Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Celine Boehm, Head of School for Physics, University of Sydney

Three, only three, is the number of women who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in the 117-year history of the prize.

Donna Strickland, aged 59 and an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, is the female academic who this year was awarded the holy grail recognition for her major contribution to physics. She shares the 2018 prize with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou.

Read more: 2018 Nobel Prize for physics goes to tools made from light beams – a particle physicist explains

The last time a woman received the Nobel Prize in Physics was 55 years ago, when Maria Goeppert-Mayer won in 1963. Before that it was the exceptional Marie Curie who won the prize in 1903. In 1911 Curie also won the Nobel prize in Chemistry.

A major breakthrough

Strickland’s technique (powerful short laser pulses) was developed jointly with her PhD advisor Mourou, and is one of those major breakthroughs that any physicist would envy. It has myriad far-reaching applications, including in the field of medicine and the fight against cancer.

Some will see this award as a powerful response to the recent polemics that took place at CERN – one of the leading physics institutions in the world – after a male physicist argued at a workshop on equity and diversity that “physics was invented and built by men; it is not by invitation”.

CERN issued a statement saying that the physicist was suspended from any activity at CERN with “immediate effect, pending investigation” into the event.

Somehow this male physicist has forgotten that the Emmy Noether theorem, which he uses on a daily basis, was proposed by a female mathematician, Emmy Noether, whose work was critical for the development of what is now known as quantum field theory and particle physics.

So, yes, by awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics to a woman this year, the Nobel committee finally acknowledged the powerful contribution that a woman made, not only to a research field but to humankind.

Long overdue

Unfortunately, the reality is that this 2018 award to a female physicist is long overdue. The list of female physicists who did (and do) deserve the holy grail of scientific recognition is very long.

And yes, the list of male physicists who should have got it too is also very impressive. But it is striking that only three women have received the physics Nobel since its creation, and that Strickland – at 59 years old and after such a major contribution – is still an assistant professor at her own institution.

Peter Higgs, who was awarded a Nobel prize in 2013 for predicting the existence of the so-called Higgs boson (which was only discovered in 2012, many decades after its prediction), admits he had published a relatively small number of papers in his whole career. Was he an assistant professor? No. He had been promoted to professor of theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh.

Let us be fair to the Nobel committee though. Somehow they have now repaired an injustice. The British astronomer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered a new kind of star (pulsars) but was omitted when her PhD advisor (who had not made the observations but had obtained the funding for the observations) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974.

The now Dame Jocelyn was this year chosen by a panel of scientists to receive the US$3 million special Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics, in part for her work on pulsars but also for a lifetime of inspiring scientific leadership.

More acknowledgement for women in physics

There is still a gender gap in physics, and in science in general.

The last decadal plan for physics (2012-2021), released by the Australian Academy of Science, showed women only made up 21% of the staff in physics – that’s just one in five. The Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) project notes the widening gap in men and women in senior roles in the natural and physical sciences.

Some of the data used in those reports are more than a decade old but more recent figures still show a wide gap in the number of men and women in physics and astronomy.

At least now with Strickland’s award, a female former PhD student is recognised at the same time as her male then advisor, Mourou. Perhaps one day, the Nobel prize will be awarded to two or three women physicists, one of whom is a student and the other one their advisor.

Read more: Study of 1.6 million grades shows little gender difference in maths and science at school

For now, we can only hope that by rewarding Strickland with a Nobel prize, the Nobel committee has sent a strong signal to academic institutions about the need to acknowledge the contributions of women in physics properly, and promote them adequately in the same way as their male counterparts for similar contributions.

My take on this: three is a magic number because it signifies a change that hopefully will inspire women and girls to enter physics and make contributions that change human’s life.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Patrick Taylor, Professor of Environmental Science, Macquarie University

More than a quarter of commercial honey brands have potentially been watered down with sugar cane, corn syrup or other products, according to our new analysis of 95 products from local food markets and supermarket shelves.

Our discovery is set to deepen the concern over the authenticity of honey for sale in Australia, in the wake of last month’s “fake honey” scandal, which revealed the widespread adulteration of honey with cheaper substances.

Australia is the world’s fourth-largest honey exporter, and the revelations pose a threat to its reputation as a leading producer and supplier of honey.

Read more: What is fake honey and why didn’t the official tests pick it up?

Our study, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, analysed 100 honeys from 19 countries, including Australia. The study included five raw honey samples (that is, honey direct from the hive) and 95 commercial samples, 38 of them from Australian-based producers.

Analysis of the 95 commercial honeys showed that 27% of them were of “questionable authenticity”, meaning they had potentially been adulterated with cane and/or corn syrups. This means they should not be classified as genuine pure honey.

Of the Australian-sourced commercial honeys we analysed, 18% were identified as likely to have been adulterated in a similar way.

Our study used the only internationally accepted method for determining honey adulteration. This method detects the presence of sugars from a type of plants known as C4 plants – the group that includes corn and sugar cane – as opposed to pure honey, which is made from the nectar of flowers from a different group, called C3 plants.

C4 and C3 plants each have unique isotopic signatures, which allows us to ascertain whether a honey sample is pure (containing only compounds from C3 plants) or whether it has been adulterated with sugars from C4 plants.

An old problem

Honey adulteration is nothing new. It has been on the rise since the 1970s, when cheap high-fructose corn syrup became widely available. Because both corn syrup and sugar cane are cheaper than honey, they are an easy way to increase honey volume and boost profits.

Some operators adulterate honey with rice sugars that enable them to circumvent the C4 test. Some rice syrup producers openly advertise the fact that their products will not cause adulterated honeys to fail the C4 test.

Honey can be adulterated either during or after production. Inadvertent adulteration might happen through overfeeding of sucrose to bees during periods when food sources are limited, or at harvest time. This practice, if done occasionally, can protect colonies at times of low food availability. But if used injudiciously it can also filter through into the finished product.

Of course, our study also comes hot on the heels of recent revelations that 12 of 28 Australian honeys were adulterated with rice and other syrups. That discovery was made using a new proprietary method that can reportedly detect adulteration with a wider range of compounds and also identify the geographic origins of the honey. However, this method does not currently meet the provisions of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the international body that sets food standards.

Our research group has previously shown that honey can indeed be traced back to its point of origin, by comparing trace chemicals in bees and their honey with those in the dusts and soils where it was produced.

In our latest research, we therefore also investigated whether the commercial honey samples can indeed be tracked back to where they supposedly came from. We found that honey from different continents and regions do indeed have different chemical signatures, which paves the way for detecting mislabelled or geographically fraudulent honey.

Read more: How better tests and legal deterrence could clean up the sticky mess left behind by fake honey row

There is no evidence that adulterated honeys cause any significant health risk (beyond those posed by eating sugary foods anyway). However, in many cases consumers are not getting the supposedly genuine pure honey they have paid for.

But our research, along with previous studies, reveals the scale of the problem.

For Australian honey to retain its premium position in the global market, there needs to be a better framework around the chain of custody and certification of honey. Only then will customers have a guarantee that their “pure” honey is exactly what it says on the label.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siobhan O’Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, UNSW

Digital or e-government has been prominent on Australia’s political agenda for at least a decade. It has led to improvements in e-services that allow you to pay rates online, submit a digital tax return, or claim rebates for medical bills.

But while e-services can make life more convenient for those who have access, there are signs that transacting with the state digitally is fast becoming mandatory. The My Health Record opt-out system, for example, assumes everyone will participate in this digital initiative unless they take deliberate action to do otherwise.

Our research suggests those who will not, or cannot, engage with the state online, may find themselves without basic government services – and even more alienated from government in the future.

Read more: Digital government isn’t working in the developing world. Here’s why

People are being left behind

There are many reasons why citizens may not be able to engage digitally, including poverty, digital illiteracy and lack of digital infrastructure.

Research suggests that the so-called digital divide is shrinking in Australia, with 97% connectivity among households with children under 15 years.

But the same research shows that an inability to connect digitally is fast become a very serious force for compounding social exclusion. Those who are left behind, are being absolutely left behind – the gap is narrow but deep.

The Australian Digital Inclusion Index identifies those most likely to be digitally excluded as:

• people on low incomes
• people aged over 65
• people with a disability
• people with low levels of education
• Aboriginal Australians
• the unemployed
• people living outside capital cities.

Face-to-face services are shrinking

E-government is supposed to be efficient, cost effective, and according to some scholars, enhance democracy by allowing for greater interaction between citizens and the state.

But e-government isn’t only about increasing the number of ways citizens may transact with government online. It’s also moving services online that have traditionally relied upon face-to-face, empathetic and therapeutic relationships. For example, services such as those offered by the employment services sector.

Read more: What Australia can learn about e-government from Estonia

To better understand the likely impact of social service digitalisation, we looked at what it might mean for people living in remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

We conducted interviews with federal public servants working as e-government specialists in a number of social services and Aboriginal services portfolios. We also interviewed federal service providers, NGOs, and a representative from a private telecommunications company.

Exclusion is structural

We found a great appetite for digital connectivity among the people we spoke to. Facebook, Instagram, online banking, and online buying and selling websites such as eBay are popular among the communities we engaged.

At the same time, we found the ability to speak to a front line public servant – either face-to-face or over the phone – is diminishing. This is creating a service gap with very real and adverse impacts on the lives of some citizens. One interviewee told us:

until a couple of years [ago], you used to get your fortnightly form mailed out to you […] and you took that down to Centrelink and lodge it on its due day. Now you’re expected to remember that you’ve got to go online every second Tuesday and self-report.

And the penalties for missed engagement can be significant:

a mainstream client would have received a text message telling them that you’ve missed an appointment, please contact your provider immediately. Because our clients don’t get those text messages they don’t find out their allowance has been suspended […] until their next payment day when it doesn’t come.

It’s the people most dependent on social services, who are least able to easily transition into the digital age. In some cases, they live in a part of Australia that simply does not have internet infrastructure, and perhaps will never get it. We were told:

there’s no NBN infrastructure, and it’s not going in. One day they’ll get the satellite connections, but at the moment no-one has internet in the homes.

In other cases, there is infrastructure but maintaining digital connectivity is a personal cost that exacerbates the divide. People living in remote parts of Australia do not have a choice of providers, and that is reflected in the costs of monthly plans.

Sometimes the citizen may have access and a working device, but colonial assumptions that permeate the e-government landscape act as a deterrent to engagement. For example, one interviewee told us that when it comes to setting security questions:

they’re questions like, what is the name of the street you grew up on, which is not applicable. A lot of communities have house numbers, not street names. It’ll ask you the name of your first pet. And again, Indigenous people don’t think of the animals around as pets in the same way that we do.

It’s not getting better

Our research suggests that while digital services have great potential, that potential is yet to improve the life chances of the most vulnerable members of our community. And things appear to be getting worse. While the government is focused on e-services as an alternative way to engage citizens, the reduction of much more costly face to face services is problematic.

Read more: Australia’s digital divide is not going away

Our research also suggests the government is not investing the time, money and effort needed to make sure all Australian citizens are successfully transitioning to the digital world. There is a widening gap, which the not-for-profit sector is graciously filling in many communities, But our concern is while e-government may bring advantages for some, it will further marginalise those who are already seriously disadvantaged.

Supporting an individual’s transition to active digital engagement is just as important as the ongoing development of digital services. As digitalisation progresses it must bring all citizens along with it.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andy Towers, Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, Massey University

Mention hazardous drinking and most of us imagine teenagers or students getting drunk, causing havoc and filling our emergency departments on a Friday night.

But what if I told you that we should be just as worried about how much our parents and grandparents are drinking?

Our latest research shows that up to 40% of adults aged 50 and over are hazardous drinkers. This increases to almost 50% for men in this age group.

Read more: Beer, bongs and baby boomers: the unlikely tale of drug and alcohol use in the over 50s

Alcohol-related risk for older adults

Alcohol is the drug of choice for baby boomers. However, the older we get the lower the threshold for hazardous drinking is for two key reasons. First, ageing bodies can’t process alcohol as well as they used to so we get drunk faster and feel the effects more. Second, the older we get the more likely we are to have developed health conditions that alcohol exacerbates and to use medication that alcohol can interfere with.

Despite the heightened risks, we know older adults are less likely to be screened for alcohol than other groups. Further, when screening occurs, it usually ignores the combined health and medication risk factors that place older drinkers at such high risk.

Our research aimed to answer three simple questions: How many older adults are hazardous drinkers? Who is most at risk of harm? Where can we find them?

Hazardous drinkers

We used data from more than 4,000 New Zealanders aged 50 and over in the government-funded Health, Work and Retirement study at Massey University. We compared the number of hazardous drinkers identified on two different screening tests: a standard screening and one specific to older adults.

The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-Consumption (AUDIT-C) is a standard screening for primary health care. It assesses how often you drink, how much you drink, and how often you binge (have six or more drinks). You are a hazardous drinker if your drinking pattern puts you at risk of harm immediately (weekly binge drinking) or in the long-term (frequent moderate drinking).

The Comorbidity Alcohol Risk Evaluation Tool (CARET) is a screening specific to alcohol-related harm for older adults. It assesses drinking patterns but modifies the allowable drinking frequency, quantity and binge limits based on the presence of health conditions and health issues that alcohol can make worse, and medication that alcohol can interfere with.

First, we found that 83% of older New Zealanders in this sample were current drinkers, while 13% were past drinkers who no longer drank, and 4% were lifetime abstainers.

Second, we found the CARET classified 35% of the sample as hazardous drinkers compared to 40% on the AUDIT-C. The higher proportion on the AUDIT-C resulted from our use of a stricter threshold for hazardous drinking than used on the CARET.

Approximately 10% of non-hazardous drinkers on the AUDIT-C were classed as hazardous on the CARET because despite their low levels of alcohol use their existing ill health and medication use made any drinking potentially harmful.

Read more: Maybe moderate drinking isn’t so good for you after all

Most at risk of harm

We were able to identify key characteristics of older drinkers who were hazardous in both tests or one test only.

• Hazardous drinkers on both screens were predominantly healthy men who drank high amounts of alcohol very frequently, with monthly binge drinking

• hazardous drinkers on AUDIT-C only were healthy men and women who drank small amounts of alcohol very frequently, with some binge drinking

• hazardous drinkers on CARET only were unhealthy men and women who drank small amounts of alcohol frequently, with little or no binge drinking.

This suggests GPs and practice nurses need to understand even older adults in good health require screening for their alcohol use, particularly older men. Further, any indication of very frequent drinking (five or more times a week) and binge drinking is a flag for concern.

Any older adults in poor health definitely require screening for alcohol use as any level of consumption may be dangerous.

Where are the older hazardous drinkers

For a GP or a practice nurse, older hazardous drinkers will be some of their most frequent patients. We found the majority of older hazardous drinkers saw their GP three or more times a year. Approximately 60% of drinkers whose ill health places them most at risk of harm actually visit their GP almost once a month.

International research shows health professionals are reluctant to talk to older adults about their drinking, older adults are less likely to be screened for alcohol use, and younger adults are prioritised for treatment. But the results of our study suggest the GPs office is the ideal setting to start this conversation about alcohol with older adults.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorraine Finlay, Lecturer in Law, Murdoch University

If a pregnant woman is the victim of a criminal offence that leads to the death of her unborn child, should the person responsible be charged with the murder or manslaughter of that child?

This is the question being asked following the tragic Orchard Hills car crash last week. The crash killed Katherine Hoang, her unborn twin boys, and her 17-year-old sister-in-law Anh Hoang, also known as Belinda. Katherine’s husband Bronco Hoang is in an induced coma in hospital.

Police have charged the driver of the other car with ten separate offences, including two counts of manslaughter.

However, the family of Katherine Hoang, who was reportedly due to give birth this week, have called for manslaughter charges to also be laid with respect to the unborn twins, saying “these babies were already part of the family”.

What laws apply when unborn children are killed?

What criminal charges might apply when an unborn child is killed following a car crash or criminal assault is a complex legal question. In New South Wales, the “born alive rule” applies. This is a common law rule that states that a homicide can only be committed on a legally recognised person, and that a person is not legally recognised until they are “fully born in a living state”.

That means they must have completely left their mother’s body and must show some indication of independent life. Under this definition, an unborn child killed in utero is not a legal person and cannot be the victim of a homicide.

This would mean that manslaughter charges could not be laid with respect to the unborn twins of Katherine Hoang, unless there was evidence they had been born alive. Instead, the loss is considered an extension of the injury suffered by the mother. In a 2005 appeal considering the “born alive rule”, the NSW Chief Justice suggested there was a strong case for abandoning this rule, on the basis that it was “anachronistic” and “adopts an artificial and non-scientific concept of when life begins”.

The legal position across Australia

The legal position is not uniform across Australia. Even within individual states there are a range of different offences that could potentially apply in this type of case.

Queensland introduced specific foetal homicide laws in 1997. If the Orchard Hills crash had occurred in Queensland, the driver could be charged with the separate offence of killing an unborn child, which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

In Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory , there is also a separate offence of “killing an unborn child” that applies “when a woman is about to be delivered of a child”. A similar offence of “child destruction” applies in the Australian Capital Territory. These offences are generally understood to have a restrictive application, in that they will only apply when the birth is imminent or delivery has actually commenced.

A number of jurisdictions have attempted to deal with offences involving harm to an unborn child by expanding their legal definitions of harm. For example, Western Australia introduced reforms in 2016 to amend the definitions of “bodily harm” and “grievous bodily harm” to expressly include harm caused to an unborn child.

Similar provisions exist in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT. Under these provisions, the loss of unborn children would be seen as part of the overall injuries sustained by the mother, rather than being reflected in separate charges.

Should NSW introduce foetal homicide laws?

Foetal homicide laws have been debated in NSW parliament a number of times in recent years. Zoe’s Law was introduced for debate in 2013 following the case of Brodie Donegan, who lost her unborn baby Zoe after being hit by a drug-affected driver while 32 weeks pregnant. The loss of Zoe was charged only as part of the injuries sustained by her mother. Brodie Donegan described the failure to separately recognise the death of her baby as a gap that “should be filled” as “to me, she was more important than my injuries”.

Zoe’s Law has been introduced to the NSW parliament a number of times. It was passed by the Legislative Assembly in 2013 but lapsed before debate in the Legislative Council. It was reintroduced as a Private Member’s Bill in March 2017, with debate being adjourned in October 2017.

A key reason for supporting foetal homicide laws is a belief that the law should recognise the loss of an unborn child in these circumstances as a separate and distinct loss, and more than just an injury suffered by a pregnant woman.

The key concern raised by opponents is that foetal homicide laws recognise an unborn child as having a separate legal identity to its mother, with potential implications for abortion laws and the legal rights of pregnant women.

These are important considerations, but the issues are not inevitably interlinked. For example, an argument that Queensland foetal homicide laws gave rise to an expanded concept of legal personhood (with implications for laws concerning abortion) was described as ‘without foundation’ by the Queensland courts in 2010.

In any event, a foetal homicide law can be carefully drafted so that it has no broader implications for either abortion or the legal rights of pregnant women. This can be as simple as including in the law, for the avoidance of doubt, a sub-section that expressly limits any concept of legal personhood to the terms of the specific provision and that confirms that the foetal homicide law does not apply to cases of lawful abortions.

Recent events show the need for this reform to be considered. The family of Katherine Hoang is tragically grieving the loss of not just two family members, but four. The fact that the law does not fully recognise this loss is simply unjust.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Bonnell, Associate Professor of History, The University of Queensland

This article is part of our series of explainers on key moments in the past 100 years of world political history. In it, our authors examine how and why an event unfolded, its impact at the time, and its relevance to politics today.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the night of November 9-10, 1989, East German border police opened the gates at crossing points in the Berlin Wall, allowing masses of East Berliners to stream through them unhindered.

This started a night of unbridled celebrations as people crossed freely back and forth through the Cold War barrier, climbed on it, and even danced and partied on it.

The signal for the mass breach of the previously heavily guarded wall was a fumbled announcement in a press conference by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) Party chief of Berlin, Günter Schabowski.

His announcement that travel restrictions for East German citizens would be lifted led to the Wall’s transit points being mobbed by thousands of East Germans as they interpreted the announcement to mean immediate freedom of movement to the West.

What happened?

The opening of the Berlin Wall triggered a series of events that led to an unexpectedly rapid unification of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) on October 3, 1990.

But to really understand this moment, we need to look at when and why the Berlin Wall was erected in the first place. Following Germany’s defeat in the second world war, the country was split between the victors – the Western Allies’ occupation zones became the Federal Republic in 1949, while the Soviet zone was reconstituted as the German Democratic Republic shortly thereafter.

Germany’s capital, Berlin, was also split down the middle. The wall was erected by the East German leadership in August 1961 to stop the flow of citizens from East to West, completing a sealed border that elsewhere ran along the frontier between the two German states.

The Wall’s opening was the product of two processes that had gathered momentum throughout the second half of 1989: the peaceful demonstrations and protest marches of a number of newly constituted East German civil rights organisations, and the growing number of East German citizens leaving from the GDR’s side doors.

The latter mostly happened through Hungary, which opened its border with Austria in May. Large numbers of East Germans on holidays in Hungary took advantage of the opportunity to migrate to West Germany. By November 1989, the trickle of East Germans leaving had become a flood, with thousands a day going to the West by the week the wall was opened.

Furthermore, the East German SED leadership had been increasingly on the back foot since peaceful demonstrations started, following manipulated local government elections in May 1989.

By the start of October, there were regular Monday night protest marches through Leipzig and other East German cities. Initially, there were fears that the SED leadership might suppress these protests with violence.

The Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent mass killings in Beijing in June 1989 were fresh in the minds of many. But after a large-scale Monday night demonstration in Leipzig was allowed to proceed without armed opposition from the police and security services on October 9, the opposition gained courage and momentum.

A few days before the opening of the Wall, an estimated half a million protesters gathered in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, calling for democratic reform of East Germany.

There was, of course, a wider context for these events. By 1989, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had become convinced of the need to carry out economic reform measures in the Soviet Union. He considered disarmament and a winding down of Cold War confrontation in Europe as necessary preconditions for such reforms.

Unlike previous Soviet leaders, Gorbachev signalled a tolerant attitude to reforms in the member states of the Warsaw Pact, including relaxation of censorship and central control of economic matters.

Indeed, Gorbachev even began to encourage the replacement of older generation communist hardliners with younger reformist leaders. When Gorbachev visited East Berlin for the official 40th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the GDR on October 7, 1989, he was rapturously welcomed by young demonstrators. They saw his visit as promising reforms that had hitherto been resisted by the ageing SED leadership under Erich Honecker.

On October 18, Honecker was obliged to step down in favour of his younger protégé Egon Krenz. However, in the following weeks, despite the almost inadvertent opening of the Berlin Wall, Krenz failed to keep up with escalating popular pressure for change.

The impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall

The new openness to reform in what was still known as the “Soviet bloc” had already seen contested elections in Poland in May 1989, and political and economic reforms in Hungary. These were catalysts for the changes in East Germany (especially events like Hungary’s opening of its western border).

In the weeks after the opening of the Berlin Wall, there was a peaceful transition to democratic government in Czechoslovakia, and less peaceful changes of régime in Romania and Bulgaria, as it became clear the Soviet Union was no longer prepared to support hard line Communist governments in Eastern Europe.

Contemporary relevance

The lasting consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall were momentous.

Despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of Soviet army troops in the former Cold War front line state of East Germany, Gorbachev agreed in negotiations with the United States President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to permit a swift unification of the two German states. This occurred almost entirely on West German terms.

The speedy collapse of the East German economy in mid-1990 left East German leaders, now democratically elected, with little leverage. Once the West German currency, the Deutsche Mark, was introduced into the East in a currency union in July 1990, East German firms, already exposed by the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, were drastically unequipped to compete.

For two centuries, modern European history had largely revolved around the “German Question”: what external borders would a German state have, and what political order would prevail in this pivotal Central European state? The peaceful and democratic unification of 1990 seemed to provide a definitive answer.

Providing real unity between West and East Germans required massive financial transfers from West to East. The transformation of the Eastern states in practise caused significant economic and social dislocation. As East Germans made enormous adjustments in their lives, their Western cousins were also paying slightly higher taxes to cover the costs of unification.

More globally, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of the Cold War. Berlin had long been a cockpit of Cold War confrontation – now it was the victors’ trophy. One US policy analyst prematurely proclaimed the “end of history”, in so far as history was a clash between major political orders, and Western democracy and capitalism had won.

But since 1989, many disappointments have followed the initial euphoria. The “peace dividend” hoped for by millions, and Gorbachev’s sunny but characteristically vague formula of peaceful coexistence in a “common European home”, have not eventuated. Instead, a triumphant NATO has pitched its tents inside the borders of the old USSR, and a surly and resentful Russia has responded with brinkmanship and confrontation.

Following the end of the Cold War, neoconservative US administrations sought to put their stamp on the world, and the “blowback” has resulted in chaos in much of the Middle East and think tank predictions of a “clash between civilizations”.

Economically, turbocharged neoliberal capitalism has come under question, especially following the 2008 global financial crisis. But, what is significant to note is that since the collapse of state socialism, symbolised by the fall of the Wall, the contours of an alternative social order have become almost impossible to discern.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Deputy Director, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University

Opening Night, Melbourne Comedy Festival 2018. Dilruk Jayasinha’s introductory salvo:

This is so exciting. I honestly… Sorry, it’s unbelievable — that I get to do stand-up comedy here at the Palais in Melbourne. Because I… I’m from Sri Lanka! And I used to be an accountant. Yeah. A Sri Lankan accountant!!! So — not just a money cruncher, but a curry-munching money cruncher!

Thaaat word … is it back again? For someone who has spent the last 30 years of her life specialising in English literary, postcolonial and cultural studies, I had never encountered it until I arrived in Australia 10 years ago.

On today’s episode of Essays On Air, a podcast from The Conversation, I’m reading my essay, titled The politics of curry.

Find and subscribe to Essays on Air in Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: When a suburb’s turn for gentrification comes …

Today’s episode was recorded and edited by Maggy Liu.

Additional audio

Big Mojo Vadodara by Kevin MacLeod

Dilruk Jayasinha’s performance at the Melbourne Comedy Festival 2018 (used under fair dealing)

Indian beats by delta9THC #2

Indian dream by zebra 404

Old Man’s Tale by David Szesztay

Snow by David Szesztay

Sound effects from Orange Free Sounds and Free Sound

Today’s episode was recorded and edited by Maggy Liu.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Cook, Senior Lecturer of Australian Politics, Murdoch University

In its early days, political opinion polling’s leading advocate, George Gallup, sold it as an essential tool for democracy. He believed polling made for better representation because it allowed politicians to take the people’s “pulse”.

But opinion polling didn’t so much enhance democracy as remake it.

Thanks to Gallup, polls have become so ubiquitous in modern-day politics that we’re now convinced they can accurately predict elections. (Even though Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US presidential election suggests otherwise.) Gallup ran his first poll in the US in 1935 and in Australia in 1941.

Since then, opinion polling has changed every liberal democracy by turning politics into a contest between two sales teams trying to synthesise a product they believe voters want and diluting what was once the key role of politicians: to provide leadership.

Polls driving the news cycle

In Australia, this can be seen in the revolving door of prime ministers over the past decade. Polling isn’t the sole reason for this political instability, but it’s played an important part.

Obsessive poll-watching has become standard practice for politicians, as well as the journalists who cover them. This is partly because polls have become news stories in themselves, and not just at election times. A new poll is “news” because it provides the latest measure of the mood of the electorate, which is what everyone wants to know.

Read more: Election explainer: what are the opinion polls and how accurate are they?

The weekly countdown of Malcolm Turnbull’s losses in the Newspoll is a case in point. Because Turnbull arbitrarily set a threshold of 30 Newspoll losses as his justification to challenge the leadership of Tony Abbott, the media fixated on the same arbitrary threshold during his time in office.

When Turnbull lost his 30th straight Newspoll, the media made it feel like a death knell.

Before Abbott, Julia Gillard was dumped for Kevin Rudd because internal Labor polling predicted he could swing crucial votes Labor’s way and save the party from a disastrous defeat in the 2013 election.

In her parting shot to her party, Gillard made clear what she felt had contributed to its decline in leadership:

…real thought has to be given to how to make any leadership contest one in which candidates have to articulate why they want to lead Labor and the nation. … The identification of the top new ideas – not just who is top of the opinion polls.

As soon as Scott Morrison was picked to replace Turnbull, all eyes turned again to the polls to see how the electorate would respond.

In the latest Newspoll, the Coalition had closed the gap with Labor somewhat, but still trailed overall 46-54%. The Fairfax-Ipsos poll showed similar numbers.

The slightly good news for Morrison: he led Bill Shorten as better prime minister 45-32%. But as many commentators have pointed out, this isn’t much of an improvement on where Turnbull was a few weeks ago.

So, not much has changed for the Liberals and it appears not much will – they’re stuck with Morrison now. Some are probably asking themselves now if the spill was worth it, particularly with so many marginal seats in play in the next election and the Coalition sitting on a one-seat majority.

The impact on decision-making

A less visible effect of polling has been the impact it’s had on conversations inside the major parties.

In some regards, policymaking is no longer based solely on a leader’s principles and what the party stands for. It’s about which policies are most likely to keep the party ahead in the opinion polls.

It’s becoming increasingly unlikely for the inner core of senior politicians who run the parties to push through a necessary, but unpopular, policy with the goal of changing the minds of voters who don’t agree with it.

Read more: How political opinion polls affect voter behaviour

Take Australia’s contentious asylum seeker policy, for instance. Following record numbers of boat arrivals in 2012, many polls were taken to gauge the public’s opinion on the Gillard Labor government’s handling of the issue.

The results showed a high degree of confusion. As many as one in five respondents reported uncertainty in a number of surveys. When that happens, a minor change in a poll’s wording can shift the results in major ways.

But those who wanted to turn back the boats were far more entrenched. In a 2012 survey by the Scanlon Foundation, 26% of respondents favoured “turning the boats back” as a solution to the crisis. Other polls showed that voters overwhelmingly blamed the government for the impasse.

There was an opportunity for our leaders to step in with a solution that would bring together the 74% of people who didn’t support a “turn back the boats” policy.

But faced with negative headlines and an unhappy electorate – only 6% of respondents in the Scanlon survey thought the government was doing a good job on asylum seeker policy – it was far more expedient for the government to take a hard line than to craft and sell a more nuanced approach that would address people’s concerns and provide a more humane outcome for asylum seekers.

Potential problems with polling

Another troubling aspect of polls is that the numbers are less real than they are made to look. Hard as they try, pollsters are increasingly having a harder time finding a representative sample of people to survey.

According to Cliff Zukin, the former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, election polling is nearing a crisis:

Two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys.

The Pew Research Centre, for example, reported that 36% of those called in the US would agree to be polled in 1997 and only 9% agreed in 2016.

Many pollsters believe that IVR (interactive voice response), or robopolling, is the future. This automated software allows pollsters to make a higher volume of calls to compensate for the higher numbers of
hang-ups. Robopolling is also much cheaper.

Read more: US election: how did the polls get it so wrong?

In Australia, Newspoll stopped surveying people by landline phones in 2015 and shifted to a mixed methodology of robopolling and online surveys. The new Newspoll was found to be less prone to random fluctuations, but appeared to lean a little to Labor, relative to other polls.

Ipsos still relies on live phone polling, both land lines and mobiles. While Ipsos’ polling results are generally well-regarded, some analysts have found them to underestimate Labor and overestimate the Greens.

Despite all these questions about the accuracy of polls in the mobile phone era, however, they did appear to provide an accurate prediction of the 2016 general election in Australia.

While this is perhaps reassuring, it will only continue to fuel their appeal. As journalist Gay Alcorn put it, Australia’s obsession with polling is not only dispiriting, but corrupting for our politics:

What’s sad is that we know it, but find it impossible to rise above it.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anja Scheffers, Professor, Southern Cross University

The magnitude 7.5 earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, that struck Indonesia days ago has resulted in at least 1,200 deaths.

Authorities are still gauging the extent of the damage, but it’s clear the earthquake and tsunami had a devastating effect on the Sulawesi region, particularly the city of Palu.

It’s not the first time earthquakes have caused mass destruction and death in Indonesia. The tsunamis that follow are particularly damaging. But why?

A combination of plate tectonic in the region, the shape of the coastline, vulnerable communities and a less-than-robust early warning system all combine to make Indonesian tsunamis especially dangerous.

Read more: Would a better tsunami warning system have saved lives in Sulawesi?

Tectonic plates

Indonesia covers many complex tectonic environments. Many details of these are still poorly understood, which hampers our ability to predict earthquake and tsunami risks.

The biggest earthquakes on Earth are “subduction zone” earthquakes, which occur where two tectonic plates meet.

In December 2004 and March 2005, there were a pair of subduction zone earthquakes along the Sunda Trench offshore of the west coast of Sumatra. In particular, the magnitude-9.1 quake in December 2004 generated a devastating tsunami that killed almost a quarter of a million people in countries and islands surrounding the Indian Ocean.

But only looking out for these kinds of earthquakes can blind us to other dangers. Eastern Indonesia has many small microplates, which are jostled around by the motion of the large Australia, Sunda, Pacific and Philippine Sea plates.

The September quake was caused by what’s called a “strike-slip” fault in the interior of one of these small plates. It is rare – although not unknown – for these kinds of quakes to create tsunamis.

The fault systems are rather large, and through erosion processes have created broad river valleys and estuaries. The valley of the Palu river, and its estuary in which the regional capital Palu is located, have been formed by this complex fault system. Studies of prehistoric earthquakes along this fault system suggests this fault produces magnitude 7-8 earthquakes roughly every 700 years.

The sea floor shapes the wave

Another important factor for tsunamis is the depth and shape of the sea floor. This determines the speed of the initial waves. Strong subduction zone earthquakes on the ocean floor can cause the entire ocean water column to lift, then plunge back down. As the water has momentum, it may fall below sea level and create strong oscillations.

The bulge of water moving outward from the centre of a earthquake maybe of limited height (rarely much more than a metre), but the mass of water is extremely large (depending on the surface area moved by the earthquake).

Tsunami waves can travel very fast, reaching the speed of a jet. In water 2km deep they can travel at 700km per hour, and over very deep ocean can hit 1,000km per hour.

When the wave approaches the shallower coast, its speed decreases and the height increases. A tsunami may be 1m high in the open ocean, but rise to 5-10m at the coast. If the approach to the shoreline is steep, this effect is exaggerated and can create waves tens of metres high.

Despite the fact that the waves slow down near the coast, their immense starting speeds mean flat areas can be inundated for kilometres inland. The ocean floor topography affects the speed of tsunami waves, meaning they move faster over deep areas and slow down over submarine banks. Very steep land, above or below water, can even bend and reflect waves.

The coastlines of the Indonesian archipelago are accentuated, in particular in the eastern part and especially at Sulawesi. Palu has a narrow, deep and long bay: perfectly designed to make tsunamis more intense, and more deadly.

This complex configuration also makes it very difficult to model potential tsunamis, so it’s hard to issue timely and accurate warnings to people who may be affected.

Read more: Explainer: after an earthquake, how does a tsunami happen?

Get to high ground

The safest and simplest advice for people in coastal areas that have been affected by an earthquake is to get to higher ground immediately, and stay there for a couple of hours. In reality, this is a rather complex problem.

Hawaii and Japan have sophisticated and efficient early warning systems. Replicating these in Indonesia is challenging, given the lack of communications infrastructure and the wide variety of languages spoken throughout the vast island archipelago.

After the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster, international efforts were made to improve tsunami warning networks in the region. Today, Indonesia’s tsunami warning system operates a network of 134 tidal gauge stations, 22 buoys connected to seafloor sensors to transmit advance warnings, land-based seismographs, sirens in about 55 locations, and a system to disseminate warnings by text message.

However, financing and supporting the early warning system in the long term is a considerable problem. The buoys alone cost around US$250,000 each to install and US$50,000 annually for maintenance.

The three major Indonesian agencies for responsible for earthquake and tsunami disaster mitigation have suffered from budget cuts and internal struggles to define roles and responsibilities.

Lastly, the Palu tsunami event has highlighted that our current tsunami models are insufficient. They do not properly consider multiple earthquake events, or the underwater landslides potentially caused by such quakes.

No early warning system can prevent strong earthquakes. Tsunamis, and the resulting infrastructure damage and fatalities, will most certainly occur in the future. But with a well-developed and reliable early warning system, and better communication and public awareness, we can minimise the tragic consequences.

With earthquakes that occur very close to the beach – often the case in Indonesia – even an ideal system could not disseminate the necessary information quickly enough. Indonesia’s geography and vulnerable coastal settlements makes tsunamis more dangerous, so we need more and concerted efforts to create earthquake and tsunami resilient communities.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ruth Schubert, Senior Fellow, LH Martin Institute, University of Melbourne

This article is part of a series on the Future of VET exploring issues within the sector and how to improve the decline in enrolments and shortages of qualified people in vocational jobs. Read the other articles in the series here.

Some 20 years ago, the Australian vocational education system was regarded as world class. Sadly, this is no longer the case when compared to systems in places such as Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and even China.

Australia’s vocational education system has been bedevilled by competing jurisdiction control, political ideology, chronic under-funding, piecemeal reforms, rampant rorting by a small number of corporate private providers, and a disappointing and surprisingly high level of policy confusion.

In February this year, Labor announced it would commit to a generational review of the VET sector in Australia if elected at the next election.

Read more: Learning from Victoria’s TAFE mistakes

There is already a substantial list of research reports, reviews and inquiries into issues within the sector. A well-crafted plan can be distilled from this, which, combined with proactive leadership and action, is what the sector needs. Not yet another all-encompassing, long-winded review that will inevitably run aground due to the short-term federal political cycle.

The workforce is changing fast

Our society and economy rely on the vocational system to be highly effective and responsive. After all, just over 24% of our population aged between 15 and 64 years is actively engaged with vocational education every year. This figure is even higher for young people – 46% of 15 to 19-year-olds are involved with vocational education. It’s a system geared to cater for mass and equitable participation.

This is a good thing.

The speed of change for those in the workforce is rapid. This will remain a constant for the foreseeable future. We only have to look to the World Economic Forum and reports from the Foundation for Young Australians for independent advice on the kind of skills our workforce and enterprises will need in coming months and years.

These reports suggest a new focus on technical and enterprise skills as being of equal importance. This is neatly captured by the idea of the “T-shaped graduate”. This is a term commonly used in Europe to capture the idea of a graduate having both specific technical skills and knowledge, and the enterprise skills of collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, complex problem solving and creativity.

Australia needs a workforce with a new set of skills and the flexibility and capacity to adapt to even more change. Vocational education can deliver this workforce, but for this to happen the sector needs to be given autonomy and political trust. Trying to change the system piece by piece will result in a camel instead of the thoroughbred Australia needs.

What change is most urgently needed?

First, identify the mature, comprehensive, low-risk providers and give them a new status, independence from government control, and operational autonomy so they can lead the change we need.

This new category could include many TAFEs or TAFE divisions of dual sector universities (which provide vocational and higher education, such as RMIT and Swinburne), a number of not-for-profit providers, and a smaller number of private registered training organisations (RTOs). This classification of provider should be highly prized, not awarded lightly, or in great numbers.

Victoria is fortunate to have a number of mature TAFEs ready to be recognised in this category. These include Holmesglen, Box Hill Institute and Chisholm Institute, to name a few. Arguably, a number of the whole-of-state TAFEs, such as TAFE QLD, should also be recognised in this category. These TAFEs already deliver across the gap between vocational education and higher education.

Second, the group of providers should be given long-term equitable funding, based on an agreed framework with clear and measurable performance outcomes, as well as self-accrediting status to respond quickly to the changes in skills required of new and existing employees.

Performance outcomes would include student participation, progression and completion targets, and be tailored to institutional missions. Those outcomes should also to include specific regional innovation and development targets, with a clear focus on small and medium sized enterprises. Australia is largely a small and medium enterprise nation. Small to medium enterprises are a natural fit with highly responsive higher vocational education institutions.

Read more: Not all vocational training providers are stacking up

It’s this group of providers that will change the system and provide the service that business, communities and students need. Creating this new status of provider will enable education that delivers educational services across an increasingly blurry and arguably artificial divide between vocational education and higher education, with a focus on applied and work-integrated learning, and problem solving.

While we applaud the federal Opposition for committing to a generational review, they’re not the government (at least not yet), and we already know where the issues lie. Reports from the Mitchell Institute have provided compelling evidence of the need to restore funding for vocational education. Industry bodies such as the Business Council have called for a reinstatement of TAFE as a central part of the vocational system.

We don’t need more temperature-taking. We need to begin work on the actual implementation plan and action. This can begin now – not in three or four years’ time.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina Raynor, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Transforming Housing Project, University of Melbourne

Social housing is in crisis in Australia, with almost 200,000 people on waiting lists. Social housing made up 8% of all housing stock in Australia in 1966. This had fallen to just 4.3% at July 2016.

As a result, governments have tightened eligibility. Social housing is increasingly home to only the most vulnerable households. And even these households often spend years on the waiting list while experiencing severe housing stress or homelessness.

Outside of social housing, rental and ownership options are increasingly unaffordable, particularly in the capital cities. Social housing was once a stepping stone to home ownership, but this is becoming more difficult.

Read more: Six lessons on how to make affordable housing funding work across Australia

There is a solution

The Melbourne-based Barnett Foundation responded by creating a model of affordable home ownership for social housing tenants. The foundation developed a 34-unit apartment in the inner suburb of North Melbourne and offered 28 units to households living within 4km of the site and willing to leave their social housing. It’s called the Melbourne Apartments Project (MAP).

The foundation offered an interest-free second mortgage scheme to ease buyers’ transition into home ownership. This allows the owner to retain 100% ownership of their home while combining their own savings, a standard first mortgage with a bank and a second mortgage with the foundation.

The developer achieved cost savings during construction through reduced marketing and real estate costs (thanks to support from Melbourne City Mission), reduced tax requirements and foregone profit. The savings totalled about 37% of the market value of each property.

These savings were passed on to the buyers in the form of a no-interest second mortgage. This is not payable until the home owner sells their apartment. The second mortgage also reduces every year for the first four years.

Buyers were required to provide at least a A$25,000 deposit and to seek a mortgage to cover the remaining development costs of each unit. This is about 63% of market value, meaning they require a much smaller loan and pay less interest, as well as a smaller deposit. This helps overcome two of the largest barriers to home ownership for first home buyers.

What do the buyers think about it?

I interviewed ten of the 28 MAP households in our research and will be presenting findings next Tuesday, October 9, at a free event.

Residents offered extremely positive feedback on their new homes and about being able to buy a home near their existing communities. They would not have contemplated this without the MAP.

Many had lived in social housing for 20 to 30 years and had never felt capable of making the move into market housing.

Participants spoke of the benefit of being able to pass on an asset to their children or to build wealth in their home. Many spoke of the great sense of achievement this move had given them.

I found residents retained extremely strong connections to their previous communities. They often returned to the public housing estates for social activities, to visit family and for community gardening.

However, many also spoke of their deep desire to leave unsafe, “aggravated” and uncomfortable previous homes. Households spoke of the deep sense of relief that came from feeling safe.

Most respondents told me their financial position had not changed or even improved since moving into MAP. Most were “over income” tenants, with a household income that meant they paid market rent for their social housing. Many found their mortgage repayments were similar to their previous rental costs.

However, social housing provides a “safety net” as rents are adjusted if household income decreases. Given some households gathered their deposits with significant support from family and friends while earning low incomes, this might be a future concern for residents.

Scaling up solutions

A 28-unit development is a drop in the ocean compared to the level of unmet need. Recent research suggests Greater Melbourne alone has a 160,000-dwelling deficit of housing that is affordable and available to very low and low-income households.

Read more: Ten lessons from cities that have risen to the affordable housing challenge

Creating a significant change requires effective models to be replicated and scaled up. In Toronto, a similar model called Options for Homes has delivered 2,000 affordable units. A further 2,500 units are in the construction pipeline.

Our research found this model is replicable and suitable for a subsection of more financially secure social housing tenants. Its scaling would be supported by access to land and finance and integration with social rental housing options.

Access to land

Access to affordable land in well-located areas is one of the largest barriers to developing affordable housing. Projects like MAP could be integrated into state government initiatives like the Public Housing Renewal Program.

Such schemes would also benefit from discounted land sales by philanthropic or religious groups, or even deferred land sale costs. Options for Homes almost always works with vendors that are prepared to defer land purchase costs until development is completed.

Read more: Put unused and ‘lazy’ land to work to ease the affordable housing crisis

Access to funds

Philanthropic organisations and social impact investors like the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation have already supported affordable home ownership through the Affordable Housing Loan Fund. This allowed the not-for-profit organisation Habitat for Humanity to provide no-interest loans to low-income buyers in the town of Yea in Victoria.

Similarly, social impact investors are key to providing project equity to models like the Nightingale housing model. They could provide important equity and/or debt finance to projects using the MAP model.

Integrated housing solutions

This model is aimed at households with incomes of at least A$75,000 a year, or access to a substantial capital contribution. Despite the reduced deposits and mortgage repayments, most social housing tenants will not be able to access this scheme.

Other not-for-profit organisations could replicate this model and integrate it into their existing portfolios of social rental housing. The MAP model could cross-subsidise other housing options and help to provide a diversity of housing options in developments.

Why does this matter?

For the Melbourne Apartments Project, we estimated that for every A$1 of cost to the government, it receives A$2.19 in benefits from the project. This is mainly due to new households being able to move into vacated public housing units.

If every public housing unit made available as a MAP participant moved out were reallocated to a high-needs applicant on the waiting list, the government could save A$27,458.22 in costs per MAP participant per year.

Housing is increasingly unaffordable in many parts of Australia. As governments reduce their role in social and affordable housing, the need for industry-led innovations is growing. Pilot projects such as MAP are important but need to be supported by policy and scaling mechanisms to have a systemic impact on our housing environment.

The authors of this and two other recent Conversation articles – Carolyn Whitzman, Matt Palm and Katrina Raynor – are presenting the full findings of their research project at a Transforming Housing event from 6.30pm on October 6.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Ward, Fellow in Historical Studies, University of Melbourne

“We look after our mates,” Australia’s new prime minister, Scott Morrison, has declared. He’s said it on several occasions, in fact. So it must be a value he thinks important. Meanwhile the man he defeated for the top job, Peter Dutton, has been embroiled in controversy over allegedly using his powers as immigration minister to do favours for “mates”.

Where do we draw the line between looking after a mate and being corrupt?

The line, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. As recently noted in The Conversation, many people regard corruption as being more than illegal acts like taking bribes or misappropriating funds. They also include actions that are technically legal but still morally suspect.

Abusing entrusted power for private gain

This understanding mirrors the definition from the anti-corruption group Transparency International: the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.

Some research suggests Australians believe corruption is getting worse.

Read more: Australians think our politicians are corrupt, but where is the evidence?

Other evidence, however, suggests perceptions of corruption are only slightly more than a decade ago. This data comes from the World Happiness Report, published by the United Nations and edited by economist Jeffrey Sachs and colleagues.

The report collects and compares data from 150 countries. Its figures on the public perception of corruption is based on answers to two questions in the Gallup World Poll: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?”

This means it paints a wider picture than Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, which reports only people’s perception of political corruption.

With survey results now available for the past 12 years, we can see how perceptions differ both over time and between countries. We can also assess what drives those changes. Do they reflect particular events? Or is something more fundamental going on?

For simplicity, let’s just look at the data for Australia, Britain and the United States, given their relatively similar legal and cultural values.

The data show some significant differences in the way perceptions of corruptions have shifted over the past decade.

The most obvious detail is that Americans have significantly higher perceptions of corruption than the other two countries. Those perceptions seem to have been increasing steadily. Some 60% of Americans felt corruption was widespread in 2005; this has now climbed to 70%.

By contrast, perceptions of corruption in Australia and Britain seem to rise and fall, with little difference in 2017 compared with 2005.

What is responsible for these shifts in sentiment? In Britain, perceptions of corruption were greatest between 2008 and 2010. The Global Financial Crisis may have played a part, with disgust at politicians bailing out bankers while ordinary people suffered. The MP expenses scandal of 2009 would also certainly have reinforced the belief politicians were exploiting the system.

Read more: From our ancestors to modern leaders, all do it: the story of corruption

Thankfully, the Global Financial Crisis did not affect Australians that much. This might explain why perceptions of corruption here peaked in 2007. That peak is probably related to two developments; the oil-for-wheat scandal and the Howard government’s introduction of WorkChoices, which was widely seen as being unfair.

Underlying social factors

The Global Financial Crisis might have contributed to American jaundice about the cosy relationship between politicians and bankers. But the steady increase in the US corruption measure points to more than specific events influencing perceptions. The national mood Donald Trump captured so well with his promise to “drain the swamp” attests to underlying social factors.

One of those factors is a society’s level of inequality.

This second graph shows the combination of inequality and corruption perception in OECD countries. Inequality is measured by the standard Gini coefficient, which runs from 0.0 (everyone has the same income) to 1.0 (one person has all of a country’s income). The line running through the dots is a trend line. It shows that, on average, perceptions of corruption rise as inequality increases.

Read more: What factors influence income inequality?

Inequality is clearly not the only factor involved. But it does have a role. On average, an increase of one percentage point in inequality is associated with an increase of 2.7 percentage points in perceived corruption.

This is perhaps not surprising. In their ground-breaking book “The Spirit Level”, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showed that in less equal societies people have less trust in others. The belief it’s a “dog-eat-dog” world, or that “everyone’s out for themselves”, is more prevalent.

The relationship goes both ways. It is also likely societies with more corruption will become less equal.

Directly tackling corruption is therefore important. As well as restoring faith in public governance, it builds trust more generally, and has economic benefit.

But robust anti-corruption institutions, rules and processes should not be our only tools. Measures to address inequality can also help.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caillan Davenport, Senior Lecturer in Roman History, Macquarie University

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” asks Reg from the People’s Front of Judaea in Monty Python’s comedy classic, Life of Brian. Rome: City + Empire, now showing at the National Museum of Australia, offers visitors a clear answer: they brought civilization.

This collection of more than 200 objects from the British Museum presents a vision of a vast Roman empire, conquered by emperors and soldiers, who brought with them wealth and luxury. Quotations from ancient authors extolling the virtues of Rome and the rewards of conquest stare down from the walls. This is an exhibition of which the Romans themselves would have been proud.

Portrait head resembling Cleopatra. Italy, 50–30 BCE limestone 1879,0712.15 © Trustees of the British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, 2018. All rights reserved

Indeed, the major issue is that the displays present a largely uncritical narrative of Roman imperialism. One section, called “Military Might,” features a statue of the emperor Hadrian in armour, a defeated Dacian, and a bronze diploma attesting to the rewards of service in the Roman army. An explanatory panel informs us that resistors were “treated harshly” while those “who readily accepted Roman domination, benefited”. This is especially troubling to read in an Australian context.

The exhibition is beautifully laid out, with highly effective use of lighting and colour to emphasise the different themes: “The Rise of Rome”, “Military Might”, “The Eternal City”, “Peoples of the Empire” and “In Memoriam”. And it boasts impressive busts and statues of emperors, imperial women, priests and priestesses, gods and goddesses, most displayed in the open, rather than behind glass. This allows visitors to view them up close from many angles.

Mummy portrait of a woman. Rubaiyat, Egypt, 160–170 CE encaustic on limewood 1939,0324.211 © Trustees of the British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, 2018. All rights reserved

The use of imagery is one of the exhibition’s greatest strengths. Close-ups of coins and other small artefacts are projected against the wall, while enlarged 18th-century Piranesi prints of famous monuments such as the Pantheon provide a stunning backdrop.

There are some excellent curatorial choices. The number of images of women is commendable, enabling the exhibition to move beyond emperors, soldiers and magistrates to emphasise women as an intrinsic part of the life of Rome.

Stories of key monuments, such as the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla, and the Pantheon, are accompanied by busts of the emperors who built them as well as associated everyday objects such as theatre tickets and strigils. However, there is no map of the city of Rome to allow visitors to place these buildings in context. And the evidence for the true cost of Roman conquest is not sufficiently highlighted.

Where are the slaves?

Coins show emperors subduing prostrate peoples, including one featuring Judaea, where Vespasian and Titus cruelly crushed a revolt between 66-73 CE. The accompanying plaque refers obliquely to Roman “acts of oppression”, but one has to turn to the exhibition catalogue to find the true list of horrors, including the thousands enslaved and the sacking of the Temple of Jerusalem. Nor is there any mention that the construction of the Colosseum, profiled just a few feet away in the exhibition, was funded by the spoils of the Jewish War.

Relief showing two female gladiators. Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), Turkey, 1st–2nd century CE marble 1847,0424.19 © Trustees of the British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, 2018. All rights reserved

The walls are covered with quotations extolling the Romans’ own imperialistic vision. “The divine right to conquer is yours”, a line from Virgil’s Aeneid, greets visitors at the start. Even more troubling is a quotation from Pliny the Elder which looms over the “Peoples of the Empire” section:

Besides, who does not agree that life has improved now the world is united under the splendour of the Roman Empire.

Toothpick from the Hoxne Treasure. Hoxne, England, late 4th – early 5th century CE silver and niello with gold gilding 1994,0408.146 © Trustees of the British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, 2018. All rights reserved

This section is full of objects displaying the luxurious lifestyle of provincial elites under Roman rule, from the stunning decorated spoons and bracelets of the British Hoxne treasure to beautiful funerary reliefs of rich Palmyrenes. The exhibition trumpets the “diversity” of Rome’s peoples, but this curious set of objects does not tell any coherent story beyond the comfortable lives of the privileged.

Slavery – the most horrifying aspect of Roman society – is all but absent. There are incidental references (a gladiator given his freedom, the funerary urn of a former slave), but they are presented with little context. Scholars have estimated that slaves composed at least 10 per cent of the empire’s total population of 60 million. They undertook domestic and agricultural labour, educated children, and served in the imperial household. Their stories remain largely untold.

Read more: Mythbusting Ancient Rome: cruel and unusual punishment

Alternative narratives

The absence of any counterpoint to the Romans’ story in this exhibition is all the more surprising given that the catalogue contains an essay from the NMA that does show awareness of these problems. Curators Lily Withycombe and Mathew Trinca explore how the narrative of Roman conquest influenced imperial expansion in the modern age, including the colonisation of Australia.

Particularly revealing is their statement: “While the Classics may have once been in the service of British ideas of empire, they are now more likely to be taught using a critical postcolonial lens.” Yet this nuance does not make it into the exhibition itself.

Ring with sealstone depicting Mark Antony probably Italy, 40–30 BCE. gold and jasper 1867,0507.724 © Trustees of the British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, 2018. All rights reserved

A very different narrative about the Roman world could have been presented. Even in their own time, Roman commentators were aware of the darker side of imperialism. In his account of the influx of Roman habits and luxuries into Britain, the historian Tacitus remarked:

The Britons, who had no experience of this, called it ‘civilization’, although it was a part of their enslavement. (Agricola 21, trans. A. R. Birley).

The colossal head of the empress Faustina the Elder from a temple in Sardis is a spectacular object, but its overwhelming size should remind us of the asymmetrical power dynamics of Roman rule. Emperors and their family members were meant to be figures of awe to peoples of the empire, to be feared like gods. Tacitus memorably described the imperial cult temple at Colchester in Britain as a “fortress of eternal domination”.

Read more: Guide to the Classics: Virgil’s Aeneid

The Rome of the exhibition is a curiously timeless world. The grant of Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire in 212 CE goes unmentioned, and the coming of Christianity is presented almost as an afterthought.

There are some spectacular items from the vibrant world of Late Antiquity (3rd-7th centuries CE), such as the gold glass displaying Peter and Paul and parts of the Esquiline treasure. But this section is marred by factual errors and it misses the opportunity to explore the dynamics of fundamental religious and cultural change.

Horse-trappings from the Esquiline Treasure. Rome, Italy, 4th century CE silver and gold gilding 1866,1229.26 © Trustees of the British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, 2018. All rights reserved

Rome: City + Empire is a wonderful collection of objects, displayed in an engaging manner, which will be of interest to all Australians. The exhibition is likely to be a hit with children – there is a playful audio-guide specifically for kids and many hands-on experiences dotted throughout: from the chance to electronically “colour-in” the funerary relief of a Palmyrene woman on a digital screen, to feeling a Roman coin or picking up a soldier’s dagger.

But visitors should be aware that it presents a distinctly old-fashioned tale of Rome’s rise and expansion, which is out of step with contemporary scholarly thinking. The benefits of empire came at a bloody cost.

Rome: City + Empire is at the National Museum of Australia until 3 February 2019.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mike Johnstone, Security Researcher, Associate Professor in Resilient Systems, Edith Cowan University

Facebook announced on Friday that its engineering team had discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. Due to a flaw in Facebook’s code, hackers were able to take over an account and use it in the same way you would if you had logged into the account with a password.

The company says it has now fixed the problem in its code and reset access tokens for those accounts – along with 40 million other accounts that were vulnerable to the flaw. If you found yourself logged out of your Facebook account last week, it’s likely you were affected.

Read more: Overcoming ‘cyber-fatigue’ requires users to step up for security

Beyond that, little is known about the extent of the security breach. In its security update, Facebook said:

Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed. We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based.

What it means

This not the worst data breach to date. That accolade belongs to the credit bureau Equifax, which had personal data stolen from the accounts of 147 million people. But, unfortunately for Facebook, there are several flow-on effects from the recent hack.

First, the breach may run afoul of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was introduced in May. Although the GDPR only applies to European citizens, the penalties for data breaches are severe – up to 4% of global turnover per breach.

Read more: Regulating Facebook won’t prevent data breaches

Second, any accounts on other platforms that use Facebook verification are also at risk. That’s because it’s now a common practice to use one account as an automatic verification to connect to other platforms, for example by using a Facebook account to log in to another social media platform such as Twitter, Spotify or Instagram. This is known as single sign-on (SSO).

How single sign-on works

If you connect to any system, you need some form of authentication – usually a login credential such as a username and password pair. When you have many different systems that all require credentials before you can use them, suddenly you’re faced with remembering ten different (ideally very long) passwords.

Some people can do this, but many can’t. And we still want the systems to be secure. If we could connect to one system that was trusted by the others, and use the trusted system’s password, then we wouldn’t need ten passwords – just one. That’s the principle behind SSO.

But this only works as long as the trusted system is secure. If it’s not, a cybercriminal could use the hacked account on one platform (in this case, Facebook), to access any other connected platform.

What you should do

Authentication usually works because of one of three factors:

• something you know, such as a password
• something you have, such as an access card
• something you are, such as a fingerprint.

Clearly, using more than one factor increases security. In your Facebook account, you can choose to use two-factor authentication. That means that you would need to enter your password plus a code sent to you via an SMS message when you next log in.

Read more: The age of hacking brings a return to the physical key

The future of verification

There is always a tension between usability and security. People want systems to be secure so that their identities aren’t stolen, and they also want the same systems to be easily accessible. SSO is an attempt to balance usability and security, but the Facebook hack reveals its limitations.

Many people don’t like passwords, so they choose easily remembered, and therefore easily breakable, passwords. Cybercriminals have access to lists of millions of common passwords (hint: “Gandalf” isn’t as unique as you might think).

Access tokens, such as cards or other physical devices (as used by some banks, for example) are a solution – as long as you don’t lose it. It might be that using a unique physical attribute is the best way forward. After all, you always carry your fingerprint, iris or voice with you.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Cunneen, Research Fellow, Curtin University

The death toll from the magnitude 7.5 earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck near Palu, Indonesia, on Friday evening continues to rise, with several regions yet to be reached by rescue teams.

But the size and location of the earthquake should not have come as a surprise. Palu is situated at the end of a long, narrow bay which is the surface expression of a very active fault, the Palu-Koro fault.

The area is at high risk of tsunami, with several large earthquakes and tsunamis occurring along the fault within the past 100 years.

Read more: Explainer: after an earthquake, how does a tsunami happen?

Details of Friday’s incident are limited, but already there are questions being asked about the effectiveness of Indonesia’s tsunami warning system.

It was developed after the devastating 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that occurred after an earthquake near Sumatra, but in this recent event the warning did not reach many of the people who were affected.

The tsunami occurred in an area where there are no tide gauges that could give information about the height of the wave. There are reports that a more high-tech system could have saved lives if it had been fully implemented.

Most of Indonesia’s deep ocean tsunameter buoys, specially designed to detect tsunamis in the open ocean, have not been working since 2012.

The Indonesian Tsunami Warning System issued a warning only minutes after the earthquake, but officials were unable to contact officers in the Palu area. The warning was cancelled 34 minutes later, just after the third tsunami wave hit Palu.

Tsunami history of Palu

Large earthquakes are not uncommon in Palu, with 15 events over magnitude 6.5 occurring in the past 100 years. The largest was a magnitude-7.9 event in January 1996, about 100km north of Friday’s earthquake.

Several these large earthquakes have also generated tsunamis. In 1927, an earthquake and tsunami caused about 50 deaths and damaged buildings in Palu. In 1968 an earthquake with magnitude 7.8 near Donggala generated a tsunami wave that killed more than 200 people.

Despite this history, many people in Palu were not aware of the risk of a tsunami following the earthquake. Ten years on from the 2004 Boxing Day tragedy that killed at least 226,000 people, there were concerns about tsunami warning systems across the region.

An advanced warning system currently only in the prototype stage may not have helped the people of Palu, as the tsunami struck the shore within 20 minutes of the earthquake.

Such early warning systems are most useful for areas several hundred kilometres from the tsunami source. In regions like Palu where the earthquake and tsunami source are very close, education is the most effective warning system.

It is not yet clear whether Friday’s tsunami was caused by movement on the fault rupture from the earthquake, or from submarine landslides within Palu bay caused by the shaking from the earthquake.

The sides of the bay are steep and unstable, and maps of the sea floor suggest that submarine landslides have occurred there in the past.

If the tsunami was generated by a submarine landslide within the bay, tsunami sensors or tide gauges at the mouth of the bay would not have sensed the tsunami wave before it struck the shore in Palu.

Communication networks

High tech tsunami warning systems are able to send out warnings through phone networks and other communications channels, and reach the community through text messages and tsunami sirens on the beaches.

But in areas where a devastating earthquake has occurred, this infrastructure is often too damaged to operate and the warning messages simply can’t get through. In Palu, the earthquake destroyed the local mobile phone network and no information was able to get in or out of the area.

Timing is also crucial. Official tsunami warnings require analysis of data and take time – even if it is only minutes – to prepare and disseminate.

This time is crucial for people near the earthquake epicentre, where the tsunami may strike within minutes of the earthquake. Those living in such areas need to be aware of the need to evacuate without waiting for official warnings, relying on the earthquake itself as a natural warning of a potential tsunami.

Read more: Be prepared, always: the tsunami message from New Zealand’s latest earthquake

The need to raise awareness of the risk becomes even more challenging when large tsunamis occur infrequently, as in Palu. Many residents would not have been born when the last tsunami impacted the town in 1968.

So high tech warning systems may not be effective in areas close to the earthquake epicentre. Ongoing awareness and education programmes are the most important part of a tsunami warning system in coastal areas at risk of tsunami, no matter how infrequently they occur.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phil Sutton, Group Leader/Snr Princ Research Fellow, Mucosal Immunology, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

In 1982, two Australians – Robin Warren and Barry Marshall – presented their first observations of strange bacteria living in the human stomach. They went on to propose that these bacteria caused a common condition called gastritis, which is essentially inflammation of the stomach.

This radical suggestion was not well received by doctors at the time. To convince sceptics, Marshall famously infected himself with a culture of these bacteria, causing him to develop gastritis.

Read more: In Conversation with Barry Marshall: using pathogens to help humans

These bacteria, which became known as Helicobacter pylori, look like curved rods with a bank of structures called flagella at one end. These flagella beat like arms to propel the bacteria around the stomach.

Around half the world’s population is infected with Helicobacter pylori, although this varies between countries and age groups, with the highest rate among the elderly. Around 15% of Australians are infected.

Helicobacter pylori normally infect the stomachs of children where, in most cases, they stay for ever.

In developed countries such as Australia, it appears likely to be spread from mouth to mouth and mother to child. In developing countries, it might also be spread in contaminated water, though this is not proven.

Complications

Most infected people are blissfully unaware of their little passengers. But in around one in five infected people, the resulting gastritis can, many years later, lead to one of several diseases including peptic ulcers – open sores in the lining of the stomach.

It was for discovering the link between Helicobacter pylori, gastritis and peptic ulcers that Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2005.

Helicobacter pylori infection can also cause two types of cancer: the rare MALT lymphoma and a stomach cancer called gastric adenocarcinoma.

Read more: A new blood test can detect eight different cancers in their early stages

Gastric adenocarcinoma is the fifth most common cause of death due to cancer in the world and claims around 1,200 Australian lives each year. At least 90% of these cancers are thought to be caused by Helicobacter pylori, with this disease occuring due to genetic abnormalities that develop in stomach cells as a result of constant and severe gastritis.

Diagnosis

People with ulcers or other gastric problems can be tested for Helicobacter pylori infection in a number of ways, including the following three tests:

• a blood test that looks for antibodies
• a stool test that detects bits of the bacteria in the faeces
• a breath test that detects an enzyme produced by Helicobacter pylori in the stomach. This involves drinking a special solution that is broken down by the enzyme, producing a compound that is breathed out and measured.

Treatment

A single antibiotic would be prescribed to treat most bacterial infections. But treating a Helicobacter pylori infection is far more complex. It commonly involves two or three antibiotics, delivered with a drug called a proton pump inhibitor, which temporarily reduces acid secretion in the stomach.

The development of resistance to antibiotic treatments is becoming a major concern for many disease-causing bacteria and Helicobacter pylori are no exception. This means front-line treatments aren’t always able to immediately eradicate Helicobacter pylori infection.

Some people who undergo treatment don’t actually clear the infection in the first go, although they do normally do so with subsequent alternative drug combinations.

Progress

Many things have changed over the past 36 years. Prior to 1982, ulcers were believed to be caused by stress and/or the overproduction of stomach acid. People with these common conditions often suffered for years. Also the cause of gastric adenocarcinoma was unknown.

Marshall and Warrens’ discovery that Helicobacter pylori cause gastritis means peptic ulcers can now be cured; in many countries including Australia, these have now become relatively rare conditions.

And their discovery that most stomach cancers are caused by Helicobacter pylori has revealed a way of preventing this terrible disease. These days, people diagnosed with Helicobacter pylori have the infection treated which greatly reduces their chance of getting this cancer.

Read more: Is it OK for medical students to practise on themselves?

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Gedye, Oncologist and Senior Lecturer, University of Newcastle

This year’s award of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine to Dr James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo, for their work in the early 1990s on immune checkpoint proteins CTLA4 and PD1, is a fitting recognition of how their work has led to a seismic shift in the way we treat cancer.

Read more: James Allison and Tasuku Honjo: deserving winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

In a remarkably short time, drugs that inhibit these immune checkpoints (or immune brakes) have transformed the practice of clinical oncology. Drugs like pembrolizumab (Keytruda), ipilimumab (Yervoy), nivolumab (Opdivo), avelumab, durvalumab (Imfinzi) and atezolizumab – some of which are now being subsidised on Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) – are being applied across a range of cancers.

From AFL player Jarryd Roughead to businessman Ron Walker, to former US president Jimmy Carter, anecdotes abound for the activity of immune checkpoint inhibitors in advanced cancers such as melanoma, lung, kidney and bladder and others.

One of the first patients I was privileged to care for in clinic had completed four rounds of treatment with an experimental drug – three months of infusions of a checkpoint inhibitor (one of which is now on the PBS). She had managed these infusions well, but past treatments had failed, so she was understandably anxious.

Before going to see her, I checked her scan report.

Then I looked at the scans.

I checked the report again.

My first words when I walked into her room were ones I never dreamed I’d say to someone with advanced cancer: “I can’t see the cancer on your scans anymore”. My entrance would have been a lot more dramatic if the nurse hadn’t already told her the good news.

“When can I book a holiday?” she said.

How checkpoint inhibitors work

Originally, Allison and Honjo’s studies were focused on the underlying machinery of how the immune system controls itself. Like many mechanisms in our body, the immune system has the ability to sense prevailing conditions and rapidly amplify a response to defend the body.

Read more: Explainer: how does the immune system work?

This powerful process has evolved over millions of years. But a powerful system also needs powerful regulation, for which our bodies have evolved so-called “checkpoints”, or brakes, that guard against overactivity of the immune response.

There are myriad immune checkpoint proteins on the surface of immune cells and normal cells of the body to allow this regulation to occur. Immune checkpoints work in a committee to vote their approval or disapproval of whether an immune cell becomes activated and attacks when it meets and recognises another cell or organism.

Insufficient or impaired checkpoint signalling allows an overreaction, which may contribute to the causes of autoimmune diseases such as colitis and arthritis. Conversely overactivity of immune checkpoints can obscure and confuse the immune system, allowing infected or abnormal cells to persist.

Cancer cells use these immune checkpoints to hide and evade from immune cells, tipping the balance in favour of the cancer and turning each immune cell off. Checkpoint inhibitor drugs work by not allowing the brakes to come on, so the immune system can keep attacking the cancer.

Read more: The fourth pillar: how we’re arming the immune system to help fight cancer

Allison and Tashuka initially conceived that their discoveries may help treat chronic infections such as hepatitis B and C. The drugs created from their discoveries remain in trials for these conditions, but their most exciting application has come through the treatment of cancer.

Using the power of the immune system to fight off cancer actually goes back to the late 19th century. Surgeon William Coley had developed an approach to treating cancer that involved injecting patients with a mixture of heat-killed bacteria in the hopes of stimulating the body’s “resisting powers.”

But with rapid understanding of the physics of radiotherapy, and the chemistry of chemotherapy, the use of immune therapy for cancer languished. It waited until we had a better understanding of the biology of the immune system.

We now know that the current crop of immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs will help a minority of patients across many cancers, but still fail the majority. Our understanding still feels very basic. We can’t yet predict who will be helped, who will be failed, who will suffer side-effects, or who will benefit from different combinations of therapy.

But this platform of studies and drugs will provide us with the foundation to understand how the immune system is structured and could be reactivated in every person with cancer, to try to solve this puzzle in real-time for each individual.

The work of Allison and Honjo has given us hope of delivering mundane miracles to everyone with cancer, and turning cancer patients back into people.

Read more: Cancer immunotherapy drugs like Keytruda and Opdivo hold hope for some, but there’s still a way to go

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathleen Riach, Associate Professor in Management, Monash University

This week’s International Day of Older Persons reminds us Australia has made an international commitment to work towards the eradication of poverty in old age, and that at least one side of politics, Labor, has developed a suite of policies it says will help.

The retirement savings of single women are well below those of single men, and homelessness among older women is climbing.

Labor’s policies are built around superannuation. It has promised to remove the A$450 per month wage threshold at which employers make compulsory contributions meaning they will make them for all workers, and to itself make contributions on behalf of workers during paid parental leave.

Read more: Super. If Labor really wanted to help women in retirement, it would do something else

Questions have been asked about whether these moves would do much at all to lift superannuation balances.

Questions have also been asked about whether, even if they did boost superannuation balances, that would be the best way to help the women most in need in old age.

Women’s lives aren’t linear

Unpaid work, part-time and interrupted work, and the gender pay gap are only some of the reasons women are poor in retirement. A lot of the time the reasons are far more complex.

When I asked women over 40 to draw their careers on pieces of paper, they drew circles, zig zags and spirals, what one called called: “ups and downs, and rounds and rounds, and a bit, sort of, snakes and ladders”.

The drawings contrasted with the linear, continual and upward (albeit interrupted) financial trajectory usually assumed by financial planners.

Sexist workplaces and ageism have a lot to do with it.

I and my colleagues heard accounts of harassment that resulted in women being denied promotion despite being good candidates and leaving lucrative jobs or re-starting their careers in lower-paid, less hostile environments.

Domestic norms such as the “second shift” (the work undertaken by women at home in addition to their paid jobs) and the “mental load” (the job usually assigned to women of being aware of what needs to be done to keep the household running) eat away at what’s possible.

And choice isn’t all it is talked up to be

Business legends Sheryl Sandberg (chief operating officer of Facebook) and Marissa Mayer (until recently president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!) talk about the battle for economic security as a battle for the right to make choices, or as Sandberg puts it, to “lean in”.

But inflexible work structures, hard to get child-care, expensive childcare, and enduring social norms make it hard to exercise choice.

Taken too far, the idea that women are free to make choices can lead to unhelpful suggestions that they should bear the financial consequences of having children – a suggestion rarely made about men.

Superannuation is sold as being about choice. It is built around individual accounts, with a choice of fund.

But women’s superannuation balances are also determined by relationships and cultural expectations, among them gender inequality in family care for older or disabled family members and the division of household labour.

Read more: The superannuation myth: why it’s a mistake to increase contributions to 12% of earnings

To present different outcomes as the results of choices undermines the pervasive and real cultural scripts that co-opt women into particular roles.

Attempts to change those roles, by, for example, replacing maternity leave with paternity leave, can carry long-term financial penalties for men as well, as shown in research from other countries.

The real roots of poverty are deeper

Women certainly aren’t helpless victims. Many I spoke to knew they had traded off financial security in their old age for other aspirations or needs.

But “choice” and financial literacy won’t be nearly enough to get women who lack financial security back on track.

If we want women to be secure in retirement, we will have to examine the reasons why their lives zig-zag and spiral and resemble games of snakes and ladders. We will need to examine the environment in which their choices take place.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Victoria University of Wellington

It was a few minutes past midnight on 14 November 2016, and I was drifting into sleep in Wellington, New Zealand, when a sudden jolt began rocking the bed violently back and forth. I knew immediately this was a big one. In fact, I had just experienced the magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake.

Our research, published today, shows how the slow build-up to this earthquake, recorded by satellite GPS measurements, predicted what it would be like. This could potentially provide a better tool for earthquake forecasting.

Read more: New Zealand’s Alpine Fault reveals extreme underground heat and fluid pressure

Shattering the landscape

The day after the quake, I heard there had been huge surface breaks in a region extending for more than 170 km along the eastern part of the northern South Island. In some places, the ground had shifted by 10 metres, resulting in a complex pattern of fault ruptures.

In effect, the region had been shattered, much like a fractured sheet of glass. The last time anything like this had happened was more than 150 years ago, in 1855.

Quite independently, I had been analysing another extraordinary feature of New Zealand. Over the past century or so, land surveyors had revealed that the landscape is moving all the time, slowly changing shape.

These movements are no more than a few centimetres each year – but they build with time, relentlessly driven by the same forces that move the Earth’s tectonic plates. Like any stiff material subjected to excessive stress, the landscape will eventually break, triggering an earthquake.

I was studying measurements made with state-of-the-art global positioning system (GPS) techniques – and they recorded in great detail the build-up to the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake over the previous two decades.

A mobile crust

GPS measurements for regions at the edges of the tectonic plates, such as New Zealand, have become widely available in the last 15 years or so. Here, the outer part of the Earth (the crust) is broken up by faults into numerous small blocks that are moving over geological time. But it is widely thought that even over periods as short as a few decades, the GPS measurements still record the motion of these blocks.

The idea is that at the surface, where the rocks are cold and strong, a fault only moves in sudden shifts during earthquakes, with long intervening periods of inactivity when it is effectively “locked”. During the locked phase, the rocks behave like a piece of elastic, slowly changing shape over a wide region without breaking.

But deeper down, where the rocks are much hotter, there is the possibility that the fault is slowly slipping all the time, gradually adding to the forces in the overlying rocks until the elastic part suddenly breaks. In this case, the GPS measurements could tell us something about how deep one has to go to reach this slipping region, and how fast it is moving.

From this, one could potentially estimate how frequently each fault is likely to rupture during an earthquake, and how big that rupture will be – in other words, the “when and what” of an earthquake. But to achieve this understanding, we would need to consider every major fault when analysing the GPS data.

Invisible faults

Current earthquake forecasting “reverse engineers” past distortions of the Earth’s surface by finding all the faults that could trigger an earthquake, working out their earthquake histories and projecting this pattern into the future in a computer model. But there are some big challenges.

The most obvious is that it is probably impossible to characterise every fault. They are too numerous and many are not visible at the surface. In fact, most historical earthquakes have occurred on faults that were not known before they ruptured.

Our analysis of the GPS measurements has revealed a more fundamental problem that at the same time opens new avenues for earthquake forecasting. Working with statistician Richard Arnold and geophysicist and modeller James Moore, we found the GPS measurements could be better explained if the numerous faults that might rupture in earthquakes were simply ignored. In other words, surface faults seemed to be invisible when looking at the slow movements recorded by GPS.

There was only one fault that mattered – the megathrust that runs under much of New Zealand. It separates the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates and only reaches the surface underwater, about 50 to 100km offshore. Prior to the Kaikoura earthquake, the megathrust was locked at depths shallower than about 30km. Here, the overlying Australian plate had been slowly changing shape like a single piece of elastic.

The pacemaker for future quakes

In the conventional view, every big fault has its own inbuilt earthquake driver or pacemaker – the continuously slipping part of the fault deep in the crust. But our analysis suggests that these faults play no role in the driving mechanism of an earthquake, and the pacemaker is the underlying megathrust.

We think the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake provides the vital clue that we are right. The key observation is that numerous ruptures were involved, busting up the boundary between the two plates in a zone that ran more-or-less parallel to the line of locking on the underlying megathrust. This is exactly what we would anticipate if the slow build-up in stress was only driven by slip on the megathrust and not the deeper parts of individual crustal faults.

I remember once watching a documentary about the making of the Boeing 777 aircraft. The engineers were very confident about its design limits under flying conditions, but the Civil Aviation Authority wanted it tested to destruction. In one test, the vast wings were twisted so that their tips arced up to the sky at a weird angle. Suddenly, there was a bang and the wings snapped, greeted by loud cheering because this had occurred almost exactly when predicted. But the details of how this happened, such as where the cracks of metal fatigue twisted the metal, were something that only the experiment could show.

I think this is a good analogy for realistic goals with earthquake prediction. The Herculean task of identifying every fault and its past earthquake history may be of only limited use. In fact, it is becoming clear that earthquake ruptures on individual faults are far from regular. Big faults may never rupture in one go, but bit by bit together with many other faults.

But it might well be possible to forecast when there will be severe shaking in a region near you – surely something that is equally as valuable.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Audrey Courty, PhD candidate, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US, Islam has become central to debates about social cohesion and national security in Australia.

Restrictions on Muslim immigration have been openly discussed – most recently by Senator Fraser Anning in his maiden speech to parliament – and many believe another terrorist attack in the name of “Islam” is inevitable.

Confronted with this reality, the media are playing an essential role in informing us about Islam and influencing how we respond. But, perhaps due to a limited understanding of Islam or a fear of antagonising Muslims, a fundamental point has largely been absent from reporting: the threat of terrorism does not stem from Islam. Rather, it stems from Islamism, a political ideology.

The two terms may sound similar, but Islam and Islamism are not the same thing. Islam is a faith observed by over 1.6 billion people, whereas Islamism is the political ideology of relatively small groups that borrow concepts like shariah and jihad from Islam and reinterpret them to gain legitimacy for their political goals.

How the media legitimises the aims of terrorists

Islamist groups like al Qaida and the Islamic State use violence against non-Muslims with the aim of establishing a political institution (“caliphate”) based on shariah law – neither of which have a basis in the Quran or hadith (Islamic prophetic traditions).

Part of the appeal of the Islamic State comes from its insidious ability to selectively use Islamic teachings and repackage them as legitimate religious obligations.

In particular, Islamists have appropriated the concept of jihad to legitimise an offensive “holy war” against non-Muslims. This interpretation, however, has been rejected by studies that have examined the Quran’s principles concerning war and peace.

Read more: Defeated in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State is rebuilding in countries like Indonesia

Islamic teachings, for instance, prohibit terrorism and the use of violence against civilians. Further, Muslim leaders and scholars around the world have repeatedly condemned terrorism, issuing fatwas (Islamic legal rulings).

By reporting on this misleading interpretation of jihad and under-reporting Muslim condemnations, the Western news media reinforce the perceived connection between Islam and terrorism.

In some cases, media pundits explicitly make this link, pointing to the fact terrorists specifically refer to “Islam” as the basis for their actions.

This uncritical acceptance of terrorists’ claims and misrepresenting of Islam legitimises and unwittingly promotes the Islamist agenda.

In other words, the media plays into the hands of terrorists by allowing them to become the representatives for Islam and Muslims in general.

Islamic State recruiting tool

Islamist terrorists have a strategic interest in propagating the belief that Islam and the West are engaged in a civilisational war.

As the Islamic State outlined in its online magazine in February 2015:

Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two choices.

The group explained that, as the threat of further terrorist attacks looms, Western Muslims will be treated with increased suspicion and distrust, forcing them to:

…either apostatize [convert] … or [migrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens.

The Islamic State’s divide-and-conquer strategy is crucial to its ability to replenish its ranks with foreign recruits. The group targets disaffected and marginalised Western Muslims and invokes an Islamist narrative with promises of brotherhood, security and belonging.

In turn, the Western news media indirectly advance the group’s interests by repeatedly linking Muslim communities to terrorism and failing to meaningfully distinguish the Islamic faith from Islamist political ideology.

Read more: Explainer: ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State or Da’esh?

For example, as the first wave of Syrian refugees arrived in the UK in 2015, The Daily Mail warned of “the deadly threat of Britain’s enemy within” and associated refugees with the threat of “Muslim extremists”.

In the midst of the 2014 Sydney siege, The Daily Telegraph prematurely linked the Muslim hostage-taker with the Islamic State – a claim that was later dispelled by terrorism experts.

The impact of careless reporting

This kind of overly simplistic and sensationalist media coverage serves the Islamic State’s objective to pit Muslims and non-Muslims against one another.

As a study conducted at the University of Vienna in 2017 confirmed, media coverage that does not explicitly distinguish between Muslims and Islamist terrorists fuels hostile attitudes toward the general Muslim population.

Read more: Islamic State wants Australians to attack Muslims: terror expert

With growing awareness of the impact this kind of reporting, some media outlets like CNN have tried to distinguish between “moderate Islam” and “radical Islam”, “Islam” and “Islamic extremism”. But this, too, is misleading because it focuses on presumed religious motivations and overlooks the central role of Islamist political ideology.

A survey of almost 1,200 foreigner fighters by the Combating Terrorism Center revealed that over 85% had no formal religious education and were not lifelong, strict adherents to Islam. The report suggests the Islamic State may prefer such recruits because they are:

less capable of critically scrutinising the jihadi narrative and ideology.

Islamism masquerades as religion, but is much more a post-colonial expression of political grievances than a manifestation of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. While the establishment of a caliphate or shariah-based order is the expressed agenda of Islamist terrorists, this is not a religious obligation for Muslims.

And it is not an assault on Islam for non-Muslims to say so.

Political correctness, or a more nuanced discussion?

In an effort to strip the Islamic State of its legitimacy, some governments have advised news outlets in the UK and France to use the derogatory acronym “Da’esh” to refer to the group, although this is not always practised.

Malcolm Turnbull, also adopted the term “Islamist terrorism” in order to differentiate between those subscribing to the Islamist ideology and Muslim communities.

But many politicians, such as Donald Trump continue to blur the distinction by using rhetoric like “radical Islamic terrorism” instead.

Some argue that our “political correctness” inhibits us from tackling the problem head on.

But those who say the problem stems from Islam are are mistaken. We should be able to have a constructive conversation about the central concepts of Islam, including whether establishing a “caliphate” and committing violence against non-Muslims are indeed religious obligations or have legitimacy in Islam.

Given the extent to which concerns about Islam have impacted on our society, there is an ethical obligation to differentiate between Islam and Islamism – or at least present a counter to the Islamist perspective.