Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

How do you define love? Is it a choice or a feeling? – Izzy, age 11, Golden, Colorado

Love is confusing. People in the U.S. Google the word “love” about 1.2 million times a month. Roughly a quarter of those searches ask “what is love” or request a “definition of love.”

What is all this confusion about?

Neuroscience tells us that love is caused by certain chemicals in the brain. For example, when you meet someone special, the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine can trigger a reward response that makes you want to see this person again. Like tasting chocolate, you want more.

Your feelings are the result of these chemical reactions. Around a crush or best friend, you probably feel something like excitement, attraction, joy and affection. You light up when they walk into the room. Over time, you might feel comfort and trust. Love between a parent and child feels different, often some combination of affection and care.

But are these feelings, caused by chemical reactions in your brain, all that love is? If so, then love seems to be something that largely happens to you. You’d have as much control over falling in love as you’d have over accidentally falling in a hole – not much.

As a philosopher who studies love, I’m interested in the different ways people have understood love throughout history. Many thinkers have believed that love is more than a feeling.

More than a feeling

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that love might cause feelings like attraction and pleasure, which are out of your control. But these feelings are less important than the loving relationships you choose to form as a result: lifelong bonds between people who help one another change and grow into their best selves.

Similarly, Plato’s student Aristotle claimed that, while relationships built on feelings like pleasure are common, they’re less good for humankind than relationships built on goodwill and shared virtues. This is because Aristotle thought relationships built on feelings last only as long as the feelings last.

Imagine you start a relationship with someone you have little in common with other than you both enjoy playing video games. Should either of you no longer enjoy gaming, nothing would hold the relationship together. Because the relationship is built on pleasure, it will fade once the pleasure is gone.

Compare this with a relationship where you want to be together not because of a shared pleasure but because you admire one another for who you are. You want what is best for one another. This kind of friendship built on shared virtue and goodwill will be much longer lasting. These kinds of friends will support each other as they change and grow.

Plato and Aristotle both thought that love is more than a feeling. It’s a bond between people who admire one another and therefore choose to support one another over time.

Maybe, then, love isn’t totally out of your control.

Celebrating individuality and ‘standing in love’

Contemporary philosopher J. David Velleman also thinks that love can be disentangled from “the likings and longings” that come with it – those butterflies in your stomach. This is because love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a special kind of paying attention, which celebrates a person’s individuality.

Velleman says Dr. Seuss did a good job describing what it means to celebrate a person’s individuality when he wrote: “Come on! Open your mouth and sound off at the sky! Shout loud at the top of your voice, ‘I AM I! ME! I am I!’” When you love someone, you celebrate them because you value the “I AM I” that they are.

You can also get better at love. Social psychologist Erich Fromm thinks that loving is a skill that takes practice: what he calls “standing in love.” When you stand in love, you act in certain ways toward a person.

Just like learning to play an instrument, you can also get better at loving with patience, concentration and discipline. This is because standing in love is made up of other skills such as listening carefully and being present. If you get better at these skills, you can get better at loving.

If this is the case, then love and friendship are distinct from the feelings that accompany them. Love and friendship are bonds formed by skills you choose to practice and improve.

Does this mean you could stand in love with someone you hate, or force yourself to stand in love with someone you have no feelings for whatsoever?

Probably not. Philosopher Virginia Held explains the difference between doing an activity and participating in a practice as simply doing some labor versus doing some labor while also enacting values and standards.

Compare a math teacher who mechanically solves a problem at the board versus a teacher who provides students a detailed explanation of the solution. The mechanical teacher is doing the activity – presenting the solution – whereas the engaged teacher is participating in the practice of teaching. The engaged teacher is enacting good teaching values and standards, such as creating a fun learning environment.

Standing in love is a practice in the same sense. It’s not just a bunch of activities you perform. To really stand in love is to do these activities while enacting loving values and standards, such as empathy, respect, vulnerability, honesty and, if Velleman is right, celebrating a person for who they truly are.

How much control do you have over love?

Is it best to understand love as a feeling or a choice?

Think about what happens when you break up with someone or lose a friend. If you understand love purely in terms of the feelings it stirs up, the love is over once these feelings disappear, change or get put on hold by something like a move or a new school.

On the other hand, if love is a bond you choose and practice, it will take much more than the disappearance of feelings or life changes to end it. You or your friend might not hang out for a few days, or you might move to a new city, but the love can persist.

If this understanding is right, then love is something you have more control over than it may seem. Loving is a practice. And, like any practice, it involves activities you can choose to do – or not do – such as hanging out, listening and being present. In addition, practicing love will involve enacting the right values, such as respect and empathy.

While the feelings that accompany love might be out of your control, how you love someone is very much in your control.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Edith Gwendolyn Nally, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Kansas City

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In August many Australian universities have open days as Year 12 students make up their minds about what they want to study next year.

There will be lots of things for prospective students to think about – including what course they want to study and what career they want to pursue.

Beyond questions about study content, there are five other important aspects to investigate about university life. These can have an impact on how much you enjoy your studies and how much you are supported to succeed.

1. Academic supports

Studying at university is different from school. You need to be more independent and there is less time “in class” (lectures or tutorials). This can be an adjustment for some students.

Check out what kinds of support are available to help students meet academic expectations. Some questions you could ask include:

• what academic writing resources and supports are available?

• can I get help to understand the expectations of essay writing and other forms of assessment?

• can the library support me with database searches and referencing?

• are there peer-supported study groups for my course?

• what online learning platform is used and do we get an orientation?

• can I use ChatGPT for assignments and what is the university’s approach to the use of AI?

2. Health and wellbeing services

Study at university can coincide with health and wellbeing challenges for students. You may be worried about study deadlines or cost-of-living, or there may be other things going on in your life you need help with. Some questions you could ask include:

• what resources are available to help manage my health and wellbeing?

• are there counsellors or mental health professionals?

• is there a general practice or health clinic on campus?

• is there a pharmacy?

• are urgent mental health services accessible at all times?

• what supports are available if I need help with access and inclusion?

3. Work-life-study balance

Many students need to work part-time to support themselves and have family or other life commitments. This can be challenging if deadlines all come at once or your schedule is very full.

Ask your university about how healthy work-life-study balance can be supported. This is of particular concern if your course has mandatory work experience placements. You could ask:

• are there flexible study options?

• can I start or switch to part-time study during my course or term?

• how and when can I take a study break or leave of absence?

• is there an option to complete part of my degree remotely?

4. Living costs

Being a student is typically a time of life when money is tight. But this is made even more difficult during cost-of-living and housing crises.

Ask about the full costs of study. Along with course fees or loans, check out the associated costs (such as equipment or textbooks) as well as potential supports. Specifically you could ask:

• does the university offer emergency financial assistance?

• is there financial counselling?

• are there grants and scholarships and help to apply for these?

• what materials do I need to buy for my course?

• are there student discounts at local businesses to help reduce living expenses?

Also, don’t forget there are government payments available for eligible students.

5. Social supports and community

A significant part of enjoying university will be feeling as if you belong. So consider universities that foster inclusive environments and offer supportive networks. Some questions to ask include:

• how does the university ensure students from diverse backgrounds are included and represented in campus activities and decision-making?

• are there specific programs to support First Nations students?

• what resources and support services are available for LGBTQIA+ students?

• what supports can I access if I have disability?

Choosing a university isn’t just about the course or the degree – it’s finding your fit in a place that will help you realise your study and life goals. So, keep asking questions – academics, university staff and students at open days are there to help.

Christopher Patterson, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, University of Wollongong and Catherine Stephen, Lecturer, School of Nursing,, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As Year 12 students begin term 3, they will be thinking increasingly about what to do next year. Throughout August, many universities have have open days as students investigate different courses and options for study.

This is a significant time for young people as they navigate study pressures with decisions about what to do beyond school.

If you are still making up your mind (and there is still plenty of time!), here are six things to consider.

1. There are lots of options

Your personal interests and ability are some of the most important factors to consider when choosing a university degree.

So your Year 12 subjects can help steer what you study after school. Many high school students will be familiar with the careers “bullseye” posters which help you see the links between school study, possible careers and what kind of study you need to get there. These posters cover a huge range of subjects, from biology to food studies, languages and physical education.

For example, if you love maths, you may want to consider studying data analytics, engineering, economics or architecture.

Meanwhile, most careers can be done in a whole range of ways. For example, many archaeologists may not be excavating tombs in Egypt, but undertaking heritage site surveys for construction projects.

If you have a specific idea in mind – or even just a general area of interest – talk to your careers adviser at school. At uni open days, talk to subject-area specialists about what they do in their courses.

2. High school subjects are not quite the same as uni

Keep in mind the subject you love at school is likely to be a little different at university level, or may go by a different name.

For example, high school English is much broader than English literature at university. So if you love creative writing or essay writing at school, you may want to consider a creative writing or journalism course rather than English literature at uni.

To better understand what you might study, look at the specific subjects involved in possible degrees and talk to academics (the people who research and teach at uni) and current university students at open days.

3. Think about your uni as well as your course

On top of your studies, make sure you look at any additional opportunities that may be offered by a university.

Do they have opportunities to do study tours or a semester abroad? Do their degrees include industry experience? Do they have social or sporting clubs you would like to join?

4. Don’t forget there are options with how you study

Along with the subject matter you will also be thinking about where you are studying and how you are getting there.

Not all students live close to their chosen university, where it’s a simple commute to campus. Relocating can be expensive and we know this is made all the more difficult by housing and cost-of-living crises.

Full-time study might be supported by Youth Allowance or ABSTUDY for First Nations students.

A full-time study load is usually eight courses a year. But many universities now offer flexible enrolment patterns that allow you to spread your study over the year by studying fewer courses across more study periods.

Another option is studying part-time. Your degree will take longer to complete, but this might allow you to better manage your work and study commitments.

Don’t forget you can also investigate doing degrees online, and make sure you check out any scholarship opportunities for which you may be eligible. Each university will advertise its own scholarships on its website, and some organisations also offer scholarships for study in particular fields.

5. The ATAR is not everything

There can be a lot of pressure on students to get a certain ATAR. But missing out on ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank) entry for a certain course does not mean university study is out of reach.

Many courses use other entry criteria such as auditions or portfolios.

Many students also use non-ATAR pathways to get to university, including vocational, diploma or bridging studies to get to uni.

6.It’s OK to change your mind

Starting a degree and finding it isn’t quite the right fit is a common experience. In almost all cases, you will be able to transfer to another degree or another major within your current degree, and sometimes get credit for the study you have already completed.

Alison Bedford, Senior Lecturer Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Even if you weren’t lucky enough to spot the aurora light shows visible across southern Australia this week (and which may potentially reappear in coming days), you probably did encounter the onslaught of online news articles and photos that followed.

Just 35 years ago, however, this wouldn’t have been the case. Even digital cameras weren’t easily available until the mid-1990s, which means any dazzling aurora sightings would have been a privileged view for a select few.

According to Photutorial founder Matic Broz, about 1.94 trillion photographs will be taken globally over 2024 – with more than 90% of these taken by smartphones.

Taking photos is also increasingly becoming a part of our experience of the natural world. What was once just stargazing has branched off into the massive field of astrophotography. Our cameras enable a new way of experiencing nature that’s far-removed from how earlier generations would do so.

New technology brings new opportunities

In the case of auroras and other forms of astrophotography, night-friendly photo settings have allowed us to see the world after dark.

Improvements in “night mode” technologies have been in development since smartphones were invented. That said, Google could be considered the first company to have released technology that enables simple astrophotography, with its introduction of “night sight” for Pixel phones in 2018.

Then, in 2019, Apple released a similar “night mode” setting for the iPhone 11 – and for many smartphone users, the need to manually apply exposure settings on a camera suddenly disappeared.

In one of Apple’s night mode ads released in 2020, we see a montage of “before and after” images highlighting the difference in quality when the mode is applied. The montage is set against the Smashing Pumpkins song We Only Come Out At Night, as an aurora photo appears in the set.

Today, there are numerous official and unofficial guides (and even entire books) to help people harness their smartphone camera’s capabilities.

In her book The Aurora Chaser’s Handbook: In Search of Tasmania’s Southern Lights, author Margaret Sonnemann provides a how-to for “photographing the aurora on a mobile phone”. She suggests using apps to enhance the visual settings and switching to “night” or “astro” mode.

Is nature enhanced through the artificial lens?

There are several reasons why you might want to capture the beauty of nature through your smartphone.

For one thing, doing so helps “democratise” our collective experience of the natural world. Sharing photos of nature gives many more people the ability to come across incredible natural sights. This is especially valuable for those who may be financially or physically unable to travel to the distant lands where these sights are found.

Then there’s the fact that photos and video allow us to watch and rewatch natural phenomena. Apart from being a cool thing to do, this provides opportunities for education and analysis of the natural world. Indeed, sharing photos to increase public interest in nature could even be considered a form of environmental communication.

Technology also helps “enhance” our view of the natural world. Aurora photos, for instance, use prolonged exposure times to greatly enhance colours and lights in a way that can’t be seen by the naked eye. This provides an additional incentive to whip out your phone if you do come across one.

Similarly, prolonged exposure times allow us to take “flowing” photographs of waterfalls and surf waves. And time-lapse settings let us create stop-motion videos of slow-moving nature, such as cloud movements or flower buds opening.

Is nature tainted through the artificial lens?

As aurora photography and similar forms become increasingly common, we should also ask the following question: how is this new way of interacting with nature impacting our relationship with it?

Digitally enhanced images literally change what we would otherwise see with the naked eye. Might this distort our ideas of nature?

Many widely shared photos of auroras may not even be real. Post-editing techniques are often used to further enhance aurora shots, or to add an aurora to a shot that never even had one. Some striking images that circulated earlier this year were deliberately faked.

The increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence will only make it harder to distinguish between the truly phenomenal and the phony. As such, the large set of photographs that appear on social media carry with them a whole new set of representational concerns.

Visual culture professor Nicolas Mirzeoff suggests we are compelled to take photos as a “key part of our effort to understand the changing world around us and our place within it”. But photos risk becoming visual commodities when they are extraneously edited (or faked) and plastered online in the millions.

And then there is the concern that a cultural obsession with photographing nature might divert our focus from what’s truly in front of us, taking us out of the magical moment. So, as these new photo technologies enable new ways of connecting with nature, so too do we need to consider how they might be distracting or removing us from it.

Gemma Blackwood, Lecturer, Media, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Social media has once again lit up with the spectacle of aurora australis, also known as the Southern Lights, as it became visible in some skies across the southern states last night.

The lights – which aren’t seen outside the south polar region very often – were last sighted in May, unusually far north in the skies of Australia, New Zealand, South America and South Africa.

Despite (or maybe because of) their infrequent appearance, the Southern Lights have long inspired humans. From as far back as early Aboriginal ancestral accounts, to recent contemporary art, they have continued to ignite our imagination. Let’s take a look at some examples.

Visual works

1. Pavel Mikhailov

Pavel Mikhailov (1787–1840) was a Russian expedition artist with the Imperial Russian Navy’s first Antarctic expedition, which sailed from 1819 to 1821.

Captained by Fabian Bellingshausen, the voyage circumnavigated the south polar seas in search of the fabled “southern continent” which Captain James Cook had hoped to find some 50 years earlier.

In 1820, Bellingshausen’s became one of three expeditions to glimpse the edges of the continent (the others were headed by Irish-British explorer Edward Bransfield and US explorer Nathaniel Palmer).

Although there are much earlier accounts of aurora australis, Mikhailov’s watercolour – reproduced from a sketch he drew on March 2 1820, is one of the first painted depictions to come straight from Antarctic waters.

The expedition’s astronomer noted in his diary:

I saw three shining pillars […] the colour of a comet’s tail. Long did I gaze at that aurora.

2. Edward Roper

Painter and printer Edward Roper (1854–1909) was born in the United Kingdom and lived between the UK, Canada and Australia in the late 19th century.

His 1870 portrayal of an aurora seen from Port Phillip, Melbourne, shares a striking resemblance to Mikhailov’s painting (albeit minus the icebergs). The red tinge in the rays of light indicates Roper’s lower-latitude viewpoint.

3. Edward Wilson

Edward Adrian Wilson (1872–1912) was a naturalist, physician and expedition artist with both of British Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expeditions, Discovery (1901–04) and Terra Nova (1910–13). Throughout these, Wilson faithfully recorded Antarctica’s landscapes, wildlife and atmospheric phenomena for the benefit of science.

His white-on-black chalk sketches of south polar aurorae emphasise the shape of the various formations as seen in the winter of 1902. He meticulously recorded the date, time and a descriptive title with each of his drawings.

4. George Marston

George Edward Marston (1882–1940) was the expedition artist for famous explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod (1907–09) and Imperial Trans-Antarctic (1914–17) expeditions.

In 1908, during his first Antarctic winter, Marston used oil paints to capture the aurora australis. In his atmospheric scene the air is still, the night is clear and sled dogs frolic in the snow under the blue/green glow of the moonlight and the aurora. The Cape Royds expedition hut (now a protected historic site) blends into the hillside while three men brave the cold to watch the lights perform over Mount Erebus.

5. George Marston

Worthy of a second mention, Marston produced the images for “Aurora Australis”, the first book to be written, printed and published in Antarctica. Copies are highly prized, as fewer than 100 were lovingly hand-printed during the dark and frigid winter months of 1908. The title page features Marston’s lithographic print of the aurora australis dancing above Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano.

6. David Abbey-Paige

David Abbey-Paige (1901–1978) was the official expedition artist with Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition (1933–1935). The artist worked almost exclusively in pastels in Antarctica to avoid the issue of freezing paints. His drawings are a celebration of polar light and colour.

In one drawing, a lone emperor penguin stands in an icescape illuminated by a stream of green auroral light.

7. Stephen Eastaugh

Stephen Eastaugh is an Australian itinerant artist who has travelled to Antarctica nine times, including three times with the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). He is the only AAD arts fellow to have over-wintered.

He created his Outlandish – Aurora Australis series during a winter at Mawson Station in 2009. Each panel in this work has an icy feature in the foreground and a black polar night backdrop, upon which Eastaugh has stitched astonishing green aurorae, streaming and unfurling playfully across the sky.

8. Bill Sutton

The late William Alexander “Bill” Sutton (1917–2000) was one of New Zealand’s most respected 20th-century landscape painters.

His work Aurora at Arrowtown (1949), painted early in his career, contrasts with his later expansive mountain scenes and abstracted landscapes. The greyed Arrowtown buildings are barely visible in the gloomy half-light. Like a portent of doom, a glowing blood-red aurora looms ominously over the town.

Multimodal works

9. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding – two contemporary artists based in Sydney’s Blue Mountains – brought the energy of the solar and electromagnetic realms into the art gallery in their 2008 multi-sensory installation EarthStar.

The artwork combined sight, sound and smell. A video projection of the Sun’s surface, recorded through a hydrogen-alpha telescope lens, showed the detail of the Sun’s corona and the ejections of material that can cause auroral activity. Copper-coiled antennas tuned to detect electromagnetic activity were hooked up to amplifiers that emitted audible pops and sizzles of invisible energy.

To complete the “triptych”, Haines created a synthetic aroma in liquid form that represented the smell of burning ions in an aurora. As Haines explained, “If one could go up into the Earth’s ionosphere when an aurora takes place it would probably smell like this due to burning of oxygen molecules.”

10. Jason O’Hara and Warren Maxwell

Jason O’Hara is a digital storyteller, photographer and experience designer based in Wellington, New Zealand. Along with Auckland-based musician and composer Warren Maxwell, the pair created the immersive 2019 work Where Memories Sleep: The Legend of the Aurora.

O'Hara and Maxwell travelled south with Antarctica New Zealand, the government agency responsible for supporting the country’s Antarctic research program. These journeys inspired their spectacular cine-dance production which combines music, dance and cinematography.

The story follows a young explorer who ventures to the ice, where she meets a powerful kuia (female Māori elder), who gifts her the memories of the world (a metaphor for scientific research into Earth’s geological and climate pasts).

She falls in love with a selkie, a seal-human shapeshifter. In the closing scene, when she has to return home, the selkie’s love song transcends from the ocean to the sky, transforming into the aurora australis – beckoning his love back to Antarctica.

Adele Jackson, Adjunct Researcher, College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you search most primary or high school websites, you will likely find a images of happy, smiling children.

Students images are also used publicly for school newsletters, social media accounts and other school publications like annual reports.

Parents could reasonably expect schools and educations departments have conducted thorough checks and evaluations to do this. To some degree this is true, but a recent AI scare where children’s images were used in a massive training data set included some photos from school websites.

Research also shows schools can do more to promote children’s rights to privacy.

Parents and governments are already concerned about children’s safety online. As part of this, we need to look more closely at how students’ information and images are being used by their schools.

Why is online information an issue?

Publication of children’s images and personal information on social media platforms generates a trail of information or profile of that child. This information is permanent and may have implications for children now and in the future, including on their self-esteem.

This data also contributes to a “digital shadow”. This is the digital data associated with individuals we cannot see. It can can be sold and used to profile and target individuals for advertising or dictate what information and content we see online through recommender systems.

What are schools required to do?

In Australia, the publication of a child’s personal data, which includes images and video, is protected by the Australian Privacy Principles. This is underpinned by the Privacy Act or state and territory privacy laws.

This means all schools need to have the consent of the child and/or their parent/caregiver to publish images, videos and personal information on learning platforms, school websites, advertising and social media accounts and in school newsletters and news media.

This is why parents are asked to sign a “consent to publish” form, usually at the start of each school year.

Privacy laws outline how consent needs to be voluntary, current and provide sufficient and specific information about the different uses of personal data.

But publicly available policies show schools differ in the way they inform parents about the uses of children’s data. This is because Australia has a state-based education system with a variety of school types that are all governed differently.

While current policies may align with federal and state laws, they do not necessarily promote children’s right to privacy or consider their best interests considered. There are three issues that need more attention.

1. More specific consent

At the moment we don’t have enough detail about the different ways children’s data is handled across different platforms.

For example, publishing a photo of a child will have different privacy risks, if it’s published on a school’s Facebook page, on a class learning platform or in a hard-copy school newsletter.

Parents should be able to refuse consent in one context but provide it for another.

2. What happens if you say no?

We also don’t have a clear understanding about how schools deal with children of families who do not consent

We know there is some increased work for teachers to identify children who do not consent and without clearly communicated procedures there is uncertainty about how to engage with and manage online publication processes. For example, how does a teacher treat a non-consenting child when taking a whole class photo?

There are also reports children can be excluded from some school experiences, such as large music and dance performances.

3. Do students have a say?

The eSafety Commissioner says adults should seek consent from children of all ages when taking their photo or video and explain the purpose.

This is something we also teach children as part of consent education as they get older.

But many current policies do not require children to give their consent. Nor do they require schools to talk to students about what consent means if an image is used online. This is because it is assumed many students are too young to understand.

This suggests current approaches around gaining consent are more about legal compliance, rather than truly promoting children’s rights to privacy.

What should schools do differently?

This is not a question for individual schools to solve on their own. This issue needs to be tackled by governments, education departments and independent school associations (who represent private schools). Education departments and associations can review existing policies to:

• improve schools’ understanding of the way images/videos are used by platforms

• improve communication with families about this information

• provide clearer procedures for non-consenting children, developed in partnership with families

• improve children’s capacity to understand consent around the way their image is used as a part of digital literacy education.

What can parents do?

Parents and teachers can model safe and healthy digital habits. If you are taking an image of a child, ask for verbal consent and explain your purpose. For example, “is it OK if I talk this photo of you, I want to show Grandma how you look in your soccer uniform.”

For parents and caregivers who sign consent to publish forms, it is perfectly reasonable to have questions or concerns. If you have any doubts about how your child’s images or data will be used, talk to your school.

Karley Beckman, Senior Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Learning, University of Wollongong and Tiffani Apps, Senior Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Learning, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The phenomenal growth in artificial intelligence tools has made it easy to create a story quickly, complicating a reader’s ability to determine if a news source or article is truthful or reliable. For instance, earlier this year, people were sharing an article about the supposed suicide of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist as if it were real. It ended up being an AI-generated rewrite of a satirical piece from 2010.

The problem is widespread. According to a 2021 Pearson Institute/AP-NORC poll, “Ninety-five percent of Americans believe the spread of misinformation is a problem.” The Pearson Institute researches methods to reduce global conflicts.

As library scientists, we combat the increase in misinformation by teaching a number of ways to validate the accuracy of an article. These methods include the SIFT Method (Stop, Investigate, Find, Trace), the P.R.O.V.E.N. Source Evaluation method (Purpose, Relevance, Objectivity, Verifiability, Expertise and Newness), and lateral reading.

Lateral reading is a strategy for investigating a source by opening a new browser tab to conduct a search and consult other sources. Lateral reading involves cross-checking the information by researching the source rather than scrolling down the page.

Here are five techniques based on these methods to help readers determine news facts from fiction:

1. Research the author or organization

Search for information beyond the entity’s own website. What are others saying about it? Are there any red flags that lead you to question its credibility? Search the entity’s name in quotation marks in your browser and look for sources that critically review the organization or group. An organization’s “About” page might tell you who is on their board, their mission and their nonprofit status, but this information is typically written to present the organization in a positive light.

The P.R.O.V.E.N. Source Evaluation method includes a section called “Expertise,” which recommends that readers check the author’s credentials and affiliations. Do the authors have advanced degrees or expertise related to the topic? What else have they written? Who funds the organization and what are their affiliations? Do any of these affiliations reveal a potential conflict of interest? Might their writings be biased in favor of one particular viewpoint?

If any of this information is missing or questionable, you may want to stay away from this author or organization.

2. Use good search techniques

Become familiar with search techniques available in your favorite web browser, such as searching keywords rather than full sentences and limiting searches by domain names, such as .org, .gov, or .edu.

Another good technique is putting two or more words in quotation marks so the search engine finds the words next to each other in that order, such as “Pizzagate conspiracy.” This leads to more relevant results.

In an article published in Nature, a team of researchers wrote that “77% of search queries that used the headline or URL of a false/misleading article as a search query return at least one unreliable news link among the top ten results.”

A more effective search would be to identify the key concepts in the headline in question and search those individual words as keywords. For example, if the headline is “Video Showing Alien at Miami Mall Sparks Claims of Invasion,” readers could search: “Alien invasion” Miami mall.

3. Verify the source

Verify the original sources of the information. Was the information cited, paraphrased or quoted accurately? Can you find the same facts or statements in the original source? Purdue Global, Purdue University’s online university for working adults, recommends verifying citations and references that can also apply to news stories by checking that the sources are “easy to find, easy to access, and not outdated.” It also recommends checking the original studies or data cited for accuracy.

The SIFT Method echoes this in its recommendation to “trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.” You cannot assume that re-reporting is always accurate.

4. Use fact-checking websites

Search fact-checking websites such as InfluenceWatch.org, Poynter.org, Politifact.com or Snopes.com to verify claims. What conclusions did the fact-checkers reach about the accuracy of the claims?

A Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review article found that the “high level of agreement” between fact-checking sites “enhances the credibility of fact checkers in the eyes of the public.”

5. Pause and reflect

Pause and reflect to see if what you have read has triggered a strong emotional response. An article in the journal Cognitive Research indicates that news items that cause strong emotions increase our tendency “to believe fake news stories.”

One online study found that the simple act of “pausing to think” and reflect on whether a headline is true or false may prevent a person from sharing false information. While the study indicated that pausing only decreases intentions to share by a small amount – 0.32 points on a 6-point scale – the authors argue that this could nonetheless cut down on the spread of fake news on social media.

Knowing how to identify and check for misinformation is an important part of being a responsible digital citizen. This skill is all the more important as AI becomes more prevalent.

Tracy Bicknell-Holmes, Library professor, Boise State University; Elaine Watson, Librarian and Associate Professor, Boise State University, and Jose Guillermo 'Memo' Cordova Silva, Library associate professor, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the Olympics get going in earnest this week, not everyone’s attention is focused on host city Paris. Surf fans are heading to Tahiti, half a world away in French Polynesia.

Why? Well, apart from the French coast resembling a lake at this time of year, on the south-west coast of Tahiti Iti is a wave unlike any other on the planet: Teahupo'o, which translates somewhat ominously as “place of skulls”.

The wave is unique in the way it breaks. The lower part of the wave appears to drop away below sea level, with the top half folding over dramatically to create an almost cartoonishly perfect form.

It is both the weight of water in the plunging lip and the risk of injury or death for a surfer in the wrong position that make this one of the world’s heaviest waves (in both senses of the word).

To understand why the wave breaks like this, we need to start with bathymetry: the shape of the seabed that influences waves as they approach the shore. At Teahupo'o, a combination of factors comes into play.

A one-of-a-kind wave

Waves arriving at Teahupo’o generally originate from intense “roaring forties” storm systems south of New Zealand. By the time the waves reach Tahiti they have become ordered swell, with wave heights of two to five metres and periods of 14 to 20 seconds between successive waves.

These types of long-period waves normally start interacting with the seabed at depths of around 200 metres. On most coasts, this depth would occur up to several kilometres offshore. But at Teahupo’o, it is much closer, just a couple of hundred metres.

This rapid change in depth forces the wave to “shoal” very quickly – the wave speed slows, the distance between waves compresses and the wave height increases.

The change is so abrupt that the wave is still very linear – it hasn’t had time to develop the peaked crest and flat trough (the lowest part of the wave) typical of waves in shallow water.

Waves breaking on this type of steep slope would typically collapse, breaking from the middle of the wave and creating an unsurfable mess. But this doesn’t happen.

At around ten metres’ depth, a flatter shelf in the reef allows the wave to stabilise and “stand up” with a steep front face, before finally breaking as the reef rises again.

And break it does. Owing to the linearity, there is far more water in the crest (the part above water) then most waves, and a deeper trough in front.

This makes for the characteristic below-sea-level break at Teahupo'o, with the overturning lip being half the wave height, and a jet of compressed air forced out of the wave’s barrel after breaking.

The larger the wave, the closer to the steep offshore ramp it breaks, and the more extreme the plunging.

A pro surfers’ paradise

A range of other unique features contribute to the way the wave breaks at Teahupo’o – and what makes it so challenging as a surfing wave.

A deep channel runs alongside the shallow reef shelf. The wave doesn’t break in this deeper area, allowing it to peel – to break in one direction (in this case towards the left looking towards the shore) – and enabling surfers to ride the wave before it finally closes out onto shallow reef.

A part of the shallow reef platform extends offshore, into the reef pass. This shallow area bends and focuses wave energy from the wider, deeper part of the wave back into the breaking wave. This happens particularly on more westerly orientated swells, increasing the intensity of breaking.

As well as this, the Teahupo'o wave breaks in a direction nearly opposite to the prevailing trade winds, keeping the wave face smooth.

A low tidal range also limits the times the reef is too deep or too shallow to surf. And the wave is near the Passa Hava'e reef pass, which helps the wave’s focusing and breaking. But because it isn’t right in the pass, the wave isn’t affected by high tidal or wave-induced currents.

New-generation wave models that simulate individual waves, rather than just average energy density, provide insight into what creates a surf break such as Teahupo'o (see figure below). These models provide insight into what happens as waves shoal and refract (bend and focus) over the seabed as they approach break point.

They also significantly improve our understanding of what makes a particular surf break unique. This can help in assessing the potential impact of human or natural modifications to the environment.

Tom Shand, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NASA’s DART mission – Double Asteroid Redirection Test – was humanity’s first real-world planetary defence mission.

In September 2022, the DART spacecraft smashed into the companion “moon” of a small asteroid 11 million kilometres from Earth. One goal was to find out if we can give such things a shove if one were headed our way.

By gathering lots of data on approach and after the impact, we would also get a better idea of what we’d be in for if such an asteroid were to hit Earth.

Five new studies published in Nature Communications today have used the images sent back from DART and its travel buddy LICIACube to unravel the origins of the Didymos-Dimorphos dual asteroid system. They’ve also put that data in context for other asteroids out there.

Asteroids are natural hazards

Our Solar System is full of small asteroids – debris that never made it into planets. Those that come close to Earth’s orbit around the Sun are called Near Earth Objects (NEOs). These pose the biggest risk to us, but are also the most accessible.

Planetary defence from these natural hazards really depends on knowing their composition – not just what they’re made of, but how they’re put together. Are they solid objects that will punch through our atmosphere if given the chance, or are they more like rubble piles, barely held together?

The Didymos asteroid, and its tiny moon Dimorphos, are what’s known as a binary asteroid system. They were the perfect target for the DART mission, because the effects of the impact could be easily measured in changes to Dimorphos’ orbit.

They are also close(ish) to Earth, or are at least NEOs. And they’re a very common type of asteroid we haven’t had a good look at before. The chance to also learn how binary asteroids form was the icing on the cake.

Quite a few binary asteroid systems have been discovered, but planetary scientists don’t exactly know how they form. In one of the new studies, a team led by Olivier Barnouin from Johns Hopkins University in the United States used images from DART and LICIACube to estimate the age of the system by looking at surface roughness and crater records.

They found Didymos is roughly 12.5 million years old, while its moon Dimorphos formed less than 300,000 years ago. That may still sound like a lot, but it’s much younger than was expected.

A pile of boulders

Dimorphos is also not a solid rock as we’d typically imagine. It is a rubble pile of boulders that are barely held together. Along with its young age, it shows there can be multiple “generations” of these rubble pile asteroids in the wake of larger asteroid collisions.

Sunlight actually causes small bodies like asteroids to spin. As Didymos started to spin like a top, its shape became squashed and bulged in the middle. This was enough to cause large pieces to just roll off the main body, with some even leaving tracks.

These pieces slowly created a ring of debris around Didymos. Over time, as the debris started sticking together, it formed the smaller moon Dimorphos.

Another study, led by Maurizio Pajola from Auburn University in the US used boulder distributions to confirm this. The team also discovered there were significantly more (up to five times) large boulders than have been observed on other non-binary asteroids humans have visited.

Another of the new studies shows us that boulders on all asteroids space missions have visited so far (Itokawa, Ryugu and Bennu) were likely shaped the same way. But this excess of larger boulders on the Didymos system could be a unique feature of binaries.

Lastly, another paper shows this type of asteroid appears to be more susceptible to cracking. This happens due to the heating–cooling cycles between day and night: like a freeze–thaw cycle but without the water.

This means if something (such as a spacecraft) were to impact it, there would be much more debris thrown up into space. It would even increase the amount of “shove” it could have. But there is a good chance that what lies underneath is much stronger than what we’re seeing on the surface.

This is where the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will step in. It will not only be able to provide higher-resolution images of the DART impact sites, but will also be able to probe the asteroids’ interiors using low-frequency radar.

The DART mission not only tested our ability to protect ourselves from future asteroid impacts, but also enlightened us on the formation and evolution of rubble pile and binary asteroids near Earth.

Eleanor K. Sansom, Research Associate, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’m a palaeontologist. That means I study fossils and learn about the ancient history of life on Earth.

People ask me lots of questions about being a palaeontologist. What do palaeontologists do all day? Why do they do it? How can I become a palaeontologist? And, of course, Where can I see some fossils?

Here are some answers about being a palaeontologist, and some tips for people who might want to become one.

What is a palaeontologist and what do they do?

Palaeontologists are scientists who study the history of life on Earth using fossils. Fossils represent the remains or traces of past life, preserved in rocks on or near Earth’s surface.

Palaeontologists use fossils to document the world’s plants and animals through time, to work out what ancient climates and ecosystems were like, and to understand evolution and ecology.

Palaeontologists have lots of different jobs. We work as researchers and lecturers at universities, researchers at research institutions and government organisations, as museum curators, collections managers, specimen preparators, exhibition designers, palaeo-artists, science educators and science communicators.

Palaeontologists don’t just go out to find and dig up fossils. We also study fossils brought up from hundreds of metres underground by drilling out long, skinny tubes of rock and dirt called “sediment cores”. We prepare the sediment cores very carefully and then study their physical and chemical properties to identify fossils.

Most of the time, palaeontologists share their research findings in scientific journals and at conferences. We are also involved in designing public exhibitions at museums and research centres.

Why do palaeontologists do all that?

The goal of palaeontology is to illuminate the grand history of life on Earth. From the beginnings of life more than 3 billion years ago to the present day, fossils record how it adapted or perished as the world changed.

Palaeontology also has lessons from the past that we can use today.

Looking deep into Earth’s history, we see examples of how giant carbon emission events – like those happening now – affected life on Earth. The fossil record repeatedly shows that large carbon releases result in substantial global warming, ocean acidification, and dramatic alteration of ecosystems on land and in the sea.

The effects of these past large carbon releases lasted a long time. To judge by what we see in the fossil record, if we burn all the fossil fuels available it could take 100,000 years for natural processes to soak up all the extra carbon from the atmosphere.

Much of what palaeontologists learn from the past confirms other scientists’ grim predictions of ecological disruption. However, fossils also show how ecosystems can return to equilibrium even after a very long period of altered climate if the species that make up the ecosystems survive.

Are there different kinds of palaeontologists?

Most palaeontologists have a special area of study. The most common areas are animal fossils (vertebrate or invertebrate palaeontologists), plant fossils (paleobotanists or palynologists) or microfossils (micropalaeontologists).

Some palaeontologists also study geological records to provide long-term perspectives on modern conservation and restoration issues (conservation palaeobiologists) and to figure out the details of ancient ecosystems (palaeoecologists).

How did you become a palaeontologist?

At high school I studied English, geography, economics, mathematics, chemistry and French. Next I completed a Bachelor of Science with an honours year, majoring in geoscience.

After that was a PhD in geology and a research fellowship at the University of Melbourne, followed by a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.

Now I am a lecturer in environmental geoscience at the University of Melbourne and a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

How can I become a palaeontologist?

Here are my top tips for becoming a palaeontologist:

1. learn about the history of life and fossils through reading, visiting museums or parks with fossil displays and watching documentaries. If you can find fossils near where you live, try to identify them using books or internet resources

2. prepare in high school by studying science and maths. Geography and outdoor education are also very useful

3. complete a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in a field such as geology, Earth science, zoology, ecology, evolutionary biology, marine biology or botany

4. next, obtain an Honours and/or Master’s degree in one of these fields

5. and finally, if you would like to become a researcher at a university or museum, you’ll probably need to complete a PhD.

Where can I see fossils in Australia?

Australia has plenty of exciting places you can visit to see fossils. A few highlights are:

• the “dinosaur dreaming” dig site at Inverloch in Victoria

• the Riversleigh Fossil Site in northwest Queensland

• the Ediacaran fossils of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia

• the Gogo Fish Site in Western Australia

• and the dinosaur trail taking in Hughenden, Richmond and Winton in Queensland.

Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Paris is about to host its third summer Olympics. While we don’t yet know what the legacy of this year’s games will be, let’s take the opportunity to reflect on the city’s previous Olympics of 1900 and 1924 – the first of which nearly ended the modern Olympic movement, whereas the second set it alight.

The disaster of Paris 1900

The 1900 Paris Olympics was negatively impacted by the decision to link the games with the World Fair, held in Paris at the same time. The committee of the much larger and more popular fair was given control of organising everything, despite its minimal knowledge of sport. The organisers saw the Olympics as far less important than the fair’s exhibits, focused on fashion and new technologies such as escalators and audio recorders.

As a result, the Olympic games were treated like a sideshow. This poorly organised event was held at inadequate venues over nearly six months and almost ended the modern Olympic movement in its infancy.

Sports historians refer to 1900 as a farcical games and have debated whether it should even be considered an Olympics. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, later commented it was a miracle the Olympic movement survived.

Confusing scheduling led to few spectators. Minimal venues were built and there were no officially agreed rules and regulations, which led to numerous disputes. There were no opening or closing ceremonies and many athletes were unaware they were competing in the Olympics.

Competing for one’s country was also not a concept yet, so numerous medals were won by teams with athletes from different countries. One Danish journalist became a last-minute substitute on a combined Danish-Swedish tug-of-war team that defeated France in the final. A young unknown French boy was also pulled out of the crowd to cox a Dutch rowing team to a gold medal, because the team had decided the adult cox was too heavy.

Australian sprinter Stan Rowley, who referred to the games as a “huge joke”, became the only person to win medals for two different countries in the same Olympics. He won medals in athletics for Australia and then as part of the British cross country team. The strange points system meant he just had to finish and record a time for the British team to win – so he walked. In the end he didn’t even have to finish; officials got sick of waiting and awarded him last place so they could leave.

Some people who attended the World Fair signed up for the Olympic games while they were there. One example is Margaret Abbott, who entered the golf tournament along with her mother and won gold. These were the first Olympic games that saw women competing. Unfortunately, the poor organisation meant Abbott was never informed of her victory as the United States’ first female Olympic gold medallist. Her family was notified by a sports historian years after her death in 1955.

Athletics events took place in a wet, uneven field with trees in the way. Discus and hammers ended up in the trees or the crowd, as the area was too narrow. The long jumpers had to dig their own pit before they could start competing. Fencing events were held in the cutlery section of the World Fair.

Swimming events took place in the polluted Seine river – which had a strong current, resulting in unrealistically fast times. The shooting events used live pigeons. And the marathon winner was accused of taking short cuts – and didn’t receive his medal until the dispute was settled 12 years later.

Many of the events held in 1900 are no longer part of the Olympics, such as fishing, cannon shooting, obstacle course swimming, kite flying, motor racing and hot air ballooning. One competitor in the long-distance ballooning competition landed in Russia and was arrested for not filing a passport request. The winner of the contest landed some 2,000 kilometres away in modern-day Ukraine and had to make his own way back to Paris.

These, and other strange events out of de Coubertin’s control, resulted in him pushing for the International Olympic Committee to be in charge for the next Paris Olympics in 1924, which was his last Olympics as president of the committee.

Paris 1924

The success of the 1924 games is often considered to have saved the Olympic movement. The games were widely regarded as a major success that announced the arrival of the Olympics as a major international event. The number of countries and athletes taking part significantly increased from previous games, as did the number of spectators. More athletes from lower social classes also boosted public interest.

The event’s rising popularity was confirmed by worldwide media coverage. More than 1,000 journalists reported on the games, including with live radio coverage for the first time. This attention made superstars of gold medallists such as the Uruguayan football team, Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi and US swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who went on to become a Hollywood actor.

And while female athletes were still rare in those years, the media coverage allowed them to grab headlines and reshape perceptions of women in sport. Athletes of colour also started to gain more recognition when US athlete DeHart Hubbard won the 1924 long jump, becoming the first black sportsman to win an individual Olympic gold medal.

The 1924 Olympics remained famous in popular culture for decades. They were even the subject of the 1981 Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, based on the true story of British runners Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.

Many Olympic traditions were first seen at the 1924 Paris games. It was the first games to use the closing ceremony ritual of raising four flags – the Olympic flag, the flag of Greece (which hosted the first modern Olympics in 1896), the host nation’s flag, and the next host nation’s flag.

It was also the first games in which athletes stayed together in a purpose-built Olympic Village, the first time the Olympic motto, “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (“Swifter, Higher, Stronger”) was used, and the first time a 50-metre pool was used for swimming events. This pool, Piscine des Tourelles, is still operational and will be used as a practice venue for swimmers and triathletes in 2024.

Another lesser known but potentially more influential impact of the 1924 games was the organisers’ decision to establish exclusive rights to all photos and videos of the games. This model – and the lucrative media and sponsorship deals it has garnered over the past 100 years – have been a key contributor to the funding and success of the Olympic movement.

Vaughan Cruickshank, Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania and Brendon Hyndman, Associate Professor of Health & Physical Education (Adj.), Charles Sturt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia is one of several countries currently considering a social media ban for children. Nationally, there are calls to raise the age a young person can legally use social media from 13 to 16, while South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas is leading calls to raise the age to 14.

The idea of a ban has not been without controversy. But the idea is to effectively put legal boundaries on the age children can access social media, to keep kids safe and protect their health.

Politicians such as Malinauskas acknowledge that such a ban may not be completely effective, but argue measures such as age limitations should be considered, in the same way age limits are in place for smoking, alcohol use and driving.

Our research into risk-taking behaviour associated with social media use shows the harmful repercussions of social media use do not only happen online, or just affect mental health. There are many real physical risks that stem from social media use, particularly for children and young people.

As such, from a public health perspective, we argue a ban on social media use for children is worth considering.

From selfies to stunts

Many children and young people have been injured or died as a result of trying to take photos in dangerous places – such as at cliffs or waterfalls – for social media. Research has shown children and adolescents are most at risk for selfie-related incidents, with at least 109 deaths worldwide since 2008.

Others have suffered injuries from taking part in viral challenges. For example, in the “skull breaker” challenge, shared widely on TikTok in early 2020, two children would kick the legs from under a third, making them fall over. The results of this stunt included severe spinal injuries, hospital admissions, and even children being charged with assault.

Around 2018, the “Tide pod” challenge went viral, encouraging children to eat laundry detergent capsules. The repercussions of doing so can include vomiting, breathing difficulties and loss of consciousness.

A popular stunt called the “blackout challenge”, which proliferated on TikTok and was particularly popular with children, led to the death of at least 20 children in 18 months around the world. The challenge involved children holding their breath, or cutting off their supply of air, until they blacked out.

Children are much more likely to engage in these sorts of risky behaviours than adults are. Children are still forming their identities, pushing boundaries, aiming to gain approval from their peers, and learning about risk.

The scale of social media

Social media algorithms are quick to promote the most appealing content, so risky stunts can go viral quickly – potentially exponentially increasing the harm.

Dangerous activities, such as taking selfies and photos in precarious poses and locations, often garner lots of views and “likes” on social media. And children want to be liked and seen as popular online, with many aspiring to be influencers over and above regular professions.

If we restrict children from using social media, it doesn’t mean they won’t take risks. Children have always naturally pushed boundaries and taken risks, and some play can be dangerous.

But social media pushes risky activities and behaviours to children en masse, at a scale previously impossible.

Continued controversy

Academics, parents and children themselves have argued a ban is not the answer to the harms social media is having on childrens’ health and wellbeing.

Much of the discussion against a ban makes the case that social media has benefits for honing children’s digital literacy, community building and online support networks. Groups including LGBTQ+ advocates have pointed out that a ban would remove an outlet they say is essential for their mental health and sense of community.

Other experts believe a ban is the right move, arguing social media is disrupting teenagers’ identity development, increasing rates of anxiety and depression, and fuelling polarisation.

But the link between social media use and risk-taking behaviours in the real world is often neglected in the discussion. Alongside other benefits, putting a stronger age restriction on social media use may reduce the likelihood of children engaging in dangerous viral challenges and risky stunts seen online.

Implementing and enforcing a social media ban for children would face push back from both industry and the public, and would not be without technical challenges.

But if we know a product is causing harm to children, regardless of some perceived benefits, it’s only right we take action to protect them.

Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate - Social Media and Communication, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney and Amy Peden, NHMRC Research Fellow, School of Population Health & co-founder UNSW Beach Safety Research Group, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Waanyi writer Alexis Wright and her magnum opus Praiseworthy have made history by winning this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. She’s now the first writer to win the Miles Franklin and The Stella Prize (both national literary prizes) for the same work.

It’s also her second Miles Franklin win: her first was for Carpentaria in 2007.

Wright becomes one of a handful of authors since the Miles Franklin was first awarded in 1957 to win the prize more than once, and only the fourth woman to do so. Other multiple winners have included Patrick White (the award’s first winner), Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, Thea Astley, Jessica Anderson and Tim Winton.

She was already the first person to win both prizes, though for different works – her first Stella was for Tracker in 2018.

The power of a true classic only becomes apparent over time, when a work is reinterpreted over and over again by different generations. I’ve often wondered what Australian work might ever meet such a standard. I think Praiseworthy may be it.

Praiseworthy is the defining work written on this continent so far this century. It defies classification: to call it a novel is to limit the achievement within these 700 plus pages. Comedy, elegy, epic, eulogy, farce, satire and tragedy – all and none are apt descriptors.

Wright herself is uninterested in classification. The Miles Franklin judges say: “Through its sheer ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the possibilities of fiction.”

‘Incomprehension about Aboriginal humanity’

Praiseworthy, a fictional town in northern Australia, is now written into Australia’s literary tapestry, blanketed with an “ochre-coloured haze” that is both the visual consequence of climate catastrophe and the metaphorical representation of “endlessly wandering fragments of ancient words”.

The novel’s setting stands in contrast to the rest of the continent, especially Canberra, which struggles with a “complete incomprehension about Aboriginal humanity”.

As in all epics, there are many characters. However, it is Cause Man Steel, his wife Dance, and their two sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk, who drive the action. While these characters have their own arcs, they are also avatars of allegory, particularly Aboriginal Sovereignty.

Cause Man Steel, also known as Planet or Widespread, understands the havoc being wreaked by the climate crisis. He also understands help from the government is not coming. So after dreaming of a donkey – one perfect grey donkey among the millions of the continent’s feral donkeys – he makes his own plan. He will establish a donkey conglomerate for the people of Praiseworthy, “who would become millionaires”.

His epic quest, more akin to Cervantes’ Don Quixote than Homer’s Odysseus, takes him and his old Ford Falcon (which stands in as his mighty steed or trusty boat) on an adventure.

His wife, Dance, is uninterested in the hordes of donkeys deposited in town for her to look after. She leaves them in the cemetery, where she lives on contested Native Title land. Instead, she turns to “the wisdom of moths, of butterflies, while hatching her own plan to escape from the known world”. Dance dreams of moving to China to escape what is around her.

Aboriginal Sovereignty, the eldest child of Chance and Dance, is 17 and the hope of the community. He is “named for young hope and all that emotion-laden charged asset language of the modern day”. When he attempts suicide, the potential loss of Aboriginal Sovereignty – the young man, but also sovereignty itself – both breaks the town and brings it together.

Tommyhawk, the second child, is eight. Through his arc, Wright explores what may happen to children exposed to the politicking, dog whistling and race baiting in the Australian media. His story recalls the ongoing consequences of the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response (the “Intervention”), as well as so many other instances in contemporary media.

Tommyhawk accuses a family member of rape because “he listened to all of the news about how the government and all the white commentators in the country – except those Aboriginal people – were saying how bad Aboriginal communities were to live in because of the paedophiles”. He wants to leave Praiseworthy and live in the “white palace of Federal Parliament” with “the golden-hair Minister for Aboriginal Affairs whom he had been watching faithfully on ABC News”.

Around these central characters, the people of Praiseworthy showcase the best and basest impulses of humanity. Wright explores questions of assimilation, especially through the Mayor Ice Pick (who is slowly turning white), who wants to keep a “tidy town” to make Canberra happy.

All times are happening at once

Time is not linear in Praiseworthy: all times are happening at once. Wright’s approach to story, as Jane Gleeson-White noted in The Conversation’s review, “involves all times and realities, the ancient and the new, the story within story within story – all interconnected, all unresolved”.

Wright has written and spoken of the influence of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes on her writing, especially his observation that “no time has ever been resolved”. This may well be difficult for readers, but continuing to read – learning to read in a new way – may be the most rewarding thing a reader can do this year.

Praiseworthy is also available as an audiobook. Given the strong tradition of oral storytelling and lyricism of Wright’s work, listening to Djok woman Jacqui Katona narrate Praiseworthy is an experience in itself.

Praiseworthy is for all readers. But interpretations and understandings of the work will differ depending on who is reading. I am a white reader, and my interpretation – and this review – is born of that perspective.

First Nations readers will surely uncover and understand more than I have. I encourage readers to muse on First Nations authored reviews by Claire G. Coleman, Declan Fry and Mykaela Saunders.

Astrid Edwards, PhD Candidate and literary critic, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Great-grandmothers. We all have them. But most of us will never know them except through glimpses of fading bits of paper: sepia photographs, recipe cards, letters in handwriting traced by a fountain pen dispensing cocoa-colored ink.

What does it take to build coherent stories out of such tantalizing fragments of lives? I face this question routinely in my career as a professor of 19th-century literature and culture. Recently, I’ve turned that experience to writing a book about my own family.

When I inherited my great-grandmother’s diary, a repurposed teacher’s planner in which she chronicled the family’s 1926 move from Michigan to Miami, I found a wedding portrait tucked inside. The angled profile showcases her youthful skin and a dress too elaborate for a Midwestern schoolteacher’s daily wear. It is easy to imagine that she took pleasure in inscribing her new name on the picture’s reverse: Faith Avery.

I stared at her beautiful image for years, as if details of her satin gown could explain why a woman widowed in 1918 would, for the rest of her life, refuse to admit to having had that first husband and yet carefully preserve this portrait.

And then, because archives have been at the center of my scholarly work, I turned to research. I located marriage records and draft cards, pored over maps, found family members in censuses and obituaries. Within those documents lay answers both surprising and poignant.

What did I look for? How might anyone with a half-told family story begin to uncover more truths? And what does it take to make sense of them?

The digging

Questions that begin with “why” can rarely be answered easily. Researchers thus often prefer to start with “who” and “when” and “how,” locating a person in one spot and then tracing them through time. This adventure down a rabbit hole follows a method.

Make a list of unknowns. These may be facts or enticing tidbits of incomplete family lore. My mother, trying to be helpful, told me things like, “Faith always said there was a horse thief in the family, but she was too mortified to reveal his name” and “I think Aunt Harriette (Faith’s sister) was married once briefly.”

Do precise, not general, searches. Typing “horse thief Avery” into Google yields nothing useful, but many other sources contain rich information about old-fashioned exploits. The New York Public Library’s guide for family research introduces some options. The Library of Congress print and photograph collection can also help you envision your ancestors’ world. Physical libraries contain historic photographs, maps, local records and digitized newspapers not available online. Historical societies and state universities typically allow free, in-person use of their collections.

Know that sometimes you will fail and need to change course. I spent several days looking for the horse thief to no avail, much to my mother’s disappointment. But when I turned to Aunt Harriette’s marriage, I found a character no less fascinating, one I now think of as “Four Wives Frank.”

Read old documents knowing they were produced by a patchwork of individuals who took information on trust. The handwritten birth, death, marriage and census records of past centuries relied on self-reported data that required no verification. They can be plagued by carelessness in the name of efficiency.

One hurried census-taker recorded Faith’s mother Cara as “Cora,” another renamed her brother Horace “Harris.” Frank offered up a variety of birth years, countries of origin and maiden names for his mother as he worked his way west. He must have been charming. Who but a charming man could have convinced woman after woman to marry him, each thinking she was, at most, his second wife? Marriage register officers and census-takers, not to mention his trail of brides, were none the wiser.

Which leads me to this: Cross-check information. I knew I had the right Frank because he had the same three sons in multiple records. Inconsistencies across those records, in conjunction with the trajectory of his life, made this conclusion inevitable: The man purposefully reinvented himself.

The assembly

My academic work has taught me that most archival answers lead to more questions. As a result, I expect multiple phases of collecting. I gathered everything I could find about Faith’s early life, in hopes something might explain her reticence about her first marriage. As her story emerged, I periodically hit holes in the narrative that sent me back for more digging.

Understanding people is easier if you are familiar with their world. For background, I read histories of Miami in the 1920s and researched details in Faith’s diary that might reveal her personality or motivations. Exploring her reading lists showed me a woman who enjoyed popular entertainment, such as 1926’s blockbuster “Aloma of the South Seas.” Primers of 1920s wages and prices explained the family’s economic worries.

As I got to know Faith, I revisited documents with new questions. To figure out whether Harriette’s husband Frank had anything to do with Faith, I made timelines for both sisters. To ponder the emotional underpinnings of those events, I reread Faith’s diary, paying particular attention to entries about Harriette and about Faith’s second husband.

Because every pile of documents contains multiple stories, the key to a coherent narrative is locating a through line that addresses the biggest conundrums while identifying the tangents. I let go of the horse thief.

The results

The detective-style plots of what I call “investigative memoir” may inspire you to do your own family research. Genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org can help.

But it’s worth remembering that secondary reading will add richness to any family story. And local librarians are extraordinary at helping patrons navigate the search process.

Improbable as it might seem, Four Wives Frank helped me understand the extent of Faith’s secrets and that she harbored them in hopes that her children’s lives would be easier. Such self-sacrifices are common for mothers. And yet, their particulars are as individual as the faintly silvered portrait of the soft young woman who married Harold Avery in 1911, and whose story requires an entire book to tell properly.

Andrea Kaston Tange, Professor of English, Macalester College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you search most primary or high school websites, you will likely find a images of happy, smiling children.

Students images are also used publicly for school newsletters, social media accounts and other school publications like annual reports.

Parents could reasonably expect schools and educations departments have conducted thorough checks and evaluations to do this. To some degree this is true, but a recent AI scare where children’s images were used in a massive training data set included some photos from school websites.

Research also shows schools can do more to promote children’s rights to privacy.

Parents and governments are already concerned about children’s safety online. As part of this, we need to look more closely at how students’ information and images are being used by their schools.

Why is online information an issue?

Publication of children’s images and personal information on social media platforms generates a trail of information or profile of that child. This information is permanent and may have implications for children now and in the future, including on their self-esteem.

This data also contributes to a “digital shadow”. This is the digital data associated with individuals we cannot see. It can can be sold and used to profile and target individuals for advertising or dictate what information and content we see online through recommender systems.

What are schools required to do?

In Australia, the publication of a child’s personal data, which includes images and video, is protected by the Australian Privacy Principles. This is underpinned by the Privacy Act or state and territory privacy laws.

This means all schools need to have the consent of the child and/or their parent/caregiver to publish images, videos and personal information on learning platforms, school websites, advertising and social media accounts and in school newsletters and news media.

This is why parents are asked to sign a “consent to publish” form, usually at the start of each school year.

Privacy laws outline how consent needs to be voluntary, current and provide sufficient and specific information about the different uses of personal data.

But publicly available policies show schools differ in the way they inform parents about the uses of children’s data. This is because Australia has a state-based education system with a variety of school types that are all governed differently.

While current policies may align with federal and state laws, they do not necessarily promote children’s right to privacy or consider their best interests considered. There are three issues that need more attention.

1. More specific consent

At the moment we don’t have enough detail about the different ways children’s data is handled across different platforms.

For example, publishing a photo of a child will have different privacy risks, if it’s published on a school’s Facebook page, on a class learning platform or in a hard-copy school newsletter.

Parents should be able to refuse consent in one context but provide it for another.

2. What happens if you say no?

We also don’t have a clear understanding about how schools deal with children of families who do not consent

We know there is some increased work for teachers to identify children who do not consent and without clearly communicated procedures there is uncertainty about how to engage with and manage online publication processes. For example, how does a teacher treat a non-consenting child when taking a whole class photo?

There are also reports children can be excluded from some school experiences, such as large music and dance performances.

3. Do students have a say?

The eSafety Commissioner says adults should seek consent from children of all ages when taking their photo or video and explain the purpose.

This is something we also teach children as part of consent education as they get older.

But many current policies do not require children to give their consent. Nor do they require schools to talk to students about what consent means if an image is used online. This is because it is assumed many students are too young to understand.

This suggests current approaches around gaining consent are more about legal compliance, rather than truly promoting children’s rights to privacy.

What should schools do differently?

This is not a question for individual schools to solve on their own. This issue needs to be tackled by governments, education departments and independent school associations (who represent private schools). Education departments and associations can review existing policies to:

• improve schools’ understanding of the way images/videos are used by platforms

• improve communication with families about this information

• provide clearer procedures for non-consenting children, developed in partnership with families

• improve children’s capacity to understand consent around the way their image is used as a part of digital literacy education.

What can parents do?

Parents and teachers can model safe and healthy digital habits. If you are taking an image of a child, ask for verbal consent and explain your purpose. For example, “is it OK if I talk this photo of you, I want to show Grandma how you look in your soccer uniform.”

For parents and caregivers who sign consent to publish forms, it is perfectly reasonable to have questions or concerns. If you have any doubts about how your child’s images or data will be used, talk to your school.

Karley Beckman, Senior Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Learning, University of Wollongong and Tiffani Apps, Senior Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Learning, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A recent study has suggested Shingrix, a relatively new vaccine given to protect older adults against shingles, may delay the onset of dementia.

This might seem like a bizarre link, but actually, research has previously shown an older version of the shingles vaccine, Zostavax, reduced the risk of dementia.

In this new study, published last week in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers from the United Kingdom found Shingrix delayed dementia onset by 17% compared with Zostavax.

So how did the researchers work this out, and how could a shingles vaccine affect dementia risk?

From Zostavax to Shingrix

Shingles is a viral infection caused by the varicella-zoster virus. It causes painful rashes, and affects older people in particular.

Previously, Zostavax was used to vaccinate against shingles. It was administered as a single shot and provided good protection for about five years.

Shingrix has been developed based on a newer vaccine technology, and is thought to offer stronger and longer-lasting protection. Given in two doses, it’s now the preferred option for shingles vaccination in Australia and elsewhere.

In November 2023, Shingrix replaced Zostavax on the National Immunisation Program, making it available for free to those at highest risk of complications from shingles. This includes all adults aged 65 and over, First Nations people aged 50 and older, and younger adults with certain medical conditions that affect their immune systems.

What the study found

Shingrix was approved by the US Food and Drugs Administration in October 2017. The researchers in the new study used the transition from Zostavax to Shingrix in the United States as an opportunity for research.

They selected 103,837 people who received Zostavax (between October 2014 and September 2017) and compared them with 103,837 people who received Shingrix (between November 2017 and October 2020).

By analysing data from electronic health records, they found people who received Shingrix had a 17% increase in “diagnosis-free time” during the follow-up period (up to six years after vaccination) compared with those who received Zostavax. This was equivalent to an average of 164 extra days without a dementia diagnosis.

The researchers also compared the shingles vaccines to other vaccines: influenza, and a combined vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis. Shingrix and Zostavax performed around 14–27% better in lowering the risk of a dementia diagnosis, with Shingrix associated with a greater improvement.

The benefits of Shingrix in terms of dementia risk were significant for both sexes, but more pronounced for women. This is not entirely surprising, because we know women have a higher risk of developing dementia due to interplay of biological factors. These include being more sensitive to certain genetic mutations associated with dementia and hormonal differences.

Why the link?

The idea that vaccination against viral infection can lower the risk of dementia has been around for more than two decades. Associations have been observed between vaccines, such as those for diphtheria, tetanus, polio and influenza, and subsequent dementia risk.

Research has shown Zostavax vaccination can reduce the risk of developing dementia by 20% compared with people who are unvaccinated.

But it may not be that the vaccines themselves protect against dementia. Rather, it may be the resulting lack of viral infection creating this effect. Research indicates bacterial infections in the gut, as well as viral infections, are associated with a higher risk of dementia.

Notably, untreated infections with herpes simplex (herpes) virus – closely related to the varicella-zoster virus that causes shingles – can significantly increase the risk of developing dementia. Research has also shown shingles increases the risk of a later dementia diagnosis.

The mechanism is not entirely clear. But there are two potential pathways which may help us understand why infections could increase the risk of dementia.

First, certain molecules are produced when a baby is developing in the womb to help with the body’s development. These molecules have the potential to cause inflammation and accelerate ageing, so the production of these molecules is silenced around birth. However, viral infections such as shingles can reactivate the production of these molecules in adult life which could hypothetically lead to dementia.

Second, in Alzheimer’s disease, a specific protein called Amyloid-β go rogue and kill brain cells. Certain proteins produced by viruses such as COVID and bad gut bacteria have the potential to support Amyloid-β in its toxic form. In laboratory conditions, these proteins have been shown to accelerate the onset of dementia.

What does this all mean?

With an ageing population, the burden of dementia is only likely to become greater in the years to come. There’s a lot more we have to learn about the causes of the disease and what we can potentially do to prevent and treat it.

This new study has some limitations. For example, time without a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily mean time without disease. Some people may have underlying disease with delayed diagnosis.

This research indicates Shingrix could have a silent benefit, but it’s too early to suggest we can use antiviral vaccines to prevent dementia.

Overall, we need more research exploring in greater detail how infections are linked with dementia. This will help us understand the root causes of dementia and design potential therapies.

Ibrahim Javed, Enterprise and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, UniSA Clinical & Health Sciences, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Conservative media titan Rupert Murdoch is making news again – this time, with a secretive effort to change an irrevocable trust. That trust has important ownership interests in both Fox Corp. and News Corp., so it affects broadcast news as well as The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Under the current terms of the trust, upon Murdoch’s death, his four oldest children – Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence – will have “an equal voice” in determining the future of the news empire.

But as The New York Times recently reported, the 93-year-old Murdoch has been trying to alter the trust to ensure his oldest son, Lachlan, stays in charge of his media properties. The legal dispute played out behind closed doors for months, and it might have stayed there if the Times hadn’t obtained a sealed court document shedding light on the conflict.

Murdoch is calling his efforts to change the terms Project Harmony, reportedly out of the belief that doing so would head off any intrafamily wrangling.

The effort to change the trust is so secretive that a spokesperson for the Nevada probate court where the proceedings are occurring stated that all information related to the case is confidential, based on a court order.

As law professors who teach trusts and estates, we are intrigued by the publicity surrounding a somewhat obscure method for holding property. Trusts are private documents that don’t get filed in court unless there’s a dispute.

All about trusts

Trusts are an estate planning technique for giving away property. In our law classes on trusts and estates, we explain how they can be useful for minimizing estate taxes, protecting assets, making charitable contributions, avoiding probate and, in certain circumstances, qualifying for government benefits.

Unlike making an outright gift and transferring full ownership to someone else, the donor of a trust – called a “settlor” – transfers legal control of the gifted property into the trust.

The people who hold the legal title to the property in the trust are called “trustees.” They manage the property and make decisions about how and when to distribute funds to the beneficiaries, who are the actual recipients of trust property.

Trustees are fiduciaries, which means they are under strict legal requirements to manage the property in the sole interests of the beneficiaries. If the property in a trust includes shares in a business, then trustees have the power to exercise any voting rights for those shares.

Trusts allow donors to prolong their control over their property by appointing trustees to carry out their objectives after they die or become incapacitated. Trusts are useful when giving away complex business interests that require extensive supervision and sophisticated decision-making, all of which can be administered by trustees according to the settlor’s preferences stated in the trust.

The view from Nevada

In Nevada, where the Murdoch case is playing out, a settlor can’t unilaterally change any trust’s terms unless the trust itself specifically reserves the right to do so. In other words, trusts are presumed to be irrevocable, or irreversible.

But even when a trust is irrevocable, there are still ways to change its terms.

In any state, including Nevada, irrevocable trusts can be altered by court order if the settlor and all beneficiaries agree to the modification. In some cases, trusts can also be modified without court approval through a process known as “trust decanting,” which can be performed by the trustee without the consent of settlors or beneficiaries.

Nevada is unusually permissive in allowing settlors to maintain secrecy about the trust, even with respect to trust beneficiaries. In most states, trust beneficiaries have much broader rights to receive financial information about the trust.

Nevada also explicitly protects confidentiality in trust proceedings by law, even without a court order. Indeed, having reviewed thousands of trust cases from courts around the country, we find Nevada to be especially protective of the donor’s interests. That may be one reason the Murdoch Family Trust is located there.

The stakes of the dispute

The Murdoch Family Trust holds a variety of types of property, including a family farm in Melbourne, Australia; the Murdoch art collection; and shares in Disney, News Corp. and Fox. The property in the trust is managed by a corporate trustee, Cruden Financial Services.

The trust terms at the center of this dispute appear to stem from Murdoch’s 1999 divorce from his second wife, Anna. She negotiated an agreement to ensure that their three joint children – Lachlan, James and Elisabeth – along with Prudence, Murdoch’s daughter from an earlier marriage, would inherit News Corp.

The trust document sets out what will happen to ownership of the media assets upon Murdoch’s death: His voting share will be transferred to the four oldest children. That could lead to a scenario in which the children are fighting over the future of the media assets. Fear of that outcome seems to have motivated Rupert Murdoch to seek this change to the trust.

Although Lachlan is now the chair of News Corp. and executive chair and CEO of Fox Corporation, the children have already aired some of their disagreements over the political direction of the media companies. For example, James and his wife have criticized Fox’s move to the right. Murdoch may well see this as a threat to the company’s business model, which caters to a conservative audience.

Even though Murdoch’s trust is irrevocable, it reportedly “contains a narrow provision allowing for changes done in good faith and with the sole purpose of benefiting all of its members.” Rupert Murdoch’s argument is that by taking away governance rights from James, Elisabeth and Prudence, Lachlan will be able to manage the family business more profitably, thereby increasing the value of trust assets for all beneficiaries.

Because some of Murdoch’s children object to his proposed governance changes, Murdoch appears to be relying on the power he retained as settlor to modify the trust in good faith for the beneficiaries’ benefit.

A court will decide later this year whether the changes really are in good faith; If so, then Murdoch will be able to change the trust as he would like so that Lachlan can continue to control the family business.

The saga shows the ways that trusts can protect a family business. But when the next generation lacks a shared vision for the future of that business, even irrevocable trusts can’t ensure family harmony.

Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law, University of Virginia and Reid Kress Weisbord, Distinguished Professor of Law and Judge Norma Shapiro Scholar, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

David Jones is donating its archive to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, it has been announced today. It is a timely reminder of the significance of “DJs”, Australia’s oldest department store, to the development of modern Australia.

David Jones’ archive was overseen by Barbara Horton for 35 years.

Since she retired in 2010, David Jones has changed hands several times and the archive, holding over 185 years of history, has been locked away with limited access.

Thankfully, DJs’ heritage is now secure for the future and access to this significant cultural asset will again be possible.

The shaping of an emporium

Archives are important records of our past. They help us to tell stories about how we developed, lived and learned – and the David Jones archive is brimming with forgotten stories of Australia’s past.

DJs opened its first store in Sydney’s George Street in 1838 selling fabrics, clothing and haberdashery.

Mail order began in 1887, a clothing factory in Surry Hills followed in 1914 and three Sydney stores by 1938. The first interstate stores opened in Perth and Brisbane in 1954.

Of particular interest in the archive are the papers of David Jones’ chairman from 1920 to 1958, Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, or CL as he was known.

These papers reveal a remarkable story of good business and good will. The grandson of founder David Jones, CL was an innovator in department stores not just in Australia, but the world.

Trained as an artist at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School and a lifelong patron of the arts, CL saw the store as more than a business. His vision for the stores was one of an institution displaying art and culture and a window to the world.

He established the David Jones Art Gallery in 1928, an early promoter of modern art and design.

He pioneered modern advertising at DJs in 1902, bringing American trends of larger ads with white space and illustrations to Australia.

CL employed artists and copywriters to realise this and by the 1950s, DJs’ advertising department was run by Sydney’s leading ad women – long before the “mad” men of the 1960s.

His background as an artist, passion for marketing and the welfare of his workers set DJs apart from its competitors.

With the opening of the Elizabeth Street store in 1927, staff could relax in a staff lounge and order subsidised meals from DJs’ Great Restaurant. They enjoyed a 15% staff discount, above award leave entitlements, long service bonuses, subsidised training opportunities, in house medical and dental, and an annual ball.

Things were done differently. There was a level of creativity and style across every facet of the business that few stores could match.

Creative Australia

The archive contains connections between DJs and some of Australia’s great creative minds.

There are links to members of the Sydney Push group, Max Dupain’s iconic photographs and Gordon Andrews’ distinctive brand and packaging design.

There are the designers Marion Hall Best, Dahl Collings and Douglas Annand – and a cast of other forgotten characters.

The David Jones Store News contains fascinating insights to a community of fiercely loyal staff known as “Dajoneans”.

The newspaper contains information about the staff amateur theatre group, choir, holiday competitions, travel, balls, weddings, retirements, births, deaths, store news from across Australia, courses and advice columns.

The archive also includes photographs of DJs’ theatrical window displays – and a story of one featuring a live python that escaped overnight.

A window to the world

One of my favourite stories from the archive is that of the international exhibitions the stores once held, bringing international design and goods to Australian shoppers.

Inspired by American department store events, Sweden at David Jones opened in June 1954.

It was a huge exhibition seen by thousands of visitors from across Australia. Visitors ate smörgåsbord, marvelled at jet engines, saw the first Volvo in Australia and a SAAB Safir plane that was craned in through the windows of the fourth floor of the Market Street store to gobsmacked onlookers.

They saw a museum collection of Swedish glass, ceramics and furniture and a model home complete with a streamlined kitchen that – according to news reports – had women gasping and men secretly taking measurements. Gossip pages reported at Sydney’s chicest parties, “skål” had replaced cheers.

This was followed by Italy at David Jones in 1955 and 1966, before a host of other events including Asian, Mediterranean, American, Scandinavian, Danish, Finnish, German, British and more. Items shown in these events are already in national collections.

Uncovering stories

The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds 148 artworks acquired through DJs’ Art Gallery between 1928 and 1992, and the archive of David Jones Art Gallery was donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2012, where it became key to untangling the recent Asian art smuggling scandal.

Now the rest of DJs’ archive will be secured and more accessible at Powerhouse, and more stories wait to be uncovered and told.

While the department store continues to transform, its history remains as a testament to its resilience and may provide clues as to how it might transform its future.

Objects from the archives are on display at the former David Jones Art Gallery on Level 8 of DJs’ Elizabeth Street store, Sydney, until August 25.

Mark Ian Jones, Senior Lecturer, School of Art and Design, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 10–20% of people suffer from long COVID after they recover from the initial COVID infection.

Common symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath and “brain fog”, but more than 200 different symptoms have been linked to long COVID. The condition affects daily functioning and can be debilitating.

Our research, published today, estimated the economic burden of long COVID in Australia. We calculated long COVID cost the Australian economy almost A$10 billion in 2022 alone.

What is long COVID?

The WHO defines long COVID as the continuation or development of new symptoms three months after the initial COVID infection, where these symptoms last for at least two months with no other explanation.

We’re still learning about what causes long COVID, but persistent symptoms can be explained by the diverse effects of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) on different parts of the body. For example, the virus can affect the heart, blood vessels and lungs.

Research suggests long COVID is linked to persistence of the virus in the body long after infection, and this in turn causes dysfunction of the immune system.

SARS-CoV-2 can also affect the brain and cognition, especially executive function, which is the ability to plan, monitor and execute goals. This can result in difficulty performing work tasks and other activities of daily living among people with long COVID.

What we did

We used Australian data to estimate infections in 2022 and modelled long COVID and recovery rates across all age groups to understand the burden of long COVID.

We then used this data in a mathematical model to estimate economy-wide labour supply losses in 2022 and to determine the decline in real gross domestic product (GDP). Economic losses occur because people affected by long COVID may be unable to work, or work at reduced capacity, for a period of time.

We found that at a peak in September 2022, up to 1,374,805 people (5.4% of Australians) were living with long COVID following a single infection. Allowing for recovery from long COVID, up to 3.4% would still be living with long COVID after 12 months.

We estimated long COVID resulted in more than 100 million hours of lost labour in 2022. These lost employment hours translate to an economic cost of roughly $9.6 billion, equivalent to 0.5% of GDP for 2022.

Working-age adults between 30 and 49 were most affected. The estimated labour loss was greatest for people aged 30–39 (27.5 million hours, or 26.9% of total labour loss) who saw the highest overall numbers with long COVID of any age group. People aged 40–49 followed close behind, with an estimated 24.5 million hours lost, or 23.9% of total labour loss.

Higher numbers of long COVID in these younger age groups are likely because they experience more COVID infections, possibly because they are more mobile and mix more with others.

We did not include losses incurred by healthy employees who could not work due to caring for others with COVID or long COVID. Further, we only considered a single COVID infection, and the risk of developing long COVID thereafter. But we didn’t consider the risk from reinfections, which increase the likelihood of long COVID. Therefore our research likely underestimates the impact of long COVID.

Long COVID affects people of all ages, and can occur regardless of the severity of their COVID infection. Widespread and ongoing COVID infections means if even only a small percentage of people develop long COVID, this is still a very large number of people.

By way of comparison, 2% of Australians have coronary heart disease, which is the leading cause of illness and death in Australia (and the world). Even if only 3.4% of people have ongoing long COVID, this imposes very large public health and economic costs.

And unlike coronary heart disease, which disproportionately affects older people, our study suggests the impact of long COVID is highest in working-age adults, which is why the economic impacts are so great.

A global trend

Many countries including the United States and the United Kingdom are experiencing similar economic losses due to long COVID, with rising numbers of people unable to work.

Recent estimates indicate roughly 400 million people around the world have had long COVID. The condition may be costing US$1 trillion annually – equivalent to about 1% of the global economy.

The weight of evidence around long COVID and its impact on population health has experts calling for the condition to be factored into policy decisions.

What can we do?

In Australia, it’s primarily the immediate outcomes of acute COVID, such as hospitalisation and death, which are used to determine eligibility for antivirals and the importance of vaccines. Healthy people under 70 are not eligible for subsidised antivirals, while vaccines are restricted for children and adult booster rates are low.

But there’s strong evidence vaccines reduce the likelihood of long COVID, and some evidence antivirals may also lower the risk. Long COVID should therefore be factored into Australian policy and guidance on antivirals and vaccines.

Other measures that reduce the risk of COVID infection will also reduce long COVID risk. These include a focus on safe indoor air, and mask use in high-risk, crowded places during COVID epidemics, especially in health-care and aged-care settings.

Finally, we need to consider how to support those with long COVID who can’t work. Long COVID is the sting in the tail of SARS-CoV-2, and planning proactively for it will reduce the impacts on society.

C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC L3 Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney; Long Chu, Associate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Quentin Grafton, Australian Laureate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Tom Kompas, Professor of Environmental Economics and Biosecurity, The University of Melbourne, and Valentina Costantino, Research Associate, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Most people with knee osteoarthritis can control their pain and improve their mobility without surgery, according to updated treatment guidelines from the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.

So what is knee osteoarthritis and what are the best ways to manage it?

More than 2 million Australians have osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is the most common joint disease, affecting 2.1 million Australians. It costs the economy A$4.3 billion each year.

Osteoarthritis commonly affects the knees, but can also affect the hips, spine, hands and feet. It impacts the whole joint including bone, cartilage, ligaments and muscles.

Most people with osteoarthritis have persistent pain and find it difficult to perform simple daily tasks, such as walking and climbing stairs.

Is it caused by ‘wear and tear’?

Knee osteoarthritis is most likely to affect older people, those who are overweight or obese, and those with previous knee injuries. But contrary to popular belief, knee osteoarthritis is not caused by “wear and tear”.

Research shows the degree of structural wear and tear visible in the knee joint on an X-ray does not correlate with the level of pain or disability a person experiences. Some people have a low degree of structural wear and tear and very bad symptoms, while others have a high degree of structural wear and tear and minimal symptoms. So X-rays are not required to diagnose knee osteoarthritis or guide treatment decisions.

Telling people they have wear and tear can make them worried about their condition and afraid of damaging their joint. It can also encourage them to try invasive and potentially unnecessary treatments such as surgery. We have shown this in people with osteoarthritis, and other common pain conditions such as back and shoulder pain.

This has led to a global call for a change in the way we think and communicate about osteoarthritis.

What’s the best way to manage osteoarthritis?

Non-surgical treatments work well for most people with osteoarthritis, regardless of their age or the severity of their symptoms. These include education and self-management, exercise and physical activity, weight management and nutrition, and certain pain medicines.

Education is important to dispel misconceptions about knee osteoarthritis. This includes information about what osteoarthritis is, how it is diagnosed, its prognosis, and the most effective ways to self-manage symptoms.

Health professionals who use positive and reassuring language can improve people’s knowledge and beliefs about osteoarthritis and its management.

Many people believe that exercise and physical activity will cause further damage to their joint. But it’s safe and can reduce pain and disability. Exercise has fewer side effects than commonly used pain medicines such as paracetamol and anti-inflammatories and can prevent or delay the need for joint replacement surgery in the future.

Many types of exercise are effective for knee osteoarthritis, such as strength training, aerobic exercises like walking or cycling, Yoga and Tai chi. So you can do whatever type of exercise best suits you.

Increasing general physical activity is also important, such as taking more steps throughout the day and reducing sedentary time.

Weight management is important for those who are overweight or obese. Weight loss can reduce knee pain and disability, particularly when combined with exercise. Losing as little as 5–10% of your body weight can be beneficial.

Pain medicines should not replace treatments such as exercise and weight management but can be used alongside these treatments to help manage pain. Recommended medicines include paracetamol and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Opioids are not recommended. The risk of harm outweighs any potential benefits.

What about surgery?

People with knee osteoarthritis commonly undergo two types of surgery: knee arthroscopy and knee replacement.

Knee arthroscopy is a type of keyhole surgery used to remove or repair damaged pieces of bone or cartilage that are thought to cause pain.

However, high-quality research has shown arthroscopy is not effective. Arthroscopy should therefore not be used in the management of knee osteoarthritis.

Joint replacement involves replacing the joint surfaces with artificial parts. In 2021–22, 53,500 Australians had a knee replacement for their osteoarthritis.

Joint replacement is often seen as being inevitable and “necessary”. But most people can effectively manage their symptoms through exercise, physical activity and weight management.

The new guidelines (known as “care standard”) recommend joint replacement surgery only be considered for those with severe symptoms who have already tried non-surgical treatments.

I have knee osteoarthritis. What should I do?

The care standard links to free evidence-based resources to support people with osteoarthritis. These include:

• education, such as a decision aid and four-week online course
• self-directed online exercise and yoga programs
• weight management support
• pain management strategies, such as MyJointPain and painTRAINER.

If you have osteoarthritis, you can use the care standard to inform discussions with your health-care provider, and to make informed decisions about your care.

Belinda Lawford, Postdoctoral research fellow in physiotherapy, The University of Melbourne; Giovanni E. Ferreira, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, Institute of Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney; Joshua Zadro, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney, and Rana Hinman, Professor in Physiotherapy, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The current shortage of sterile intravenous (IV) fluids is a serious ongoing concern for doctors across Australia. During surgery, these sterile fluids are essential to administer drugs and hydrate patients intravenously (via the veins).

But supplies of two of the most common solutions are critically low.

The Australian government has recently moved to coordinate supplies of IV fluids to increase manufacturing and ensure distribution. Despite this, supplies are not expected to return to normal levels until the end of the year.

So, what will this mean for surgery in Australia? And are there any alternatives?

Why do we need IV fluids for surgery?

IV fluids are used before, during and after surgery to maintain blood volume and the body’s normal functions. They also combat dehydration, which can happen in a number of ways.

Before surgery, patients may become dehydrated from illnesses that cause vomiting or diarrhoea. They are also asked to stop eating and drinking for several hours before surgery. This is to minimise the risk of stomach contents being regurgitated and inhaled into the lungs – a complication that can cause injury or death. But it can also make them more dehydrated.

During surgery, the body continues to lose fluid through normal processes such as sweating and making urine. But some aspects of surgery also exacerbate dehydration, for example, through blood loss or when internal organs are exposed and lose more fluid through evaporation.

After the operation, IV fluids may be required for some days. Many patients may still be unable to eat and drink until the function of the gut returns to normal.

Multiple research studies, including a trial of 3,000 patients who underwent major abdominal surgery, have demonstrated the importance of adequate fluid therapy throughout all stages of surgery to avoid kidney damage.

Apart from hydration, these sterile fluids – prepared under strict conditions so they contain no bacteria or viruses – are used in surgery for other reasons.

Anaesthetists commonly use fluid infusions to slowly deliver medications into the bloodstream. There is some evidence this method of maintaining anaesthesia, compared to inhalation, can improve patients’ experience of “waking up” after the procedure, such as being clearer headed and having less nausea and vomiting.

Surgeons also use sterile fluids to flush out wounds and surgical sites to prevent infection.

Are there workarounds?

Fluid given intravenously needs to closely resemble the salts in the blood to prevent additional problems. The safest and cheapest options are:

• isotonic saline, a solution of water with 0.9% table salt
• Hartmann’s solution (compound sodium lactate), which combines a range of salts such as potassium and calcium.

Both are in short supply.

One way to work around the shortage is to minimise how much IV fluid is used during the procedure. This can be achieved by ensuring those admitted to surgery are as well hydrated as possible.

Many people presenting for minor surgery can safely drink water up until an hour or so before their operation. A recent initiative termed “sip ‘til send” has shown it is safe for patients to drink small amounts of fluid until the operating theatre team “sends” for them from the waiting room or hospital ward.

However, this may not be appropriate for those at higher risk of inhaling stomach contents, or patients who take medications including Ozempic, which delay the stomach emptying. Patients should follow their anaesthetist’s advice about how to prepare for surgery and when to stop eating and drinking.

Large research trials have also helped establish protocols called “enhanced recovery after surgery”. They show that using special hydrating, carbohydrate-rich drinks before surgery can improve patients’ comfort and speed up healing.

These protocols are common in major bowel surgery in Australia but not used universally. Widespread adoption of these processes may reduce the amount of IV fluids needed during and after large operations, and help patients return to normal eating and drinking earlier. Medications reducing nausea and vomiting are now also routinely administered after surgery to help with this.

What will the shortage mean for surgeries?

The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists has advised anaesthetists to reduce the consumption of fluid during operations where there might be limited or minimal benefit. This means that the fluid will only be used for people who need it, without a change to the quality and safety of anaesthetic care for any patient.

Even with these actions, there is still a chance that some planned surgeries may need to be postponed in the coming months.

If needed, these cancelled operations will likely be ones requiring large volumes of fluid and ones that would not cause unacceptable risks if delayed. Similar to cancellations during the height of the COVID pandemic, emergency operations and surgery for cancers are unlikely to be affected.

Monitoring of the supplies and ongoing honest and open dialogue between senior health managers and clinicians will be crucial in minimising the disruption to surgical services.

Stuart Marshall, Associate Professor, Department of Critical Care, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Giant black holes in the centres of galaxies like our own Milky Way are known to occasionally munch on nearby stars.

This leads to a dramatic and complex process as the star plunging towards the supermassive black hole is spaghettified and torn to shreds. The resulting fireworks are known as a tidal disruption event.

In a new study published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, we have produced the most detailed simulations to date of how this process evolves over the span of a year.

A black hole tearing apart a sun

American astronomer Jack G. Hills and British astronomer Martin Rees first theorised about tidal disruption events in the 1970s and 80s. Rees’s theory predicted that half of the debris from the star would remain bound to the black hole, colliding with itself to form a hot, luminous swirl of matter known as an accretion disc. The disc would be so hot, it should radiate a copious amount of X-rays.

But to everyone’s surprise, most of the more than 100 candidate tidal disruption events discovered to date have been found to glow mainly at visible wavelengths, not X-rays. The observed temperatures in the debris are a mere 10,000 degrees Celsius. That’s like the surface of a moderately warm star, not the millions of degrees expected from hot gas around a supermassive black hole.

Even weirder is the inferred size of the glowing material around the black hole: several times larger than our Solar System and expanding rapidly away from the black hole at a few percent of the speed of light.

Given that even a million-solar-mass black hole is just a bit bigger than our Sun, the huge size of the glowing ball of material inferred from observations was a total surprise.

While astrophysicists have speculated the black hole must be somehow smothered by material during the disruption to explain the lack of X-ray emissions, to date nobody had been able to show how this actually occurs. This is where our simulations come in.

A slurp and a burp

Black holes are messy eaters – not unlike a five-year-old with a bowl of spaghetti. A star starts out as a compact body but gets spaghettified: stretched to a long, thin strand by the extreme tides of the black hole.

As half of the matter from the now-shredded star gets slurped towards the black hole, only 1% of it is actually swallowed. The rest ends up being blown away from the black hole in a sort of cosmic “burp”.

Simulating tidal disruption events with a computer is hard. Newton’s laws of gravity don’t work near a supermassive black hole, so one has to include all the weird and wonderful effects from Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

But hard work is what PhD students are for. Our recent graduate, David Liptai, developed a new do-it-Einstein’s-way simulation method which enabled the team to experiment by throwing unsuspecting stars in the general direction of the nearest black hole. You can even do it yourself.

The resultant simulations, seen in the videos here, are the first to show tidal disruption events all the way from the slurp to the burp.

They follow the spaghettification of the star through to when the debris falls back on the black hole, then a close approach that turns the stream into something like a wriggling garden hose. The simulation lasts for more than a year after the initial plunge.

It took more than a year to run on one of the most powerful supercomputers in Australia. The zoomed-out version goes like this:

What did we discover?

To our great surprise, we found that the 1% of material that does drop to the black hole generates so much heat, it powers an extremely powerful and nearly spherical outflow. (A bit like that time you ate too much curry, and for much the same reason.)

The black hole simply can’t swallow all that much, so what it can’t swallow smothers the central engine and gets steadily flung away.

When observed like they would be by our telescopes, the simulations explain a lot. Turns out previous researchers were right about the smothering. It looks like this:

The new simulations reveal why tidal disruption events really do look like a solar-system-sized star expanding at a few percent of the speed of light, powered by a black hole inside. In fact, one could even call it a “black hole sun”.

Daniel Price, Professor of Astrophysics, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern, after rising cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the potential for further spread.

This now triggers a coordinated international response to an extraordinary event and the mobilisation of resources, such as vaccines and diagnostic testing, to curb the spread of this infectious disease.

But WHO has not declared mpox a pandemic. Rather, the measures it has triggered are designed to prevent it from becoming one.

What triggered this latest alert?

Mpox, once known as monkeypox, is a viral infection closely related to smallpox. Initial symptoms include a fever, headache, swelling of the lymph nodes and muscle ache. A typical rash follows, mainly on the face, hands and feet.

The spread of mpox through certain African countries led the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to declare earlier this week mpox a public health emergency of continental security. This is the first time the organisation has issued such an alert since it was established in 2017.

The situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa has been particularly worrying for more than a year.

There are two types or clades of mpox. Clade II, which originates in west Africa, is less severe. It has a fatality rate of up to 1% (in other words, roughly one in 100 are expected to die from it). But clade I, from central Africa, has a fatality rate of up to 10% (up to one in ten die). This compares to a 0.7% fatality rate for the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing large epidemics of the more deadly clade I mpox.

Mpox is endemic in some parts of central and west Africa, where the virus exists in animals and can spread to humans. Outbreaks have been increasing, with more human-to-human spread, since 2017.

This is partly due to very low levels of immunity to the mpox virus, which is related to the virus that causes smallpox. Mass vaccination against smallpox ceased more than 40 years ago globally, resulting in minimal immunity in populations today against mpox.

The WHO designation announced this week relates to the clade I. Not only does this have a higher fatality rate, it has new mutations that enhance spread between people. These changes, and the global lack of immunity to mpox, makes the world’s population vulnerable to the virus.

There are two different epidemics

In 2022, an epidemic of mpox swept through non-endemic countries, including beyond Africa. This was a variant of clade II originating from Nigeria, called clade IIb. This was sexually transmitted, predominantly affecting men who have sex with men, and had a low fatality rate.

That epidemic peaked in 2022, with vaccines made available to people at risk in high-income countries, but there has been an uptick in 2024.

At the same time, large clade I epidemics were occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but with far less attention.

Vaccines were not available there, even in 2023, when there were 14,626 cases and 654 deaths. Mortality was 4.5%, and higher in children.

In fact, most cases and deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been children. This means most transmission there is non-sexual and is likely to have occurred through close contact or respiratory aerosols.

However, in 2023 an outbreak in a non-endemic part of the country, South Kivu in the east, appeared to be by sexual transmission, indicating more than one epidemic and different transmission modes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

By mid-2024, there were already more cases in the country than all of 2023 – more than 15,600 cases and 537 deaths.

Testing capacity is low in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, most cases are not confirmed by lab testing, and the data we have are from a small sample of genomic sequences from the Kamituga region of South Kivu.

This show mutations to the clade I virus around September 2023, to a variant termed clade Ib, which is more readily transmissible between people. We do not have much data to compare these viruses with the viruses causing cases in the rest of the country.

Mpox is spreading internationally

In the past month, the virus has spread to countries that share a border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo – Rwanda and Burundi. It has also spread to other east African countries, such as Kenya and Uganda. None of these countries have had mpox cases previously.

In an interconnected, mobile world, cases may spread to other continents, as mpox did in 2018 from Nigeria to the United Kingdom and other countries.

A few travel-related cases between 2018 and 2019 may have led to the large multi-country 2022 clade IIb epidemic.

We have vaccines, but not where they are needed

As the mpox virus and smallpox viruses are related (they are both orthopoxviruses), smallpox vaccines offer protection against mpox. These vaccines were used to control the 2022 clade IIb epidemic.

However, most of the world has never been vaccinated, and has no immunity to mpox.

The newer vaccine (called Jynneos in some countries and Imvamune or Imvanex in others) is effective. However, supplies are limited, and vaccine is scarce in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

WHO’s declaration of mpox as a public health emergency of international concern will help mobilise vaccines to where they are needed. The Africa Centres for Disease Control had already begun negotiations to secure 200,000 doses of vaccine, which is a fraction of what is required to control the epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

What happens now?

Ultimately, a serious epidemic anywhere in the world is a concern for all of us, as it can spread globally through travel, as we saw with the COVID pandemic.

Controlling it at the source is the best measure, and WHO’s latest declaration will help mobilise the required resources.

Surveillance for spread of this more serious version of mpox is also essential, bearing in mind that many countries do not have the capacity for widespread testing. So we’ll have to rely on “suspected cases”, based on a clinical definition, to keep track of the epidemic.

Open-source epidemic intelligence – such as using AI to monitor trends in rash and fever illness – can also be used as an early warning system in countries with weak health systems or delayed reporting of cases.

A further complication is that 20-30% of people with mpox may simultaneously have chickenpox, an unrelated infection that also causes a rash. So an initial diagnosis of chickenpox (which is easier to test for) does not rule out mpox.

Effective communication and tackling push-back against public health measures and disinformation is also key. We saw how important this was during the COVID pandemic.

Now, WHO will coordinate the global mpox response, focusing on equity in disease prevention and access to diagnostics and vaccines. It is up to individual countries to do their best to comply with the International Health Regulations, and the protocols for how such a global emergency are managed.

The World Health Organization has more information about mpox, including symptoms and treatment. For information about vaccine access and availability, contact your local health department or doctor, as this varies from country to country.

C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC L3 Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A study of almost 100,000 people in Japan aged 10 to 69 found playing video games – or even owning a console – can be good for mental health. But playing too much each day can harm wellbeing.

Video games and other forms of online media consumption are an everyday part of life.

Surveys have shown playing video games can have positive effects on stress levels and creativity. But concern remains about the potential negative effects on, for example, general wellbeing, aggressive behaviour and social development, especially for young people.

The World Health Organization lists gaming disorder as a mental health condition, and a severe social withdrawal condition called hikikomori has been described in Japan.

The new survey showed links between gaming and wellbeing and researchers found a way to show cause and effect – that even owning a gaming console improved wellbeing.

What the study found

The research was conducted between 2020 and 2022 – during the COVID pandemic. The researchers used measures of psychological distress and life satisfaction and asked 97,602 people in Japan about their gaming use.

The survey coincided with supply chain shortages. These led retailers to use a lottery system for the purchase of two consoles: Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5. Of the overall survey group, 8,192 participated in the lottery.

Researchers compared the 2,323 lottery winners against those who did not win the opportunity to purchase one of the new consoles (over five rounds of surveys). They found those who won the lottery had improved distress scores and better life satisfaction.

The results were not all positive. Over time, the scores indicated drops in wellbeing for those who played more than three hours a day. Scores continued to drop for each additional time increment measured.

The study had some limitations.

Firstly, the survey was conducted when the COVID pandemic presented a particularly challenging time for mental health. It also brought changes in social, occupational and lifestyle behaviours.

The study focused mainly on general gaming habits without distinguishing between different types of games, which could have varying impacts on mental health.

Further, participants chose whether to enter the lottery, so it was not a random sample. And the study could not specifically attribute findings to the effects of playing video games versus the effects of winning the lottery.

Finally, we know self-reported studies are not always reliable.

Gaming pros and cons

We know from other surveys video games can be useful stress relievers and aid social connection (albeit online). We also know some games can improve particular cognitive skills such as visuo-spatial navigation and problem solving.

Games and technologies can also specifically target mental health issues, such as social anxiety or phobias, address ADHD symptoms and enhance motivation and performance.

Yet, concerns remain about possible long-term consequences, particularly in terms of reductions in “real-life” socialisation, participation in physical activity, school performance and other health consequences, including sleep and eating behaviours.

3 tips for positive gaming

While video games can offer some benefits, it’s important to maintain a balanced approach to gaming. Here are a few tips to help manage gaming habits and promote overall wellbeing:

1. Set time limits

Encourage moderate gaming by setting clear time limits to ensure it doesn’t interfere with sleep, physical activity or other important daily activities. The Australian institute of Family Studies recommends creating a media plan that includes limits on screen time and balances gaming with other activities.

2. Choose games wisely

Opt for games that are age-appropriate and consider their content. Some games can promote problem-solving skills and creativity, but it’s important to be mindful of those that might encourage aggression or excessive competition.

3. Monitor eating and sleeping habits

Pay attention to eating patterns and ensure meals are not skipped in favour of gaming. Encourage regular sleep patterns and avoid gaming close to bedtime to prevent disruptions in sleep.

While the new study provides promising insights into the potential positive effects of video games on mental wellbeing, these findings should be approached with caution due to the limits of the survey.

While the potential benefits are encouraging, it is essential to adopt a balanced approach to gaming and pursue further research to fully understand its long-term impact on mental health.

Katarina Fritzon, Associate Professor of Psychology, Bond University; Oliver Baumann, Associate professor of psychology, Bond University, and Peta Stapleton, Professor in Psychology, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Social media is full of claims that everyday habits can harm your skin. It’s also full of recommendations or advertisements for products that can protect you.

Now social media has blue light from our devices in its sights.

So can scrolling on our phones really damage your skin? And will applying creams or lotions help?

Here’s what the evidence says and what we should really be focusing on.

Remind me, what actually is blue light?

Blue light is part of the visible light spectrum. Sunlight is the strongest source. But our electronic devices – such as our phones, laptops and TVs – also emit it, albeit at levels 100-1,000 times lower.

Seeing as we spend so much time using these devices, there has been some concern about the impact of blue light on our health, including on our eyes and sleep.

Now, we’re learning more about the impact of blue light on our skin.

How does blue light affect the skin?

The evidence for blue light’s impact on skin is still emerging. But there are some interesting findings.

1. Blue light can increase pigmentation

Studies suggest exposure to blue light can stimulate production of melanin, the natural skin pigment that gives skin its colour.

So too much blue light can potentially worsen hyperpigmentation – overproduction of melanin leading to dark spots on the skin – especially in people with darker skin.

2. Blue light can give you wrinkles

Some research suggests blue light might damage collagen, a protein essential for skin structure, potentially accelerating the formation of wrinkles.

A laboratory study suggests this can happen if you hold your device one centimetre from your skin for as little as an hour.

However, for most people, if you hold your device more than 10cm away from your skin, that would reduce your exposure 100-fold. So this is much less likely to be significant.

3. Blue light can disrupt your sleep, affecting your skin

If the skin around your eyes looks dull or puffy, it’s easy to blame this directly on blue light. But as we know blue light affects sleep, what you’re probably seeing are some of the visible signs of sleep deprivation.

We know blue light is particularly good at suppressing production of melatonin. This natural hormone normally signals to our bodies when it’s time for sleep and helps regulate our sleep-wake cycle.

By suppressing melatonin, blue light exposure before bed disrupts this natural process, making it harder to fall asleep and potentially reducing the quality of your sleep.

The stimulating nature of screen content further disrupts sleep. Social media feeds, news articles, video games, or even work emails can keep our brains active and alert, hindering the transition into a sleep state.

Long-term sleep problems can also worsen existing skin conditions, such as acne, eczema and rosacea.

Sleep deprivation can elevate cortisol levels, a stress hormone that breaks down collagen, the protein responsible for skin’s firmness. Lack of sleep can also weaken the skin’s natural barrier, making it more susceptible to environmental damage and dryness.

Can skincare protect me?

The beauty industry has capitalised on concerns about blue light and offers a range of protective products such as mists, serums and lip glosses.

From a practical perspective, probably only those with the more troublesome hyperpigmentation known as melasma need to be concerned about blue light from devices.

This condition requires the skin to be well protected from all visible light at all times. The only products that are totally effective are those that block all light, namely mineral-based suncreens or some cosmetics. If you can’t see the skin through them they are going to be effective.

But there is a lack of rigorous testing for non-opaque products outside laboratories. This makes it difficult to assess if they work and if it’s worth adding them to your skincare routine.

What can I do to minimise blue light then?

Here are some simple steps you can take to minimise your exposure to blue light, especially at night when it can disrupt your sleep:

• use the “night mode” setting on your device or use a blue-light filter app to reduce your exposure to blue light in the evening

• minimise screen time before bed and create a relaxing bedtime routine to avoid the types of sleep disturbances that can affect the health of your skin

• hold your phone or device away from your skin to minimise exposure to blue light

• use sunscreen. Mineral and physical sunscreens containing titanium dioxide and iron oxides offer broad protection, including from blue light.

In a nutshell

Blue light exposure has been linked with some skin concerns, particularly pigmentation for people with darker skin. However, research is ongoing.

While skincare to protect against blue light shows promise, more testing is needed to determine if it works.

For now, prioritise good sun protection with a broad-spectrum sunscreen, which not only protects against UV, but also light.

Michael Freeman, Associate Professor of Dermatology, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cranberry juice has been used medicinally for centuries. Our new research indicates it should be a normal aspect of urinary tract infection (UTI) management today.

While some benefits of cranberry compounds for the prevention of UTIs have been suspected for some time, it hasn’t been clear whether the benefits from cranberry juice were simply from drinking more fluid, or something in the fruit itself.

For our study, published this week, we combined and collectively assessed 3,091 participants across more than 20 clinical trials.

Our analysis indicates that increasing liquids reduces the rate of UTIs compared with no treatment, but cranberry in liquid form is even better at reducing UTIs and antibiotic use.

Are UTIs really that bad?

Urinary tract infections affect more than 50% of women and 20% of men in their lifetime.

Most commonly, UTIs are caused from the bug called Escherichia coli (E.coli). This bug lives harmlessly in our intestines, but can cause infection in the urinary tract. This is why, particularly for women, it is recommended people wipe from front to back after using the toilet.

An untreated UTI can move up to the kidneys and cause even more serious illness.

Even when not managing infection, many people are anxious about contracting a UTI. Sexually active women, pregnant women and older women may all be at increased risk.

Why cranberries?

To cause a UTI, the bacteria need to attach to the wall of the urinary bladder. Increasing fluids helps to flush out bacteria before it attaches (or makes its way up into the bladder).

Some beneficial compounds in cranberry, such as proanthocyanidins (also called condensed tannins), prevent the bacteria from attaching to the wall itself.

While there are treatments, over 90% of the bugs that cause UTIs exhibit some form of microbial resistance. This suggests that they are rapidly changing and some cases of UTI might be left untreatable.

What we found

Our analysis showed a 54% lower rate of UTIs from cranberry juice consumption compared to no treatment. This means that significantly fewer participants who regularly consumed cranberry juice (most commonly around 200 millilitres each day) reported having a UTI during the periods assessed in the studies we analysed.

Cranberry juice was also linked to a 49% lower rate of antibiotic use than placebo liquid and a 59% lower rate than no treatment, based on analysis of indirect and direct effects across six studies. The use of cranberry compounds, whether in drinks or tablet form, also reduced the prevalence of symptoms associated with UTIs.

While some studies we included presented conflicts of interest (such as receiving funding from cranberry companies), we took this “high risk of bias” into account when analysing the data.

So, when can cranberry juice help?

We found three main benefits of cranberry juice for UTIs.

1. Reduced rates of infections

Increasing fluids (for example, drinking more water) reduced the prevalence of UTIs, and taking cranberry compounds (such as tablets) was also beneficial. But the most benefits were identified from increasing fluids and taking cranberry compounds at the same time, such as with cranberry juice.

2. Reduced use of antibiotics

The data shows cranberry juice lowers the need to use antibiotics by 59%. This was identified as fewer participants in randomised cranberry juice groups required antibiotics.

Increasing fluid intake also helped reduce antibiotic use (by 25%). But this was not as useful as increasing fluids at the same time as using cranberry compounds.

Cranberry compounds alone (such as tablets without associated increases in fluid intake) did not affect antibiotic use.

3. Reducing symptoms

Taking cranberry compounds (in any form, liquid or tablet) reduced the symptoms of UTIs, as measured in the overall data, by more than five times.

Take home advice

While cranberry juice cannot treat a UTI, it can certainly be part of UTI management.

If you suspect that you have a UTI, see your GP as soon as possible.

Christian Moro, Associate Professor of Science & Medicine, Bond University and Charlotte Phelps, Senior Teaching Fellow, Medical Program, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New Zealanders’ first point of contact for healthcare – their general practice – is increasingly harder to reach, to the detriment of the overall health system.

Our new research found 80% of general practices in Aotearoa New Zealand stopped enrolling new patients (known as closing the books) at some point between 2019 and 2022. While the pandemic has exacerbated the issue, it is not the only cause.

The key reasons for not enrolling new patients included workforce shortages, high workloads and staff burnout, funding issues, concerns about quality of care and insufficient physical space.

This can lead to no access, or delayed access, to primary care, worsening health conditions, undiagnosed or untreated diseases, and less or no access to preventive care for many.

In the short term, the government needs to consider increasing investment in primary care and the training of doctors and nurses. But in the longer term, New Zealand needs to consider if the current model of care works, or if there are alternative models that would better suit the healthcare needs of New Zealanders.

An entry point to the healthcare system

There are approximately a thousand general practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. While they are private businesses, they are largely funded by the government.

Being enrolled with a general practice means reduced consultation fees, the centralisation and management of patient data and higher levels of preventive care. Enrolled patients also then have a team who can take responsibility for prescriptions, referrals to specialised care and subsequent followups.

If someone can’t enrol in a specific practice, many of these elements of primary care become a lot harder to access.

We interviewed 17 people (including general practitioners (GPs), practice managers, academic researchers, a nurse practitioner and a national general practice leader) and undertook a survey, to which 227 people responded (including practice managers, GPs, practice owners and administrative staff). The responses revealed six key reasons why practices closed their books.

1. Workforce shortages

A shortage of GPs was cited as one of the key reasons for closing the books. As one survey respondent explained:

Recruitment and staff retention, especially GPs and nurses, has been the key issue. Almost no job applicants, and those few that do, have multiple offers to pick between because there are so many vacancies around.

There is a growing number of GPs who are reaching retirement age. And, while 50% of New Zealand’s GPs have been trained overseas, COVID restrictions made it more difficult to recruit from other countries.

There is also a significant pay gap between primary doctors and nurses and those in secondary and tertiary care (hospital staff and specialists). As a consequence, fewer medical students are choosing primary care compared with other fields.

2. Under-funding of general practices

There is also insufficient funding for general practices. They are partially funded through a formula based on the number of people enrolled and their needs. But many in primary care feel the model doesn’t adequately account for the complexity of conditions many patients have.

As one interviewee told us:

Funding per patient does not reflect the workload that is required. It is problematic especially for high-needs patients.

3. High workloads and staff burnout

Underfunding and staff shortages have caused a higher workload among existing staff, resulting in staff burnout in general practice.

As one survey respondent wrote:

General practices are asked to take on more and more work, including work that was previously performed in hospitals. The paperwork has also increased. So, there is more work but a seriously declining number of healthcare workers (most particularly GPs) to carry out this work.

4. The impact of COVID-19

The pandemic had both direct and indirect impacts on healthcare. The workload of general practices increased with the rising number of sick patients. Along with an increase in patient demand there were added precautions needed to treat COVID-19 patients.

The pandemic also resulted in staff shortages due to staff or family sickness. The border closure enforced during the pandemic worsened New Zealand’s existing workforce shortages due to a high reliance on overseas-trained medical professionals.

5. Quality of care concerns

Work shortages and increasing demands meant many of the research participants were concerned about the quality of care they were delivering to their patients. Practices closed their books to ensure they were able to still deliver care to clients – even if this didn’t make the best business sense.

From a business point of view, there is a disincentive to close your book. But at some point, patient care has [to] take priority over financial benefit.

6. A lack of space

The final reason given for the rise in closed books was a lack of space in the current practices.

Our research participants noted there may not be a sufficient number of rooms for examination and treatment. In some practices, patient waiting areas were also limited. In some cases, staff were working in shifts to occupy the working spaces available to them.

The road to better primary care

When it came to improving primary care, 95% of our survey respondents said there needed to be better funding, 91% called for support for pay equity between general practice nursing and hospital nursing staff, and 89% called for pay equity for GPs. Some 77% called for an increase in medical students and 85% called for increasing the recruitment of overseas doctors.

As well as an increase in funding, policymakers should be asking if there are other models that could help meet New Zealand’s needs. For example, could nurse practitioners work with community organisations to enrol patients so there is, at least, somewhere for them to go?

With ongoing issues around access and affordability, it is time to consider what are the necessary improvements in general practice care in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This research was completed with Nisa Mohan, Maite Irurzun-Lopez, Megan Pledger, Mona Jeffreys, all from Te Hikuwai Rangahau Hauora - Health Services Research Centre at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.

Jackie Cumming, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A major Federal Court class action has been dismissed this week after Justice Michael Lee ruled there was not enough evidence to prove the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer.

Plaintiff Kelvin McNickle, now aged 41, developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) in his family’s vegetation management business for more than 20 years.

More than 800 others joined the class action against German chemical and pharmaceutical company, Bayer, which produces Roundup. Bayer has long maintained glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, despite a number of court cases around the world. It said this week’s ruling was a “win for Australian farmers”.

The court acknowledged the scientific community had mixed views on whether glyphosate causes cancer. Justice Lee looked at three types of scientific evidence – epidemiological, animal studies and evidence showing the mechanisms involved in the development of cancer – in his ruling.

Yet in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

So what does the science say?

What is glyphosate?

Glyphosate is one of the most used herbicides worldwide, and has been used in agriculture, public parks and footpaths, and in home gardens in Australia for more than 40 years.

It kills weeds by targeting a specific pathway (the shikimic acid pathway) that exists in plants and a type of bacteria (eubacteria), but not animals (or humans).

In terms of short-term exposure, glyphosate is less toxic than table salt. For example, a 70Kg person would need to eat a quarter of a kilogram of table salt in order to die, but would need to eat around half a kilogram of glyphosate to die.

However, it is chronic, or long-term, exposure to glyphosate that’s causing the controversy.

What does ‘probably carcinogenic’ to humans mean?

Those who believe glyphosate causes cancer often refer to the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) 2015 report that classified the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. This was based on:

convincing evidence that these agents cause cancer in laboratory animals.

However, IARC arrived at its conclusion using a narrower base of evidence than other peer-reviewed papers and governmental reviews. Also, unlike other regulatory bodies, it flags any possibility of causing cancer, rather than risk from plausible exposures.

The Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization joint meeting on pesticide residues report in 2016 concluded that glyphosate was unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet.

In contrast to the IARC’s confident conclusion that glyphosate had convincing evidence of causing cancer in laboratory animals, the joint meeting concluded:

glyphosate is not carcinogenic in rats but could not exclude the possibility that it is carcinogenic in mice at very high doses.

Australia’s regulator, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, reviewed the safety of glyphosate after IARC’s determination and concluded:

there is no reliable evidence that products containing glyphosate pose a risk of causing cancer in humans.

What have epidemiological studies found?

The IARC considered ten cohort studies, where research participants are studied over a period of time, and nine case control studies, where people who have the disease are compare with groups that do not have the disease, to try and identify possible causes. There was no evidence of cancer association.

However, three small studies suggested an association with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but this association was not statistically significant. This means the association could have occurred by chance alone.

A 2016 meta-analysis which reviewed all the available evidence at the time, suggested a small but non-statistically significant association of glyphosate with non-Hodkin lymphoma, but no causal relationship was established.

In 2018, the Agricultural Health Study was published. This was a long-running study of 54,251 participants licensed to use glyphosate, where their exposure could be followed. This strong study, which controlled for a number of factors that could cloud the conclusion, found no statistically significant associations with glyphosate use and cancer at any site.

What does the research in animals say?

There have been multiple animal studies of glyphosate and cancer. In these studies, rodents are typically exposed to high but sub-lethal concentrations for at least 80% of their total lifespan. These concentrations will be higher than humans would be likely to be exposed to.

In the European Food Safety Authority review in 2015, there were nine rat studies where no cancers were seen.

There were also five mouse studies in the review above. Of these, three were negative. One found sporadic tumours that were not dose-dependent (indicating glyphosate was not the causative agent). In the other study, researchers found tumours at highest doses in males only.

The animal studies show no consistent evidence of developing cancer, and no equivalent of human non-Hodgkin lymphoma was seen. The European Food Safety Authority therefore concluded glyphosate was unlikely to be a carcinogenic hazard to humans.

In the 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) report that classified the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans”, there were six rat studies. Cancer was seen in only one study, but again this was not dose-dependent. This indicates glyphosate was not the causative agent.

There were two mouse studies; one was negative and the other found a “trend” for a cancer that forms in the glandular tissue in males, but not females.

No equivalent of human non-Hodgkin lymphoma was seen.

While the IARC considered there was sufficient evidence of cancer causation in animals, there was no consistency in tumour type (mouse versus rat) or location.

What mechanisms could be involved?

There are a number of ways that chemicals can cause cancer, typically through damage to DNA or chromosomes.

For glyphosate, there is little evidence these classical mechanisms are involved.

Bacterial mutation studies looking for damage to bacterial DNA have been negative, mutation studies in mammalian cell lines have been negative, chromosomal damage studies have been largely negative. These studies involve concentrations and routes of exposure that humans will never encounter.

Oxidative stress occurs when there is imbalance of toxic free radicals and antioxidants in your body that leads to cell damage. Oxidative stress is involved in cancer, and it has been suggested that oxidative stress could be a plausible mechanism for inducing cancer. While this damage may be implicated in causing cancer, it may also be part of the mechanism the body uses to fight cancer.

However, while oxidative stress has been shown in cellular studies and animal studies of exposure to glyphosate, the levels were much higher than what humans are exposed to.

While glyphosate exposure can alter markers of oxidative stress in humans, these changes are relatively minor. Given the lack of evidence for cancer induction in animal studies and human epidemiology, the significance of these small changes is unclear.

Over all, there is currently no plausible mechanism for glyphosate to cause cancer at the levels of glyphosate humans are likely to be exposed to.

Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Linda Burney, Minister for Indigenous Australians, announced her retirement from politics last week, and Labor has quickly appointed Northern Territory Senator Malarndirri McCarthy to take over the portfolio.

McCarthy comes into the position at a difficult time. Burney was a strong advocate for Indigenous rights, but her tenure as minister finished on a sour note.

The defeat of the Voice to Parliament proposal at last year’s referendum has increased disillusionment in Indigenous communities about the role of the federal government on key Indigenous issues. Since the referendum, Indigenous affairs have been largely absent from national politics.

Amid this lack of direction from Canberra, state and territory governments are making progress on issues such as Treaty, agreement-making, and establishing state advisory bodies. South Australia held elections for its First Nations Voice to Parliament in March.

There is declining interest from the public on Indigenous issues, which is at its lowest since 2021. This has implications for government and industry support for Indigenous policy and advancement more generally.

Declining voter turnout in remote Indigenous communities continues to be an issue for governments. This raises ongoing questions about how to increase Indigenous participation in democratic processes. After the referendum loss last year, turnout in upcoming elections is likely to decline further in the absence of some unheralded solution.

Territory issues, national significance

While these factors make the Indigenous affairs portfolio a daunting task at a national level, some of the most demanding cases exist in McCarthy’s own senate seat. The NT is where she will face her toughest challenges and critics while in the ministry.

With an NT general election set for the August 24 and a federal election scheduled for next year, Labor’s lead in both jurisdictions is being narrowed. The Country Liberal Party (CLP) and Territory Labor are polling closely just under month out from the NT election.

In 2016, the CLP lost government and was reduced to two members. In 2020, it improved on that result and finished with eight seats in the assembly. The CLP has also acquired double the election donations relative to Territory Labor for this election, which could prove to be vital in campaigning for remote seats.

Although this battle is at the territory level, this election result will be an indication of support for Labor’s Indigenous policies.

The most pressing issue for Indigenous people in the NT continues to be housing. In March, the Albanese government announced a $4 billon agreement with the territory government, land councils and the peak remote housing body. The commitment under this deal is to build 270 homes a year over ten years in remote communities in the NT. However, with current housing and skills shortages nationwide, it is a wonder whether this goal and timeframe is realistic.

There are other significant issues that might make McCarthy’s role difficult: Territory Labor’s support for fracking and lack of commitment to Treaty.

Fracking has been an important issue for Aboriginal Traditional Owners of the NT for some time. It’s only become more of a focus since the Territory Labor government gave approval to expand development in the Beetaloo Basin. Some Traditional Owners of the region are opposed to fracking, citing concerns about environmental degradation and climate change.

In 2018, the Territory Labor government signed a memorandum of understanding with the four NT land councils to commit to working towards treaty-making with Aboriginal people. A Treaty Commission was established and given funds to consult with Indigenous communities throughout the NT. However, in 2022, after submitting a report on the viability of Treaty, the Commission was disbanded. No further progress has been made on Treaty to date.

Critics in close quarters

If that’s the policy, there’s also the politics to consider.

McCarthy’s strongest critic as minister will be the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Both senators are Traditional Owners of respective Aboriginal communities in the NT. Both have experience as presenters on TV. Both have expressed concerns about resource development in the NT.

They do share some similar characteristics, but what separates them is their views on the paths forward for Indigenous Australians. Price and McCarthy prioritise different ways to address Indigenous socioeconomic disadvantage.

Price has focused on social and family issues in Indigenous communities, while McCarthy on healthcare and employment. Both campaigned on opposite sides of the Voice referendum – the result of which will surely feature in future Indigenous policy debates, especially in the lead up to the next federal election.

McCarthy’s most important role before next year’s election will to be communicate a clear agenda for Indigenous affairs to the public post-referendum. Indigenous communities and the Australian public are looking for leadership and planning moving forward.

With the Voice to Parliament off the table for the foreseeable future, there needs to be a clear indication of government’s willingness for change. Existing policies and structures are not making adequate improvements to Indigenous lives.

Bartholomew Stanford, Lecturer in Political Science/Indigenous Politics (First Peoples), Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.