The Conversation

Time #3: Why does it hurt to look at a woman breastfeeding?

2012-05-16T20:38:01Z

The media storm surrounding Time magazine’s recent cover featuring a three-year-old boy breastfeeding while standing on a chair, indicates how important it is for more images of breastfeeding to be circulated in the media – and for more of these images to be striking and diverse.

Editor Richard Stengel was frank in admitting he chose the image knowing it was provocative. Nevertheless, there’s a reasonable defence to be made of the photograph, based on its relevance to the cover story about attachment parenting. Attachment parenting promotes extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping and maximising skin-to-skin contact.

More importantly, there’s a defence to be made on the grounds that there are simply too few images of mothers breastfeeding their babies, and this contributes to women’s reluctance or inability to breastfeed their children beyond a certain age. Although an impressive 96% of Australian mothers initiate breastfeeding, indicating their strong desire to do so, by six months of age the figure has fallen to just over 50% and by two years, 5%.

This is despite the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommendation that we breastfeed exclusively to six months and continue mixed feeding for “up to two years … or beyond”.

A 2004 “overview of recent reviews” by NSW Health noted that there were “few descriptions of advocacy strategies to promote the acceptability and image of breastfeeding.”

Drawing from a report in 2002, it concluded that breastfeeding “could be more actively supported and promoted by publishing more newspaper articles that present a positive message … more positive headlines, and more breastfeeding photos.”

Most importantly, it stated that only “1.3% of 334 articles were accompanied by a baby being breastfed.’

The circulation of images and media coverage via social and online media, of breastfeeding celebrities such as Miranda Kerr, Toni Collette and Salma Hayek, has since enhanced the accessibility of images to some extent. But the fact that these images invariably attract controversy indicates there’s plenty of room for improvement.

Facebook, which has removed personal breastfeeding images posted by users, continues to do so over uncertainty about their decency, and confusion about the ethics of a mother visually documenting her breastfeeding relationship and sharing it with her friends.

One of the most important cultural reasons that women don’t breastfeed for longer, is that there are so few images of women breastfeeding, so few opportunities for people to observe breastfeeding women, to learn about breastfeeding through incidental exposure, and to consider it commonplace.

The rare sight of a mother breastfeeding in public is often fraught with anxiety from passers-by, who don’t know where to look, and mothers, who are uncertain of their rights.

While the medical research around the benefits of breast milk has been useful in promoting breastfeeding since it hit rock bottom in the 1970s, an unintended side effect of the scientific discourse has been to make breastfeeding “special” and breast milk “liquid gold”.

This has created both a tone of high seriousness around breastfeeding, which must be engaged in for nutritional and health reasons, and a scarcity model, with new mothers feeling they have to learn the “right way”, eat the “right food” and read the “right books”, to be successful.

While helpful to lactation consultants as well as mothers starting out, this way of thinking about breastfeeding overlooks the simple fact that women’s bodies make milk, and babies drink it most easily from their breasts.

The scientific approach has also allowed us to forget that breastfeeding is pleasurable for mothers when it’s adequately supported, and that, like most forms of eating, children breastfeed for enjoyment and comfort as well as hunger.

Even images used to promote breastfeeding have tended to rely on Madonna-and-child iconography that’s dutiful and virtuous, with a mother and infant whose gaze is modestly averted. These images are not only unnecessarily serious, they fail to revel in the fact that breastfeeding engages our breasts.

A recent US campaign promoting breastfeeding relied on visual puns, such as two stethoscopes, ice cream scoops, or flowers because of a reluctance to show the feeding breast, even by those who most support it.

Australian breastfeeding scholar Karleen Gribble concludes her 2005 study of the motivations of children who breastfeed for longer saying, “The most common reason for a mother to breastfeed her baby beyond two years was the child’s own enjoyment.”

Adding, only “7% of women said they had intended to breastfeed this long [but] for these mothers, there was a change in their own attitude, usually as a result of seeing others breastfeed toddlers, or their increasing knowledge and confidence, or their own enjoyment of breastfeeding.”

Time is to be congratulated for providing us with this image, which not only shows that breastfeeding might extend beyond infancy, but that it can also be funny and fun. Perhaps if we begin to acknowledge its pleasures as well as its virtues, our breastfeeding rates might increase.

Read more stories on Time’s controversial cover:

Time #1: What’s wrong with this picture?

Time #2: Extreme parenting, Time magazine style

What do you think of the image and the article? Leave your comments below

Fiona Giles does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Time #2: Extreme parenting, Time magazine style

2012-05-16T20:37:59Z

If Time magazine editors had set out to garner a huge amount of free publicity with their latest cover, they’ve achieved their aim. This week’s US edition featuring a photograph of a young, attractive mother breastfeeding a three-year-old child has provoked a high degree of media attention and fervid commentary on the internet, largely from other mothers.

The mother depicted on the cover, Jamie Lynne Grumet, became an instant celebrity, appearing on the US television show Today to defend her parenting practices.

Eroticism and breastfeeding

I trawled through the blogosphere for commentaries and responses to the magazine cover. Two issues were constantly raised. The first was the idea that Grumet was subjecting her son to future embarrassment and humiliation by allowing the image of him suckling at her breast to appear on the cover. People argued that this boy would live to regret his public appearance as a breastfeeding child.

Many of these comments displayed almost revulsion at the idea that a child would be able to remember breastfeeding and being in such regular close proximity to his mother’s breast. It was claimed that once he had grown older, this boy would find the idea that he had breastfed as a three-year-old child disgusting.

There are two major social beliefs underpinning these responses. One is that breastfeeding is appropriate only for tiny infants; for older children, it’s somehow unnatural or abnormal.

The second, related, belief is that breastfeeding older children has a sexual element. The idea that a boy might remember touching, viewing in close-up and suckling from his mother’s breast has erotic, incestuous overtones. So, it’s viewed with suspicion and even horror.

Grumet’s attractiveness, youth and dress contribute to this sexual element of the image. Described on one website as a “hot mom” and another as a “blonde bombshell”, she is wearing a blue singlet and tight black jeans and gazing directly at the camera. She conforms to conventional images of models appearing on magazine covers. The one major difference between the images is the little boy attached to her breast.

One might wonder whether the reaction would’ve been different if the mother shown had been older and less attractive, or if her child had been female rather than male.

“Are you Mom enough?”

The other issue that attracted much debate on online forums was the provocative headline splashed across the cover: “Are you Mom enough?”. This appeared in very bold red and large wording, followed by a subheading in smaller font, “Why attachment parenting drives some mothers to extremes – and how Dr. Bill Sears became their guru”.

If readers look inside the magazine to read the feature article, they find that this well-known American paediatrician and his ideas about attachment parenting is the main focus. There’s some reference to women who have taken up his advice and descriptions of them as perhaps being overly committed to the ideals of attachment parenting.

Some of these mothers are verging on “extreme” according to the article because they’re denying their own needs in favour of those of their children. Nonetheless, there’s reasonably considered discussion of the pros and cons of attachment parenting and the scientific evidence for it.

Despite this, the cover headline is almost a call to arms for mothers who support attachment parenting. It suggests a challenge to other mothers in a contest for who is the best, most devoted mother. By posing the question “Are you Mom enough?” and showing both Grumet and her son defiantly staring into the camera lens, the suggestion is that women who don’t breastfeed their children, or give up the practice while the child is still an infant, don’t measure up as good mothers. There’s an aggressive and competitive tone to these words and imagery.

These aspects of the cover provoked much ire online, as women claimed that whether or not they breastfed or continued to do so for a long time, they were still good mothers. Many commentators pointed out that Time magazine seemed attempting to deliberately be provocative and inflammatory by using both the image and the headline. It was seen as an effort to instigate another skirmish in the so-called “Mommy Wars”.

The commentary demonstrates that many mothers have become tired of being positioned by the media as being in opposition to other mothers, or having to constantly demonstrate their mothering credentials by conforming to one or another expert opinion on the best way to be a mother.

And poor Bill Sears must be frustrated that the main messages of the piece that was supposed to publicise his work on attachment parenting have been somewhat lost in noise of the furore over the cover image and headline.

Read more stories on Time’s controversial cover:

Time #1: What’s wrong with this picture?

Time #3: Why does it hurt to look at a woman breastfeeding?

What do you think of the image and the article? Leave your comments below

Deborah Lupton receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Time #1: What’s wrong with this picture?

2012-05-16T20:37:56Z

Breastfeeding generally falls under the jurisdiction of mothers, so I decided to ask a group of mothers I see regularly on Saturday morning what they thought of the recent Time magazine cover portraying an attractive young woman, hand on hip, staring down the camera while her passive three-year-old dressed in cargo pants stands on a chair and suckles from her exposed left breast.

What they told me was deeply reassuring.

Is it wrong to breastfeed a three-year-old? “No, I wouldn’t do it, but there’s nothing wrong with it,” said one mother helpfully. “It’s not immoral”.

All agreed in fact; it’s a question of choice, culture, circumstances, needs, and so on.

How about an 11-year-old? (I got daggers for that one.) “Other kids will let you know when it’s gone too far!”

Further prodding revealed a commitment to breastfeeding because of the nutritional benefits it confers on the baby, a sentiment shared by the young woman pictured on the cover of Time magazine, Los Angeles mum Jamie Lynne Grumet, who engages in “attachment parenting”.

Attachment parenting is a popularization of “attachment theory”, a long-standing ethological approach to the study of human relationships. Attachment theory has been dominated by two very big ideas. The first concerns the universality of attachment bonds emerging in infancy and their importance for protection, state regulation, and healthy development.

The second concerns the distinctive ways in which attachment bonds form in individual mother-infant pairs. This latter approach attempts to define optimal or secure attachment in terms of the infant’s capacity to effectively get the mother’s protection and care in times of need, such as when fear or anxiety are experienced, or when frustrations become too great.

It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of research studies have been devoted to understanding the underpinnings and consequences of secure attachment. Many researchers working in the field believe the key to security lies in the mother’s prompt and sensitive responses to her infant’s needs. But of course this can mean many things.

For the proponents of attachment parenting, there tends to be an intense focus on physical closeness (including breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and “baby-wearing”) and responsiveness to infant cries.

But let’s be clear, the majority of babies that have ever been studied in psychological research (and there are many thousands) have been securely attached to their mothers. Further, all this has been achieved without attachment parenting philosophies.

In fact, secure attachment is the norm. Most children develop strong affectionate ties to their caregivers that we recognize as loving, and they are able to rely on these relationships throughout development to support them in positive ways.

So what goes wrong? What undermines secure attachment?

The great British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued that infants and children usually get what they need from their mothers. He coined the phrase “good enough mother” to convey his view that perfection doesn’t exist when it comes to parenting. And, even if it did, he added, it would undermine children because it would rob them of their autonomy.

But like many who have followed, Winnicott understood that various factors could prevent a mother from being able to recognise her infant’s needs and appropriately respond to his signals. In particular, ill health (including mental health problems) and environmental stress are prime candidates.

In more recent attachment theory, there’s also some consensus emerging that the mother’s state of mind can undermine her natural capacity to understand and respond to infant signals, such as when she is preoccupied with her own ongoing concerns or is psychologically unavailable.

A final question for the mothers: is there a right time to stop breastfeeding? “You should stop when one or both of the participants is no longer comfortable,” quietly and thoughtfully stated.

This last sentiment carries a lot of wisdom; it reminds us that there’s a relationship between a mother and her infant and the act of breastfeeding is one of the most salient and powerful forums in which the early relationship is played out during the prolonged infancy that humans experience.

It is so tempting to cast breastfeeding in terms of nutritional needs and health, but attachment theory actually presents us with a radical alternative: the biological imperative is not mothers’ milk, nutritional though it may be, it is the relationship itself. When the bonds of affection are in place, the food will come.

So, what is wrong with this picture? For the mothers I spoke to on Saturday morning, it violates precisely what it is that they value about the act of breastfeeding – it is devoid of love, tenderness, warmth or affection. You don’t need to be a developmental psychologist to see this.

My Saturday morning companions hit the nail on the head: this picture is about the mother, her own ongoing issues and preoccupations. No matter how justified these may be, they have no place in the care of infants and children precisely because they prevent us from seeing children for who they are. They prevent us from reading the signals coming from the child and responding to them appropriately and with sensitivity.

That this truth was so obvious to my companions is deeply reassuring, no wonder most children are securely attached.

Read more stories on Time’s controversial cover:

Time #2: Extreme parenting, Time magazine style

Time #3: Why does it hurt to look at a woman breastfeeding?

What do you think of the image and the article? Leave your comments below

Marc de Rosnay receives funding from the SRC for research on attachment.

Brain-controlled robotic arm toasts success with a drink

2012-05-16T20:37:22Z

The world of brain-machine interfacing (BMI) has a new posterchild. A study on people with tetraplegia, published in Nature, has shown participants were able to control a robotic arm and hand over a broad space without any explicit training.

This builds on advances in BMI research, which have shown people with profound upper-extremity paralysis or limb-loss could use their brain signals to direct useful robotic arm actions.

Findings in this field have previously demonstrated that able-bodied monkeys equipped with electrodes implanted into their brains can control a robotic arm, but until recently it was unknown whether people with profound upper-extremity paralysis or limb-loss could use their brain signals to direct a robotic arm.

The new study by Leigh R. Hochberg of Brown University and colleagues involved something known as the BrainGate neural interfacing system, equipped with a 96-channel microelectrode array.

One of the participants, as you’ll see in the video below, was able to drink from a bottle using the robotic arm, something she had not been able to do with her own limb since a stroke nearly 15 years ago.

BMIs, also known as neural-interfacing systems, play a very important role in the advancement of the methods enabling humans to interact with and control a specific machine (such as a computer, a robotic arm, and so on).

Such interfaces can detect electrical signals from the brain in an invasive or non-invasive manner. The BrainGate system is an invasive technology that uses thin silicon electrodes surgically inserted a few millimetres into the primary motor cortex, a part of the brain that controls movements.

Non-invasive BMIs include those systems with electrodes attached on the surface of the skull. Although several techniques (such as electroencephalography (EEG)) can record signals from the brain in a non-invasive manner, it is generally thought electrodes positioned inside the brain convey more information.

Thought-processing

Brain signals acquired through either of the above techniques are then subjected to processing to remove the noise and any unwanted artifacts (the equivalent of static on your TV or radio) from the signal.

To decode movement intentions from neural activity, artificial intelligence models are then utilised to extract the most promising features – statistical descriptors of the brain signals – that discriminate between the signals related to the imaginations of different hand movements.

Finally, pattern-recognition algorithms trained with these features are employed to discriminate an intended hand-state based on the features extracted from the brain signals in real-time.

All the right moves

Although the robot’s movements reported by Hochberg and colleagues were not as fast or accurate as those of an able-bodied person, the participants successfully touched their target object (in this case some foam balls) on 49% to 95% of attempts. These findings were consistent across multiple sessions with two different robot designs.

What’s more, about two-thirds of successful reaches resulted in correct grasping. The authors further established the efficacy of brain control by one participant in the bottle-grasping and drinking task I mentioned earlier (see video above). This demonstrates that a neural-interface system can perform actions that are useful in daily life.

The results demonstrate the feasibility of this technology for use with people with tetraplegia (also known as quadriplegia). Years after injury to the central nervous system, BMIs are able to recreate useful, multidimensional control of complex devices directly from a small sample of neural signals.

Indirect action

In the context of existing research on the control of robotic arm movements for amputees and the disabled, there are two main classification schemes covering the approaches to interfacing the human brain with the external world.

These can be divided according to the method used to acquire the human intentions to perform a movement.

In the first scheme, the interface is implemented through an indirect link with the brain by utilising the human muscular activity, known as the Electromyogram (EMG). This forms a muscle-computer interface, as recently coined by Microsoft.

The EMG reflects the voluntary intentions of the central nervous system to contract a muscle (or group of muscles) and has been well studied and utilised in controlling robotic prosthetic devices. The vast majority of current research in this area is focused on the clinic applications of EMG-driven prosthetics.

But paralysis following spinal cord injury, brain stem stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other disorders can disconnect the brain from the body. This eliminates the ability to perform volitional movements and can render the indirect approach useless.

In such a case there is a need for direct access to the brain signals.

Brainput monitors blood flow to infer the intentions of the user. MIT

Brain invasion

The progress achieved by Hochberg and colleagues with BrainGate falls within the second classification scheme, providing a direct link to the brain through the BMIs. This work paves the way for more advanced research for a variety of applications, including the control of robotic arms.

However, it should also be noted here that as well as the risks associated with surgery required to implant the BMIs, a disadvantage of such implants is the potential for scar tissue to form around the electrodes. This can result in a deterioration of signal quality over time.

Further efforts to understand, build, and control more powerful brain-signal-acquisition units will be crucial for widespread clinical application of neural-interface systems that can decode the intentions of the brain.

Perhaps the recently proposed wearable BMI known as Brainput by researchers from MIT (see image above) could be a future replacement to the invasive techniques.

This approach uses a non-invasive neuroimaging technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to monitor the blood flow (blood oxygenation and volume) to infer human intentions.

As we move forward, the technology will become more sophisticated, and the results even more remarkable.

Rami Khushaba works for University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

Coal’s burning question - how much difference can technology make to emissions?

2012-05-16T20:36:56Z

From time to time, new technologies are proposed to help us use even more of Australia’s abundant coal.

Many of these technologies are designed to reduce emissions, either by drying the coal or capturing its emissions as it is burned. Other forms convert coal to cleaner burning fuels, such as synthetic diesel or methane.

For brown coal power stations, use of this technology promises to lower power station CO₂ emission levels to 0.8 or lower (from the 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ per MWh put out by a typical brown coal operation). The vision being put forward by government and industry on the back of this promise is that this technology could help to increase our exports. Apart from the promised economic benefit, how real is the promise of lower levels of CO₂?

Bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have suggested we need to limit atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to around 450ppm if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. At current CO₂ emission rates, we could reach this level by 2040, or even earlier if the global trend towards coal continues. Since 2000, global coal consumption has increased by 50%, while in China consumption has more than doubled.

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal. Government figures say brown coal resources in Victoria are over 400 billion tonnes; 65 billion tonnes is located in the Latrobe Valley with the economically recoverable portion, the reserves of the resource, estimated to be around 33 billion tonnes. If consumed today, Victoria’s coal resources alone could emit sufficient CO₂ to reach the IPCC target of 450 ppm. The reserves of the Latrobe Valley alone have the potential to contribute at least two years’ worth of global CO₂ emissions.

Because it can take more than 50 years to reduce the CO₂ emitted to the atmosphere by a factor of 2 (and around 500 years by a factor of 4), emitting the same amount of CO₂ more slowly via lower-emitting technology is likely to make little difference to the climate change problem since it is the total amount in the atmosphere that matters.

Globally, the potential to increase atmospheric CO₂ emissions is even greater. Despite the claims of peak oil and declining reserves of fossil fuels, remaining reserves are sufficient to drive atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to unprecedented levels. One estimate of the combined global fossil fuel reserves suggests they are equivalent to almost 100 years supply at the current rate of consumption. When estimates of the total resource base are added, this jumps to more than 1000 years, due primarily to the global resource of black coal.

A further problem we face is the increase in energy consumption which results from population growth. In Victoria, for example, population is expected to grow from 5.6 million to 7.3 million over the next 20 years. To maintain CO₂ emission reductions, technological development and its deployment must keep pace with changes in demand. This is made more challenging by the very long operational life of much of this technology.

One benefit of low emission technology is that it might give us the time to further develop the zero-CO₂-emitting energy technologies that we must ultimately use, particularly those based on renewable energy. In a financially constrained world, where giving money to one project means taking it from another, achieving the right balance between these two approaches is no easy task. Many of the newer renewable technologies on offer are yet to be used on a large scale, and much of the technology being proposed for coal, particularly CO₂ capture and storage, is still under development, or at best, yet to be demonstrated commercially.

Unless the push to develop cleaner coal is balanced by a greater push to implement zero emission renewable energy technologies, the risks associated with climate change will continue to grow.

Damon Honnery receives funding from the ARC and ACARP to develop a safer mining environment and is lead author in Working Group III of the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report.

NAPLAN tests mean academic achievement but is there a price?

2012-05-16T20:36:30Z

As the fifth year of NAPLAN testing gets underway this week, it has prompted the usual debates. Are the tests in our student’s best interests? Are students adequately prepared? If teachers are “teaching to the test”, what will be the implications for students’ overall education?

High stakes tests create a culture in which academic achievement is highly valued. Students must perform well, or there will be consequences – whether it is in terms of rankings, prestige or funding. It is in each school’s best interests to prepare their students, and to make sure that they do as well as possible.

Australian schools should be placing this kind of emphasis on academic achievement – valuing human intelligence and motivating students is important.

But there can be a price to pay. All you need to do is look at the example set by the culture of learning in many East Asian countries. It is this kind of culture, rather than the testing itself that we should try and stop happening in Australia.

Hard at the top

At the international level, East Asian countries such as China, South Korea, Singapore and Japan are notoriously successful in standardised testing. In the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), they consistently appear in the top ten countries.

That these East Asian students do so well in international assessments is often linked to the pedagogical practices which emphasise memorisation and drills.

Students from Confucian heritage countries are widely known to be high achievers on these tests because of their emphasis on repetition and the higher levels of effort they invest in studying.

However, the academic accomplishments of students from these Asian countries comes at a cost.

High price to pay

European students – from Austria, Germany, Finland, The Netherlands and Sweden – perform only slightly worse than their Asian counterparts. But students from the top PISA Asian countries tend to be more anxious and self-doubting. They are less confident and have a lower self-concept scores than their European counterparts.

On the measure of self-concept among 41 countries, European students are on top and Asian students are at the bottom.

It is generally accepted that Asian students experience tremendous stress due to familial and societal demands for academic success. Confucian Asian culture has a long history of high regard for learning and achievement and emphasis on effort to achieve academically.

High achieving students from some Asian countries are also likely to be more stressed than their European counterparts. Flickr/televiseus

In the minds of Asian students with this cultural heritage, the distinction between the self and one’s family is not clear-cut. It’s not just an individual’s academic achievement or failure it is the family’s too.

This means the students take the implications and consequences of their academic success and failure very seriously. From this vantage point, the internal pressure for academic achievement is probably higher in Confucian Asian societies than in the other parts of the world.

Lessons for Australia

Students from these East Asian countries possess a strong drive towards achievement, which is deeply rooted in their culture. They are also less forgiving when it comes to underachievement and misbehaviour.

But what can Australia learn from this example? And what can it tell us about high stakes tests?

In the context of NAPLAN, and the high pressure that the tests are placing on Australian students to achieve academic success, the lesson could go one of two ways – depending on the comparative values that are placed on educational outcomes and psychological well-being.

There is solid evidence to suggest that the education systems and pedagogical practices of East Asian countries are highly successful.

If Australia is determined to achieve high levels of academic performance, students should be motivated to work harder. Testing can motivate and bring up the level of academic performance.

But we must also be aware that consistently strong academic performance has seen the presence of higher mean anxiety and self-doubt. This should be of concern to educators and to Australian society as a whole.

Achieving high levels of academic performance may not be worth the sacrifice of young peoples’ psychological well-being.

NAPLAN-style tests can have the impact of raising the aspirations of students and increasing their confidence in their overall academic abilities. But they can also have the reverse effect, if the onus on success is too strong.

High stakes tests are not necessarily the incorrect path.

Do Australians want to have a performance-driven education system that values performance over the well-being of its students, or is there another way of fostering high achievement without going down the Confucian path?

Lazar Stankov does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Once a cultural icon, is Australia's surfboard industry destined to disappear?

2012-05-16T20:35:53Z

Last October surfboard company BASE abruptly closed its factory on the Gold Coast, with the direct loss of 30 jobs. Since then, nearby D’Arcy Surfboards has announced it is shedding workers and downsizing from a state-of-the art, purpose-built factory into a backyard workshop. Is the surfboard industry yet another victim of the high Australian dollar?

Dominating conversation on the future of Australian manufacturing has been talk of exports and the high dollar. Australia cannot compete in a race to the bottom for cheap labour. Even if the dollar drops substantially, the more complicated truth is that there are deeper structural and human issues threatening the making of things in Australia.

Surfboards: an Australian niche

Led by UOW economic geographer Andrew Warren, we have been undertaking research on the Australian surfboard industry for the past three years.

Few realise that surfboards are still made by hand: by expert “shapers” who plane and sand foam “blanks”, and “glassers” who seal them against the elements. Because they are customised to local waves and body size, most Australian surfers ride boards made locally – even when cheaper imported boards are available.

Australia has had an advantage in surfboard-making since the 1960s, when Bob McTavish invented the “plastic fantastic” board, sparking the so-called shortboard revolution. Simon Anderson’s 1980 “Thruster” design, now the industry standard, was also an Australian innovation. Since then hundreds of surfboard workshops have sprouted, up and down the coast, where there are good waves: Noosa, the Gold Coast, Byron Bay, Port Macquarie, Newcastle, Brookvale, Cronulla, Wollongong, Torquay.

In the 1980s and 1990s the industry grew on the back of surfing’s sexy, tanned, outdoors appeal. Quiksilver, Billabong and Rip Curl, from Torquay, branched out into fashion and apparel. They have since suffered from the global economic slowdown, with piles of unsold inventory in American and European flagship stores.

Master-shaper Bob McTavish, Byron Bay Andrew Warren

Making by hand or by machine?

Smaller local workshops face different pressures. First, machines have replaced human craftsmanship. Only recently has it become possible to shape boards more cheaply using computer-aided design and machine-cutting technology. Workshops have embraced machines. Trying to compete with corporate surf brands for retail exposure, they used loans to finance costly machinery, fattened marketing budgets and increased volume.

The result has been increased sales in good times, but also greater risks when the economy contracts.

Retail wars

Second, power has concentrated with retailers. When the first workshops opened in the 1960s there were few surf shops. Now it is very competitive. Workshops without boards in retail megastores miss out on the lucrative market for beginners.

Risky handshake deals have been made with surf retailers to stock boards – often on consignment, and with lengthy delays on getting paid. It worked – only just – when the market grew. But since the global financial crisis and the slump in domestic tourism, declining retail sales have combined with unpaid bills and slim margins to increase risk of bankruptcy.

Mates growing old

Third, this is a remarkably informal industry: it all started when a bunch of mates who made boards for each other took their craft seriously enough to register businesses and open up commercial workshops. To this day, the business-customer relationship is typically that of mates who surf the same waves together.

Master glasser, Mick Carabine, Wollongong Andrew Warren

It also means the “industry” is poorly organised, lacks lobbying power, and pays shapers and glassers casually. Employees are “mates”, there are no unions, and as the market contracts, workshops have cut costs by shedding staff or cutting casual hours.

There are also no recognised qualifications for shaping, other than the informal rule that “master-shapers” must have carved out at least 30,000 boards. The issue is now critical because the original generation of Australian surfboard-makers is growing old, and with rare exception has failed to train up newcomers. Some workshops are too small; others have been fearful of having their niche poached by young upstarts.

The very real possibility is that when ageing shapers retire there won’t be a younger generation to replace them. Surfboard-making could become purely mechanised. Then Australia would be forced to compete with Thailand and China for cheap “pop-out” boards.

RIP Australian surfboard-making?

Is the death of Australian surfboard-making inevitable? Perhaps not. Surf culture provides the industry its core base: regular local surfers damage their boards every year or so, and when buying new ones remain loyal to their preferred shapers.

Customised ordering: relic of the 1960s, or future niche marketing? Andrew Warren

The more likely scenario is that of the D'Arcy workshop on the Gold Coast: scaling back to cottage industry size. That would be a shame. Surfboard-making is worth maintaining, for its high quality products, its competitive advantages in Australia, and its deep links to a coastal way of life.

Beyond the high dollar, closer mapping of the challenges and opportunities of small-scale manufacturing is critical, before decision-makers jump to conclusions. Let’s not forsake the making of things for which Australian regions and workers have distinct talents.

Chris Gibson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Oil fuels the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan – and it keeps getting hotter

2012-05-16T05:40:58Z

Khartoum has resumed its bombardment of South Sudan despite the passing of a UN Security Council Resolution calling for a ceasefire.

With military action escalating over the past few days, the two nations are now on the brink of all-out war. The rhetoric of both nations' leaders is becoming increasingly strident.

While the immediate causes of this conflict are control of oilfields and territorial disputes, the tension is rooted in a deeper clash of culture, religion and politics.

A history of oil, division and conflict

In 1978, Chevron discovered oil in the Bentu and Heglig districts of southern Sudan, and America resumed foreign aid to Sudan. At this stage, the Sudan was the world’s sixth largest recipient of U.S. military aid.

The central government in Khartoum was determined to control the oil fields from the outset, and moved to create the “Unity Province” in 1980. This creation excluded the oil regions from southern control and incorporated them into the north.

The takeover of the oil districts and the introduction of sharia law in 1983 reignited rebellion in the south. Colonel John Garang formed the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), attacking Chevron oil installations. By 1993 the war against the south had become a jihad, with the current ruler Brigadier Omar al-Bashir staging a successful coup with the support of the National Islamic Front under Hassan al-Turabi.

A preliminary peace accord with the SPLA was signed by the al-Bashir government in 1997. The final peace accord in 2005 granted autonomy to the southern region and a 50/50 share of the oil revenue with the central government in Khartoum. John Garang of the SPLA then became Vice President of Sudan and an agreement was made to hold a referendum within ten years on independence for Southern Sudan.

This “Peace for Oil” deal led to a falling out between al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front, but oil revenue was essential to maintain the patronage politics that kept al-Bashir in power. In turn, el-Turabi and the National Islamic Front allied itself with Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equity Movement (JEM) rebels in Darfur.

The conflict in Darfur took on a new dimension with the 2005 Peace Accord with the south, as Darfur was left out of the oil revenue carve-up. The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), a regional group representing Fur peasant interests, felt left-out of the advantage received by their former SPLA allies in the south. They demanded greater autonomy for Darfur and a share of the oil revenue.

Foreign interests

In 1999, China National Petroleum Corporation constructed a 1,600 km pipeline from the southern oil fields to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. At this time, Sudan provided less than 1% of China’s oil imports. By 2009, Chinese investments in Sudan amounted to more than $8 billion. Sudan became the fifth largest supplier of oil to China in 2012, exporting 67% of its oil to the rising nation.

But most of the oil in the region is in South Sudan, and al-Bashir’s government in Khartoum was increasingly dependant upon oil revenue to survive. In January 2012, faced with falling revenue, al-Bashir raised the transit charges for oil in the pipeline to Port Sudan to $38 per barrel. The international rate would be between $0.40 and $1 per barrel.

The government of South Sudan countered this by shutting down oil production on January 22, and made a one-off $2.6 billion grant to Khartoum plus a transit fee of $0.63 to $0.69 per barrel.

A year after achieving independence through a U.N. monitored referendum on 9 July 2011, South Sudan is now constructing a second pipeline across Kenya to the Indian Ocean port of Lamu. This pipeline will have the long-term effect of ending dependence on the Chinese pipeline and lessening Khartoum’s control over Southern oil.

The fight for control

The government in Khartoum has launched military attacks in the disputed border district of Abyei where much of Khartoum’s remaining oil fields are located. Southern Kordofan was suppose to hold a separate referendum to decide whether it stayed in Sudan or joined South Sudan. However, the referendum has been repeatedly postponed by al-Bashir over the issue of who can vote.

A fire at an oil factory in the area of Heglig in Sudan. EPA/str

The fighting threatens to spill over into Blue Nile Province, with the South Sudan government helping to arm the rebel Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile Provinces. The Sudanese Armed Forces have carried out bombing raids against towns and refugee camps in South Sudan, with the SPLA capturing the Heglig oil fiends in Sudan in retaliation, cutting about half of Sudan’s remaining oil output.

Khartoum is now faced with regional conflicts in Darfur, Southern Kordofan and West Nile Provinces, as well as simmering unrest in the Beja region along the Red Sea, where locals feel they have reaped few benefits from the oil flowing through their region to Post Sudan.

Unless there is forceful diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, African Union, the Arab League and closer regional cooperation between China and the United States, matters could easily escalate into full-scale war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the SPLA.

Prospects of peace

There are numerous post-independence issues that need to be resolved between Sudan and South Sudan: border demarcation, the referendum in Abyei, agreement on oil transit fees, joint exploration agreements, and the citizenship of peoples such as the southerners who have lived for years in Khartoum.

If the corrupt and oppressive al-Bashir regime were to fall, it would leave a power vacuum in Sudan with armed rival fighting for power. Sudan could easily slide into the status of a failed state as Afghanistan did after the fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992.

For a start, the UN needs to implement the Joint Border Verification and Monitoring Mechanism authorised under Resolution 2024 in 2011. The SPLA must also withdraw from Sudanese territory and the Sudan government cease attacking South Sudan.

The South Sudan government is riven by its own internal divisions, to say nothing of those disaffected element who have been sidelined. Without a resumption of oil revenue, it will be unable to pay the SPLA, which could well mutiny. Much greater effort needs to be invested in nation-building now that the euphoria of independence is fading. Without greater inclusion, its legitimacy will be eroded.

The government in Khartoum needs to enter dialogue with disaffected elements in the provinces and redress their grievances with meaningful reforms within an inclusive government.

The IMF and World Bank now need to provide debt relief for Sudan to ease its financial plight. The southern pipeline could not only ease some of the tensions, it could contribute to development in Kenya and Uganda.

All this will require sustained international effort, including “carrots” for both sides to induce them to come to the negotiations. The U.S. needs to lift sanctions and remove Sudan from its list of “states sponsoring terrorism”. America is however in election mode and Obama seems determined to sound bellicose in the face of Republican challengers. China also has to take some hard political decisions to protect its oil interests.

David Dorward does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

New standards could make consumers choose between the chicken and the egg

2012-05-16T05:23:57Z

The RSPCA has spoken out against the increased density of free-range chickens being proposed by the Australian Egg Corporation today, saying it doesn’t “meet animal welfare standards or consumer expectations.”

Proposed new accreditation standards for free-range eggs aim to drastically increase the density of laying birds. The Greens intend to raise this issue in parliament this week to address animal welfare concerns, but guidance for consumers remains unaddressed.

Little is known about how and why consumers make purchases in this area, but what we do know is that people tend to misread branding cues. So the question now is whether the new standards will merely add more confusion to an already cluttered egg market.

Eggs are a food category where we have a plethora of choice, including options such as “free range”, “barn laid”, “certified organic” and “Omega 3”. While consumers often express a desire for variety, the reality is that most of us are baffled by all this choice.

The European Union has strict standards when it comes to what constitutes free range and certified organic eggs. But in Australia, standards exist for certified organic eggs but not for free range.

Currently, some free-range brands are accredited under the Free Range Poultry Association of Australia (FRPAA) and the Free Range Farmers Association. These associations have clear free-range egg standards, but they don’t apply to all the brands on the egg market.

The current poultry standard followed by the Australian Egg Corporation is based on the Model Code of Practice for the Welfare of Animals and recommends that hens are stocked at a rate of 1500 birds per hectare. But the new standard they are supporting would increase this number to 20,000 per hectare. This is a significant change and substantially greater than the density standards set by other industry bodies.

Consumers are often confused by the variety of choices when it comes to buying eggs. pietrozzo/Flickr

Leaving aside issues of animal welfare (although we would argue that these are significant), what will the impact of this new standard be on consumers?

For those who already seek out free-range eggs, confusion exists about the difference between the various offerings. In a qualitative study from 2010, consumers exhibited confusion over organic versus free-range eggs, often conflating the two.

Add in the other options and it becomes not unusual to hear people expressing confusion over which eggs they should be purchasing if they’re concerned about animal welfare.

This confusion also translates to the purchase of chickens, with study participants claiming they have purchased organic chicken when they have, in fact, bought free-range chicken. This mistake is the result of branding and advertising material.

When prompted, the people in the latter study described the labels on their chicken, revealing that images, such as rolling green hills, give the impression that a product is organic. But the brand they described only sold free-range chicken, not certified organic as they believed.

It’s apparent that people make assumptions about chicken based on label imagery. Nowhere did the label state that the chicken was organic. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see this confusion translate to the egg market.

suzieblackmon/Flickr

These sorts of mistakes happen because we take short cuts in assessing cues, such as labels. Most people don’t have the time, energy or inclination to carefully evaluate every product, label or buying situation so we utilise schemas, usually unconsciously.

Schemas are mental structures that help us organise some aspect of the world. They act as a short cut for us to categorise information so that, when we’re presented with new information, we can slot it into our existing schema or reorganise the schema to fit the new information.

In most cases, this saves us time and isn’t part of a conscious process. It’s likely that in the studies discussed above, the participants were relying on schemas.

People will always make assumptions about food and the retail outlets where they buy it. Most people are unable or unwilling to devote the time to explore every piece of relevant information to check if their perceptions are accurate.

The parliamentary debate by the Greens and the new free-range standards may end up providing more information and, possibly, more variety. While animal welfare may benefit, consumers’ ability to support this may not be so easy.

It remains to be seen whether new standards will add confusion or clarity to the already cluttered egg marketplace.

Joanna Henryks is currently the recipient of funding from the ACT Government for two projects related to community gardens and is also working on a project partly funded by the Organic Federation of Australia.

Bethaney Turner is currently a recipient of funding from the ACT Government for 3 projects related to Community Gardens.

Fewer hens doesn't always mean happier hens

2012-05-16T04:17:39Z

The Australian egg industry has seen a large shift in the proportion of chicken eggs coming from non-cage systems, especially free range. There is little doubt that some of this has been driven by consumer and retail demand. But some has been the result of new cage regulations introduced in 2008, which led producers to modify their cage facilities to free range and barn production. By removing cages, they avoided the high costs associated with new cage refurbishment.

This has left the industry with a wide range of very different facilities designated as “free range production units”. In its simplest expression, we could say free range provides birds with a range area. But if you’re interested in bird welfare, you should be asking what role bird density in the range area has on hen well-being.

This question has initiated strong debate in the egg industry, but what do we really know about the relationship between range density and hen welfare? A search of the literature suggests, not a lot.

Research efforts have been directed at comparing welfare of birds maintained in different housing systems. These look at measures such as behaviour, stress, health, plumage condition, biology, body injuries and mortality.

Figuring out the right number of hens for happiness is a complex thing. Kevin Utting

The EU had a directive that conventional cages were to be banned from 2012. There was a rapid movement to floor based systems – such as barns and aviaries – especially in countries which implemented their own ban on conventional cages earlier than 2012. This rapid transition did, to some extent, leave researchers lagging behind in their efforts to evaluate welfare of hens in these facilitates. It is now obvious that floor based systems have a range of issues associated with hen welfare that need to be further researched.

Whenever hens are housed in groups, there will a range of social interactions that occur. There will always be competition for space. The size of the group will influence aggression and recognition within the group. If resources – including space – are limited, competition for these can be intense.

The intensity that hens exert in an effort to maintain a larger space is not great. However, when provided with alternatives, they appear to prefer increased space. This could suggest that hens will do without some comfort activities – such as dust bathing, scratching and wing flapping – if they have to make a large effort to get the space needed to perform them. Collectively, these observations indicate that the effects of stocking density are complex.

Most studies on stocking densities have use small scale facilities with changes in group size or floor area. They are often conducted in enclosed sheds such as barns and aviaries. Such studies may lack some relevance in large commercial facilities because of differences in the degree of aggressive behaviour.

It has been reported that hens are can only identify about 100 individuals in a group, and that they prefer to be with familiar hens rather than unfamiliar hens. This would imply that constantly changing group dynamics in large production units might create increased stress.

Chickens prefer to be in a small group. Jay Bradshaw

The density of the free range area is likely to have an influence on the degree of social stress. However, farmers don’t have total control over how densely hens are gathered. The way hens move from the housing unit to the range area, climate, management and the positioning of resources (such as shade) in the range are all going to influence the density of hens in various parts of the range and hen house.

While it’s probable that the maximum densities in particular areas of the free range system are going to have more influence on hen welfare than the average range density, we don’t know for sure because there are no scientific studies performed under Australian conditions.

The model code of practice identifies 1500 birds per hectare as the upper density limit but this has not been validated by scientific evaluation. For an informed debate as to what is an appropriate density in free range production systems more scientific evidence is needed.

While debate about a suitable density for free range systems continues, there remains another consideration which is often left to one side. Egg production systems produce different environmental footprints. A farm’s nitrogen and carbon production and the energy it uses will depend on the farm management, hen housing, manure handling and so on. There is meagre information concerning the environmental footprint for various production systems; it’s an area where more research is needed. There are environmental legislative constraints that need to be considered when deciding how to use the range area.

Jeff Downing receives funding from The Rural Industries Reserach and Development Corporation, Australian Egg Corporation Limited and the The Pork Corporate Research Centre.

When it comes to solving the euro's woes, it's the same gold story

2012-05-16T04:08:07Z

Are the tragedies of the 1920s repeating themselves in the twenty-first century? In the 1920s, an irrational attachment to the gold standard helped cause the Great Depression, as European fears of inflation acted as a deadweight on growth. By the 1930s, economic collapse facilitated the rise of fascism, Nazism and World War II. While the Great Depression eventually broke the gold standard, enabling economic recovery, this would come too late for central Europe.

In the current day, a similar attachment to the euro – again as a bulwark against inflation – risks a similar tragedy. Once again, respectable opinion stresses the need for monetary discipline. Support for a strong euro has led the European Central Bank – and German policymakers in particular – to insist on austerity across the continent, despite the consequences for growth and social welfare. The result has been double-digit unemployment across the Eurozone, and truly frightening levels of unemployment among those under the age of 25 – from 21.8% in France to 51.2% in Greece. It is no small wonder that the far right and neo-Nazi groups did well in the recent French and Greek elections, as respectable opinion seems to offer little other than the policies that have so respectably failed.

Ironically, just as in the 1920s, there is a technically easy way out of this predicament: put broadly, the European Central Bank should print more euros, lower interest rates, and so ease the burdens of debtor states. Indeed, nothing requires that the euro as a common currency also be a strong currency.

Ironically, a weaker euro in the short term would ease the burden on debtor states relative to creditor states – and so strengthen the currency in the long run. By making euros cheaper and more plentiful, Greeks, Italians, Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish debtors could more easily pay off their creditors in Germany, London, and New York. In the short term, this might seem unfair. However, in the long term, it would be better for everyone – and paradoxically lead to a stronger euro. By reviving global growth, and so European demand, real economic growth would increase, and European debtors could buy more from their varied American and European creditors, in ways that might spark a self-reinforcing recovery.

History bears this out. Over the 1920s, the economic conventional wisdom was overwhelming: the gold standard was essential to growth. In the absence of a metallic anchor, inflation and reckless government spending would brew collapse. Even as the Great Crash and Global Financial Crisis of 1931-1933 deepened, and as fascist movements across Europe gained support, support for the gold standard remained entrenched.

Over the Hoover administration, the US stressed the importance of the gold standard – and the global economy suffered for it, leading to a global banking crisis. In 1933, with Hoover turned out of office, Franklin Roosevelt famously reversed course. In his first week in office, Roosevelt passed an executive order prohibiting banks from paying out gold for dollars. By April 1933, the US was off the gold standard itself, freeing the Treasury and Federal Reserve to pursue an inflationary policy, printing dollars. The result was to not simply raise wages and prices – and so demand – but also to ease the burden of interest payments on debtors. In an important paper, one of Barack Obama’s chief economic advisers, Christina Romer, has argued that Roosevelt’s inflationary policies were the key antidote to the Great Depression.

Did inflation result? The answer is a definite no. Inflation would not revive as a major policy problem until the 1970s. In this light, just as Paul Krugman has argued that contemporary arguments for austerity have been premised on the misguided notion that a “confidence fairy” rewards economic discipline, one might argue that inflationary fears are similarly based on misguided policy beliefs. Inflation is not, Milton Freidman’s claims aside, a monetary phenomenon; it is a macroeconomic and institutional problem rooted in low levels of unemployment and the assertiveness of militant unions. Neither low employment nor labour militancy seems likely to reemerge in the short on middle-term.

As Keynes put it, the threat to prosperity comes from nothing material. Instead, Keynes argued in the 1930s that “our predicament is notoriously of another kind. It comes from some failure in the immaterial devices of the mind … It is as though two motor-drivers, meeting in the middle of a highway, were unable to pass one another because neither knows the rule of the road. Their own muscles are no use; a motor engineer cannot help them; a better road would not serve.” From this vantage, he concluded: “Nothing is required and nothing will avail, except a little, a very little, clear thinking.”

In the current context, this requires setting aside the theological attachment to a strong euro and an Old Testament-styled desire to punish undisciplined debtors. Instead, it requires recognising that the best means to a strong euro is, paradoxically, in expanding the supply of euros themselves – and so restoring economic growth and the legitimacy of the European project itself.

Wesley Widmaier works for Griffith University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Learning experience: let's take consciousness in from the cold

2012-05-16T03:27:23Z

Until 20 years ago, scientists interested in empirical work on consciousness – our private subjective experiences – hid it by minimising or eliminating the “c-word”, the use of which was a career-limiting (or at least fund-limiting) move.

Consciousness defied scientific characterisation until, at the very beginning of the decade of the brain (1990-2000), the late Nobel Laureate Francis Crick and others began a dialogue that made an empirical science of consciousness viable. For 20 years, the mainstream science of consciousness could be generically called the ABC-correlates of consciousness, and the most widely published science is the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).

It sounds very simple: we measure a subject’s neuron behaviour while a subject reports an experience. Repeatable patterns emerge. We publish.

Now, following a tsunami of empirical work, journal articles and books, you’d think we’d all be gleefully splashing about in the nascent science of consciousness, shedding light on the natural world like never before.

But we’re not.

The overall message is in the negative: there is still no account of consciousness that an engineer might use to construct a conscious machine.

We don’t know what the role of consciousness is in humans (or elsewhere). We don’t know what causes it. We cannot explain its kinds. We can’t prove consciousness is necessary, present and is/is not operating in anything (organism, inanimate object or artefact).

Despite the overall negative result, there are many remarkable findings and reasons for optimism. To convey these, however, requires a little background.

Zeal Harris

Consciousness 101

For technical specificity, the science of consciousness has converged on a small but effective terminology. A few terms, cherry-picked from philosophy, seem to have stuck.

To “do” science-of-consciousness is to pursue an account of what’s called phenomenal consciousness.

Phenomenal consciousness refers directly to, and only to, a very specific thing: the privately experienced first-person perspective each of us has. It’s a unified composite of the following kinds of experience:

Visual
Auditory
Smell: olfaction
Taste: gustation
Touch: e.g. pressure, temperature …
Situational emotion: e.g. mad, bad, glad, sad …
Primordial emotions: e.g. hunger, thirst, fear, orgasm …
Imagined, dreamt and pathological versions of all of the above.

Each of these experiences has a qualitative feel to it from a first-person perspective. Subjective qualities are referred to as qualia in the plural, or quale in the singular. If the brain is regarded as a subjective content-provider, then the “contents of phenomenal consciousness” are a collection of qualia.

Your visual scene may involve the “redness of red”. The red quale is used to construct a redness experience. This introduces the next phrase: that it is always “like something” to have qualia.

In our wakeful state, we can ask “what it is like” to be a bat or a rock or a computer or a bacterium. But if you are in that portion of sleep that is dreamless then “it’s not like anything”.

Finally, we have the phrase “states of consciousness”. These are overall brain states such as coma, slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, vegetative and so forth.

The science of states of consciousness is not the science of phenomenal consciousness, although each informs the other.

If you are in a coma, all phenomenal consciousness is gone, and it is “not like anything”. Not being in a coma is necessary, but insufficient, to generate any kind of phenomenal consciousness.

The above basic terms apply to scientist and lay-person alike and, after 20 years of grinding in the machinery of critical argument, could be taught to all in the knowledge that they won’t be suddenly overturned.

A single science outcome

The ABC-correlates of consciousness confirm that, contrary to appearances, the physics that causes phenomenal consciousness is contained in and unique to the cranial central nervous system (the brain).

This means phenomenal consciousness is not delivered by the spinal central nervous system or the peripheral nervous system or muscles or the huge nervous system in the gut.

This result does not mean the external natural world or a subject’s body is uninvolved in the generation of phenomenal consciousness.

It merely means the physics that makes it “like something” is located within the cranium in humans. In the case of visual consciousness the implication is that you see with your brain, not your eyes.

There are a significant number of simple findings such as this, and they’re easy to report when the background basics are understood.

Ay, there’s the rub

Some 20 years ago there were no mainstream institutions with specialist training in consciousness issues and science. Now they exist, but are sparsely embedded around the world, usually in cognitive science and psychology courses.

In the non-biophysical sciences and engineering, the science of consciousness is essentially invisible.

h.koppdelaney

This cannot last. Eventually, a form of fundamental physics must connect through the intervening sciences to neuro/cognitive science. Consciousness is expressed by a natural but trans-disciplinary process and, as such, training must be cross-disciplinary.

But beyond this is a much deeper implication.

Consider an explanation of scientific observation (empirical evidence) which we now know literally originates in the phenomenal consciousness of a scientist. Objectivity is revealed as ultimately mediated by the subjectivity of the scientist. To explain phenomenal consciousness is therefore (shock horror) to explain us – scientists and our ability to objectify.

If you chose to become a scientist prior to 1990, did you know that, for no reason ever given, you signed up for explaining everything in the natural world except scientists? Feeling a little uncomfortably sacred, are we?

Thankfully, 20 years on, we now get to apply normal scientific doubt to the centuries of taboo operating at the heart of our own activities.

A new experience

There are fundamental technical problems with the ABC-correlates paradigm and, taken on their own, these are complex enough. But the science of consciousness is also:

fundamentally entwined with the consciousness of scientists
central to the lives of all of us
poised to address the fundamentals of scientific behaviour in a way that has not happened in 300 years.

To rise to this challenge, I believe we are ready for a cross-disciplinary education in a few basics, and look forward to implementing a short tertiary course called Consciousness for Engineers and Scientists.

I like to imagine that one day it may end up being taught in secondary schools. Why not?

No conflicts of interest.

Greeks to go back to the polls - and back on the edge

2012-05-16T03:13:56Z

“I don’t envisage, not even for one second, Greece leaving the euro area. This is nonsense; this is propaganda.”

That’s Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, chairman of the Eurogroup, speaking after Monday’s EU finance ministers' meeting. Not given to half-measures, Juncker added:

“The exit of Greece out of the euro was not the subject of our debate today. Absolutely no one, absolutely no one, argued in that sense.”

The global media is agog with speculation about what appears to be Greece’s Eurozone death throes. Like a car crash about to happen, one can’t quite look away from the chaos that has come to characterise Greece.

Greek voters will also go back to the polls after President Karolos Papoulias failed to find a way through the impasse gripping Greek political elites.

The left’s Alexis Tsipras, leader of Syriza, refused to negotiate with potential coalition partners, arguing against the terms of the EU-IMF austerity regime.

The centre-left and centre-right parties, PASOK and New Democracy, remain committed to the bailout conditions, despite the fact it cost both parties dearly in the election.

Ironically, Tsipras' Syriza bloc finds itself in the same camp as far-right parties, such as Golden Dawn, who also oppose the bailout conditions vociferously.

The Good

Greece actually beat its primary fiscal deficit (i.e., budget deficit minus interest payments) targets in calendar Q1 2012, and through April as well. IMF and EU forecasts estimate that the primary deficit will be 1% this year, which is not as optimistic as the 1% primary surplus predicted in late 2011. But, as the late Christopher Hitchens would say, “It’s progress. Of a kind.”

The bad

Not a beautiful set of numbers, to be sure. And government revenues are down slightly (quelle surprise), while spending is down a little as well.

The ugly

But Athens also has to come up with a cool $US500 million plus today to pay 10-year bond issues, although indications are that government-less Greece will stump up the cash.

Dumb and dumber

Not to put too fine a point on it, the anti-bailout parties in Greece are behaving foolishly. It may well be that Tsipras is bluffing the Germans to see whether they will soften the austerity regime, but this is a dangerous and unpredictable game.

So, how might it turn out?

Call the bluff

The Germans may well call this bluff, leaving Athens with no option but to exit the Eurozone and the EU. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has stated he “hopes” Greece will remain in the Eurozone. But he’s implacable about conditionality, although there are two things Schäuble appears to have forgotten: he’s not Chancellor Angela Merkel; and he doesn’t make the decisions.

Syriza wins the second election

All right, Alexis: you wanted this job; are you defaulting now? If so, you’ll need a copy of the Lisbon Treaty. Fortunately, they’re a free 1.2MB download. Got it? Good. Turn to Article 50.

Yes, that’s the one that says member countries can exit the EU. Not the Eurozone, mind; there’s no mechanism for that.

Would you like capital controls with that?

Right, Alexis. You are now Prime Minister of Greece. You’ve defaulted, left the EU, introduced the ‘New Drachma’ and exited the Eurozone. You’ll be wanting some capital controls with that to prevent capital flight.

Who are they? Over in the corner? Just a bunch of lawyers here to enforce your euro-denominated bond contracts. And every other Greek contract denominated in Euro since 2002.

No, they are not accepting drachma, although US dollars will be fine, coupled with an appropriate forex fee, of course. Now, Prime Minister, here’s the fax from Brussels:

You will no longer receive any bailout funding.
All fiscal transfers from the EU Common Agricultural Policy cease forthwith (yes, Greece is a net beneficiary).
All EU structural funding is halted. Permanently.
All tariffs, quotas and other barriers to trade in goods and services with non-EU members now apply to Greece.
Greeks no longer possess EU citizenship or passports. Greeks are not free to work in, or emigrate to, any other EU member country, except for strictly limited periods under tourist or work visas.
The EU customs union with Turkey no longer applies to Greece.
All EU Framework funding to Greece ceases forthwith.
The Greek government no longer has any recourse to commercial legal arbitration within the ambit of the European Court of Justice.
Your 114 tonnes of gold reserves are hereby forfeited to bank creditors. Read the fine print.
The EU may negotiate an exchange rate between the euro and the ‘New Drachma’ (see Lisbon Treaty, Protocols 4–14). But probably not.
Countries may apply for re-admission to the EU. Let me know how you go with that one.

Greece. Is. Not. Argentina.

No, it’s not; it’s much worse. Argentina only had $US97 billion in debt when it went to the IMF in 1997, and defaulted with $US132 billion in 2001–02. It tried IMF prescriptions and dollarization (a currency board where the Argentine peso was fixed 1:1 with the US dollar).

By late 2001, following announcement of the default, Argentine inflation was running at 10% per month. By the end of 2002, the peso depreciated to around 30% of the value of the US dollar. Annualized inflation reached 80%.

Fires and riots: about the only thing Greece and Argentina have in common. towngun.co.uk

This was not a victimless default: the Argentinian middle class was effectively wiped out; violence erupted in the streets; homelessness and prostitution became endemic; and unemployment hit 25% (yes, Great Depression levels).

Argentina undertook successful debt restructuring in 2005, wiping out 60% of the red ink. Despite paying the IMF back nearly $US10 billion (in order to remove Fund conditionalities), US and other jurisdictions have frozen Argentinian assets, and Buenos Aires still has tremendous difficulty raising credit in international markets.

Why Greece could not ‘do an Argentina’

The Argentinian industrial and resource base is vastly different from Greece’s. Argentina is a highly diversified economy, with a large-scale, and export-oriented agricultural sector, significant chemicals and automotive industries, a solid taxation base [no comparison to Greece there], and is a net exporter of oil with proven reserves of 2.5 billion barrels. It’s also a net exporter of natural gas.

And Argentina also has relatively-low per capita labour costs.

Ah, there’s the rub: It also has 30% of the population living below the poverty line. Would the Greek electorate accept significantly-reduced standards of living of this magnitude under the terms of a default?

The staggering number of crass commentators and junk analysts suggesting with apparent seriousness that Greece should follow Argentina’s example suggests complete ignorance of the facts and a disturbing distortion of the realities of Greece’s economic predicament.

But if you really want to, Alexis, pull the trigger. Go on – pull it. I dare you.

Remy Davison is a Director of a Centre that receives funding from the European Commission.

Reframing climate change could deliver health benefits

2012-05-16T02:18:32Z

Climate change is a complex problem but appears to many people as lacking immediate impact on their lives. Reconceptualising it as a health issue may allow for both better understanding of the issue and greater scope for changing behaviour.

Climate change is often perceived as affecting people far from us in both time and space. And what doctors, psychologists and other health professionals have known for some time is that just providing people with more facts about an issue doesn’t always change their minds or cause them to act in an appropriate manner. In fact, how we say something may be as important as what we say.

Health-related behaviour can be determined by a number of factors including whether people think the problem is serious, feel they’re susceptible to it and are convinced they’re able to take effective action. While denial may result from apathy or self-interest, it may also be a way of actively avoiding something deeply worrying that we feel powerless to change.

Cognitive dissonance – the discomfort generated when there’s a discrepancy between beliefs or behaviours – occurs when we are presented with information that’s incompatible with our word views or firm beliefs, and we employ strategies to defend these. Denying the new information may be the easiest way to deal with the conflict.

Generating powerful emotions, such as fear or guilt, can create an “emotional dissonance” with people trying to avoid what is upsetting, leading to a different type of denial. So fear-based appeals, if not coupled with solutions, can actually reduce engagement. Our emotions and values are intricately tied up with how we respond to information and that‘s why framing of the issue is so important.

Smoke from bushfires can cause respiratory problems. AAP Image/Department of Environment and Conservation WA

Climate change can be seen as an environmental, moral, or economic issue. And it can be also framed as a health problem. One of the benefits of using the health frame is that it makes the issues more tangible – here and now and about people, not polar bears.

People are already familiar with health problems and accept their importance. While it can seem a somewhat nebulous concept when spoken of in its own terms, framing climate change in terms of heart disease, asthma, food safety and infectious disease can make it more “real” and personally relevant.

Issue frames that emphasise benefits rather than focusing on costs, and tailoring messages as much as possible to particular audiences, will achieve better responses. The health frame offers solutions and a positive vision of the future with multiple benefits.

The Climate Commission has recently started using the health frame to communicate about climate change. It has also recognised that health professionals are a source of trusted information for people.

In fact, there’s an emerging body of literature pointing to the health benefits of acting on climate change.

Even increasing the proportion of vegetables and reducing meat consumption is better for both health and the environment. SteveR-/Flickr

Policies that reduce greenhouse emissions can result in significant health improvements and contribute to tackling the epidemic of chronic diseases now facing modern societies. According to medical journal The Lancet, “the news is not all bad”.

Being less dependent on car use and more physically active – walking or cycling – can benefit people by reducing the risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and promoting good mental health.

Reducing fossil fuel combustion from vehicle use and coal combustion can reduce air pollution, a significant cause of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and premature death. By designing our cities and transportation systems more efficiently, we can reduce emissions and help prevent a range of health impacts.

Even increasing the proportion of vegetables and reducing meat consumption in our diets can provide a win for both health and the environment. Such multi-sectoral policies and approaches to daily life also have the capacity to generate considerable economic savings.

Health professionals are well-placed to use the health frame for communicating the impact of climate change and illustrating the benefits mitigation strategies can have for health. Reframing climate change as a health issue helps people understand what climate change predictions mean for them and their loved ones, as well as to unite people across ideological divides and empower and motivate them to act.

Marion Carey receives funding from the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria and VicHealth.

Hollande and Merkel: breaking up is hard to do

2012-05-16T01:30:58Z

Europe is in economic dire straits and the two most powerful economies on the continent are, at least on paper, led by individuals with considerable differences.

The previous French President Nicolas Sarkozy was not merely regarded as a man of austerity, but a man who Chancellor Angela Merkel could do business with.

The Sarkozy-Merkel imprint marks the entire bailout strategy that is now being employed against the Greeks. It is a model that has ushered in technocratic governments whose loyalties lie less to the citizen than the budget. Balancing accounts and paying creditors is considered the noble thing to do. Sovereign interests come second.

The search for common ground

Greek efforts to form a government have so far failed, and the Germans are getting agitated. High on the list of points to be discussed between the freshly elected François Hollande and Merkel in their first meeting will be adopting a unified stance on rectifying the problem. The issue is how far Merkel will budge, and how far Hollande is happy to yield to Berlin’s hardline approach.

Before audiences, and before the electorate, Hollande has adopted a stance that flies in the face of Merkel’s harsh program of economic medicine and no-frills accounting. On French television, when asked what gifts he would be taking to Berlin, his response was general: “The gift of growth, jobs and economic activity.” This on its own says nothing, and nor is it designed to. Hollande is confident, and is carrying a powerful baggage of sentiments with him.

Hollande’s party spokesman Benoît Hamon has given a clue on Hollande’s position. After complaining that Europeans were simply not buying anything any more, Hamon explained that Merkel’s primacy, and that of Germany in Europe, had to be stood up to. “We didn’t have an election to get a European president called Mrs Merkel who has the power to decide everyone else’s fate,” he said.

Scratch the surface further, and the unpopularity of the German position becomes clearer. The meeting will be a tense one.

Growth is the solution – but how

On the face of it, Hollande’s position mirrors that of the Syriza party in Greece – one can hardly repay a debt when there is nothing to draw upon. Accounts can hardly be balanced in times of economic contraction. Growth is the mandatory prerequisite, though how that growth will be feasibly achieved is a difficult prospect. France has better prospects in this area.

Merkel may be facing a revolt at home, despite polls in Germany saying that as many as 61% of Germans approve of her austerity stance. For one, the finger is being pointed in her direction, notably amongst members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that Greek nationalist extremism is due, in part, to her refusal to bend.

The emergence of a neo-Nazi movement in Greece has German voters concerned. Harsh economics often engender extreme politics.

The move away from austerity

Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, returned the Hannelore Kraft led SPD-Greens to power in a thumping result this week, suggesting that the austerity brand is losing its appeal amongst local German voters. The Christian Democrats, led by Merkel’s environment minister Norbert Röttgen, barely had a look in, getting their worst result since 1949 in securing a mere 26% of the vote.

This follows defeat for them in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Attempts to label the SPD-Green coalition as a “pro-debt” party did little to turn voters away.

With considerable effect, government campaigners have sought to underline the poor level of investment in parts of Germany. The emphasis, at least at the state level, is growth rather than belt tightening, notably in depressed areas.

Disagreement does not mean a Franco-German break up

The anti-austerity platform Hollande embraced was largely an anti-Sarkozy one: electorally expedient, necessary to distinguish himself from a deeply unpopular opponent. But populism doesn’t necessarily translate into coherent policy. That reflects an anti-German position is making too strong a contention.

Both Merkel and Hollande have made it clear that balancing the books is a priority for both their governments, though their means may differ at points.

The Greeks will be wondering whether the French-German position will fracture. That said, disunion will be avoided, though each leader will have a different audience to pander to.

Binoy Kampmark does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Highway to dystopia: time to wise up to the looming risks

2012-05-15T20:05:25Z

In that world of peripheral vision, essential for business, social and political leaders, it is surprising that the World Economic Forum’s report, Global Risks 2012 has not received greater publicity or provoked greater public interest. It is a measured examination of 50 major risks, clustered in economic, environmental, geopolitical, social and technological risk categories, facing the world in the next 10 years. Its contributors number more than 469 of the world’s leading business and economic leaders as part of the Davos process and it paints a shocking and bleak picture.

Scoring each risk category for both likelihood and impact, the report highlights that all risk-categories contain elements that have a near certainty of occurrence within the next 10 years with an impact that will be devastating. Scoring most highly in terms of both likelihood and impact are the risks associated with water and food shortages. Next come the economic risk factors including chronic fiscal imbalance, severe income disparity, and extreme volatility in energy and agricultural prices. Then there is a cluster of environmental risks that include rising greenhouse gases, failure of climate change adaptation, and the failure to manage urbanization and land and water resources.

Scoring slightly lower in terms of risk are the technology and geopolitical risk categories respectively, where cyber attacks, information systems failures, data fraud, terrorism, fragile states (produced by various combinations of the above), and pervasive entrenched corruption dominate.

The world's urban population will double by 2050, calling for more city-building than has happened in the past 4000 years. AAP/EPA/How Hwee Young

Putting all elements of the risk categories together, water supply and food shortage crises, volatility in energy and agricultural prices, fiscal imbalances, income disparity, and greenhouse gas emissions control, dominate the high scores.

Perhaps more significant than their relative scores is the fact that these risks are highly interconnected. Unsustainable population growth, currently with age peaks both in the young and in the old, produce enormous consumer demands for basic living requirements, societal pressures for maintenance, and issues of fiscal instability and urban management. Greenhouse gas control and climate change have major impacts on agricultural prices. Fiscal imbalances have impacts on inflation, currency stability and market imbalances, which in turn impact on national and global governance. And in this globalised lean economy, with its “just in time ” supply chain manufacturing, we have the complicating factors of critical systems failure and cyberterrorism as additional risks.

The complexity of these interdependencies and the increasing velocity of change in these transformative processes are said by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chair of the WEC, to threaten to overwhelm countries, companies, cultures and communities. His view is that the world’s foremost challenge is to master this complexity.

A very short while ago, “globalisation” was the key to economic success for society. It predicted a world of increased wealth, consumer choice and confidence aided by globally distributed workforces, along with “just in time” manufacturing, hyper-connectivity of markets and stock exchanges, and the death of the command economy.

Brace for more: Mozambican security forces patrol the streets the day after six people were killed and 80 injured in protests over the rising cost of food and power. AAP/EPA/Antonio Silva

The linkages across a range of fiscal, demographic and societal risks lead the authors to describe the world of 2012 and beyond as “dystopian” (the opposite of “utopian”), a place full of hardship and devoid of hope. Moreover, since the start of the global financial crisis the risk profile has moved heavily in the direction away from geopolitics and economics towards a connected cluster of risks linking society, environment and economy focusing on issues such as economic equity, the availability of food, and unsustainable water withdrawals. It also uses the word “dystopian” for the first time to describe what happens when attempts to build a better world go unintentionally wrong – the norm of “unintended consequences”.

In this case, the unintended consequences include a new class of critically endangered states emerging, as formerly wealthy countries are unable to meet their social and fiscal obligations, and they descend into lawlessness and unrest. Clearly the prediction of unintended consequences must be part of all of our scenario planning.

The population projections alone are formidable. By 2023, the world’s rural population will decline in absolute terms. By 2050, the global urban population will have doubled to nearly 6.2 billion, 70% of the world’s population. This will require an unimagined increase in urban capacity in the next 40 years that is equivalent to all of that built in the past 4000 years, but somehow without the accompanying environmental destruction and failure.

The youth component of this may be largely unemployed, placing a requirement on society NOW to give consideration to the educational requirements of the imminent next generation, including potentially radically redesigning educational systems, including universities, and extensively fostering entrepreneurship to prevent the seeds of dystopia from taking root. Perhaps these entrepreneurial skills could be directed to solving the pressing environmental constraints that stem from progressive disengagement of urban communities from rural issues.

As our numbers and desires grow, so too does our toll on the land. This woman and her daughter paddle in Jakarta after floods some blame on deforestation. AAP?EPA/Jurnasyanto Sukarno

What is required now are new conceptual models to understand and interrogate these complex systems. In the face of real uncertainties about the future, we have to develop an understanding of what will confer resilience to potential solutions. We must get better at predicting the “ifs” in the “what if” scenarios, but accept that solutions must be robust to challenges we cannot imagine. There is real urgency here. We do not have time to lose political momentum to arguments over relative minutiae such as the carbon tax; such distractions hide the fact that we lack a coherent vision to address these interrelated and pressing issues in the coming decade. The need for a coherent vision is crucial if our education systems are to develop in the young the knowledge and skills needed to build a sustainable future for Australia – knowledge we can export to less fortunate countries that lack the means to similarly invest in their futures.

Australia already has a report on Food Security, but it was published in 2010 and much has happened in the world since then – it would be interesting to see an update on progress on the “suite of actions” recommended in the report: actions including lifting agricultural R&D as a matter of urgency, boosting PhD scholarships for agricultural and food processing studies, and setting up an Australian Food Security Agency.

More interestingly, it would be fascinating to see the outcomes of a World Economic Forum-type appraisal of Australia’s risk register. What cluster of hazards and challenges await our economy, society, environment, geopolitical space and, of course, technology, and what are we going to do about them?

Emeritus Professor Bernard King CBE CCMI FBS, and Tony Coote AM also contributed to this article.

Comments welcome below.

John Crawford receives funding from the ARC and the Commonwealth Government. He is affiliated with the Outcomes Australia Soils for Life Program, the Mulloon Institute and serves on the Federal Ministerial Working Party on Soil, Water and Food as a Reference Panel Member.

Crowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters

2012-05-15T20:04:43Z

Web 2.0 tools and mobile technologies have lowered the barriers not just for people to access the internet but to create and share content. Through open-source, collaborative programs such as wikis, the creation and distribution of information has effectively been crowdsourced.

But can this democratisation of the production of information and the expansion of networked global communities lead to action in solving real-world problems? As inventor Vinay Gupta of Hexayurt sharply puts it: “Ten years from now there will be 2 billion people with broadband internet access, but no toilet.”

Access to technology is only ever one side of the problem. The other is how people bridge the gap between the creation and sharing of knowledge and action based on that information.

Crowdsourced crisis mapping represents a significant step upon this path.

Australian Bureau of Statistics

Crisis mapping is often equated to a geographic information system (GIS). GIS is a way of visually presenting, analysing and managing data and statistics, primarily through the use of maps. For example, a map could show the population density throughout Australia by using a sliding scale of colours (see image above).

Crisis mapping goes further by embracing a broader set of tasks that provide a geolocated visualisation, allowing for filtering, categorisation and analysis of information. The Women Under Siege crowdmap from Syria, for instance, allows you to filter the information by category of attack, location and the report’s source, while checking for any available related media.

The Ushahidi (“witness” in Kiswahili) interactive mapping platform, with more than 20,000 deployments across 132 countries, ranks among the most popular crisis mapping tools.

Ushahidi was developed in the wake of the disputed Kenyan elections of 2007 as a way of reporting eye-witness accounts of violence across the country. People could text the volunteers of Ushahidi, who would display the reports through Google Maps.

In 2010, the team from Ushahidi released Crowdmap, a crowdsourced version of the platform, which allows people to “check-in” with their location and add relevant reports and information.

Crowdsourced crisis mapping aims to harness the streams of information that flow through social media to provide response organisations and other interested parties with near-real-time, categorised, and geolocated data.

The explosion of user-generated content through social media can be leveraged to assist first-aid responders and humanitarian organisations in the wake of natural disasters, crises and violent conflicts, or even (more tongue-in-cheek) a zombie apocalypse.

Screenshot of the Libya Crisis Map used in different presentations by Standby Task Force members.

Automatic processes can be applied to extract, filter and structure content from social media – tasks that are currently performed by human volunteers.

In the 2011 Libya Crisis Map, a joint initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) and the Standby Task Force, online volunteers would work in shifts to monitor social media sites and extract relevant information to manually create reports.

Other teams would provide GIS coordinates, perform categorisation checks and seek to verify the information – a highly complex task when it comes to crowdsourced information.

The advantages of crowdsourcing are becoming apparent in other areas. Software engineer and political activist Tarik Nesh-Nash launched an on-line platform where citizens would post comments and vote for articles of the new Moroccan constitution, attracting 200,000 visits in a few weeks.

He has partnered with Transparency Morocco to set up Mamdawrinch (see image below), inspired by the Indian site I Paid A Bribe – a site dedicated to tracking, verifying and mapping corruption incidents across the country.

But there is still plenty of room to foster further cooperation between computer scientists, human rights activists and digital citizens. The social web and the “web of data” have to become more inter-connected and usable in the deployment processes.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Open Linking Data Community Project is a collective effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make it more readily available and reusable.

The W3C is also working on a framework for sharing knowledge and emergency management operating systems, with the aim of helping to classify and manage the content of reports. But, this has yet to be tested through the reality of crisis mapping deployment.

Digital neighbourhood actions can operate under extremely difficult scenarios: collapsed states, countries undergoing transitional justice and development of democratic institutions.

In sensitive environments such as the Libya Crisis Map or, more recently, the Syria Tracker, building a set of trusted information sources may involve major security issues. It can seriously compromise the safety of the people who originally published information on social media.

The crisis mapping community is currently developing general standards and the ethical, privacy and security issues that need to be carefully addressed in each case that crowdsourced crisis mapping is deployed.

To protect and maintain the ability of human-rights activists to operate in this digital space, a renewed framework, or “relational law”, is required that can bring technology, networked governance and legal protection together.

One thing’s for sure – there will never be a shortage of crises nor, hopefully, enough people willing to help solve them.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

Navigating Australia's bumpy road to aged care reform

2012-05-15T20:04:16Z

Much of the budget analysis over the past week has concentrated on the shuffling of expenditure for 2012-13 back to this financial year in order to achieve a surplus. It’s true that $17.6bn of such transfers is hardly pocket money, and needs careful assessment, but this focus (together with the media’s preoccupation with the Slipper/Thomson affairs) means the government’s achievements in aged care have largely been ignored.

Catalyst for change

Australia has fallen far behind most European countries in reshaping its aged care arrangements. This is despite the important Hogan Review of residential aged care facilities in 2004. The Department of Health and Ageing, which commissioned the report, did little to implement Hogan’s findings, as did aged care ministers of either political persuasion since then. Instead, they passed them off as “too difficult to tackle”.

Federal Treasury’s last three intergenerational reports highlighted the problem of a huge shift in the population towards old age, with inevitable rises in health costs and broader aged-care needs. The reports warned this would potentially outstrip available fiscal resources for both the Commonwealth and states. But the problem still didn’t resonate as a priority in health-care planning.

It became almost an afterthought in the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission’s (NHHRC) 2009 report. The NHHRC noted the need for improved flexibility in aged care arrangements – and some promising examples in Austria, where the elderly could be cared for in their homes with minimal use of nursing homes – but made little comment on advances across Europe, Scandinavia and Singapore over the past two decades.

The NHHRC simply recommended the whole field become the responsibility of the Commonwealth, rather than building on shared programs with the states.

Successive ministers have put aged care reform in the 'too hard basket'. Richy Schley/Flick

Action on the NHHRC report became the responsibility of then Prime Minster Kevin Rudd and Health Minister Nicola Roxon. The former wanted to achieve real reform in many areas, while the latter was concerned primarily with improved national bureaucratic control, better funding for hospitals, revised primary care strategies to take pressure off hospitals and enhanced preventive care.

A series of Council of Australian Government (COAG) negotiations saw many of the important elements of the Rudd plan dismantled, as the Roxon agenda came to dominate. She had the support of officers the Department of Health and Prime Minister and Cabinet, but faced opposition from several state premiers who didn’t want to surrender control of their health systems.

Rudd chose to refer the whole set of aged care issues to the Productivity Commission, which conducted extensive consultations with the many organisations representing and supporting the aged. The Commission also undertook a rigorous international review, which included care structures in Europe and Asia.

The Commission’s three-person team, chaired by Mike Woods, did an outstanding job, and presented a very comprehensive report to the Commonwealth in June 2011. It advocated huge reform to achieve an ongoing, viable structure for aged care into the future. This included a new national system and new funding arrangements including the necessary, but controversial, user-pays elements.

The Productivity Commission achieved broad agreement from all those consulted, despite raising the controversial issues of how to constructively use accumulated capital of elderly people (largely vested in their homes and superannuation) to contribute to aged care.

The alternative was for the growing cost to be fully met by a younger generation still in employment. But this would require heavy public taxation and intergenerational wealth transfer, which wasn’t tenable.

The proposals came to light when the Gillard government planned to slash expenditure to achieve a budget surplus, and the report was passed to the Minster for Mental Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler, who had just completed a mental health reform project.

The government's aged care reform package will improve the lives of ageing Australians. Erik Starck

Butler carried out this difficult task with real skill and last month announced his government would adopt most of the Commission’s recommendations and establish a new national administrative process.

Under the reforms:

Elderly people will gain support to remain in their homes as long as possible,
Support services will be developed so they’re readily accessible to elderly people, including advice on alternative arrangements,
The growing problem of care for people with Alzheimer’s disease will receive specific support, and
Further funding will be provided to enhance training of community nurses and other carers.

This major reform package has huge implications for all ageing Australians and for Commonwealth and state budgets for many years to come.

Next steps for reform

New ways must be developed to use the growing availability of broadband information technologies to improve communication with the elderly in their homes. This would improve access to support and advice, without the need for frequent visits to GP surgeries.

Such changes will enhance the productivity of skilled community nurses and nurse practitioners who can visit as needed, and will reduce the sense of isolation, which can be such a problem for the elderly.

For the first time, Australian governments have grasped the nettle. The reforms are every bit as important for our social fabric as was Medicare in 1984, even though they will take three to four years to become fully operational.

The package deserves bipartisan support as the many changes are worked through with the states, local governments, health professions, educational institutions, residential care and accommodation providers, and organisations for the aged.

David Pennington has received funding from the ARC.

Penny Wong, Joe Hockey and the dire state of political punditry

2012-05-15T20:03:38Z

If there is a turning point in the Australian debate on same-sex marriage it may well be Penny Wong’s remarkable grace and honesty when answering Joe Hockey on last night’s Q&A.

Wong was asked by host Tony Jones whether Hockey’s view that children were better off with a mother and father was hurtful to her.

“Of course it is,” she said. Then, with a curt nod: “But I know what my family is worth.”

For once, a minister spoke on television from her heart, unconstrained by the need to follow whatever script was issued that day from head office.

But such honesty is rare in political debate in Australia.

Recently I appeared on an ABC program called, ironically, “Outsiders”. Ironic because one of my co-panellists was former Liberal Minister Peter Reith. Whatever else one might say about Reith, he is not an outsider, and he obediently repeated the current Liberal Party attacks on the government.

The trend towards employing ex-politicians to pontificate is increasing at an alarming rate. The Age gives us the reflections of Amanda Vanstone and Peter Costello on a regular basis. Mark Latham seems to be embedded in the Financial Review, and Graham Richardson is such a fixture on Q & A that he is presumably now entered as a depreciation for tax purposes.

Latham and Richardson can at least be counted on for venom, passing as analysis. Costello and Vanstone, being somewhat more loyal to their old mates — well, not all of them in Costello’s case — will tell us, predictably, the current party line.

Other than a moment from Malcolm Fraser some years ago, acknowledging during a speech at La Trobe that he had not handled East Timor’s independence movement well, I have yet to hear a former politician admit to an error, or add much to political understanding. But this is symptomatic of the general decline of political commentary, which becomes increasingly an obsessive rehashing of current events, in which predictable positions are adopted.

If it isn’t politicians, we rely on members of the press gallery, who between them dominate political analysis on Sunday morning talk shows. I suspect no one watches these shows, but they provide footage for the evening news, when the same opinions that were in their newspapers can be trotted out again, and then reported the following day in an endless cycle of repetitive insider knowledge.

There are some dispassionate political journalists: George Megalogenis continues to actually analyse rather than preach, as did Michelle Grattan before her extraordinary dislike of Julia Gillard took over. But the cycle of the same small group of folk reinforcing each others’ views is drowning out anything else.

Until politicians are free to actually express their own views rather than those of the party, they cannot be used as commentators. Perhaps that is why the final exchange between Penny Wong and Joe Hockey on Monday’s Q&A was so electric. Here were current politicians talking about personal beliefs, and Hockey’s clear embarrassment was evidence that his basic decency is restricted by his party’s policy.

Far more important than Gillard’s rather inexplicable opposition to changing the Marriage Act is that the Liberal Party, which claims to believe in individual conscience, has forbidden a free vote on the issue. Australian politics is remarkably restricted by party discipline, which means that what passes for debate is limited to who can be most ingenious in finding ways of selling statements they obviously cannot believe.

Frontbenchers have to defend party policy. I don’t expect Wong to agree that the surplus is a con job or Hockey to acknowledge that his knowledge of economics is sadly limited. Their job is to be combatants, though one wishes their language could be as dignified as Wong was on Monday. But we desperately need commentators whose positions are not compromised by partisan loyalties, or the need to exercise payback.

We used to rely on the ABC for this sort of informed but dispassionate analysis. Maybe it’s time for it to cleanse its stables and move beyond the smug circle whereby “insiders” and “outsiders” merge, as long as Tony Jones can interrupt at will.

Dennis Altman does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Wicked problems and business strategy: is design thinking an answer?

2012-05-15T20:02:55Z

Obesity. Climate change. Brain drain. Tax havens. War in Afghanistan. All have been described as “wicked problems”.

UC Berkeley scholars, Rittel and Webber, coined the term in 1973 when they were reacting to urban planning challenges, a frustrating process that was attempting to find scientific bases to social problems. Wicked problems were described by systems scientist and philosopher C. West Churchman as “a class of social system problems, which are ill-formulated; where the information is confusing; where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values; and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing”.

Post 9-11, the illusion of the security of linear, rational approaches to planning and problem solving was shattered and there was a spike in the usage of the term “wicked problems” across academic disciplines, public policy and the media. It was thrown around at climate change conferences, in Australian public policy initiatives, in the Harvard Business Review, and even by the Australian Tax Commissioner. “Wicked problems” are even a focus of study for members of the armed forces in the Masters of Strategy at the US Naval School in Monterey, California.

The term has resonated with public policy makers of recent years, as the problems they face – ageing, migration, poverty, sustainability – are all of this nature. They are difficult to define, ambiguous, unstable, do not have one solution, and are beyond the realm or mandate of any one department or discipline. It’s also resonating in the business community, where operating in “wicked territory” challenges existing business processes. Contemporary strategic-planning processes don’t help enterprises. Trying to define the problem is a never-ending task, the amount of information you could gather is endless, and the usual planning techniques are not generating fresh ideas.

So is it that we have more wicked problems today, or are we just categorising more difficult problems as “wicked”? What are the implications for management, and by extension management education, if you are operating in this “wicked territory” And is “design thinking” really an answer? Design thinking is not new; it can be linked to the work of the likes of John Dewey and Edward De Bono. Its ethos is human-centered, integrative, optimistic and collaborative, and warrants serious consideration as a possible creative response to wicked problems. For businesses, it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

This is why we see a resurgence in “design thinking” for business and management, because traditional problem solving processes aren’t much help with wicked problems. Design thinking is more about unwrapping the problem solving process: it suggests that the creative process is not sequential, but overlapping and iterative; it requires input from people with different disciplines and backgrounds; it is argumentative, and requires integrative thinking. It’s about ‘failing forward’, rapid prototyping and using the wisdom of crowds. We already see very successful firms embracing some of these elements, the iconic IDEO, and newer firms such as Threadless, Local Motors and Kiva. The evidence is mounting – these are successful alternative platforms for creativity, design and problem solving.

Working in wicked territory also presents several issues for management education: the need to instill integrative thinking (this may be through experiencing design thinking processes), to build empathy in developing a human-centred approach to problem solving (by spending time with end-users, engaging in ethnographic methods), and to develop skills in boundary spanning (being able to communicate, respect and understand different worlds or business units). Even McKinsey, Dell and National Australia Bank are wanting to reinvent management for the 21st century. It is this skill set that is crucial when operating in wicked territory, in building innovation capability, and more broadly updating our managerial approach to value creation and the perceived tradeoff between economic efficiency and social progress.

Danielle Logue does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Scientific research spending lags behind smaller countries

2012-05-15T15:20:18Z

Nations half the size of Australia spend more on scientific research, have higher employment levels for scientists, and greater appeal to foreign investors, according to a report on Australia’s global standing in science.

Although Australia’s rate of spending on research and development is greater than in France, Canada and Britain, it remains well below the rate in smaller Scandinavian nations, according to the report, commissioned by Australia’s chief scientist, Ian Chubb, and released today.

The author, Alan Pettigrew, an Adjunct Professor at the College of Medicine, Biology and Environment at the Australian National University, compared OECD figures published in September last year for Australia and 12 other countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Britain and the US.

Australia spends about 2.25% of its GDP on research and development. Denmark spends 3%, Sweden about 3.6% and Finland almost 4%. Whereas Australia has just eight researchers per 1,000 workers, Sweden has 10, Denmark 12 and Finland 16.

Although Australia has one of the highest rates of researchers in higher education employment – five per 1,000 – it has the lowest rate in business, two in every 1,000, Professor Pettigrew said.

“The bulk of Australia’s world-class research and development takes place in its universities. Through this effort, Australia produces 2.6% of the OECD nations’ total number of science and engineering graduates at doctorate level.

“The low level of researcher employment in Australian businesses indicates, however, that this research training primarily results in employment in higher education, rather than in industry.”

The report, Australia’s Position in the World of Science, Technology & Innovation, shows that in research outcomes, measured by publications and citations in academic journals, Australia performs relatively well for its size.

It has the fifth highest number of publications in top journals per 1,000 people – placing it ahead of Britain, Canada, the US, Germany and France, but behind Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. “It is of interest that the smaller Scandinavian countries perform best among this group,” Professor Pettigrew said.

The level of funding from overseas for business research and development is highest in Austria, at 23%, the United Kingdom, with 22%, and Ireland, on 21% – and lowest in Australia, at just 1.1%.

Although Australia has one of the lowest levels of international collaboration, its research impact is nevertheless close to the average.

The relatively low level of research activity in business in Australia “is consistent with Australia’s economy being heavily based on the export of natural resources, especially coal and iron ore,” Professor Pettigrew said in his report. “Manufacturing and the export of goods and services, which depend on research and development and innovation for their competitive advantage, contribute less to Australia’s income in comparison to many other developed countries.”

But it is possible that future demand for, and revenue from, Australia’s natural resources could fall “because of declining international demand or volatile commodity prices. The need could then arise to change the balance of Australia’s economy more towards innovation-led productivity. Strategies would be required to build business research and development and innovation. This would be challenging, given the low base … and the time it takes to develop [it].”

Australia must consider whether its research investment in universities and government agencies, such as CSIRO, is adequate “when compared to other small nations, particularly in Scandinavia”.

Suzanne Cory, president of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Research Professor in the Molecular Genetics of Cancer Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, said the report was a “most welcome contribution to the public dialogue about Australia’s place in international science. In this age of science and technology, advances are rapid. Those who do not stay informed and connected will very quickly be left behind and forgo the economic benefits.”

Professor Cory said Australia faced a choice: it could take the steps needed to engage with an increasingly technology-driven world, or it could continue its present course of retreat.

“Australia produces only around 2% of the world’s science knowledge,” she said. “To access the remaining 98%, we need to be well connected with the global science network. But currently there is no overarching strategy for Australia’s global science engagement. The Academy has proposed an integrated international science program worth $250 million over 10 years – just 0.25% of total Australian Government spending on science, research and innovation.”

Australian researchers had a strong bias toward applied research at the expense of fundamental research, a reflection of a bias in its research funding bodies, and of aversion to risk by the researchers themselves, said Amanda Barnard, Leader of the Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory at CSIRO.

“Although we do have some globally competitive scientists here in Australia, we are not on the whole a country that is generally considered to be a leader in innovation and research. We do good science here, but if we wish to compensate for our small population and low levels of investment, we need to do better – and we need to do more. We can see how the Scandinavian countries are doing more from the report.

“We need to be prepared to take a few more risks, and allow researchers some degree of freedom to explore the cutting edge of science more often. Low-risk research is usually iterative, and iterative outputs do not deliver high impact. A renewed focus on discovery, in addition to refinement, will serve us well.”

There's more to successful revegetation than 'getting trees in the ground'

2012-05-15T04:57:38Z

One of my most vivid and lasting memories as an ecologist dates back to 1997. I was in the office of the then Environment Minister. I was told by the Minister and his minders that “we already knew everything we needed to know about restoring vegetation on farms” and “all we needed to do now was get the trees in the ground”.

Science was a dirty word then – much as it has now become in many areas of so-called environmental “debates” in Australia. Yet, after more a decade of detailed empirical science based on careful studies on hundreds of sites on hundreds of farms in south-eastern Australia, it is clear that back in 1997, there was in fact a lot that was important to learn about how to restore native vegetation and how to promote biodiversity conservation on farms.

Scientific research by The Australian National University and other universities, CSIRO, and organisations like Catchment Management Authorities, Greening Australia and Landcare, is helping to demonstrate why vegetation restoration is important on farms. It is identifying the features of good plantings for wildlife (such as native birds and reptiles), and how assemblages of animals differ between plantings, natural regrowth woodland, and old growth woodland.

For example, it is clear that when we manage a property by taking steps such as fencing and controlling grazing, it leads to readily quantifiable changes in vegetation structure and cover. These changes in vegetation result in marked changes in the type and number of birds in the area¹.

We can also determine which kinds of birds will benefit from these kinds of management interventions – small-bodied, non-seed-eating species¹ such as flame robins, redcapped robins and rufous whistlers.

This may sound trivial to some people, but it is remarkable how infrequently the effectiveness of management interventions has actually been documented – not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world. Documenting the impacts of management interventions is fundamentally important for determining what constitutes good management practice and what does not. Indeed, this kind of knowledge should underpin the effective expenditure of the billions of dollars of funds dedicated annually to environmental management in Australia!

Birds need regrowth vegetation too, not just old-growth forest. Ray Christy

Recent research in the temperate eucalypt woodland belt of south-eastern Australia has indicated the type of native vegetation growing on farms makes a big difference to the types of birds that will be found. The bird assemblages typically found in old growth woodland differ significantly from those found in plantings and those in areas of natural regrowth. Interestingly, birds of conservation concern are most likely to occur in plantings and regrowth rather than old growth.

This does not mean that old growth woodland has no conservation value. Far from it. Rather, it is critical for landholders to manage the range of vegetation on their farms to make sure there is habitat for a wide range of native species. This is especially important for the improved management of regrowth woodland which is often regarded as “sh*t” country by some landholders and targeted for clearing.

Yet other scientific work has helped uncover what makes a good planting for wildlife. Good plantings – those that support the highest diversity of native birds – will typically be:

block-shaped (not narrow strips)
in gullies or flat areas
next to other plantings or areas of native woodland
established around large old trees.

Plantings set up like this can provide valuable habitat for a range of bird species of conservation concern. Many of these species will breed successfully in these restored areas. Again, this kind of information is critical for guiding the effective expenditure of billions of dollars invested by Federal and State Governments as well as non-government organisations and farmers in on-farm conservation programs.

The key lesson from past myopia is that science (and particularly long-term ecological research) has a critical role to play in guiding effective natural resource management, including the effective restoration of native vegetation on farms. When we do the long-term work and establish good monitoring programs, we can actually demonstrate to taxpayers that their investments in repairing the environment have had some positive effects.

Good science and monitoring can uncover what needs to be done and how to do it, and quantify what is gained from particular investments (and how cost-effective those investments are). This is a key to gauging success not only for restoration programs on farms but in all environmental management.

References

Lindenmayer, D.B., Wood, J. Montague-Drake, R., Michael, D., Crane, M., Okada, S., MacGregor, C., and Gibbons, P. (2012a) Is biodiversity management effective? Cross-sectional relationships between management, bird response and vegetation attributes in an Australian agri-environment scheme. (Biological Conservation)

David Lindenmayer receives funding from the ARC, AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT (DEPARTMENT OF SUSTAINABILITY, ENVIRONMENT, WATER, POPULATION AND COMMUNITIES, MURRAY CATCHMENT MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, CARING FROM OUR COUNTRY SCHEME, THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT'S ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP SCHEME.

Lunar boom: we'll soon be mining the moon

2012-05-15T04:57:18Z

As history has repeatedly shown, where there are valuable minerals to be unearthed, adventurous humans will arrive in droves – even if it means battling extreme conditions and risking life and limb.

So what will happen when the next great “gold rush” in our history is quite literally out of this world? And what kind of technology would be needed for the mining? After many years of trying, I believe a have a workable answer to the second of these questions – but what about the first?

Business analysts may poke fun at the “impossibly” expensive cost of mining nearby celestial bodies such as asteroids, or even the moon, but these pursuits are not beyond the realm of possibility.

Returning to the moon for the purposes of mining will require new technologies and new ways of thinking, and this extends to the conventional business model. We cannot write these pursuits off based on high cost alone, especially given the hidden treasures to be found.

spaceports.blogspot.com

Rare-earths, off the earth

Demand for “rare-earth” minerals (which are used in a range of technologies) is rising sharply, but their supply is extremely limited.

It is estimated that China is producing and storing roughly 95% of the world’s present demand and, in recent times, has expressed an unwillingness to share the wealth by imposing export bans.

While most people have never heard the exotic names Yttrium, Lanthanum, and Samarium, these rare-earths are increasingly critical in the making of high-tech products with both civilian and military applications. Technologies ranging from tablets to missiles to wind turbines all require these valuable minerals, all of which are available in abundance on the moon.

Helium-3 (He-3), a non-radioactive nuclear fusion fuel, considered by some to be the safe energy source of the future, is also abundant on the moon.

It is presently available on Earth but costs approximately A$5,000 per litre and the energy required for extraction and processing exceeds the energy that can be gained from the fusion reactor.

In other words, it’s not economically viable. But easy access to more plentiful reserves will change this equation.

While each of these minerals alone might not provide a viable return-on-investment (ROI) their unique distribution on the lunar surface creates the opportunity to “split-the-cost”.

In other words, if designed properly, many rare-earth minerals and He-3 could be mined with the same equipment, at the same location using the same “Earth-to-Moon” shuttle – a commercial vehicle that could ferry materials back down to Earth.

This shuttle could use lunar oxygen or hydrogen as a fuel – another cost-saving approach. In other words, the “petrol” station should be on the moon and not on Earth.

So, will we ever see mining trucks hauling material on the moon or on the asteroids? Quite simply, no.

It is a common mistake made by engineers, including myself, to project terrestrial technology on to the moon. After all, the moon’s environment is vastly different to that of Earth.

The moon is not the earth

Over the past 5,000 years, mining and construction methods have been optimised to fit key parameters on Earth, including the presence of:

a gravitational acceleration of 9.8 metres per second squared (m/s²)
an atmosphere of roughly 79% nitrogen, 20% oxygen and 1% other gases
water
soils containing clay, sand and gravel
plants and timber

None of the above conditions is replicated on the moon or on asteroids, yet we are so caught up in earthly-thinking that it’s extremely difficult to consider the synergistic effect of several key factors being changed at the same time.

Let’s take gravitational acceleration that changes from 9.8m/s² to 1.6m/s² when we go from the earth to the moon. This has a drastic effect on excavation.

Gravity creates traction for the tyres, which is required during digging or as a counter-weight to keep equipment from toppling over.

In order to achieve the same amount of digging force or ballast weight on the moon a mass six times that on Earth is needed. This creates an immediate dilemma, as the cost of transporting conventional equipment to the moon would be, as analysts suggest, prohibitively expensive.

One kilogram delivered to the moon costs (today) approximately A$25,000. So, a small 3.3-metre-long skid-steer loader with a terrestrial weight of 2,500kg would need to weigh 15,000kg at launch. This would lead to a transportation cost of A$375 million.

And that’s not considering the trucks we’d need to take up to the moon to move the soil around.

Jason bache

The key feature that eliminates earthly loaders and trucks as viable options for lunar mining, and one that most definitely cannot be overlooked, is their dependence on dust-producing wheels.

Lunar dust, as highlighted by the Apollo missions, is pesky and potentially hazardous for spacewalkers and robotic equipment.

On the moon, the lack of an atmosphere, the low gravity and the small soil particles allows the sun to energise the soil enough so the particles stay levitated after being kicked up by a shoe, truck tire or a loader bucket.

This is just one reason space-engineers must drop all Earth-bound pre-conceptions. In the 25 years I’ve been thinking about lunar mining and construction, I’ve found that this “dropping” is not easy to do.

It requires us to replace all earthly principles and constraints; a process I call “synergy-n engineering”.

The term expresses a process where 1 or n key engineering factors, synergistically optimised for an Earth design (mining or construction, for instance), are substituted, each impacting all the others.

One can easily see that the complexity of space engineering raises exponentially more factors as those mentioned above (one to five) are adjusted to fit the lunar environment.

I believe that after many years of experimental work in small laboratories I have come up with a mining technology that fits the lunar condition: suction extraction with pneumatic transportation.

This technology uses airflow, much like water, to transport material that is small enough it can be sucked by a Venturi process, into a pipe and transported from a high-pressure entry to a low pressure exit point.

Moon dust might look harmless, but it has the potential to wreak havoc on machinery. NASA

I need to add a caveat here in that I have not tested this technology (yet) in the lunar environment. Still, it requires a minimal mass to be launched to the moon as it relies heavily on in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU).

So, rather than transporting pipes for moving minerals, my concept would use the readily available silicates and the solar heat energy available on the moon to manufacture and join glass pipes on site.

This is one cost-saving mechanism: relying on materials that are already available. It’s similar to how the First Fleet relied on fresh water, trees and stones to build houses, barracks and bridges in what would become Sydney.

A second critical feature of our mining process is that it’s a dust-free operation. Gene Cernan, a lunar astronaut on Apollo 17, highlighted my apprehension about creating dust when he said: “I think dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon.”

Finally, extracting and transporting the lunar soil to the processing plant is highly efficient as it utilises the lower lunar gravity as well as its dry and powdery characteristic as a resource. In this way, we would minimise the energy required to operate a lunar mine.

There is obviously much work still to be done, and many naysayers to convince, but it’s not a pipe-dream without proponents.

Some investors forecast lunar mining will start by 2016. Mining on asteroids, some analysts believe, will have to wait in line until 2022.

Time will tell how these plans will be realised but there is no question that mining on the moon and asteroids will eventually happen.

Leonhard Bernold does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

If police and government can't control Sydney gun crime, local communities must

2012-05-15T04:54:52Z

The spiralling rise in shooting crimes in Sydney’s western suburbs requires strong and sustained political, community and police action to make suburbs safe for families.

I happen to live in a suburb that has been ringed by shooting incidents, and recent was just around the corner from my home. Like many of my neighbours, I can see that politicians are seeking, but are not really offering, new strategies or solutions to fight the gun crime that is plaguing Sydney.

It’s not just well organised bikie gangs to blame, but a range of criminals and business rivals, all with access to guns. They are escalating, rather than settling, all manner of disputes by targeted shootings.

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research released new statistics on 17 April 2012 – a day on which five shootings were reported in Sydney.

The figures show the offence of “discharge firearm into premises” rose by 41% (from 71 incidents in 2010 to 100 incidents in 2011) in the two years to December 2011. Approximately half of the NSW recorded incidents of “discharge firearm into premises” in 2011 was recorded in the three Sydney statistical subdivisions of Canterbury-Bankstown, Central Western Sydney, and Fairfield-Liverpool.

There have been at least 52 shootings in Sydney so far in 2012. It will probably be more by the time this article is published.

It is just a matter of time before hand guns become more widely used in disputes by traditionally law abiding members of the public, as a result of “normalisation”, and before shootings follow the US trend and occur in places such as Australian high schools.

We are not talking about rifles here, but concealed weapons – pistols. We need new and tighter controls on pistols and ammunition. This should include a new buy-back scheme for pistols, a national register and should include strengthened border control strategies because all hand guns come from overseas suppliers.

There also needs to be a greater high-profile police presence in the suburbs most affected by these shootings, and the police response to shooting incidents needs to be immediate and unrelenting. The community will support strong and hard action by police against these criminals.

Criminals are reacting to the lack of enforcement, the lack of police in key target suburbs, and what appears to be a lack of political will by the State Government to really take on the issue of gun crime and criminal gang activity.

NSW police officers arrest a man as part of an operation against bike gangs suspected of committing many of the recent shootings in Sydney

An example of such is the recent announcement that, in response to a recent batch of shootings (five in one day), the law would be changed so that outlaw motorcycle gangs members would not be able to wear their “colours” in the nightclubs of Kings Cross. This announcement was met by both police and criminals alike with howls of laughter. How does changing a dress code stop gun crime? And King’s Cross is in the eastern suburbs – not anywhere near where the shootings are occurring.

During the 1990s, Victoria faced a similar dilemma from smaller organised crime gangs, which resorted to shootings and bombings to settle disputes. The police response was slow as the view among most officers was that as long as it was criminals shooting criminals then it shouldn’t, or wouldn’t, concern the general public. This view drastically changed after Jason Moran was shot in a minivan at a children’s sporting event, while children sat terrified in the backseat.

It has now become clear that if politicians won’t take on those using guns to settle their disputes and give police the support and direction needed then it is time for local community organisations to take up the challenge.

The most enduring “fix” will come from the combined effects of public and community groups exerting pressure, on the government and police, to break the culture of gang and criminal activity that sponsors gun use as an acceptable recourse for dispute resolution.

Communities in western Sydney need to start taking action to organise and reclaim street safety in their suburbs. If politicians and the government can’t fix this escalating problem, the community must stand up and demand an end to gun violence.

It was this type of community action that helped fight the devastating impact and control of the heroin trade and Vietnamese crime gangs in Cabramatta. We need to send a clear message to the government and the gun-wielding criminals that that we will support whatever action is needed to make our streets safe again.

What is it going to take for us to act to solve the gun problem – a Port Arthur style massacre in western Sydney?

Hugh McDermott does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Age-old question: when should children be responsible for their crimes?

2012-05-15T04:35:40Z

The age of criminal responsibility acts as the gateway to the criminal justice system – under a certain age you are kept out.

Most jurisdictions have this age barrier because it’s widely understood children need sheltering from the criminal law consequences of their behaviour until they are developed enough to understand whether their behaviour is wrong.

But what age is the right age? And how do legal systems deal with this difficult question?

What is the age of criminal responsibility?

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, requires states to set a minimum age “below which children shall be presumed not to have the capacity to infringe penal law”. The convention does not actually indicate what age level should be set as a minimum.

But in fixing a minimum age, the commentary on the United Nation’s Beijing Rules notes that: “The modern approach would be to consider whether a child can live up to the moral and psychological components of criminal responsibility; that is, whether a child … can be held responsible for essentially antisocial behaviour.”

In this regard all Australian criminal jurisdictions have a modern approach, with two age levels of criminal responsibility: a lower one under which a child is always presumed too young to ever be capable of guilt and can, therefore, never be dealt with in criminal proceedings (currently under the age of 10); and a higher one where the presumption that a child is incapable of crime (termed the presumption of doli incapax) is conditional.

Children in the higher age group, between 10 and 14 years old, can be convicted of criminal offences only if the prosecution can refute the presumption of doli incapax. This can be done by proving the child understood that what he or she had done was wrong according to the ordinary standards of reasonable adults. This requires more than a simple understanding that the behaviour was disapproved of by adults.

Changing views

The presumption that children lack capacity is not new. Its roots can be traced back at least to the time of King Edward III. But in recent years many have questioned it, mainly due to the perceived escalation in youth crime and the changes made to the criminal justice system for dealing with the young.

Indeed, criticism was so strong in England and Wales that doli incapax was abolished for 10- to 14-year-olds in 1998, following the outcry over the James Bulger case. This concerned the abduction, torture and killing of three-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys.

Now in England and Wales, as soon as a child reaches the age of ten, he or she can be convicted of criminal offences without any examination of his or her capacity to understand whether their behaviour is wrong.

This leaves England and Wales with one of the lowest age levels of criminal responsibility in the world and subject to ongoing criticism by the international community.

For example, the former Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner expressed concern, commenting that he had “extreme difficulty in accepting that a child of 12 or 13 can be criminally culpable for his actions, in the same sense as an adult”.

Even England’s closest neighbours, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, have recently increased the minimum age level to 12.

Criminal example: sexting

The relatively recent phenomenon of “sexting” serves here to show the need for higher age levels. “Sexting” involves the digital recording of sexually explicit images and distribution by mobile phone texts or through social network sites.

Children who engage in this practice run the risk of being prosecuted under child pornography laws and face severe sanctions, including placement on the sex offender register, with all the flow-on consequences that this entails.

It is highly unlikely that even a 14-year-old child who takes a photo of him or herself and consensually sends this to a friend will understand that this behaviour is regarded by adults as wrongful or unlawful.

Nonetheless, as the current law stands there is little to protect children aged 14 and over from a criminal conviction.

Increase the limit, keep it flexible

In Australia, in particular in NSW, many are now calling for an increase in the minimum age level to 12.

But this might not be the great leap forward that it appears to be if it means that the flexible age period (that is, the period where children cannot be prosecuted unless it’s proven they can understand their actions) is abolished. This would take away protection for 12- and 13-year-olds, who may not be mature enough to understand the wrongfulness of their behaviour.

This is the case in Scotland and Ireland, where a child can be convicted of a criminal offence from the age of 12 without an assessment of whether he or she had the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of his or her behaviour.

The advantage of retaining a flexible age period beyond a minimum age, as presently exists in all Australian jurisdictions, is that it recognises that around the age of puberty children develop at vastly different and inconsistent rates.

It allows for the conviction of children who are sufficiently developed to be criminally responsible while protecting those children who are not so developed.

The best outcome would be to raise the minimum age level while retaining and raising the higher flexible age level. This would be a welcome development for children and the justice system in Australia.

Thomas Crofts does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.