mars was not only present, but it was there in different forms. Mars had perfect conditions for long enough for life to form and evolve. At least we can say Mars was habitable.

Spirit was active for six years and Opportunity, after 15 years, is still officially going on.

During this time a lander called Phoenix landed in the Green Valley of Castitas Borealis on the Martian northern hemisphere, near the north pole. The key discovery from Phoenix was the presence of minute concentrations of perchlorate, a powerful bacterial killer salt.

A thin layer of water frost is visible on the ground around NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Despite the impact these missions have in our understanding about Mars, there were a number of instruments we would love to use and could not fit in a rover.

The idea of having a fully equipped Martian laboratory fuelled scientists to propose a new mission: Mars Science Laboratory with a much larger rover. It’s equipped with laser beams able to analyse rocks at distance, rock grinders and analysers able to provide a more detailed characterisation of Mars rocks, soil and atmosphere.

Perchlorates were also found by the Curiosity rover, from the Mars Science Laboratory mission, and also on a Martian meteorite called EETA79001 which suggest a global distribution of these bacterial-killer salts.

A new InSight to Mars

The past 50 years were full of discoveries about Mars’s surface, but little is known about its subsoil or inner core. This is where the InSight mission that is about to land on Mars comes in to play.

Inside Mars.

It’s supported by NASA’s Deep Space Network, including our station in Canberra which is managed on NASA’s behalf by CSIRO. InSight’s team hopes to learn how the deep interior of Mars was formed, and how similar they would be to other rocky worlds such as Venus, Mercury, our Moon, Earth, or those exoplanets from other solar systems.

This is the first mission that is designed to investigate deep inside of Mars. Insight has a seismometer and temperature probe as part of its payload.

Read more: Curious Kids: What are some of the challenges to Mars travel?

The future will be dominated by sample return missions: those spacecraft able to land on Mars and bring samples back to Earth (similar to what Russians did on the Moon) and by our effort to have astronauts exploring Mars on their own feet.

We don’t yet have the technology required to make that happen. An idea of the challenge ahead is captured by the CSIRO Space Industry Roadmap, which outlines some of the key technologies needed for future exploration and the unique contributions that Australian companies and universities could offer in that pursuit

The quest for understanding the evolution of our Solar System continues and I am still confronted by a large number of questions without an answer. Hopefully InSight will provide some of those answers but there is still much to learn about what lies above us on Mars, the fourth planet out from the Sun.

This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s InSight lander after it has deployed its instruments on the Martian surface. NASA/JPL-Caltech

– ref. Our long fascination with the journey to Mars – http://theconversation.com/our-long-fascination-with-the-journey-to-mars-106541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kieren Mitchell, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) & Centre for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), University of Adelaide

A mysterious shaggy giant species of rhinoceros – named the Siberian unicorn due to its enormous single horn – turns out to have survived in western Russia until just 36,000 years ago, according to research published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. This extinction date means that the Siberian unicorn’s final days were shared with early modern humans and Neanderthals.

Previously, little was known about the creature thought to have become extinct more than 200,000 years ago. But genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating have begun to reveal many aspects of how it lived, and when it died out.

A key finding is that the Siberian unicorn did not become extinct due to modern human hunting, nor even the peak of the last Ice Age starting around 25,000 years ago.

Read more: China’s legalisation of rhino horn trade: disaster or opportunity?

Instead, it succumbed to a more subtle change in climate that reduced grassland from eastern Europe to China.

Our new results show that the Siberian unicorn was reliant on these grasslands and, unlike other species in the area such as the saiga antelope, was unable to adapt to change.

The ‘Siberian unicorn’

The Siberian unicorn (Elasmotherium) had a single large horn, estimated at up to a metre in length. It was one of many diverse rhino species that once existed.

In addition to the extinct woolly rhinoceros (which is still found as frozen mummies), there are five species of living rhino. All of these creatures are now sadly in trouble, including the white rhino (near threatened), the Javan rhino (critically endangered), and the Sumatran rhino (critically endangered).

The loss of the Siberian unicorn provides a valuable case study displaying the poor resilience of rhinos to environmental change.

The animal we worked on was found in modern-day Russia, though its range also extended to areas that now include Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and northern China, where it inhabited a steppe-like habitat dominated by grasses and herbs.

The Siberian unicorn shared this environment with the saiga antelope, and other Ice Age species including the woolly rhino and mammoth.

But most evidence to date suggested that the Siberian unicorn became extinct 200,000 years ago, while the woolly rhino and mammoth became extinct around 13,000 and 4,000 years ago, respectively.

So why did the Siberian unicorn become extinct while other species that lived in the same habitat held on for thousands of years longer or, like the saiga, still survive today?

Saiga antelope at the Stepnoi Sanctuary, Russia. Its impressive nose acts as a dust-filter and reverse-cycle air-conditioner, minimising water loss in dry environments. Wikimedia/Andrey Giljov, CC BY-SA

A smoking gun

A few unconfirmed pieces of evidence have recently suggested that the Siberian unicorn survived until closer to the present, much like the woolly rhinoceros. So we surveyed the age of 23 bone samples of the animal held in museum collections in Russia and the UK.

Rather than 200,000 years, new dating found the Siberian unicorn actually became extinct as recently as just 36,000 years ago.

Next we considered how it might have become extinct at this time.

Climate change seems a likely contender – but 36,000 years is well before the height of the Ice Age, which occurred 20,000-25,000 years ago.

But this date does match the timing of a pronounced change towards cooler summers across Northern Europe and Asia. This seasonal change resulted in grasses and herbs becoming more sparse, and an increase in tundra plant species such as mosses and lichens.

A vulnerable specialist

So why did a change in climate 36,000 years ago drive the Siberian unicorn extinct, but not the woolly rhinoceros or the saiga?

To answer this question, our study took fossil bones from the Siberian unicorn, woolly rhino, and saiga, and looked at the nitrogen and carbon they contained – as differences in these elements reflect an animal’s diet.

We found that before 36,000 years ago the saiga and the Siberian unicorn behaved very similarly, eating grass almost exclusively. After this point, the carbon and nitrogen in saiga bones showed a major dietary shift towards other plant types.

Read more: Ancient fish evolved in shallow seas – the very places humans threaten today

But shifting from a grass diet proved too difficult for the Siberian unicorn, with its special folded wear-resistant teeth and a low-slung head right at grass height. Relatives such as the woolly rhino had always eaten a more balanced array of plants, and were much less impacted by a change in habitat.

Importantly, the change in climate that drove the Siberian unicorn extinct was actually much less pronounced than those which occurred during the Ice Age that followed. Or the changes that we will face in the near future.

The story of the Siberian unicorn is a timely reminder that even subtle changes in plant distributions can have devastating knock-on effects for large animal species.

Worryingly, this is a dire risk for many animals, such as the Siberian unicorn’s surviving cousins, which thanks to humans already have heavily restricted ranges.

– ref. How a change in climate wiped out the ‘Siberian unicorn’ – http://theconversation.com/how-a-change-in-climate-wiped-out-the-siberian-unicorn-107365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alfred Allan, Professor, Edith Cowan University

We have conducted what we believe to be Australia’s first quantitative research on young people’s behaviour in nightclubs and the findings present a disturbing picture.

The research suggests that behaviour is taking place at these clubs that would be criminal if non-consensual, and totally unacceptable at the very least.

However, the behaviour is somehow tolerated – in some cases almost encouraged. Many young people think they are too conservative, and that the behaviours they witness must be normal and acceptable in a nightclub setting – so they just put up with it.

Men engage in this conduct – such as groping, grabbing, and pinching a person on the buttocks – far more than women. Our research was confined to behaviour between heterosexual men and women. The respondents came from across Australia.

On the relatively rare occasions when women initiate such conduct, respondents of both genders regard this as somewhat more acceptable than when it’s men engaging in the conduct.

A values and accountability-free zone?

On any given weekend, young Australians flock to nightclubs and bars to have a good time and, in many cases, find a sexual partner. For years, nightclubs have been hot spots for sexual behaviour that would be deemed out of order in any other setting.

We hear of women who avoid nightlife settings because they dislike their “grab, grope and grind” culture. We also know these behaviours can potentially cause some people to feel degraded, threatened or distressed .

In our study, we explored the norms of sexual behaviour in nightclubs and bars as experienced by 381 young Australians.

They comprised 342 women and 39 men, all of whom identified as heterosexual. They were aged 18 to 30 and had been to nightclubs in the past six months. We recruited them using social media, given the high level of adoption of these platforms by nightclub-goers. We were able to find only 39 male respondents because it’s very hard to get men to open up on this subject. Statistically, this is less than ideal.

We posed the various scenarios listed below, then reversed the role of male and female for each scenario. The third scenario – grinding – is clearly non-consensual, and so would amount to criminal assault. The other scenarios might well amount to criminal assault if non-consensual.

Both genders are more accepting of these behaviours if the perpetrator is a woman.

This finding is difficult to explain. The explanation is likely to be complex, but several factors probably play a role.

It could be that the rise of feminism and the associated sexual liberation of women might have influenced participants from both genders to be more accepting of these behaviours by women.

Men’s behaviour more likely to cause harm

Or could it be that participants believed this type of behaviour by men could cause more harm to recipients than women would cause. This belief is also echoed in the media and society, where the voices of male survivors of sexual assault by women are dismissed or belittled as the harm caused to them is often perceived to be less than that of a female victim. Women are sexually assaulted by men in far greater numbers than the number of men sexually assaulted by women.

In follow-up questions we posed after the study, several men indicated that the more attractive the woman engaging in the unacceptable behaviour was – attractive as perceived by the respondent making the judgement – the more acceptable the behaviour would be. No woman said anything similar of such behaviour by men.

Other research has previously found that men are welcoming of most sexual behaviour in nightlife settings. In relation to the rare instances of women groping men at nightclubs, men have said women cannot help themselves around a young attractive man and that they, the men, do not see the behaviour as a threat – more as a [self-esteem boost].

People think they must be more prudish than their peers

Participants in our study reported they often observe these four behaviours in nightlife settings. Why do they suppress their personal values in this setting and not in others?

Many young people wrongly think that most other people find the behaviours acceptable. Research shows it’s a common phenomenon for people to wrongly think they are more conservative than their peers. They therefore subjugate their personal values in nightlife settings because they think most other people find the behaviour acceptable.

Another reason is patrons find it difficult to identify whether the behaviour is consensual or not. The continuum of consensual sexual behaviour in nightlife settings extends much further than in most other public settings, such as workplaces or the street – that is, an act that would clearly be assault on the street might conceivably be mutually consented to by two people in a nightclub.

Some people go to nightlife settings to find sexual partners, and flirting and hook-up behaviours often occur. There can also be significant pressure on people, especially men, to find a sexual partner, which can lead to riskier and more aggressive sexual advances.

So what’s the solution?

Nightlife settings serve an important social function as a place where young people relax, socialise, develop their social identities and find sexual partners. Society should allow them that opportunity, but at the same time the nightclub should not necessarily be a place where personal values and integrity are left at the door.

One option is to educate young people about criminal behaviour – if they are willing to listen. Shutterstock

The lock-out laws in some states are an overreaction by authorities to engineer change in these environments. But how can young people bring the right balance to what happens in nightlife settings?

One possible way forward is to use what we academics call “normative interventions”. Such interventions involve first letting young people know what the majority of them actually think, and that is that “grabbing, groping and grinding” in nightlife settings is wrong. Just because it seems like everyone is doing it, doesn’t make it OK.

The next step is to encourage patrons to speak up when such behaviours occur, whether they are the victim or a bystander. Research in other settings shows it’s possible to develop programs that encourage people who observe such behaviour to intervene, such as confronting the perpetrator or reporting the incident to authorities. In further research currently underway, we are looking more closely at the role of consent in nightclub conduct.

– ref. Groping, grinding, grabbing: new research on nightclubs finds men do it often but know it’s wrong – http://theconversation.com/groping-grinding-grabbing-new-research-on-nightclubs-finds-men-do-it-often-but-know-its-wrong-106994

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University

Glossy Black-Cockatoos used to be common on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island until possums started eating their eggs and chicks. After volunteers helped protect nest hollows and erect safe nest boxes, the population more than doubled.

But how do you measure such success? How do you compare cockatoo nest protection with any other investment in conservation?

Unfortunately, we have few ways to compare and track the different efforts many people may be making to help conserve our natural treasures.

That’s why a group of us from a dozen Australian universities along with scientists and private researchers around the world have created metrics of progress for both our understanding of how to manage threats of different intensity, and how well that management has been implemented. We also provide guidance on what still needs doing before a threat no longer needs active management.

For the first time, we looked at every threatened bird in Australia to see how well – or not – they are managed. Hopefully, we can use this to avoid compounding our disastrous recent track record of extinctions in Australia.

Read more: For whom the bell tolls: cats kill more than a million Australian birds every day

The state of Australian birds

What we did differently was collect the same data across different species, which meant we could compare conservation efforts across all bids.

The mallee emu-wren is unique to Australia and endangered due to habitat loss. Nik Borrow/Flickr

When we applied these metrics to Australia’s 238 threatened bird species, the results were both encouraging and daunting. The good news is that we understand how to reduce the impact of about 52% of the threats – although of course that means we know little about how to deal with the other 48%.

But the situation is decidedly worse when we consider how effectively we are putting that research into practice. Only 43% of threats are being managed in any way at all – and just a third of the worst threats – and we are achieving good outcomes for just 20%.

But at least we now know where we are. We can celebrate what we have accomplished, appreciate how much needs doing, and direct our efforts where they will have the greatest benefit.

The threats to our birds

Introduced mammals, particularly cats, have been (and continue to be) a significant threat to Australian birds. Although we have successfully eradicated feral animals on many islands, saving many species, they remain a grave threat on the mainland.

The effect of climate change is becoming the top priority threat for the future. About half of all threatened birds are likely to be affected by increases in drought, fire, heat or sea level. Given the policy prevarication at a global level, targeted research is essential if birds are to be helped to cope.

By looking at multiple species, we can also identify what helps successful conservation. Monitoring, for instance, has a big impact on threat alleviation – better monitored species receive more attention.

The orange-bellied parrot is amongst Australia’s most critically endangered birds. sompreaw/Shutterstock

There is also – unsurprisingly – a strong connection between knowledge of how to manage a threat and successful application of that knowledge. Often policy people want instant action, but our work suggests that action before knowledge will squander money.

Where to from here?

So what can we use this analysis for? One use is helping species close to extinction.

Using the same approach for multiple species groups, it is apparent that, while birds and mammals are in a parlous state, the most threatened fish are far worse off. We can also identify some clear priorities for action.

Finally, we must acknowledge this work emerged not from a government research grant, but from a non-government organisation (NGO). BirdLife Australia needed an overview of the country’s performance with threatened birds and was able to draw on the volunteered skills of biologists and mathematicians from around the country, and then the world.

Read more: Australia relies on volunteers to monitor its endangered species

Indeed, one of the future projects will be using the new assessment tool to see just how much of the conservation action around the country is being driven by volunteers, from the many people who contributed their knowledge and skills to this paper through to those keeping glossy black-cockatoo chicks safe on Kangaroo Island.

– ref. For the first time we’ve looked at every threatened bird in Australia side-by-side – http://theconversation.com/for-the-first-time-weve-looked-at-every-threatened-bird-in-australia-side-by-side-107432

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neil Sipe, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, The University of Queensland

High-tech companies and venture capitalists have been striving to break into the transport and mobility market. Between 2016 and 2018, venture capital investment in urban technology surpassed that of many other areas, including pharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence. Almost 70% of this investment was in mobility.

Read more: Smart mobility alone is no substitute for strong policy leadership

There are many players in this space, but the three largest are Alphabet, Uber and Didi Chuxing.

So what do these companies do?

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was recently dubbed a superpower of transportation by business research firm Gartner. Its market capitalisation, estimated at more than US$700 billion in November 2018, makes it one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Alphabet has many different investment arms, including GV, CapitalG and Gradient. All have invested heavily in transport companies such as Uber, Lyft, Gojek, SpaceX and Scotty Labs.

Google got started in transport by creating digital maps with navigation functions. Later it added features such as traffic conditions and street views. It’s estimated that nearly 70% of smartphone users use the Google Map app.

Alphabet also owns Waze, another navigation app that enables users to crowdsource information on highway construction and traffic congestion.

Google is acknowledged as a leader in autonomous vehicle research through Waymo, its self-driving car unit. To date, Waymo vehicles have logged more than 16 million kilometres in tests.

In October, Waymo marked a milestone of more than 16 million kilometres self-driven on public roads.

Waymo is also working with cities to improve public transport. One of these initiatives is a partnership with Phoenix Valley Public Transit in Arizona to provide services to solve the “first and last mile” problem.

Another initiative related to autonomous vehicles involves developing self-driving buses. These will reduce costs of providing public transport by eliminating human drivers.

Read more: In a driverless future, what happens to today’s drivers?

Alphabet created Sidewalk Labs in 2015 to focus on building better and “smarter” cities. Sidewalk Labs’ first experimental site in Toronto will feature flexible, modular streets and heated sidewalks.

Within Sidewalk Labs are three portfolio companies. Among these, Coord is involved with improving mobility in cities. Cityblock focuses on health. And Intersection is interested in urban innovation and technology.

Personal mobility is a key focus of the Sidewalk Toronto project.

Read more: Can a tech company build a city? Ask Google

Finally, the Google founders are personally interested in developing flying cars and high-tech blimps.

Uber was founded in 2009 as a peer-to-peer ride-sharing company. It has been one of the most successful startups. As of August 2018, it was valued at US$72 billion. In a recent interview with The Economist, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said his goal is for Uber to become the Amazon of transport.

As the previous CEO of Expedia, he has experience in aggregating services from a range of companies. This is what Expedia did by combining fare information for hotels, flights and car rentals into a single site.

Uber is involved in a range of transport-related offerings, including ride sharing, pooled ride sharing, share bikes and scooters, autonomous vehicles, food delivery and freight.

The company is looking to expand into public transit. Earlier this year, it created the Cincinnati Mobility Lab to conduct research and engage with employers to help Cincinnati, Ohio, develop a transport plan to increase public transport use.

Didi Chuxing bought out Uber in China in 2016 and is now expanding to other countries, including Australia. How Hwee Young/EPA

The third major player is Didi Chuxing. Established in 2012, the Beijing-based company has attracted venture capital funding and was valued at US$56 billion as of August 2018. Didi was a major competitor to Uber in China until in 2016 it purchased Uber’s Chinese operations for US$35 billion. Until recently it operated in China only, but is now branching out in Mexico, Brazil and Australia, with plans for further expansion into a number of other countries.

Like Uber, Didi provides transport services across taxis, minibuses, ride pooling and ride, car, bicycle and e-scooter sharing.

Read more: Can e-scooters solve the ‘last mile’ problem? They’ll need to avoid the fate of dockless bikes

Recently Didi has expanded into three other transport-related areas: big data management to service its growing transport empire; artificial intelligence focusing on autonomous vehicles; and smart transport applications such as smart traffic signals, reversible traffic lane management and the like.

Read more: City streets become a living lab that could transform your daily travel

Mass transportation versus MaaS

While not specifically mentioning Mobility as a Service (MaaS), all of the tech companies are headed in the same direction. They all want to be the dominant provider of a transport services platform.

A company that has played a major role in promoting MaaS is MaaS Global. It’s much smaller than Alphabet, Uber and Didi Chuxing, but its CEO has aspirations for the company to become the Netflix of transport.

Read more: For Mobility as a Service (MaaS) to solve our transport woes, some things need to change

What’s behind all this interest?

Tech companies and venture capitalist may be interested in transport only because there is money to be made. Or, perhaps, they are also interested in solving a growing global problem.

Either way, with urbanisation increasing worldwide, traffic congestion will continue to worsen. Building more infrastructure is not only costly, but provides only a temporary fix. Perhaps improving mobility by making better use of existing infrastructure, as tech companies are proposing, is the way forward for cities.

– ref. The battle to be the Amazon (or Netflix) of transport – http://theconversation.com/the-battle-to-be-the-amazon-or-netflix-of-transport-103351

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Johnson, Warden, Forrest Research Foundation, University of Western Australia

Asked at the banking royal commission how long it might take to embed the right culture in the National Australia Bank, its chairman Ken Henry replied: ten years.

As head of the Commonwealth Treasury before he left to join the NAB board in 2011, Dr Henry was regarded as a good, if cautious, forecaster. So ten years might be about the right answer.

He said there were “cultural inhibitors” at the bank, and he is right.

Deeply embedded within the workings of many financial institutions is a corrupt ethos of client exploitation.

These words might seem harsh, a kneejerk reaction to outrageous and possibly transient circumstances.

But they are neither my words, nor new ones.

Commissions corrupt, inevitably

Way back in 1826, when life insurance was in its infancy, it was already apparent that many policies were being mis-sold.

Charles Babbage, better known as the inventor of the first programmable computer, but also actuary of the Protector Life Assurance Society of London, identified the fundamental problem with commission-based selling of financial products, which he likened to “the acceptance of a bribe”.

It is a system, said Babbage, that will inevitably “corrupt and debase those through whom it is carried on”.

Read more: Toppling bankers can be satisfying, but it’s not enough to heal a sick culture

What Babbage described is what economists have subsequently called the “agency problem”, and it is endemic to commission-based remuneration where the agent is supposed to be working in the best interest of the client, but will gain greatest personal benefit by selling the product that offers the largest commission.

It is present whether the product is insurance, or financial advice, or a mortgage.

Bankers’ codes of ethics don’t work

The Royal Commission has shown that insurance companies, banks, brokers and advisers are prepared to trample on the trust placed in them by millions of Australians by putting their own income and interests ahead of their clients’.

Read more: A tip for bankers ahead of the royal commission: be more like doctors

The way professions have typically addressed the agency problem is by constructing a set of moral codes and formal regulations to prevent (or at least limit) bad behaviour.

Medics have their Hippocratic Oath; lawyers have their Code of Ethical Conduct, and in large measure they seem to work.

Insurers, bankers, brokers and financial planners have less formal codes of conduct, but it is now clear that they don’t work – they are little more than smokescreens to conceal self-interested avarice.

As Babbage noted almost two centuries ago, wherever financial products are sold on commission, the payment received by the agent or broker has all the characteristics of a bribe.

What will work is removing temptation

These habits of rapacity are so deeply ingrained in the culture and operation of financial institutions that no amount of self regulation, no elaboration or reinforcement of voluntary codes of conduct, has been able to spare the sector from the corruption and debasement that Babbage foresaw.

More self regulation won’t help.

Here’s what would.

First, ban commissions of all types

The government should impose an outright ban on the payment of any commission of any kind with respect to any consumer financial transaction.

The cost of the work should be transparently priced, and should be paid for at the point of delivery.

Read more: Restructuring alone won’t clean up the banks’ act

It would, at a stroke, end high-pressure selling and would reward financial advisers and brokers for the service they actually deliver to clients.

Those who deliver good advice would prosper. The rest would go out of business.

The idea lies at the heart of the banning of commissions in Labor’s Future of Financial Advice Act, which unfortunately did not extend its ban on commissions to those for insurance.

Then report fees as dollar amounts

Second, where clients buy a financial product that charges an annual management fee, such as a superannuation account, the fee should be reported to the client in dollar terms rather than the percentage of funds under management.

Each year the client should be given the option of a “free transfer” of their funds to an alternative provider that can offer the same product for a lower fee.

Read more: With a billion reasons not to trust super trustees, we need regulators to act in the public interest

It would open up the opaque structure of management fees to critical review by clients, and would impose competitive pressure to drive down fees, which in Australia’s bloated superannuation sector are more than double the OECD average.

Such reforms would be greeted with howls of protest from super funds (and banks, where banks still control them) but as Babbage foresaw and the Royal Commission has demonstrated, the industry has become so beholden to its own self-interest that it has forfeited the right to control its future.

– ref. We’ll wait an eternity for the banks to fix themselves. Here’s what we can do now – http://theconversation.com/well-wait-an-eternity-for-the-banks-to-fix-themselves-heres-what-we-can-do-now-103098

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

Whatever it does, the Morrison government seems to find itself caught on the sticky fly paper. As if it didn’t have trouble enough with trying to decide about the embassy in Israel and the religious freedom report, on Monday it became messily entangled in the issue of a national integrity commission.

On the first day of formal minority government, the crossbench flexed its muscle and the government bowed to the new reality.

Well, not quite bowed – but bought time by taking a line of least resistance.

After the independent member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, introduced her private member’s bill for a national integrity commission, the House of Representatives considered a motion from the Senate which called on “the federal government to establish a national anti-corruption commission”.

The government didn’t oppose the motion, which went through on the voices.

It was claimed that Attorney-General Christian Porter wanted to set out the government’s objections to the McGowan bill, which he couldn’t do in private members’ time.

The real reason was the government didn’t want to test its numbers on the floor when there could be a defector or two from its own ranks.

Porter embarked on something of a lawyer’s frolic as he pointed to dangers in the bill.

He warned that any public official who, it could be argued, had breached public trust or impaired confidence in public administration “would be liable to a finding of corruption”, even for a trivial matter.

The ABC would come under the proposed body. So Porter conjured up the scenario of ABC political editor Andrew Probyn (who, it will be recalled, former ABC chairman Justin Milne wanted shot) being caught under the bill.

On Porter’s account, that would be because Probyn was found in breach of the ABC code of practice’s provision on impartiality for saying Tony Abbott was the “most destructive politician of his generation”.

“Under this bill before the House—no ifs, ands or buts—Andrew Probyn would be found to have committed corruption,” Porter declared.

He didn’t sound as if he were joking but maybe the Attorney has a very dry sense of humour.

Not that McGowan is claiming her bill has the detail right. What she and other crossbenchers are trying to do is force the government’s hand.

How far they’ll succeed is not clear – they’ll get something but not the full monty.

The government’s preference would be to do nothing. But that’s no longer politically viable. Labor is committed to a new anti-corruption body (once it didn’t believe in one), and the level of public distrust of the political system makes this an issue that resonates in the community.

The government now finds itself in the rather bizarre situation of having voted for a “national anti-corruption commission” without committing itself to one.

In fact, such a commission is the least likely to get a tick of the three options before the government. Porter has all but written it off.

The other options, according to Porter, are expanding one of the existing 13 bodies that presently deal with integrity and corruption (probably the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity), or merging some of them to eliminate overlap.

Ideally the way forward would be by a bipartisan approach. The issues are indeed complex and state experience suggests the need for careful balances and protections. But bipartisanship not the way of things before an election.

Attacking Shorten, Scott Morrison accused him of being preoccupied with a “fringe issue”.

Morrison said the matter would be dealt with “through a normal Cabinet process”. Porter says this process is well underway. Indeed a lot of it happened under Malcolm Turnbull – Porter says he has been working on it since he became attorney-general nearly a year ago.

Both the embassy question and the religious freedom report are in “processes” at the moment.

The government received another prod on the latter when on Monday a Labor-chaired Senate committee recommended in its majority report that a ban on religious schools discriminating against gay teachers should be considered.

This goes much further than the government’s plan – bogged down in negotiations with Labor – for legislation to prevent discrimination against gay students. The opposition is expected on Tuesday to push the government to act immediately on its promise to protect students.

As the Liberals took in the devastating Victorian result, there was the feeling that the Morrison government was just holding things together.

Read more: View from The Hill: Labor’s 55-45% Newspoll lead adds to Liberals’ weekend of woe

Senate president and Victorian Liberal Scott Ryan, who rarely enters controversies given his position as a presiding officer, unleashed a restrained but pointed assault against the right of the party (and rightwing commentators).

Read more: Senate president Scott Ryan launches grenade against the right

Victorian Liberal backbencher Tim Wilson delivered a sharp message to the coal lovers. “If anybody thinks that there’s this great public sentiment out there that people really deep down hate renewables and they’re hugging something like coal, I say again — get real”.

That immediately encouraged a rerun of Morrison’s coal hugging in parliament.

In question time the Prime Minister was decidedly shouty and aggressive.

And, despite the crossbenchers now looming large in his world, he didn’t make time to sit in the chamber for Kerryn Phelps’ maiden speech. He had other engagements, his office said.

– ref. View from The Hill: Day One of minority government sees battle over national integrity commission – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-day-one-of-minority-government-sees-battle-over-national-integrity-commission-107637

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Judith Nicholls, Senior Lecturer in Australian Studies, Flinders University

The artist Kwementyaye (Kathleen) Petyarre (c. 1938 – 24 November 2018) has died in Alice Springs, surrounded by family and loved ones, at about the age of 80. Alhwarrpe.

“About” that age, because Petyarre was born out bush, delivered by Anmatyerr midwives at Atnangker on Anmatyerr country in Australia’s northeast Central Desert. Petyarre’s birth was not recorded in any official birth register, although it is believed to have taken place between the late 1930s or early ’40s.

Earliest days

Known in childhood as Kweyetemp Petyarre, she and her extended family group moved around their vast desert estate in Anmatyerr country. Their base was Atnangker, a site over which they exerted proprietary rights through the male line. According to principles of systematic rotational navigation they hunted and gathered food and water on the basis of seasonal availability. Their daily cuisine could include emu, kangaroo, perentie, goanna, blue tongue lizard, witchetty grubs, yams, bush plums, bush tomatoes and bush honey.

Kathleen Petyarre and Myrtle Petyarre, Kathleen’s eldest sister, nursing Josie Anne Petyarre, walk up the sandhill or ‘mountain’ as Kathleen describes it, towards the ceremonial site on Atnangker, December 2000. Photograph Ian North; courtesy Wakefield Press.

Anmatyerr women would grind seeds and cook delicious cakes on open fires. Later, the “bush seeds” that flourished on her country would become a signature theme in Petyarre’s oeuvre. Delicately represented by abundant tiny dots that she originally applied with a tyepal, fashioned from a twig and also used by women in body painting, later Petyarre turned to miniature saté sticks, sourced from Indonesia.

Arnkerrth, the Mountain or Thorny Devil (Moloch horridus). Photograph Hans Boessem, Todd Camera Store, Alice Springs, Northern Territory.

During her early years, under the instruction of her paternal grandmother, little Kweyetemp embarked on a highly disciplined classical Eastern Anmatyerr education. This was how she acquired foundational knowledge relating to her principal Dreaming Ancestor, Arnkerrth, the Mountain or Thorny Devil.

A small lizard that looks like a bonsai dinosaur, arnkerrth avoids predators by changing colour to camouflage itself to merge with the surrounding environment, also needing only minimal water to survive. Underpinned by Anmatyerr Law, this small creature would become Petyarre’s greatest and most significant artistic subject.

Kathleen Petyarre, Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming (Sandstorm), 2000, synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen, 122 x 122 cm. Private Collection Adelaide.

Meeting a white man for the first time

In the late 1940s, after the second world war, Kweyetemp first encountered a white man. The man was crossing Anmatyerr country with a camel. From behind small shrubs, the children peeked nervously at the strangely hued man and his equally bizarre animal companion. Eventually their father revealed himself and addressed the stranger, offering him food and water, which the interloper desperately needed.

With no rancour, Petyarre informed me that the man, who remained there for some time, insisted that the family cover their nakedness. In turn, he supplied “garments”.

Chuckling, Petyarre reflected on this to me in the following words:

We girls had to wear sacks, flour bags with cut-out hole (sic), for neck and arms. Really itchy one!

The older boys were made to wear army supply shorts. This was in the desert summer heat in excess of 50℃ in the shade. The uninvited interloper simply would not abide with the family’s nakedness.

Becoming ‘Kathleen’

Kathleen Petyarre and relatives at Ilyentye (Mosquito Bore) Utopia, Northern Territory, 6 December 2000. From left: Gracie Ngale, Maggie Pwerle (Kathleen’s mother), Josie-Anne Petyarre, Roseanne Petyarre (Gracie’s daughter), Josiah Kemarre (nicknamed ‘Jo-Jay’), Gracie’s granddaughter Pwerle, Kathleen Petyarre, Sabrina Pwerle. Photograph Ian North courtesy Wakefield Press.

Not far from Atnangker, a pastoral property on Anmatyerr country had been established by whitefellas some years earlier. The latter group named that large stretch of country – bitterly tongue in cheek – “Utopia”.

This led to Petyarre’s family working for the new “owners” of the pastoral lease. In return the family received rations of flour, sugar and tea, but no pay. Unrelenting assimilatory pressure ensued. English names were imposed on all Eastern Anmatyerr people, and Kweyetemp became “Kathleen”.

A school was set up in a silver bullet caravan and Kathleen began working there as the teacher’s aide, insisting that she instruct the children in their natal language, Eastern Anmatyerr. Her close sister Violet worked in the school as a laundress. Older Anmatyerr ladies were charged to sew uniforms with the words “Utopia School” stitched on.

Kathleen Petyarre, Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, 1997, synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen, 122 x 122 cm. Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands.

But apropos of the uniforms, there was a catch. Anmatyerr children were permitted to wear the uniforms during school hours only, and were obliged to remove them before returning home in the afternoon. So they left in the same way they’d arrived at school on the same morning – naked.

Violet would wash their uniforms daily, hanging them out to dry overnight so that in the morning, at school, the children would don clean uniforms. Ironic, given that the small settlements that comprised Utopia had very little running water.

“Utopia” is an umbrella term encompassing a cluster of widely dispersed small homelands, once known as “outstations”. In 1977 Jenny Green arrived in Utopia to work as an adult educator, organising workshops in batik method. For kinship-related reasons, 99% of those who attended those workshops were women. These included Emily Kngwarrey (Kathleen’s aunt), Kathleen, Violet and Gloria and the other four Petyarre sisters.

Rodney Gooch at Utopia

In 1987, Rodney Gooch (1949-2002), a flamboyantly “out” gay man, who had been working for the Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs, was asked to take over the management of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. Kathleen wasn’t alone in recollecting that the Eastern Anmatyerr women adored “Ronnie” as they called him.

During his tenure, Gooch introduced acrylic painting on canvas and other media. This was a movement that had started in Papunya in the early ‘70s and took off like wildfire across the arid desert regions.

Kathleen Petyarre, My Country – Bush Seeds (Sandstorm),1999. Private Collection, Adelaide.

Kathleen, whose chronic asthmatic condition arose from an allergic reaction to the fumes generated in batik production, took to the new media like a duck to water.

By the mid-1990s Petyarre had become involved with Adelaide’s Gallerie Australis in Adelaide, which represented her exclusively. Exhibitions of her astonishing artworks were mounted – with art lovers attending in droves.

The Telstra prize

This culminated in 1996 when Petyarre won the coveted major prize: the Telstra Art Award.

But this success was relatively short-lived when Petyarre’s non-Indigenous partner Ray Beamish, a former Darwin “long-grasser”, came forward with a claim that he had painted parts of Petyarre’s artworks, including the prizewinning work. A visual art writer working for The Australian newspaper took up this allegation with gusto, which served to amplify the issue. It became national and even international news.

The protracted period of time that it took to resolve this took an enormous toll on Kathleen’s health: she began shaking with fear, for months barely speaking and not painting at all. The source of Petyarre’s malaise was what she understood to be the theft of the Mountain Devil Dreaming, passed down to her by generations of Ancestors who held sacred copyright over that Dreaming.

Kathleen Petyarre, Thorny Devil Lizard Dreaming (watercourses and rock holes) 1997, synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen, 122 x 183 cm. Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands.

In 1997-1998, the Board of the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT conducted an enquiry into these allegations. After strenuous investigations and interviews with relevant parties, Board Chair Colin McDonald announced that:

The Board found the allegations of Mr Beamish regarding the authorship of the painting were not proved. Accordingly, there is not basis for interfering with the decision of the judges awarding the 1996 Telstra Prize to Kathleen Petyarre. (24 April 1998).

Fortunately Petyarre eventually returned to painting, and since then her work has been exhibited worldwide – including France, Scotland, Indonesia and the United States. In many instances she travelled to those destinations. Like her Ancestor Arnkerrth, the Old Woman Mountain Devil, Petyarre became a seasoned journeywoman.

Wicked humour

In relation to her personal qualities Kathleen could be imperious, but the attribute I best remember is her marvellous, often wicked, sense of humour. When in 1998 I travelled to the US with Kathleen and her sister Violet, this came to the fore. There was an international conference for Indigenous people worldwide that we attended. The three of us stayed in the same hotel room.

Violet Petyarre (left) and Kathleen Petyarre in Disneyland, California, 1998. Photograph Agnes Love, courtesy Wakefield Press.

One example will suffice. The background to this is that while Kathleen’s understanding of English was very good, her spoken English was so inflected with Anmatyerr language that 99% of English speakers found it unintelligible. It also practically stopped Kathleen and Violet from trying to communicate verbally, although neither is shy.

As a result, all the other conference attendees addressed me as the conduit to the two Anmatyerr women. A very earnest, middle-aged American lady in hippy attire approached me in the presence of the sisters, asking me, “Is it true that they only communicate by telepathy”?

Kathleen remained silent, but using only her hands she gestured towards her mouth in mock-sign language. Hence I responded to the lady by saying, “No, that isn’t true. Of course they talk.” When we returned to our hotel room that evening, all three of us acted out this scenario over and over again, shrieking and screaming with laughter. It must be admitted that our outbreak of unstoppable hilarity was underpropped by a teeny modicum of schadenfreude.

The Old Mountain Devil Woman

The thorny devil is unable to cover country in a straight line – she always takes a semi-circular route across her vast, arid country. This seems an apt metaphor for Kweyetemp Petyarre’s life, which hasn’t followed the trajectory that her younger self had foreseen, perforce veering off and rounding corners that she had never dreamed of in her childhood. That life, so rudely interrupted by the colonisers, was largely held together by her love of her family, and their love for her.

Petyarre also enjoyed being feted as a successful artist, and the travel that involved – arnkerrth is a great traveller.

On the occasion that I interviewed Petyarre on the subject of death, she had this to say:

If I could make wish I like to move straight back into them old days out in spinifex country—good. Life good then — all the time.

Moloch horridus, the Mountain or Thorny Devil, tracks in the sand. Photograph Eric R. Pianka, School of Biological Sciences, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, U.S.A.

The author has received permission from the family to use Kathleen Petyarre’s full name and images of her in this article.

– ref. Kathleen Petyarre: a brilliant artist whose life was rudely interrupted by colonisers – http://theconversation.com/kathleen-petyarre-a-brilliant-artist-whose-life-was-rudely-interrupted-by-colonisers-107593

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Henry, Senior Lecturer, School of Women’s and Children’s Health, UNSW

Women often wonder what the “right” length of time is after giving birth before getting pregnant again. A recent Canadian study suggests 12-18 months between pregnancies is ideal for most women.

But the period between pregnancies, and whether a shorter or longer period poses risks, is still contested, especially when it comes to other factors such as a mother’s age. It’s important to remember that in high-income countries most pregnancies go well regardless of the gap in between.

What is short and long

The time between the end of the first pregnancy and the conception of the next is known as the interpregnancy interval. A short interpregnancy interval is usually defined as less than 18 months to two years. The definition of a long interpregnancy interval varies – with more than two, three or five years all used in different studies.

Most studies look at the difference every six months in the interpregnancy interval makes. This means we can see whether there are different risks between a very short period in between (less than six months) versus just a short period (less than 18 months).

Most subsequent pregnancies, particularly in high-income countries like Australia, go well regardless of the gap. In the recent Canadian study, the risk of mothers having a severe complication varied between about one in 400 to about one in 100 depending on the interpregnancy interval and the mother’s age.

The risk of stillbirth or a severe baby complication varied from just under 2% to about 3%. So overall, at least 97% of babies and 99% of mothers did not have a major issue.

Most pregnancies in developed countries go well regardless of the gap in between. from shutterstock.com

Some differences in risk of pregnancy complications do seem to be related to the interpregnancy interval. Studies of the next pregnancy after a birth show that:

Read more: Explainer: what is pre-eclampsia, and how does it affect mums and babies?

What about other factors?

How much of the differences in complications are due to the period between pregnancies versus other factors such as a mother’s age is still contested. On the one hand, there are biological reasons why a short or a long period in between pregnancies could lead to complications.

If the gap is too short, mothers may not have had time to recover from the physical stressors of pregnancy and breastfeeding, such as pregnancy weight gain and reduced vitamin and mineral reserves. They may also not have completely recovered emotionally from the previous birth experience and demands of parenthood.

If the period between pregnancies is quite long, the body’s helpful adaptations to the previous pregnancy, such as changes in the uterus that are thought to improve the efficiency of labour, might be lost.

Read more: Chemical messengers: how pregnancy hormones affect the body

However, many women who tend to have a short interpregnancy interval also have characteristics that make them more at risk of pregnancy complications to start with – such as being younger or less educated.

Studies do attempt to control for these factors. The recent Canadian study took into account the number of previous children, smoking and the previous pregnancy outcomes, among other things. Even so, they concluded that risks of complications were modestly increased with a lower-than-six-month interpregnancy period for older women (over 35 years) compared to a 12-24-month period.

Other studies, however, including a 2014 West Australian paper comparing different pregnancies in the same women, have found little evidence of an effect of a short interpregnancy interval.

So, what’s the verdict?

Based on 1990s and early 2000s data, the World Health Organisation recommends an interpregnancy interval of at least 24 months. The more recent studies would suggest that this is overly restrictive in high-resource countries like Australia.

Although there may be modestly increased risks to mother and baby of a very short gap (under six months), the absolute risks appear small. For most women, particularly those in good health with a previously uncomplicated pregnancy and birth, their wishes about family spacing should be the major focus of decision-making.

Read more: Better health and diet well before conception results in healthier pregnancies

In the case of pregnancy after miscarriage, there appears even less need for restrictive recommendations. A 2017 review of more than 1 million pregnancies found that, compared to an interpregnancy interval of six to 12 months or over 12 months, an interpregnancy interval of less than six months had a lower risk of miscarriage and preterm birth, and did not increase the rate of pre-eclampsia or small babies.

So, once women feel ready to try again for pregnancy after miscarriage, they can safely be encouraged to do so.

– ref. Health Check: how long should I wait between pregnancies? – http://theconversation.com/health-check-how-long-should-i-wait-between-pregnancies-106079

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paulo de Souza, Science Leader – Sensor Networks, CSIRO

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

What are some of the challenges humans will face as we make plans to travel to and explore Mars? – Lynlee, age 10, Arlington, Tennessee.

Hi Lynlee. You’re not the only one wondering what a trip to Mars might be like. Elon Musk, a US businessman who has a company called SpaceX, said his spaceship will be ready for short trips to the red planet by 2019.

Meanwhile, the Mars One project, run by a Dutch company, aims to build a permanent human settlement on Mars.

I’ve worked as a collaborating scientist with NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project for the past 16 years. If you managed to get yourself a ticket to Mars on a spaceship, here’s how I’d advise you to prepare.

An artist’s concept portrays a NASA Mars Exploration Rover on the surface of Mars. NASA/JPL, CC BY

Read more: An Opportunity for life: finding Mars’ most liveable mud

The journey to Mars

You might be travelling with other astronauts in a journey that will take between seven and 12 months, packed in a tight space. So you’ll need to stretch and probably find a way to have part of the spacecraft spinning to create artificial gravity. Having no gravity for a long time can cause a lot of painful health problems for astronauts.

Then there’s the powerful cosmic radiation that comes mostly from our Sun. It can damage electronic equipment on board and create health problems for the crew. You and the crew will have to solve these problems on your own.

You must know every detail of the spacecraft inside out and draw on your extensive astronaut training to fix problems using only what you brought with you. You may have to 3D print spare parts from materials like titanium (using tech invented by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO).

You’ll probably also need stuff like carbon fibre, printable solar cells, 3D mapping, robotics and cybersecurity technology. The good news for you is that CSIRO (where I work) is tackling this with its new space roadmap.

Communication will be difficult. Expect any message you send to Earth to take 20 minutes to reach its destination. Video conferencing will not be possible. Social media is still accessible, but tweets or Facebook posts will take 20 minutes to appear and responses from Earth will take up to 40 minutes to arrive.

Life on Mars

If you make it to Mars, the real challenge begins. Gravity on Mars is a fraction of what it is on Earth so everything will seem very light. A thing that weighed 100kg on Earth would weigh just 38kg on Mars.

You will need to live in Mars’ punishing environment. Dust storms with winds reaching 400km/h could leave you in the dark for several weeks. It’s mostly pretty cold. The temperature variation between day and night is in excess of 120℃.

The atmosphere is not breathable: it is only 1% the thickness of our atmosphere, mostly made of carbon dioxide, argon, and nitrogen with only a small amount of oxygen.

The most interesting challenge, in my opinion, is the Martian day (also known as “sol”). It is around 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth. I had the privilege of working with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity and whilst doing that I had to live on Martian time.

I arrived at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory every day at 8am (on Martian time). If that was 8am in California, then the next day I had to arrive 8:40am, then 9:20am, 10am, 10:40am. It was like having a summer daylight savings every single day.

Here’s a Mars Rover. Scientists on Earth can control and drive it along Mars’ surface to inspect geological features. NASA/JPL, CC BY

Growing plants on Mars is not going to be easy. The soil is really salty and acidic. It is still unclear if we should bring bacteria to Mars to help plants grow (as they do on Earth).

Finally, I would say any mistake in flight or during the exploration can hurt or kill you. The room for error is really narrow.

Why on Earth would you engage into such a dangerous, life-threatening endeavour?

I guess the answer lies in what has made humans explore throughout the centuries. We are always looking for the next frontier.

Read more: Curious Kids: What plants could grow in the Goldilocks zone of space?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter

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Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: What are some of the challenges to Mars travel? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-what-are-some-of-the-challenges-to-mars-travel-105030

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Jotzo, Director, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

The Labor party’s energy policy platform, released last week, is politically clever and would likely be effective. It includes plans to underwrite renewable energy and storage, and other elements that would help the energy transition along. Its approach to the transition away from coal-fired power is likely to need more work, and it will need to be accompanied by good policy in other sectors of the economy where greenhouse emissions are still climbing.

The politics is quite simple for Labor: support the transition to renewable electricity which is already underway and which a large majority of Australians support, and minimise the risk that its proposed policy instruments will come under effective attack in the lead-up to the 2019 election.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Labor’s energy policy is savvy – now is it scare-proof?

By aiming for 50% renewables at 2030, the party has claimed the high ground. That goal and perhaps a lot more is achievable, given that the large investment pipeline in electricity consists almost entirely of wind and solar projects, and that new renewables are now typically the cheapest options to produce energy with new plants.

The question then is what policy instruments Labor would use to facilitate the transition from coal to renewables.

The government’s abandoned National Energy Guarantee (NEG) policy is now a political asset for Labor. If the Coalition were to support it under a Labor government, the policy would effectively be immune to political attack. If the Coalition were to block it, Labor could blame many future problems in electricity on the Coalition’s refusal to endorse a policy that it originally devised.

The NEG has many warts. Some of the compromises in its design were necessary to get it through the Coalition party room. That no longer matters, and so it should be possible to make improvements. One such improvement would be to allow for an explicit carbon price in electricity under the NEG, by creating an emissions intensity obligation for electricity generators with traded certificates. This is better than the opaque model of contract obligations on electricity retailers under the original version.

Underwriting renewables

But the real action under a Labor government might well come from a more direct policy approach to push the deployment of renewables. In his energy policy speech last week, Shorten foreshadowed that Labor would “invest in projects and underwrite contracts for clean power generation, as well as firming technologies like storage and gas”.

As interventionist as this sounds, it has some clear advantages over more indirect support mechanisms. First, it brings the costs of new projects down further by making cheap finance available – a tried and tested method in state-based renewables schemes. Second, it allows for a more targeted approach, supporting renewable energy generation where it makes most sense given demand and transmission lines, and prioritising storage where and when it is needed. Third, it channels government support only to new installations, rather than giving free money to wind farms and solar plants that are already in operation.

Managing coal exit

Where renewables rise, coal will fall. Labor’s approach to this issue centres on the affected workers and communities. A “just transition authority” would be created as a statutory authority, to administer redundancies, worker training, and economic diversification.

This is a good approach if it can work effectively and efficiently. But it may not be enough to manage the large and potentially rapid shifts in Australia’s power sector.

Contract prices for new wind farms and solar plants now are similar to or lower than the operating costs of many existing coal plants. The economics of existing coal plants are deteriorating, and many of Australia’s ageing coal power plants may shut down sooner than anticipated.

All that Labor’s policy says on the issue is that all large power plants would be required to provide three years’ notice of closure, as the Finkel Review recommended. But in practice this is unlikely to work.

Without any guiding framework, coal power plants could close very suddenly. If a major piece of equipment fails and repair is uneconomic, then the plant is out, and operators may find it opportune to run the plant right until that point. It’s like driving an old car – it runs sort of OK until the gearbox goes, and it’s off to the wreckers right then. It is unclear how a three-year rule could be enforced.

This is effectively what happened with the Hazelwood plant in Victoria. That closure caused a temporary rise in wholesale power prices, as new supply capacity gradually fills the gap.

One way to deal with this would be to draw up and implement some form of specific exit timetable for coal power plants. This would give notice to local communities, provide time to prepare investment in alternative economic activities, and allow replacement generation capacity to be brought online. Such a timetable would need a mechanism to implement it, probably a system of carrots and sticks.

Batteries, energy efficiency and the CEFC

Most public attention was given to a relatively small part of Labor’s energy policy platform: the promise to subsidise home batteries. Batteries can help reduce peak demand, and cut electricity bills for those who also have solar panels. But it is not clear whether home batteries are good value for money in the system overall. And the program would tend to benefit mostly upper middle-income earners.

Read more: Labor’s battery plan – good policy, or just good politics?

Labor’s platform also foreshadows a renewed emphasis on energy efficiency, which is economically sensible.

Finally, Labor promises to double the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s endowment with another A$10 billion, to be used for revolving loans. The CEFC is already the world’s biggest “green bank”, co-financing projects that cut emissions and deliver financial returns. Another A$5 billion is promised as a fund for upgrading transmission and distribution infrastructure. These are big numbers, and justifiably so – building our future energy system will need massive investments, and some of these will be best made by government.

Big plans for electricity, but what about the rest?

Overall, Labor’s plan is a solid blueprint to support the electricity transition, with strong ambition made possible by the tremendous technological developments of recent years.

But really it is only the start. Electricity accounts for one-third of national greenhouse emissions. Emissions from the power sector will continue to fall, but emissions from other sectors have been rising. That poses a huge challenge for the economy-wide emissions reductions that are needed not only to achieve the 2030 emissions targets, but the much deeper reductions needed in coming decades.

A national low-carbon strategy will need to look at how to get industry to shift to zero-emission electricity, how to convert road transport to electricity or hydrogen, and how to tackle the difficult question of agricultural emissions. More pre-election announcements are to come. It will be interesting to see how far Labor will be willing to go in the direction of putting a price on carbon, which remains the economically sensible but most politically charged policy option.

As difficult as electricity policy may seem based on the tumultuous politics that have surrounded it, more seismic shifts are waiting in the wings.

– ref. Labor’s policy can smooth the energy transition, but much more will be needed to tackle emissions – http://theconversation.com/labors-policy-can-smooth-the-energy-transition-but-much-more-will-be-needed-to-tackle-emissions-107565

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Campbell, Francince McNiff Professor of criminal jurisprudence, Monash University

The use of automated facial recognition technology (FRT) is becoming more commonplace globally, in particular in China, the UK and now Australia.

FRT means we can identify individuals based on an analysis of their geometric facial features, drawing a comparison between an algorithm created from the captured image and one already stored, such as a driving licence, custody image or social media account.

FRT has numerous private and public-sector applications when identity verification is needed. These include accessing a secure area, unlocking a mobile device or boarding a plane. It’s also able to recognise people’s moods, reactions and, apparently, sexuality.

And it’s more valuable for policing than ordinary CCTV cameras as it can identify individuals in real time and link them to stored images. This is of immense value to the state in criminal investigations, counter-terrorism operations and border control.

How it impinges on rights to privacy

But the deployment of FRT, which is already being used by the AFP and state police forces and by private companies elsewhere (airports, sporting venues, banks and shopping centres), is under-regulated and based on questionable algorithms that are not publicly transparent.

This technology has major implications for people’s privacy rights, and its use can worsen existing biases and discrimination in policing practices.

The use of FRT impinges on privacy rights by creating an algorithm of unique personal characteristics. This in turn reduces people’s characteristics to data and enables their monitoring and surveillance. These data and images will also be stored for a certain period of time, opening up the possibility of hacking or defrauding.

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

In addition, FRT can expose people to potential discrimination in two ways. First, state agencies may misuse the technologies in relation to certain demographic groups, whether intentionally or otherwise.

And secondly, research indicates that ethnic minorities, people of colour and women are misidentified by FRT at higher rates than the rest of the population. This inaccuracy may lead to members of certain groups being subjected to heavy-handed policing or security measures and their data being retained inappropriately.

This is particularly relevant in relation to communities that are already targeted disproportionately in Australia.

What lawmakers are trying to do

Parliament has drafted a bill in an effort to regulate this space, but it leaves a lot to be desired. The bill is currently in second reading; no date has been set for a vote.

If passed, the bill would enable the exchange of identity information between the Commonwealth government, state and territory governments and “non-government entities” (which haven’t been specified) through the creation of a central hub called “The Capability”, as well as the National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution, a database of information contained in government identity documents, such as driver licences.

The bill would also authorise the Department of Home Affairs to collect, use and share identification information in relation to a range of activities, such as fraud prevention, law enforcement, community safety, and road safety.

It would be far preferable for such legislation to permit identity-sharing only for a limited range of serious offences. As written, this bill relates to people who have not been convicted of any criminal offences – and, in fact, need not be suspected of any offence.

Read more: Police mugshots: millions of citizens’ faces are now digitised and searchable – but the tech is poor

Also, the Australian people have not consented to their data being shared in this way. Such sharing would have a disproportionate effect on our right to privacy.

Importantly, the breach of the right to privacy is compounded by the fact that the bill would permit the private sector to access the identity matching services. Though the private sector already uses image comparison and verification technologies to some degree, such as by banks seeking to detect money laundering for instance, the bill would extend this. The bill does not provide sufficient safeguards or penalties for private entities if they use the hub or people’s data inappropriately.

The prevalence of false-positives in identity matches

In a practical sense, there are also concerns about the reliability and accuracy of FRT, which is developing rapidly but is not without major problems. Whether these problems are just bugs or a feature of FRT remains to be seen.

Experience from the UK illustrates these issues clearly. South Wales Police, the national British lead on facial recognition technology, used the system developed by a private Australian company called Neoface at 18 public gatherings between May 2017 and March 2018. It found that 91% of matches, or 2,451 instances, incorrectly identified innocent members of the public as being on a watchlist. Manual oversight of the program revealed the matches to be false-positives.

Read more: Facial recognition is increasingly common, but how does it work?

The London Metropolitan Police is also running an FRT pilot. It recorded somewhat better figures, but still had a false-negative identification rate of 30% at the Notting Hill Carnival and 22% at Remembrance Day, both in 2017.

The central role of private companies in the development of this technology is also important to flag. FRT algorithms are patented, and there is no publicly available indication of the measurement or standard that represents an identity “match”.

Legislating in a fast-moving, technologically driven space is not an enviable task. There is some benefit to a degree of flexibility in legal definitions and rules so the law doesn’t become static and redundant too soon. But even the most generous interpretation of the bill would admit that it is a flawed way of regulating the use of a powerful and problematic technology that is here to stay, like it or not.

– ref. Why regulating facial recognition technology is so problematic – and necessary – http://theconversation.com/why-regulating-facial-recognition-technology-is-so-problematic-and-necessary-107284

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sean Martin, NHMRC ECR Fellow, University of Adelaide

This article is part of the series This is research, where we ask academics to share and discuss open access articles that reveal important aspects of science. Today’s piece looks at disease itself – and how scientists known as epidemiologists work out what factors are involved.

Science is only ever as good as the research that sits behind it.

That means the methods we use to conduct science must be robust, repeatable and suitable to the questions we want to ask.

When these questions become very complex – for instance, why are some groups of people more likely to get diabetes than others? – we need to ensure that the tools we use are capable of handling such complexity.

This is really important when it comes to teasing apart the impact of distinct but sometimes interrelated factors, like ethnic background and socioeconomic factors. We need accurate answers so we can design successful health programs.

Read more: We’ve made ‘smart egg-cartons’ to transport cells to cure diabetes

How do we know what truly increases disease risk?

Some disease processes seem quite straightforward – bacteria like Salmonella can give you food poisoning, the HIV virus can lead to AIDS if untreated. Conditions like sickle cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis are the result of a single genetic mutation.

However non-infectious diseases – think cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s – are much more complex. In such cases, is a person’s risk for disease primarily determined by their genetics? Their cells? What about their organ systems? How about the role of social and cultural influences? What about their diet or other factors in their surroundings. And lastly what about their race or ethnicity?

Epidemiology – the science of understanding the patterns and causes of diseases in populations – aims to answer these questions.

A particular approach known as multi-level modelling can tease apart the roles of different risk factors – let’s look at type 2 diabetes as an example.

Type 2 diabetes

Diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes, has reached epidemic levels in most developed (and some developing) countries.

Many risk factors for type 2 diabetes have been identified in the past 20 years alone. These include genetic, lifestyle and behavioural risk factors. There’s also an increasing recognition that cultural and environmental factors, including your ancestry, also influence your risk of disease. This is supported by evidence that type 2 diabetes occurs at different rates among different ethnic and racial groups.

Multi-level modelling allows epidemiologists to study the influence of these factors at two or more levels (e.g. within an individual and at the neighbourhood level) to generate models that account for the influence of these factors alone, and in combination, to influence type 2 diabetes risk.

Multi-level modelling as a technique has its origins in the behavioural and social sciences, but is now successfully adapted to suit the study of many phenomena, including complex human diseases.

Race and ethnicity, or…

In this paper, the authors wanted to work out how race and ethnic background might interact with other factors to increase type 2 diabetes risk.

The data was collected as part of the third wave of large, representative cohort study from Boston – in total, 2,764 men and women were extensively examined.

The researchers pooled results into five possible groups of factors that influence type 2 diabetes: biological, socioeconomic, environmental, psychosocial and lifestyle/behavioural.

Then they performed analyses to work out how each of these factors were linked, both directly and indirectly, to the type 2 diabetes risk for people in different racial and ethnic groups.

The results showed, as expected, that diabetes was more prevalent in black and Hispanic study participants compared to white participants. But – counter to the prevailing view – this was only in small part due to biological and lifestyle/behavioural factors. Such factors were only found to account for a combined 15% and 10% of the total direct effect of black and Hispanic race on type 2 diabetes.

By contrast, approximately 22% and 26% of the total direct effect were the result of socio-economic factors alone – especially income, health literacy, and health care access.

This suggests it’s social circumstance, and not biology, that explains most of the differences in the occurrence of diabetes among racial and ethnic groups.

This multilevel modelling study design allowed the researchers to unravel very complex, interwoven factors that contribute to type 2 diabetes.

Read more: The curious case of the missing workplace teaspoons

No model is perfect

Almost no epidemiological model can perfectly predict the occurrence and causes of a disease process. And multilevel modelling is not without its limitations.

In this instance, the groupings of factors used in this modelling process are often defined by researchers, and may not precisely reflect their occurrence in the real world.

Nevertheless, in an era of precision public health, and where funding for expensive population interventions and targeted treatments is under intense pressure, approaches such as this are promising.

The right research techniques may provide ways to optimise strategies to tackle the growing inequality that is already apparent in many diseases.

The open access research paper for this analysis is Relative Contributions of Socioeconomic, Local Environmental, Psychosocial, Lifestyle/Behavioral, Biophysiological, and Ancestral Factors to Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Type 2 Diabetes.

– ref. Unscrambling the egg: how research works out what really leads to an increased disease risk – http://theconversation.com/unscrambling-the-egg-how-research-works-out-what-really-leads-to-an-increased-disease-risk-103990

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shalini Arunogiri, Addiction Psychiatrist, Lecturer, Monash University

Pregabalin (sold under the brand name Lyrica) is prescribed as an anti-epileptic and a painkiller for nerve pain. Australian prescriptions of pregabalin have risen significantly in the past five years. It’s now in the top ten most expensive medications for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

We’ve also seen a rise in “off-label” prescription of pregabalin. This means it’s being prescribed for conditions for which there is limited evidence of effectiveness. Pregabalin is often prescribed for chronic or persisting pain, for example, even when there is no clear nerve-related cause.

Read more: Explainer: why are off-label medicines prescribed?

Pregabalin is thought to have effects in the brain similar to those of benzodiazepines such as diazepam (Valium) by indirectly increasing levels of the neurotransmitter GABA.

Until recently, researchers and doctors did not think pregabalin was addictive. But now studies suggest pregabalin may also have an indirect effect on the brain’s reward chemical, dopamine.

Our research, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, shows ambulance call-outs associated with the misuse of pregabalin have increased tenfold in Victoria since 2012. This mirrors an increase in prescription rates.

Growing evidence of misuse

In 2010, the first study was published that reported on a trend of pregabalin misuse.

Since then, several international research articles have documented misuse, including using higher doses than are recommended. At higher-than-prescribed doses, pregabalin causes sedation and euphoria.

People who use opioids – painkillers like oxycodone, or illicit opioids such as heroin – have a particularly high risk of misusing pregabalin. So do those with a history of substance use problems.

People who use illicit drugs report often using pregabalin in combination with other drugs. Pregabalin has been implicated in drug-related deaths in individuals who weren’t prescribed the medication, and often in combination with other sedative medications or illicit drugs.

High rates of pregabalin use are also reported in secure environments, such as prisons, in both Australia and the United Kingdom.

Two-thirds of call-outs for pregabalin were for people who also used other sedatives. Paul Miller/AAP

What did we find?

We analysed a unique database (the Ambo Project) that documents all ambulance attendances related to alcohol and drug use and mental health in Victoria.

We found pregabalin-related ambulance attendances increased tenfold between 2012 and 2017, from 0.28 cases per 100,000 population to 3.32 cases per 100,000. Pregabalin misuse contributed significantly to 1,201 call-outs from 2012 to 2017.

Pregabalin has a sedative effect, which can be compounded when used with other drugs that cause sedation, including alcohol, or other prescribed medications such as benzodiazepines and sleeping tablets (such as Valium).

Read more: Despite escalating prescriptions, nerve pain drug offers no relief for sciatica

More than two-thirds of pregabalin-related ambulance call-outs were for people who also used other sedatives. Almost 90% required transport to hospital. In some situations, such sedation could be life-threatening.

Our findings of rising harms, especially from co-use with other drugs, echo findings from a New South Wales research group that used data from poisons hotline calls, hospital admissions, and coronial reports from drug-related deaths.

How to reduce the harms

Doctors need to ensure patients are provided with the opportunity for careful and considered informed consent.

Pregabalin is a high-risk medication, especially when used with other sedatives. Although some doctors are aware of the side effects and harms associated with pregabalin, many are not.

The Royal College of General Practitioners recently warned doctors to carefully assess the risks when prescribing these medications, particularly for people who are also prescribed opioids or benzodiazepines. NPS MedicineWise also recently highlighted the need for prescribers to exercise caution.

Read more: Health Check: why can you feel groggy days after an operation?

Better regulation is also needed.

Some Australian states including Victoria plan to implement real-time prescription monitoring (RTPM). This would allow authorities to monitor and regulate access to high-risk medications such as opioid painkillers (oxycodone or similar) or benzodiazepines.

But pregabalin is not on the list of medications that will be captured by real-time prescription monitoring. To reduce the high risk of harm from pregabalin misuse, we should consider adding this drug to the list.

In the United Kingdom, pregabalin will become a “scheduled” or controlled medication from April 2019. This means doctors will need to apply for a permit before prescribing it.

If this is found to be successful, Australia should consider following suit.

– ref. Ambulance call-outs for pregabalin have spiked – here’s why – http://theconversation.com/ambulance-call-outs-for-pregabalin-have-spiked-heres-why-106163

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Barry, Senior Lecturer, Plant Pathology, University of Tasmania

Undertaking a PhD can be very stressful, due to a range of challenges. These include having to develop discipline expertise as well as generic skills (such as academic writing and maintaining motivation) during a largely solo pursuit.

Concern has been growing about the prevalence of mental health issues (such as depression and anxiety) among PhD candidates. A survey of more than 2,000 graduate research students from 26 countries published this year found they were six times as likely to experience depression or anxiety as the general population.

Read more: Doing a PhD can be a lonely business but it doesn’t have to be

A study of PhD students in the United States showed that of those who identified as experiencing depression or anxiety, 84% did not seek help from university support services. Perhaps, then, the best way to help PhD candidates is to give them the skills and strategies to manage their stress.

Earlier this month, we published a study in the Journal of American College Health. It provides evidence that practising mindfulness can help reduce stress, improve levels of depression and anxiety, and enhance feelings of hope, optimism, resilience and self-efficacy about completing a PhD.

How mindfulness can help

In recent years, mindfulness has become increasingly popular as a method for managing feelings of stress and distress.

Mindfulness research has exploded in the past five years. A medline (the major medical literature search engine) keyword search on the topic today reveals 5,815 search results, with more than 70% of these in the last five years. The quality of this research is also increasing, with 584 systematic reviews (the strongest level of evidence that combines lots of similar studies) included in these results.

Mindfulness techniques like meditation or guided breathing activities can help PhD students manage stress and anxiety. from www.shutterstock.com

Our research is the first to examine the psychological impacts of mindfulness in a controlled trial with PhD students. It followed the findings of a randomised controlled trial conducted at our institution by Emma Warnecke.

Her study showed that a guided mindfulness practice could significantly decrease perceived stress and anxiety among 66 undergraduate medical students. This is a relatively small study, but it used the gold standard design of a randomised controlled trial, and showed statistically and clinically significant results.

Our new study used the same guided mindfulness practice over an eight-week period as a daily intervention in a randomised control trial design. More than 80 students at our university volunteered to take part, and were randomly allocated to a control or intervention group.

How we measured stress

Psychological distress was measured before and after the eight-week trial period using the perceived stress scale (PSS) and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress scale (DASS).

We also measured levels of psychological capital, which is a positive psychological state of development composed of four psychological resources: feelings of hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy.

Psychological capital was originally developed in the field of positive organisational behaviour, and previous research has primarily explored how psychological capital influences workplace attitudes, behaviours and performance. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore how it may also influence educational performance.

PhD students are six times more likely than the general population to experience depression or anxiety. Shutterstock.com

Pre- and post-intervention surveys collected from both groups provided data on the stress candidates experienced, how it affected their studies, the strategies they used to manage things that stressed them out, and their experiences of completing the intervention. Some 14 members of the intervention group also volunteered to be interviewed about their experiences.

For some candidates, mindfulness practice provided a period of peace and calm which gave them a time to relax, regroup, and recharge their batteries. For others, it provided an opportunity to deal with negative feelings and then shake them off. Some said the practice gave them more clarity and focus, new ways to deal with challenges, or enabled more productive work.

Read more: PhD completion: an evidence-based guide for students, supervisors and universities

Several candidates felt increased confidence in their ability to complete their PhD, for example by giving them a tool to deal with challenging times. Candidates also reported that completing the practice regularly had its own particular benefits, such as by helping them become more disciplined and structured in their habits.

Room for improvement

The study showed completing the mindfulness practice significantly reduced candidates’ reported levels of depression and improved their psychological capital. Perhaps just as importantly, these effects occurred even though study participants actually practised the mindfulness meditation much less often than requested.

The intervention group was asked to complete the 30-minute mindfulness intervention daily, a total of 56 practices over eight weeks. But the average number of sessions completed was 35.

Read more: Ten types of PhD supervisor relationships – which is yours?

An even greater effect may be possible if students practised more often. Alternatively, a daily practice may not be required in participants who are used to learning new complex skills so often. Or, shorter practices (such as 5-10 minutes) could be used with similar effect, such as those available through apps such as smiling mind.

Placing attention not only on the academic but also the psychological aspects of learning is key to successful outcomes and well-being. Self-help strategies such as mindfulness now have a proven place for supporting the PhD journey. Integration of these approaches with peer support programs such as the Write Smarter Feel Better program developed by the CRC for Mental Health provides a win-win to reduce loneliness on the journey to a PhD, and turn surviving into thriving.

– ref. Mindfulness can help PhD students shift from surviving to thriving – http://theconversation.com/mindfulness-can-help-phd-students-shift-from-surviving-to-thriving-106608

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hussein Dia, Chair, Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently warned that global warming could reach 1.5℃ as early as 2030. The landmark report by leading scientists urged nations to do more to avert an impending crisis.

We have 12 years, the report said, to contain greenhouse gas emissions. This includes serious efforts to reduce transport emissions.

Read more: New UN report outlines ‘urgent, transformational’ change needed to hold global warming to 1.5°C

In Australia, transport is the third-largest source of greenhouse gases, accounting for around 17% of emissions. Passenger cars account for around half of our transport emissions.

The transport sector is also one of the strongest factors in emissions growth in Australia. Emissions from transport have increased nearly 60% since 1990 – more than any other sector. Australia is ranked 20th out of 25 of the largest energy-using countries for transport energy efficiency.

Cities around the world have many opportunities to reduce emissions. But this requires renewed thinking and real commitment to change.

Our planet can’t survive our old transport habits

Past (and still current) practices in urban and transport planning are fundamental causes of the transport problems we face today.

Over the past half-century, cities worldwide have grown rapidly, leading to urban sprawl. The result was high demand for motorised transport and, in turn, increased emissions.

The traffic gridlock on roads and motorways was the catalyst for most transport policy responses during that period. The solution prescribed for most cities was to build out of congestion by providing more infrastructure for private vehicles. Limited attention was given to managing travel demand or improving other modes of transport.

Read more: Stuck in traffic: we need a smarter approach to congestion than building more roads

Equating mobility with building more roads nurtured a tendency towards increased motorisation, reinforcing an ever-increasing inclination to expand the road network. The result was a range of unintended adverse environmental, social and economic consequences. Most of these are rooted in the high priority given to private vehicles.

What are the opportunities to change?

The various strategies to move our cities in the right direction can be grouped into four broad categories: avoid, shift, share, and improve. Major policy, behaviour and technology changes are required to make these strategies work.

Avoid strategies aim to slow the growth of travel. They include initiatives to reduce trip lengths, such as high-density and mixed land use developments. Other options decrease private vehicle travel – for example, through car/ride sharing and congestion pricing. And teleworking and e-commerce help people avoid private car trips altogether.

Read more: City-wide trial shows how road use charges can reduce traffic jams

Shanghai’s Hongqiao transport hub is a unique example of an integrated air, rail and mixed land use development. It combines Hongqiao’s airport, metro subway lines, and regional high-speed rail. A low-carbon residential and commercial precinct surrounds the hub.

Layout of Shanghai Hongqiao integrated transport hub. Peng & Shen (2016)/Researchgate, CC BY

Shift strategies encourage travellers to switch from private vehicles to public transport, walking and cycling. This includes improving bus routes and service frequency.

Pricing strategies that discourage private vehicles and encourage other modes of transport can also be effective. Policies that include incentives that make electric vehicles more affordable have been shown to encourage the shift.

Norway is an undisputed world leader in electric vehicle uptake. Nearly a third of all new cars sold in 2017 were a plug-in model. The electric vehicle market share was expected to be as much as 40% within a year.

An electric vehicle charging station in the Norwegian capital Oslo. Softulka/Shutterstock

Read more: The new electric vehicle highway is a welcome gear shift, but other countries are still streets ahead

Share strategies affect car ownership. New sharing economy businesses are already moving people, goods and services. Shared mobility, rather than car ownership, is providing city dwellers with a real alternative.

This trend is likely to continue and will pose significant challenges to car ownership models.

Uber claims that its carpooling service in Mumbai saved 936,000 litres of fuel and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2,662 metric tonnes within one year. It also reports that UberPool in London achieved a reduction of more than 1.1 million driving kilometres in just six months.

UberPool is available in inner Melbourne suburbs. Trip must begin and end in this area. Uber

Improve strategies promote the use of technologies to optimise performance of transport modes and intelligent infrastructure. These include intelligent transport systems, urban information technologies and emerging solutions such as autonomous mobility.

Our research shows that sharing 80% of autonomous vehicles will reduce net emissions by up to 20%. The benefits increase with wider adoption of autonomous shared electric vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles can offer first- and last-kilometre solutions, especially in outer suburbs with limited public transport services. Monopoly919/Shutterstock

Read more: Utopia or nightmare? The answer lies in how we embrace self-driving, electric and shared vehicles

The urgency and benefits of steering our cities towards a path of low-carbon mobility are unmistakable. This was recognised in the past but progress has been slow. Today, the changing context for how we build future cities – smart, healthy and low-carbon – presents new opportunities.

If well planned and implemented, these four interventions will collectively achieve transport emission reduction targets. They will also improve access to the jobs and opportunities that are preconditions for sound economic development in cities around the world.

– ref. Four ways our cities can cut transport emissions in a hurry: avoid, shift, share and improve – http://theconversation.com/four-ways-our-cities-can-cut-transport-emissions-in-a-hurry-avoid-shift-share-and-improve-106076

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Haydn Aarons, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Australian Catholic University

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison bizarrely used a Fatman Scoop track embedded in a tweet, and then quickly retracted it, he shed perhaps unwitting light on the moral dimensions of our musical taste.

Morrison’s tweet used a section of the rap song with the cheerful lyrics “You got a hundred dollar bill, get your hands up! You got a fifty dollar bill, get your hands up!”. However, as many social media users pointed out, the lyrics become much more explicit in the following lines. Morrison retracted the tweet, stating that it was “just not OK”.

It may be that Morrison’s religious beliefs played a role in this incident. My research shows there are major differences in musical taste between religious and non-religious people, and between deeply religious and less committed religious people.

Read more: Why Scott Morrison’s white, male music playlists matter

These patterns represent forms of moral evaluation, based on the perceived reputations of genres such as rock, rap, and heavy metal. Highly committed Christians, for example, are far more likely to consume “highbrow” genres and attend classical music concerts. They also avoid, in much greater proportions, genres such as rock, blues, and pop.

Data reveal that regular church attendees are more than twice as likely to avoid live music venues such as nightclubs, pubs, and concerts. Of those who never attend religious services, 44.6% go to venues often, compared with only 20.6% for regular church attendees.

More theologically conservative Christian groups are also much more likely to shun popular forms of music than the non-religious. Evangelical groups, for example, were five times less likely to listen to or state a preference for rock, heavy metal, and alternative rock than the non-religious.

Conversely, Christians and committed churchgoers lead the way for highbrow genres such as classical music and opera. Of regular church attendees, 43% regularly attended classical music concerts and operas, compared with 29% of those who never attend church.

The greater differences in musical preference between the religious and non-religious are at the extremes. Avoiding rock, heavy metal, and alternative rock perhaps suggests moral aversion based on a perceived incitement to sex and violence associated with the lyrical content. Classical music is less explicit on such themes, and has also been central to some Christian liturgy.

Religion in my study also combines with class and education to produce taste patterns. These reflect an older Australian sectarian and social cleavage between Protestant and Catholic (Protestants are more in favour of highbrow genres, although Catholics are more highbrow than those who are not religious). Religious musical taste seeks to define moral boundaries through symbolically distancing some groups from others, much as class-based patterns maintain prestige and privilege.

Non-believers are less likely to attend classical music concerts. Shutterstock

Moral outrage

We usually think of musical taste in terms of class or education, using crude terms like “highbrow” or “lowbrow”. These divisions matter because they reveal our symbolic distance from each other, which in turn can produce real economic consequences. For instance, people who are thought to have “good taste” are likely to get better jobs.

Kath and Kim’s satirical take on “bad taste” led to plummeting sales of chardonnay. But, as my research and the Fatman Scoop incident demonstrate, taste also has a moral dimension.

We can see moral judgments at work in many areas of culture, from video games to film to visual art. We’re also seeing morality at work in the response to the #metoo movement, as audiences vote with their feet against artists who offend their values.

But there are dangers in mixing morals and music. Jazz, rock, heavy metal and blues have often been demonised (literally as “the devil’s music”) for their potential to incite particular passions. These genres were eventually appropriated by religious groups themselves, but my research suggests discomfort remains still in their secular guises.

Music in general has been moralised, feared, and suppressed by various authorities – both religious and secular – for its perceived power to arouse certain kinds of emotion, particularly in the young. There is a long tradition of such cultural politics that has sought to guard sexual integrity, quell violent impulses, and curb political protest, from Plato’s suspicion of certain music in The Republic through to rock music’s status as illegal in contemporary Iran.

Morality and music today tends to be confined to the private sphere. As in many other areas of cultural life, most people, including the religious, prefer an open society where people are free to listen to what they like, taste differences notwithstanding.

While there are standards (such as derived by classification bodies such as Classification Australia) that should delimit expression, access to culture, including the “devil’s music”, should be permitted.

– ref. Why Christians prefer classical music and non-believers like heavy metal – http://theconversation.com/why-christians-prefer-classical-music-and-non-believers-like-heavy-metal-103691

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

Labor has maintained a 55-45% two-party lead in the latest Newspoll, in a weekend of woe for the Morrison government, which is trying to play down the federal contribution to the Victorian Liberal wipeout.

The Coalition’s primary vote fell for the third consecutive time, to 34%, in a poll that if replicated at an election would see a loss of 21 seats. Labor’s primary vote remained at 40%. One Nation rose 2 points to 8%; the Greens were steady on 9%.

Scott Morrison boosted his lead over Bill Shorten as better PM to 12 points, leading 46-34% compared with 42-36% a fortnight ago. Morrison has a net positive satisfaction rating of plus one, improving from minus 8 in the last poll.

The poll will reinforce Coalition gloom after Saturday’s Victorian election which saw a swing to the Labor government estimated by ABC election expert Antony Green at around 4% in two-party terms. While an ALP win was expected, the stunning size of it came as a surprise.

Read more: Labor has landslide win in Victoria

Even assuming the Victoria election was mainly won (or lost) on state issues, there are clearly federal factors and lessons in this smashing of the Liberals, which if translated federally would potentially put at risk half a dozen Victorian seats.

As Premier Daniel Andrews said, Victoria is a “progressive” state. It stands to reason that Liberal infighting and the dumping of Malcolm Turnbull, the trashing of the National Energy Guarantee and the talking down of renewables, and the broad rightward lean of the federal Coalition alienated many middle-of-the-road Liberal voters.

The anecdotal evidence backs the conclusion that Victorians were sending strong messages to the Liberal party generally, including the federal party.

But are the federal Liberals willing to hear those message? And anyway, does Morrison have the capacity to respond to them effectively?

Morrison has so far demonstrated no personal vision for the country, and his play-for-the-moment tactics are being increasingly seen as unconvincing.

Read more: Victorian Labor’s thumping win reveals how out of step with voters Liberals have become

Morrison took the unusual course of not saying anything about Victoria on Saturday night or Sunday. He will meet the Victorian federal Liberals on Monday to discuss the outcome.

Ahead of that meeting Treasurer Josh Frydenberg – who is from Victoria and is deputy Liberal leader – played down the federal implications. While conceding “the noise from Canberra certainly didn’t help”, he claimed in an ABC Sunday night interview that the lessons to be learned federally were about grassroots campaigning and the need to rebut “Labor lies”. He would not concede a recalibration of policy was needed.

Some in the right will try to write Victoria off as unrepresentative of the nation, just as they did Wentworth. This flies in the face of reality – there were big swings in the eastern suburbs and the sandbelt, previously Liberal middle class strongholds.

The government needs to pitch much more to the centre in policy terms but it will be hard to do so.

Given its current positioning, how could it sound moderate on energy and climate policy? It can’t go back to the NEG. It is stuck with its obsessions about coal and its distrust of, or at least equivocation about, renewables, as well as its business-bashing threat of divestitures.

On issues such as coal and climate change, the party’s eyes have been turned obsessively to Queensland, where there is a raft of marginal seats, without sufficient regard to those in Victoria and NSW. Even in relation to Queensland, there has been a failure to adequately recognise that that state is not monolithic when it comes to issues and priorities.

The right is unlikely to stop its determined effort to take over the party, whatever the cost. Indeed some on the right will argue that the Morrison strategy should be to sharpen the policy differences further, rather than looking to the centre.

The right’s mood will be darkened by the dumping of rightwing senator Jim Molan to an unwinnable position on the NSW Liberal ticket. Molan has pulled out from Monday’s Q&A program; the ABC tweeted that he’d said he could “no longer defend the Liberals”.

As if the Victorian result was not sobering enough, the government this week begins the final fortnight of parliament in minority government, with independent Kerryn Phelps sworn in on Monday as Turnbull’s replacement in Wentworth.

The government wants the focus on national security legislation but other issues will be political irritants for it.

Crossbenchers and Labor are pushing the case for a federal anti-corruption body – the sort of initiative that would appeal to voters highly distrustful of politicians.

Crossbenchers Cathy McGowan and Rebekha Sharkie will introduce a private member’s bill. 34 former judges have signed an open letter advertisement calling for a national integrity commission.

They said: “Existing federal integrity agencies lack the necessary jurisdiction, powers and know-how to investigate properly the impartiality and bona fides of decisions made by, and conduct of, the federal government and public sector.”

The government is resisting a new body but will need some convincing alternative response.

The government will also be under pressure over Morrison’s pledge to legislate to remove the opportunity for religious schools to discriminate against gay students. Negotiations with the opposition have been at an impasse, although the government says it still wants legislation through this fortnight.

In the middle of the fortnight Morrison attends the G20, where he is expected to have a meeting with Donald Trump. One would assume they will canvass the Australian government’s consideration of moving our embassy to Jerusalem, with Trump urging Morrison to go ahead with the controversial move.

– ref. View from The Hill: Labor’s 55-45% Newspoll lead adds to Liberals’ weekend of woe – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-labors-55-45-newspoll-lead-adds-to-liberals-weekend-of-woe-107583

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

On election night, the ABC had Labor winning 58 of the 88 seats, to 20 for the Coalition. After late counting of pre-poll and postal votes, the ABC now shows Labor has won 52 of the 88 lower house seats, the Coalition 24, two Independents and ten seats are undecided, with 71% of enrolled voters counted.

Read more: Labor has landslide win in Victoria

Statewide primary votes are currently 42.9% Labor (up 4.8% since the 2014 election), 35.8% Coalition (down 6.3%) and 9.8% Greens (down 1.6%). As much of the Coalition-favouring pre-polls and postals have been counted, I expect the Greens to gain in late counting as left-leaning polling-day absent votes are counted.

In two party Labor vs Coalition terms, The Poll Bludger has Labor winning by 56.0-44.0 in seats that currently have such a count – that is, excluding Labor vs Greens counts in inner city seats, and Coalition vs independents in the regions. In seats with a two party count, the swing to Labor is 5.3%, which would be a 57.3-42.7 thrashing if projected to the whole state.

The Liberals have lost eastern suburbs heartland seats such as Mount Waverley, Burwood, Ringwood and Box Hill to Labor, but they have retained Caulfield and likely Sandringham, which looked likely to be losses earlier in the night. In Hawthorn, the Liberals lead by 53 votes, with many absent votes to come.

While the ABC currently lists Melbourne as in doubt, Greens-favouring absent votes will easily win it for the Greens. Labor leads the Greens by 72 votes in Brunswick, and will probably lose on absent votes. Labor has clearly retained Richmond against the Greens, and will regain Northcote, which they lost at a byelection. In Prahran, whichever of Labor or Greens finishes second will defeat the Liberals on the other’s preferences.

An independent has gained Mildura from the Nationals, and an independent has retained Shepparton. According to analyst Kevin Bonham, independents are some chance in Geelong, Benambra, South-West Coast, Morwell, Melton and Pascoe Vale; in some of these seats, independents are currently third, but could move ahead of a major party, then receive that major party’s preferences. These seats do not yet have a two candidate count against the independent; the ABC is guessing the two candidate result.

Micro parties could win ten upper house seats

The ABC’s upper house calculator currently has Labor winning 19 of the 40 upper house seats, the Coalition ten, the Greens one, and ten from other parties. These others include four Derryn Hinch Justice, two Transport Matters, one Aussie Battler, one Animal Justice, one Liberal Democrat and one Sustainable Australia.

Read more: Poll wrap: Labor’s worst polls since Turnbull; chaos likely in Victorian upper house

Overall upper house vote shares were 40.8% Labor, 28.2% Coalition, 9.2% Greens, 3.4% Hinch Justice and 0.6% Transport Matters. It is ludicrous that a party with 0.6% of the vote could win one more seat than a party with 9.2%, or that a party with 3.4% could win three more seats than the Greens.

The upper house count is only at 42.5%, while the lower house is at 71.1%. The pre-poll and postal votes that have assisted the Coalition in the lower house have not yet been tallied for the upper house. When they are counted, Labor will drop back and the Coalition will gain.

The below-the-line vote rate increased to about 10% at this election, from 6% in 2014. As the ABC calculator assumes that all upper house house votes are above-the-line ticket votes, errors can occur if the calculator margin at a critical point is close. Bonham thinks the Coalition will do a bit better at the expense of micro parties, but he still thinks there will be at least six micro party members.

If Labor wins 19 upper house seats, they will be in a strong position in the upper house. Since the election was a Labor landslide, they performed well in the upper house. Had Labor done worse, there would have been some incentive for them to attempt to reform group voting tickets, but this is now unlikely to happen.

– ref. Coalition pares back losses in late counting, as predicted chaos eventuates in upper house – http://theconversation.com/coalition-pares-back-losses-in-late-counting-as-predicted-chaos-eventuates-in-upper-house-107516

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Strangio, Associate Professor of Politics, Monash University

The commanding return to office of the Andrews government emphatically reaffirms that Labor is the natural ruling party in Victoria. By the time the state’s next election is due in November 2022, Labor will have presided over Spring Street for three-quarters of the previous four decades.

That ascendancy is replicated in federal election results: the ALP has won the two-party preferred vote in Victoria on 12 of the past 14 occasions. The flipside is that Victoria has become foreign ground for the Liberal Party. It seems almost unimaginable that this was once the state dubbed the “jewel in the Liberal crown”.

If Labor’s re-election consolidates an established trend in Victorian politics, the scale of the victory (it has invited comparisons with the ALP’s Steve “Bracks-slide” of 2002) and the terms on which it has been won are remarkable.

Read more: Victoria election: the scandals, sloganeering and key issues to watch

From the moment he won office in 2014, Daniel Andrews styled himself as an assertive and activist premier. This has been exemplified by an ambitious infrastructure agenda, but also a willingness to barge his way through controversies unapologetically.

Andrews’ buttoned-up Clark Kent like exterior has also belied an adventurism on social reform highlighted by Victoria becoming the first Australian state to legalise voluntary assisted dying and other initiatives such as embarking on negotiating a treaty with the local Indigenous community.

Lacking the every-man touch of Bracks, Andrews has never seemed especially fussed about courting popularity and has mostly eschewed media contrivances to leaven his image. Neither has he sought to disguise that he is unambiguously a creature of the Labor Party, nor camouflaged his government’s closeness to the trade union movement.

Only last month, Andrews boldly marched at the head of an ACTU-organised rally in support of strengthened industrial rights and improved conditions for workers. On Saturday night, he made a conspicuous point of thanking the labour movement in his victory speech. All of this has inflamed his detractors (not least News Limited’s Herald Sun), yet Andrews has remained defiantly unmoved.

Arguably, there is a risk in this audacity that might grow greater with Andrews emboldened by winning a second term. And there remains a danger that, despite Labor’s expansive infrastructure program, his government will be overwhelmed by Melbourne’s exponential growth and the enormous strains this is placing on services.

For now, though, one cannot deny Andrews’ achievement. Pledged to serve another four years, he is on track to become the state’s second longest-serving Labor premier and he has bequeathed his party a victory so sweeping it should guarantee two further terms.

For the Liberal Party, this is an abject result. It rubs salt into the wounds of the Coalition’s first-term defeat in 2014. Twice in Labor’s era of dominance of the past four decades, the Liberals have squandered office.

A combination of policy inertia and ill-discipline sowed the seeds of the premature fall of the Ted Baillieu-Denis Napthine government in 2014, while in 1999 Jeff Kennett’s tenure was cut short by hubris and insensitivity to rural and regional Victoria that paved the way for an 11-year Labor reign under Bracks and John Brumby.

For the second state election in succession, the Victorian Liberals have also been handicapped by the actions of their federal counterparts. When Victorians voted in 2014, the politically poisonous first budget of Tony Abbott’s government was still exercising their minds, while on this occasion there was the backdrop of the upheaval surrounding Malcolm Turnbull’s deposal as prime minister.

But this result shows the Liberal’s difficulties in Victoria run far deeper to matters of identity and philosophy (and organisation). Though Matthew Guy gestured towards broadening his election pitch through decentralisation policies, everything in the Liberal campaign was ultimately dwarfed by a muscular conservative law and order agenda.

It was both narrow and discordant in a community of progressive sensibility and one that is defined by complexity and diversity. It is a community where, for example, there are electorates in which greater than 50% of people were born in non-English speaking countries, electorates where more than 30% of the population are of Muslim faith, and electorates where nearly 50% have no religion. The contemporary Liberal Party appears bereft of a vocabulary to speak to this pluralism.

Liberal leader Matthew Guy concedes defeat on Saturday night. AAP/David Crosling

This problem of being out of step with the nation’s second largest and fastest growing state besets the Liberal Party federally as well. Yet Scott Morrison and many of his colleagues have shown scant evidence of recognising let alone addressing this dilemma.

Instead, they seem intent on appealing to a Queensland-focused “base”. The cost of this hewing to the right and what it potentially augurs for next year’s federal election in Victoria is now plain to see.

In a more immediate sense, there is a serious chance that the Morrison government will be further destabilised by the recriminations flowing from this result. It is likely to deepen the divide in Liberal ranks between those who appear hell bent on remaking the party in their own conservative self-image regardless of electoral consequences and those who understand that this is folly.

Lastly, what of the Greens? Since 2002, the Greens have stalked Labor in its once traditional heartland in Melbourne’s inner city. Buoyed by a heady triumph in the Northcote by-election 12 months ago, the Greens looked forward to this contest convinced they were on an irresistible forward march.

Read more: The Greens set to be tested on a number of fronts in the Victorian election

That optimism was dented by defeat in the federal byelection in Batman in March. Now, after an unhappy campaign during which the party became mired in controversy over its culture towards women and struggled for traction against a progressive-credentialed government, the Greens have lost ground. Some experienced observers are speculating that we have witnessed “peak Green”.

That is probably premature. Yet, for Labor, the sullying of their tormentor’s image and disruption of their momentum is icing on its glorious election victory cake.

– ref. Victorian Labor’s thumping win reveals how out of step with voters Liberals have become – http://theconversation.com/victorian-labors-thumping-win-reveals-how-out-of-step-with-voters-liberals-have-become-105574