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tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/articles The Conversation – Articles (UK) 2016-06-24T21:40:18Z tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60584 2016-06-24T21:40:18Z 2016-06-24T21:40:18Z Could dragons on Westeros fly? Aeronautical engineering and maths say they could
Like many people, I have recently become fascinated the lives and loves of the ruling classes of the people of Westeros, where the occasionally charming inhabitants spend a lot of time bickering about who is in charge. Game of Thrones is very entertaining – but don't get attached to any of the characters, as the lifespan in their world does seem quite variable.

One of the many aspiring rulers – Daenerys Targaryen – spends a fair bit of her time around and occasionally riding dragons. My background as an aeronautical engineer got me thinking about the mythical creatures and it struck me that in order to fly, their world must work a bit differently compared to Earth.

It's possible to estimate the size of a dragon by comparison to Daenerys who looks to be about 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall with a mass of around 60kg (132lb). The dragon's body seems to be about four times as long as her, around five times as deep, and about twice as wide, with a tail about the same length again and about as thick as her body. Assuming the density of dragon and woman are about the same then a fully grown dragon's mass must be around 44 times that of Daenerys: around 2,600kg (5,700lb).

Considering everyone in Westeros seems to move in a similar way to us on Earth, let's assume the same gravitational pull, which puts the dragon's weight at 26,000 Newtons (which we'll call W) at a nominal acceleration due to gravity of ten metres per second per second (32 ft/s/s).

 Daenerys Targaryen, often seen on the back of a dragon. brentonmb, CC BY

If we're to understand the aerodynamics of flying dragons, we need two more bits of information. First, the wing area. Each wing seems to have a span roughly twice the dragon's main body length, so let's approximate the wings as two rectangles 4m by 8m (13 by 26ft), or 64m2 (340ft), which we'll call S.

Second, the stalling speed, or slowest that the dragon can safely fly before it falls out of the sky. It would be reasonable to guess that dragons take off and land at roughly their stalling speed, just as aeroplanes and birds do. Judging by the programmes it seems that the dragon's body-length of about 13m passes by in about three seconds, which puts the stalling speed at about 4.3 m/s or 14 ft/s.

Dragon aerodynamics

As an engineer, when presented with any problem I usually to resort to mathematics, in this case the standard lift equation of:

which I can re-arrange to:-

If we use the standard earth sea-level air density of ρ = 1.2kg/m3, this gives a lift coefficient of 36. Which is completely unrealistic.

By comparison, a Rogallo winged microlight aeroplane – a tiny single or two-seater aeroplane comprising a light frame and a small engine suspended below a hang gliding-style textile wing – would have a lift coefficient of between 2.2 and 2.7. No doubt evolution has adapted the dragon's wing to be highly efficient, but I had to make some assumptions here, so went for a maximum lift coefficient (or CL.max) of 3.5.

Disregarding the possibility of magic, this tells us that the atmosphere of Westeros must be far more dense than ours. Using the same figures, we can work out just how dense:

12 kg/m3, or about 10 timesthat Earth normal (we call that 10 bar) sounds unpleasantly high, but actually isn't that bad. It's about what a diver would experience at 100 metres depth – perfectly survivable.

There's empirical evidence that supports this. Watching a few episodes of Game of Thrones you'll notice that pretty much anybody can pick up a spear or sword and throw it distances that an Olympic javelin thrower would be deeply envious of. Given that gravity seems to be roughly similar to ours, this suggests the thrown weapons are generating much more lift than on Earth – consistent with an atmosphere of higher density.

There's something in the air

What is the mix of gases in this atmosphere, I wondered? Earth's atmosphere is 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen, and 1% various other gases. We know that 21% oxygen is fine – you and I are breathing it at the moment – while 30% oxygen concentrations causes just about everything to become highly flammable (beyond that starts to verge on explosive). This seems quite likely on Westeros, as anybody going near the slightest puff of dragon breath seems to catch fire, while it's noticeable that most of the locals are all paranoid about lighting fires anywhere except inside a stone castle. Westeros probably has a high-density air with around 30% oxygen, but no more.

What of the rest? I'm going to hazard an educated guess here that it may not be nitrogen that we're used to on Earth, but is instead argon – an inert gas which is the next most common gas on earth after nitrogen. Argon is 42% more dense than nitrogen and would allow a higher-density atmosphere at a pressure a bit lower than 10 bar.

There are two laws relating to gases that can be used here to work out the behaviour of the air mix of argon and oxygen: Charles' Law to add the components up, and Boyle's Law to show what happens when the pressure increases. Applying these I can show that at about seven atmosphere's pressure, a 70% argon, 30% oxygen atmosphere has our air density of 12kg/m3, and so dragons can fly. In simple terms - we can have a more dense atmosphere if the air is heavier - in this case by replacing the inert nitrogen we have on earth with the heavier (or more accurately, denser) argon.

This argon-oxygen (or argox) mix will actually be moderately narcotic when breathed at high pressures. Perhaps this might in part explain the regularly irrational and downright aggressive behaviour seen among many citizens of Westeros.

So a bit of basic physics, aerodynamics, and some working knowledge of human physiology can tell you a lot about Westeros – where dragons fly, fire is to be feared, and the people's irrational behaviour is not necessarily down to what they're drinking, but what they're breathing.

Guy Gratton is an aerospace engineering academic, who sometimes is paid to write or appear in the media on aviation matters, or to fly aeroplanes. This article is based, with permission, upon one which previously appeared in Global Aviator Magazine. He knows that Westeros isn't real, but the maths and science in this article are.
 Guy Gratton, Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Aeronautics, Brunel University London Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61599 2016-06-24T17:14:20Z 2016-06-24T17:14:20Z Labour's failure to understand its voters has sent it into existential crisis
Before the EU referendum, the Labour Party was at risk of falling into a state of shocking disrepair. But now that Britain has voted to leave, it has entered what may be a terminal decline.

It's not just that the party leadership campaigned for Remain, whereas a majority of the British people (and many Labour voters among them) voted to leave the EU. And it's not just that the Parliamentary Labour Party will soon take up a motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. The problem is far deeper.

Under Corbyn, Labour has proven wholly incapable of reconnecting with its own supporters in traditional strongholds, the same voters it has seen slipping away two elections in a row. In places such as Sunderland, Oldham and Rochdale they not only voted to leave the EU, but in some instances did so by more than 40 points.

This is just the latest act in a long tragedy. In the minds of many of its traditional supporters, Labour has long since ceased to represent those people it was set up to defend.

Above all, it has failed those left behind by globalisation, who are subject to a combination of economic insecurity and cultural anxiety, unemployment and precarious work. They have profound concerns about the impact of immigration (more about this later). These left-behind voters associate this miserable status quo with the UK's membership of the EU, and view the Westminster elite as accomplices of the faceless Brussels bureaucrats who forced it upon them.

A series of Labour leaders and swaths of Labour MPs have ignored the core values of the party's traditional supporters, and have instead appealed mostly to a small section of the electorate – essentially a coalition of university graduates, public sector workers and certain ethnic minorities.

What these sections of society share in common is a metropolitan, liberal outlook that is at odds with the more "small-c" conservative disposition of the working-class and many older voters in the towns and villages across England – a concern for family, work, place and community.

It was these more socially conservative voters who voted so strongly for Leave. As YouGov polling showed, around a third of all Labour voters voted to leave the EU and almost two-thirds of them came from less affluent socio-economic backgrounds. Even if middle-class lefties outnumber them, those Labour supporters are indispensable if the party wants to have any hope of winning the next general election.

But far from mobilising voters, Labour is haemorrhaging support to other parties, chief of all Nigel Farage's UKIP. At the 2015 election, UKIP came second in 120 constituencies across England, 44 of which are held by Labour in its traditional midland and northern heartlands. Many of these seats' Labour MPs have majorities of fewer than 1,000 votes, making them extremely vulnerable – especially if the next Tory leader calls a snap election after David Cameron steps down in the autumn.

If Corbyn leads the party to a general election in its current terminal state, Labour's ranks could collapse to as few as parliamentary 150 seats and cease to be a serious national force.

Culture matters

As Jon Cruddas's inquiry into the dismal 2015 defeat found, Labour is now toxic with more socially conservative voters who are concerned about immigration, welfare, patriotism and Europe. Of those voters, Cruddas found that an overwhelming number consider immigration the single most important challenge facing both the party and the country.

But even though this problem was flagged long before the referendum campaign began, Labour's leaders and the bulk of its MPs don't actually seem to understand why so many Labour voters are anxious about immigration: first, competition in terms of jobs and the downward effect on wages; second, the impact on public services and the allocation of social housing or welfare benefits; and third, the loss of tradition, culture and community. Among Labour's old supporters, the second and the third reason are the most significant.

The old myth that economics trumps culture should therefore be considered dead. The politics of identity and belonging is far more potent than the transactional politics of retail-style technocracy. Against many predictions, globalisation is not turning the world into a vast cosmopolitan monoculture; on the contrary, we have seen a surge in nationalism and tribalism, a proliferation of struggles for devolution and self-determination, and a renewed concern about ethnicity, shared culture and patriotism.

In Britain, the task is to marry metropolitan modernity with English small-c conservative culture, and to fuse them into a common sense of national purpose. This would mean acknowledging and incorporating all the things both London and Brussels elites have dismissed as anachronisms: tradition, a respect for settled ways of life, a sense of place and belonging, a desire for home and rootedness, the continuity of relationships at work and in one's neighbourhood.

Far from being reactionary or jingoistic, this is a call to rediscover English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish patriotism in popular culture, in language and in historical narratives and popular practices.

For Labour, Brexit is not just another wake-up call: it looks like the party's last chance to rediscover a proper purpose. Getting rid of Corbyn will be the easy bit. The real task is to regain popular trust and a place in the life of ordinary people.

Adrian Pabst does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Adrian Pabst, Reader in Politics; Director, Centre for Federal Studies, University of Kent Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61614 2016-06-24T16:43:25Z 2016-06-24T16:43:25Z By riding the tiger of populism, the Conservatives may have destroyed the UK
It's a familiar cliché that the Conservative Party is the most successful political party in the democratic world. Once called the natural party of government, it has been in power for most of the last 150 years and, for good or ill, has shaped modern Britain. The UK is a conservative country in all senses of the word.

But the past four decades have demonstrated that the modern Conservative Party can no longer be trusted in its role as the guardian of British institutions.

The revolutionary free-market zealotry of the Thatcherites and their successors not only put the social fabric of Britain under severe strain, but also undermined the credibility of the UK's constitutional arrangements. Of the three pillars of High Toryism; church, state and monarchy, Britons only seem to still like the latter.

The decline in Tory respect for British institutions has also been on full display, not least in David Cameron's willingness to risk the union's survival twice – first in the Scottish Independence referendum, and then, probably fatally, in the EU membership referendum.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, has already signalled that she will in all likelihood now call another referendum at a time of her government's choosing. The leaders of Sinn Fein, meanwhile, are calling for a referendum on Irish unification. In time, we will now quite probably witness the break-up of the UK – all because of of an arrogant and ill-starred gamble for partisan advantage.

Even worse, the Tories have wreaked this havoc on the UK while riding the tiger of angry populism that they have done so much to cause in the first place. In England in particular, this populist rage has mapped to a certain extent onto the resurgent nationalism amplified by the Scottish referendum.

On the day after the result of the Scottish referendum, Cameron further stoked English grievances against Scotland's attempted departure, and subsequently exploited fears of SNP influence over a possible Miliband Labour government during the 2015 general election campaign. Inevitably, that tiger has now devoured Cameron.

The ties that bind

Despite the insurrectionist rhetoric, however, all we have seen so far in concrete terms is the prospect of the transfer of political power from one Eton-educated Tory to another. The British political elite remains as distant and out of touch as it ever was. But the departure of Cameron will be just the start of a process, not the end of one.

The grievances that fuel provincial populism – economic decline, globalisation, demographic change, pressure on services, disappointment with their own lives, fears for their children's futures – can never be addressed by the narrow market solutions favoured by Boris Johnson and his acolytes. Making a real difference to these people's lives would require a degree of state activism and redistributive economic policy that most of today's Tories cannot conceive of, let alone countenance.

Johnson's muted attempt to reach out to the Remain camp immediately after the result indicates that he senses the danger ahead. For, in less time than many probably anticipate, the angry citizens who voted Leave in the hope of a change in circumstances will realise they have been sold a dodgy bill of goods in order to transfer power from one bunch of toffs to another. They will ask why they remain in low-wage jobs, why their children still can't get on the housing ladder, why life remains insecure, and they will no longer have Europe to blame.

They will inevitably look closer to home for their scapegoats. When that happens, Johnson, Theresa May or whoever else becomes the next Conservative Party leader and prime minister later this year will find that the ties that bind us all have stretched painfully thin.

Charles Lees is a member of the Labour Party
 Charles Lees, Professor of Politics, University of Bath Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61615 2016-06-24T16:22:15Z 2016-06-24T16:22:15Z Gibraltar voted to remain in the EU, so where next for the Rock?

 Xiquinho Silva, CC BY

José Manuel García-Margallo, the acting Spanish foreign minister, has once again called for joint British-Spanish sovereignty of Gibraltar in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the EU.

David Lidington, UK's Europe minister (whose department also has responsibility for Gibraltar), moved to reassure Gibraltarians of Britain's commitment to their right to determine their own sovereignty. Nevertheless, Gibraltarians are entertaining severe doubts about their future relationship with the UK.

When the UK leaves the European Union so too, by default, will Gibraltar. But the Rock's economy relies upon labour and supplies from the surrounding Spanish hinterland and upon its ability to trade within the European common market. Even if Britain can negotiate to retain access to European markets, it will certainly stand outside of Europe's borders, making the frontier between Gibraltar and Spain an external border.

As a condition of its accession to what was the EEC in 1986, Spain was forced by Britain (at the threat of a veto) to reopen the Gibraltar-Spain frontier, which had been closed by General Franco in 1969. With Britain's exit from the European Union looming, Spain has threatened to escalate its economic blockade of Gibraltar. Interference at the frontier in 2013 was only alleviated by the intervention of the European Union. Such aid will not be forthcoming in future.

Spain's point is that if Gibraltar opted for joint sovereignty, its frontier would not be an external border with Europe. It would simply be a part of the territorial integrity of Spain. That would allow it to continue accessing European markets and guarantee free movement of goods and labour over the frontier.

But this logic will not find any credence on the Rock. Beyond the fact that Spanish sovereignty, even joint sovereignty, will be politically unacceptable to Gibraltarians, the local economy depends upon its institutional separateness to Spain. Moreover, joint sovereignty would be perceived by Gibraltarians as a starting point to an inevitable, if forced, repudiation of British sovereignty. In this sense, the referendum changes nothing in regards to the sovereignty dispute – any form of concession to Spanish sovereignty is as unacceptable to Gibraltarians now as it was before the referendum.

So where are we now? As Gareth Stockey and I have argued, Gibraltarian identity coalesced at the turn of the century into a sense of nationalism. Many Gibraltarians would concede that their past owes much to a sense of Britishness, but would also argue that Gibraltarian identity – and economic and political interest – is no longer aligned to the UK.

And the result of the EU referendum does much to confirm this – in Gibraltar, 96% of the electorate voted remain on an 84% turnout. Far from Gibraltarians seeing their future as being caught between Britain and Spain, there are now likely to be substantial calls for Gibraltar to become independent and to negotiate separate entry into the EU. The model that will be looked to will surely be Scotland, whose leaders are also likely to call for independence with the EU.

Chris Grocott's PhD thesis on the history of Gibraltar was funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) between 2002-2005.
 Chris Grocott, Lecturer in Management and Economic History, University of Leicester Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61459 2016-06-24T15:50:23Z 2016-06-24T15:50:23Z Germany's reaction to Brexit: a catastrophe but we'll cope
The morning after the UK's decision to leave the EU, as I was on my way from the University of Braunschweig, in Lower Saxony, where I had given a talk on Brexit, to the hotel, a German taxi driver told me that the Brexit vote is a catastrophe for Britain and for Germany.

The prospect of Brexit had been widely covered in the German media in recent weeks in a well-informed and comprehensive debate. Two weeks before the referendum, the magazine Der Spiegel published an edition in German and English under the title: "Please don't go/Bitte geht nicht", accompanied by an image of the Union Flag.

Der Spiegel's key message was that it was "smarter" for the UK to stay in the European Union. The magazine argued that the future of the West was at stake, and that the referendum was about preserving Europe's competitiveness in a time of change and struggle between world powers.

Not only would Brexit damage Britain and the EU as a whole, it would also be a catastrophe for Germany. If Britain left the EU, Germany would lose an important ally, one that is much admired by Germans, especially by the post-war generation inspired by the British sense of freedom. Without the UK, the magazine argued, Germany would be "condemned" to take on a leadership role in Europe that it does not want.

Der Spiegel's forthright approach was in contrast to German politicians' reticence to express strong opinions before the vote. British Prime Minister David Cameron had asked his European counterparts not to get involved, lest they inflame anti-EU sentiment. For this reason, there were few significant interventions by German politicians during the referendum campaign.

Merkel: no kneejerk response

In the early hours of June 24, when the results of the referendum were announced, German politicians maintained the same approach. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made only a short statement, calling the result a watershed moment for the process of European unification, and one that she personally regrets. At the same time, she warned against a kneejerk response to the referendum result, calling for calm and prudence in the EU's dealings with the UK.

She acknowledged that across the whole of the EU, many citizens have doubts about greater European integration. "Therefore", Merkel said, "we must ensure that the citizens feel that the EU can improve their lives. The EU is strong enough to find the right responses to today's problems." She added that it was now important for the 27 other member states to stand together and make sure that the EU finds a common solution.

There were few signs of complacency in German politicians' reactions towards the vote. Many fear a domino effect, citing the example of Marine LePen, the leader of the French far-right Front National, who has now called for France to hold its own "Frexit" referendum.

In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a Eurosceptic far-right populist party, is on the rise and predicted to win over five per cent of the votes and enter the Bundestag in the 2017 federal elections. Many German commentators fear the AfD and other similar parties across Europe will repeat UKIP's electoral appeal, which is based on bundling up opposition to the EU with a strong anti-immigration stance.

Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the vote, the German media has been focusing a great deal on the economic consequences of the Brexit vote. While the initial slump in the value of sterling was reported as being bad and dangerous for the British economy, a number of German economists also stressed that Frankfurt, Germany's financial capital, could actually attract investments and money away from the City of London. Britain's loss would be Germany's gain. But such voices were in the minority.

The overwhelming message across all forms of German media has been one of regret on the result. Most Germans think that the EU is necessary to address common European and global challenges, and they also think that the EU needs the UK.

Isabelle Hertner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Isabelle Hertner, Lecturer in German and European Politics and Society, Deputy Director of the Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61605 2016-06-24T15:39:18Z 2016-06-24T15:39:18Z How the UK press woke up to Brexit with that morning-after feeling
As Britain – and indeed, the rest of the world – reels from the ramifications of the Brexit vote in the UK, we are already hearing many explanations about the motives of those who disregarded so much expert testimony and voted to leave. Watching the television as the news sank in, I heard countless descriptions of the Brexit vote – from journalists and campaigners on both sides – as a kind of anti-establishment insurgency.

Yet, in many ways, that was precisely what it wasn't. What 52% of voters did on Thursday was very much in line with reported conventional wisdom. Research carried out by Loughborough University during the campaign showed a clear bias towards Leave in the newspapers most people read.

Across the UK national press, Leave articles outnumbered those on the Remain side by 59% to 41%. When weightings for circulation are factored in, this ratio becomes an overwhelming "18% pro-IN and 82% pro-OUT". While the broadcast media tried hard to remain balanced, the overall media climate clearly favoured Leave. If there was anyone resisting what they were being told to do, it was many of the 48% on the Remain side.

 It was the Sun wot got it wrong. The Sun

But even so there was an air of shocked surprise in even some of the papers that had favoured Brexit. The Sun, for example, rushed out with a front page almost as soon as polls closed, quoting Nigel Farage's rather strange apparent – and certainly well premature – concession. The steadily eurosceptic Daily Mail, meanwhile, mixed triumphalism with caution: giving its right-wing columnist Katie Hopkins free rein to gloat while at the same time cautioning of financial turmoil to come. Somewhat late, it warned its middle England readership that their savings and investments might be in for a bumpy ride.

On the openly Remain side, The Guardian had an air of shock about it. Polly Toynbee mourned for a Britain that has broken in two, thanks to the way eurosceptic media and politicians had "injected poison into the nation's bloodstream".

A lie repeated

So was it, to echo the now-infamous boast by The Sun, the media wot won it for Brexit? Many years of research tells us that it is hard for campaigns to inspire dramatic shifts in public sentiment. The seeds of the Brexit vote were sown long before the campaign began – and not just by a Eurosceptic press. When Cardiff University looked at the broadcast media coverage of the EU in recent years it found that – despite its commitment to impartiality – the EU was repeatedly cast as a negative force in people's lives (bureaucratic, interfering, undemocratic and the rest). Political debate was not whether the EU was good or bad – it was almost a given that the EU was a problem – but how best for Britain to deal with such a behemoth.

Research by the monitoring group Media Tenor found much the same. Even our more even-handed media (the BBC and the Financial Times) has portrayed the EU in overwhelmingly negative terms over a 15-year period. Indeed, their research suggests that only during the final week of the campaign did positive and negative portrayals became evenly balanced. As Media Tenor put it:

Nobody wins a referendum against an opposing media narrative … The Brexit vote was less a referendum and more of a reflex on how opinion-leading media have framed Brussels and Strasbourg for a long time.

So while broadcasters were very careful to remain impartial during the campaign, they had – over a period of decades – helped to create a climate of negativity around the EU. By the time the campaign began, it was too late to ask the question: "What has the EU ever done for us?" – and even more difficult for politicians (who prefer not to go against conventional wisdom) to answer it.

Blame's a game

The news media would, reasonably enough, blame the politicians. Governments have, for obvious reasons, often portrayed themselves as standing up for Britain's interests against the EU. It is always much easier to blame Brussels than accept responsibility as an influential member state. If David Cameron's advocacy of the EU sounded unconvincing, it was because he had colluded in the traditional sport of bashing the EU for so long. Much the same could be said about immigration, which is invariably presented as a problem.

 Happy days for the permanently europsceptic Daily Express. Daily Express

The media coverage, in this sense, reflected the political debate. Indeed, Media Tenor has found much the same patterns of coverage in other EU countries, for many of the same reasons.

But is this good enough? Reporters have a duty to challenge politicians, and yet the Cardiff study found that when it came to the EU, they did little to question the basis for a politician's anti-EU stance, and all too often replicated it.

It certainly did little to educate people about the EU: people in the UK were almost uniquely ill-informed going into the campaign. A Eurobarometer survey last year found that only 27% of people in the UK could answer three basic questions about the EU – lower than in any of the other 28 member states except Latvia.

So while the broadcasters (unlike the press) may have passed the test of impartiality during the campaign, it was after years of one-sided coverage. A vote to leave was, in that sense, the obvious default response, while the Remain camp was obliged to try and sell a damaged bill of goods. All this may, of course, be one reason why young people are so much less cynical about the EU. They are much not only less likely to read newspapers, but they have been subjected to fewer years of one-sided coverage.

Justin Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Justin Lewis, Professor of Communication, Cardiff University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61526 2016-06-24T15:35:49Z 2016-06-24T15:35:49Z Making young children give everything to football is a bad idea – here's why

Jossie's juveniles.  matimix

Many of the players at Euro 2016 will have been recruited to football clubs as children. Football has become such a big business that top clubs are under great pressure to ensure they recruit the next Cristiano Ronaldo before their nearest rival. As a result, they are taking on players very young.

British clubs commonly take advantage of the fact that they can sign players on schoolboy terms from the age of nine. And the clubs invite even younger children to their development centres and have been known to scout five-year-olds.

When a youngster signs for a big club, they and their parents sometimes have to agree not to play other sports or play for other football teams for fear of injury. This helps explain why British players who go on to become professionals tend not to participate in other sports. Yet the average age of World Cup winning teams is as old as 27.5 years. So is this early specialisation necessary?

Many specialists like myself would say it looks more like a by-product of the current talent development system rather than the most effective route to expertise. Research suggests that in sports like football where players reach their peak well into adulthood, you needn't specialise before the age of 13; and you're more likely to keep playing and to become an elite performer if you take part in a range of activities between the ages of six and 12.

One of the main arguments in favour of early specialisation is the hypothetical positive relationship between the amounts of time you spend practising a sport and the level of achievement you go on to attain – the idea that 10,000 hours of practice makes perfect. But this has been widely contested within sports research – and, even if this is true, it's not necessarily an argument for concentrating on one sport.

For example the Stoke City and England goalkeeper Jack Butland, who is missing Euro 2016 through injury, played rugby alongside football until he was 16. He strongly believes the rugby helped him develop as a goalkeeper. The research evidence suggests that related team sports with similar rules, movement, dimensions and strategies to football have the most transferable benefits. Playing darts may not be quite as beneficial, in other words.

The impact of specialising early

At top UK football clubs, only one in 200 of those under nine make it to the senior team. There are obvious psychological effects on young footballers having to cope with not only the time demands and pressure of being part of a professional club but often the brutal rejection following years of commitment.

It also takes its toll on the body by subjecting young players to more frequent and intensive loads. Between 10% and 40% of football injuries among children and adolescents are from playing too much. Players under 14 incur more training injuries than older players and they develop growth-related disorders linked to overplaying because their skeletons and tissue are still growing. The evidence indicates that children are better off not training intensively, yet the UK has recently adopted an Elite Player Performance Plan that focuses on early specialisation and increases the number of on-pitch hours for youngsters per week.

For all these reasons, the compromise for numerous continental European football clubs is to engage players at a young age but not to make them overspecialise. For example FC Barcelona is Europe's largest multi-sports club. It has four professional sections besides football – basketball, handball, roller hockey and futsal (a variant of five-a-side football). There are also six amateur sections – athletics, rugby, volleyball, field hockey, ice hockey and figure skating. Another example of this approach is Sporting Clube de Portugal, home to Sporting Lisbon.

 Messi need not apply. OK Fotos, CC BY-SA

Then there are clubs such as Belgium's Standard Liége, which are not multi-sports clubs but do provide coaching support that develops general skills and abilities, such as agility and coordination, that can be transferable to numerous sports.

These clubs approach youth football in these ways because the reality is that early specialisation is not the most effective route to the top. Countries whose clubs operate in this way are surely more likely to end up with the better players in the long run. The UK has long had a reputation for producing very few top players from club academies. If Euro 2016 ends up being another campaign where England falls short, it needs to take this into account.

Jessica Pinchbeck does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Jessica Pinchbeck, Lecturer in Sport and Fitness, The Open University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61603 2016-06-24T15:07:08Z 2016-06-24T15:07:08Z Did Bank of England governor speech shore up confidence in Brexit UK?
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney was admirably quick to read the unfolding economic dangers of a Brexit when the referendum result was declared. While stock markets and sterling plummeted amid developing financial stress, the governor's statement immediately brought to mind the famous "whatever it takes [to save the euro]" intervention by European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi at the height of the eurozone crisis in July 2012.

Carney started by making clear that the British banks are safe since their capital requirements are now ten times higher than before the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The purpose of these high requirements is to ensure banks will be able to pay off their depositors, which aims to reduce the risk of a banking panic.

Indeed, the UK banks have been stress-tested against more adverse scenarios than what the Treasury thought that Brexit might trigger. The scenarios included residential property prices falling by over 30% and the level of GDP falling by 4% at the same time as a 5% rise in unemployment.

The governor was obviously seeking to reassure the public that whatever the economic/financial headwinds after the Brexit vote, British banks are rock solid and won't see a repeat of the queues outside Northern Rock branches nine years ago.

Carney was absolutely right to do this. Lack of confidence in domestic banks often triggers recessions as depositors withdraw money, which restrict the banks' ability to lend and keep the economy growing. This can be particularly lethal when combined with capital flight, which is where nervous investors offload a country's currency and assets priced in the currency for fear that it is falling in value.

In Britain's case, there were reasons on the ground to justify the intervention. British customers have queued outside banks to ditch sterling in an attempt to "hedge" against Brexit. And the news of sterling dropping like a stone on the night of the count was a strong signal that investor confidence was deserting the UK.

The worries of these investors are well summed up by the IMF's warnings over Brexit:

[It] could entail sharp drops in equity and house prices, increased borrowing costs for households and businesses, and even a sudden stop of investment inflows into key sectors such as commercial real estate and finance.

The UK's record-high current account deficit and attendant reliance on external financing exacerbates these risks. Such market reactions could sharply contract economic activity, further depressing asset prices in a self-reinforcing cycle.

The liquidity weapon

As well as the reassurances about strong banks, Mark Carney also said the Bank of England is prepared to inject up to £250bn of liquidity for financial institutions to keep the economy going in these difficult times ahead. Without doubt, this is substantial financial help amounting to some two-thirds of the £375bn that the central bank has already pumped into the system in the form of quantitative easing in recent years.

Carney also referred to "extensive contingency planning" with Chancellor George Osborne throughout the night, as well as mentioning potential "additional measures" such as providing substantial liquidity in foreign currency if it was needed. That might desperately be needed by British companies trading internationally which might be exposed to large fluctuations in exchange rates because of turbulence with sterling.

Yet the governor deliberately didn't spell out what any other measures might be. One option might be to cut the base rate down to zero or even charge banks for "parking" their cash with the Bank of England. The European Central Bank is already doing this to encourage European banks to continue lending to the private sector.

Carney was right not to reveal his full defensive armour yet. Suffice for the time being to let both the public and the markets know he has other policy weapons in place and is ready to be tested if the economic conditions make it necessary.

Cameron steps down

The governor's speech came shortly after David Cameron resigned. The British prime minister was trying to show a very brave face by delaying his departure to October. This makes absolute economic and political sense because the captain of a sinking (UK) ship has a moral obligation to be the last one to abandon it.

Yet in truth, the eurosceptic Tories would hardly trust him to start the Brexit negotiations with the EU when he has fought passionately to stay in. He therefore might lose his job much earlier than he thinks. Not that this would have made any difference to the markets – his defeat made his departure unavoidable. The only thing that might have further traumatised the markets would have been if he had not resigned.

But despite Carney and Cameron's efforts to steady the markets, they could do nothing to disguise the UK's lack of preparation or plans for handling the Brexit negotiations. There are many possible options for trade deals with the EU but no clear direction.

The Brexit camp, particularly Justice Secretary Michael Gove, has attacked the economic "experts" who overwhelmingly warned of the huge economic and financial risks of such a move. They warned that four UK companies would lose out for every one that benefits from leaving the EU.

The odd argument of the Brexit camp is that these experts have to be wrong because they did not predict the 2008-09 financial crisis. "Once wrong, always wrong," in other words. Now that Mark Carney has had to step in while the politicians try and work out what happens next, we will know pretty soon whether we economists are going to be wrong this time around. Don't be surprised if we haven't seen the last intervention from the Bank of England.

Gabriella Legrenzi has previously received research funding from the Italian government.

Costas Milas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Costas Milas, Professor of Finance, University of Liverpool Gabriella Legrenzi, Senior lecturer in economics, Keele University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61455 2016-06-24T15:02:54Z 2016-06-24T15:02:54Z Breaking down Brexit: how the UK voted
So ends the most bitter and polarising experience of British electoral democracy. The economics of Brexit was heatedly and endlessly debated in the UK's referendum campaign on EU membership, but ultimately it was trumped by voters' considerations about national integrity and identity. A majority of 17.4m people voted to leave, against 16.1m for remain.

How the drama unfolded

Assiduous watchers of the early referendum results had been advised that if the outcome in Sunderland (perenially among the first to declare election results) showed anything more than a six-point winning margin for Leave, then Brexit would be the likely outcome nationally. Anything less, however, and Remain could expect overall victory.

In the event, Sunderland produced a remarkable 22-point margin in favour of Leave (61-39), while nearby Newcastle, which had been expected to produce a comfortable margin for Remain, only narrowly favoured the pro-EU choice (51% to 49%). The value of sterling fell off a cliff as the currency markets reacted to these early shocks, but the Remain side's nerves were briefly steadied a little by better than predicted results in Swindon and Lewisham.

But the bad news for Remain continued to pile up, as a pattern of polarisation emerged, with Leave areas proving even more hostile to the EU than had been expected, especially in the north, eastern England and Wales, and Remain areas being more supportive, at least in parts of London.

At 72%, turnout was extraordinarily high by the standards of recent general elections, but especially in the pro-Leave areas. Appalling weather on the day may have depressed turnout in London, while the other major pro-Leave zone, Scotland, saw a lower than average turnout as well – 67%. By 2am, quantitative forecasters were giving Remain a negligible chance of winning, and predicting 56% for Leave, while the bookies now made the Brexit side favourites to win.

By 2.30am there were glimmers of renewed hope for the increasingly despondent Remain campaign with the first results coming in from London – a massive 79% pro-Remain vote from Lambeth, followed shortly after by a 75% pro-Remain vote in Wandsworth, and 70% in Hammersmith and Fulham. This was enough to put Remain in the lead once again, yet only fleetingly.

Ultimately these pockets of pro-European sentiment were not enough and by 5.30am the outcome was confirmed: the UK had voted to leave the EU.

The final figures showed a 52%-48% winning majority on a 72% turnout. Voters had understood that this was a more existential question than a mere general election and mobilised in greater numbers than had been their wont for nearly two decades.

In demographic terms, the Remain and Brexit camps have been well defined for some time. Support for Brexit resembles that for UKIP in various ways, with particular strengths among older people, lower social class and less well educated voters. In YouGov's last referendum poll conducted on the day of the vote itself, Leave seemed to enjoy commanding leads among voters aged over 50, and those whose highest educational qualification was GCSE or lower. Remain was the clear preference of those aged 18-49 and those educated to A-Level or degree standard.

While Remain voters were primarily motivated by concerns about the economy and what was in the best interests of their families, Leave supporters were chiefly driven by the desire to enhance the UK's ability to act independently of other countries and to deal with the issue of immigration. The country split quite neatly into those for whom pocketbook considerations were paramount (and who opted for Remain) and those who sought to protect national integrity and identity (and who chose to Leave).

Referendum geography

The polarisation of the UK is now sharply apparent in geographical terms. The vote for Brexit was strongest in a swathe of areas running down the east of England, especially in parts of Lincolnshire, Essex and the East Midlands, while London, Scotland and Northern Ireland remain the outposts of pro-EU sentiment. With Wales also voting for Leave, the electoral picture shows a nation divided.

Beyond the UK (or what will eventually be left of it) the ramifications will be felt with great resonance: populists in France, Italy and the Netherlands have demanded their own national referenda on EU membership. Closer to home, relations between two Irelands, one in the EU and one outside it, will bring further complexity to that island's convoluted and troubled politics. This one will run and run.

Paul Webb receives funding from The Economic & Social Research Council.
 Paul Webb, Professor of Politics, University of Sussex Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61458 2016-06-24T14:54:31Z 2016-06-24T14:54:31Z Capital against country, young against old: Brexit Britain is broken Britain
Is Brexit Britain David Cameron's famous "broken Britain"? The bitterness of the referendum campaign and the divides it has revealed within the Conservative Party and between the Labour Party and its core supporters might certainly suggest so.

Deep rifts now run between old and young, London and England, England and Scotland. The prospect of a second referendum on Scottish independence is now firmly in play.

The Remain camp argued for a Britain playing its full part in Europe and accused Brexit of wanting a "little England". Is that what we have all woken up to this morning?

"Little Englander" is a rather contemptuous term originally used by Victorian supporters of the Empire. It was used especially with reference to Britain's role in the Boer War to denigrate their opponents and critics, who they accused of wanting to keep Britain small and ineffectual in a world of global European empires.

More recently it has been used by pro-Europeans to accuse Brexiters of much the same thing in a world of regional unions. Are they right? Has the electorate's decision to back Brexit revealed Britain as a little country, a small island, inward-looking and parochial?

It depends firstly on what we mean by Britain. Modern little Englanderism hardly applies in Scotland. England and Wales may have turned their backs on Europe but Scotland, true to its continental links dating back to the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) emphatically did not. The fear of Scottish independence made not a jot of difference to voting intentions in England or Wales on Thursday. Did English and Welsh voters realise they were clearly turning their backs on Edinburgh as well as on Brussels? Maybe, but didn't care. Perhaps they hate the EU even more than they value the Union.

Disraeli spoke of England as "two nations" – the rich and the poor. Modern England is just as divided but along a different faultline. This referendum was a revolt of the provinces against the domination of the capital. Not since London rallied to the side of parliament and drove out Charles I have capital and country been so much at odds.

For all the talk of immigration – and this was par excellence a vote about immigration – there is a certain irony that the most immigrant-rich part of the whole country voted overwhelmingly to remain.

Young people, unhindered by memories of World War II or the immediate post-war period, are much more European in outlook than the older generation, who voted for a nostalgic "golden age" when, they assume, Britain was Great.

The Brexit campaign's "take back control" slogan was a canny exercise in nostalgia politics. It suggested that there was a time before 1973 when Britain was fully in control of its destiny. But was there? Britain had twice sought entry to the EEC before 1973 precisely because it felt so economically and politically powerless in its post-imperial role. Is it now about to return to that state of impotence?

Two years after Edward Heath took Britain into the EEC he was himself thrown out of office in a general election fought on the question "Who Rules Britain?" David Cameron has now been brought down by a referendum fought on much the same question. As we survey the ravaged political landscape that has resulted, the question must now be: what sort of Britain has Brexit left his successor to govern?

Sean Lang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Sean Lang, Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61535 2016-06-24T13:37:02Z 2016-06-24T13:37:02Z How Brexit triggered a global market meltdown
Despite reassurances that we shouldn't listen to the experts, the financial markets have gone and behaved almost exactly as the experts predicted. Following the news that the UK will be leaving the EU, the pound has dropped to a level not seen since 1985. The FSTE has had the biggest one day drop ever.

On top of this, the yields of UK government bonds has hit an all time low. The price of commodities such as oil dropped 6% on the Brexit vote. House builders have been particularly hard hit, suggesting massive declines in the property sector. Alternatives assets like gold and bitcoin have rallied as people look for safe places to stash their money.

This very British crisis has quickly cascaded across national borders. The German share market fell 10% and the French market fell 8%. Outside of Europe there have been big falls on Japanese and Australian share markets too. Futures suggest that the American S&P 500 and the Nasdaq indexes will both open down 5% as well.

So what started out as a vote by some angry people in England has rapidly become a global economic event. It has spread across continents and asset classes. It has unleashed a kind of contagion which was last seen during the financial crisis of 2008.

Complex web

This contagion happens as falls in one asset class start to make another look more vulnerable. For instance as shares in banks go down, other funds which hold shares in these banks are likely to look increasingly shaky. Given the complex web of interlocking assets in the global financial system, it is often difficult to say when the contagion might stop. It could mean that assets which are not fundamentally affected by Brexit take a price hit – at least in the short term.

Another common dynamic which kicks off when there are large scale and complex economic events such as Brexit is herd-like behaviour. The surprise of the referendum outcome led to usual assumptions being thrown out the window. In these situations traders increasingly look to each other for a sense of what an asset is actually worth.

As a result, they can start to ignore the fundamentals and start to follow what the crowd is doing. Social proof is relied on by traders, rather than actual proof. In some cases this leads to the creation of asset bubbles. In other cases, like Brexit, it can create negative feedback loops which lead to massive falls in assets.

 Currency cliff. xe.com, CC BY-ND

As falls in markets around the world pick up steam, they could easily start to connect up with wider global economic issues which have been simmering away in the background. These include the slow burning debt crisis in China, problems with the Brazilian economy in recent months, or over-inflated housing markets in some parts of the world. And, given that most trading strategies today are automated, there could be some nasty and unpredictable surprises hiding deep within a company's algorithms.

When economic news sours, investors tend to start being more vigilant. They look more closely at their portfolios and are more likely to dispose of assets which they are a bit concerned with. As a result they get rid of good assets in an attempt to put their mind at rest. This can then create falls in asset prices.

Stopping the rout?

Central banks usually have the ability to step in to calm things down – mainly by lowering interest rates to encourage additional economic activity. The problem is that with interest rates at close to zero, central bankers don't have a lot of room for manoeuvre. This only leaves the option of quantitative easing – a solution that can simply kick the can down the road. It is uncertain whether slick communication from central bankers – as the Bank of England governor Mark Carney was swift to do on the heels of Brexit – is enough at moments like this.

Contagion, herding and misplaced vigilance are only likely to create more uncertainty about when financial markets will settle. It may be some time before we actually know how they will settle down after their Brexit shock. After all, we have no idea what Brexit will actually look like and it will likely be two years before we do.

In the meantime, HSBC predicts the pound will continue to fall to as low as US$1.20 by the end of the year. And market volatility is likely to continue for some time as the news triggers off all sorts of contagion, via the complex networks that financial markets run on.

Andre Spicer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Andre Spicer, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Cass Business School, City University London Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61608 2016-06-24T13:16:35Z 2016-06-24T13:16:35Z As British PM resigns, Boris Johnson is pivoting towards the premiership
In the context of market volatility, and in the wake of David Cameron's resignation, former London mayor Boris Johnson sought to adopt a different, more measured, tone when making his first post-referendum speech.

The extremely divisive referendum campaign was marked by hyperbole on both sides of the debate. This was Johnson's opportunity to recast his image in a more statesmanlike light. In a notably subdued manner he paid tribute to David Cameron – who had announced he would leave his post by October – and sought to steady the nation's nerves at a time of considerable legal, political and financial uncertainty.

With Number 10 now at stake, Johnson is pivoting. It's a move familiar to US presidential candidates, who play to their party's core support during primaries and then adopt a more conciliatory tone in the general election for the presidency.

In order to appeal to voters on the middle ground, politicians who harbour leadership ambitions need to demonstrate that they are not extreme or extremely silly. Johnson has become a celebrity on the back of his persona but now has to persuade the Conservative electoral college that he is a sensible choice for prime minister.

Johnson spoke of how "sad" he was that Cameron had decided to step down, praising him for delivering the first Conservative majority government Britain has seen for decades.

Michael Gove, a comparatively sober politician despite his own moment of hyperbole during the campaign, may also harbour leadership hopes. He too will need to pivot if he wants to realise these ambitions. His task will be to prove himself capable of healing the deep wounds in the Conservative Party.

The Conservative parliamentary party will soon produce a long list of candidates to succeed Cameron before seeking the views of the wider party. So Johnson, Gove and any other contender will first have to appeal to their parliamentary colleagues.

Other potential candidates waiting in the wings, such as Theresa May, will also need to demonstrate that they can offer a wide appeal to voters. Pleasing Conservative MPs and the most ideologically committed members of the party is only the first hurdle. Party management considerations will also be an important consideration for selecting the next Conservative leader. Cameron helped to restore the Conservative Party to power because he proved so effective – at least until recent years – at containing agitation within his own party. He managed to hold it together despite divisions over Europe. He also appealed to voters across the political spectrum like few before him.

It's hard to tell whether Johnson's decision to throw his lot in with Brexit was a decisive factor in swinging the referendum but he quickly became the figurehead of the campaign and the target of the Remain group's depiction of the Leave campaign as fundamentally irresponsible. Johnson appears not have been damaged by being that target.

In the weeks and months to come, he will need demonstrate that he can continue to project a responsible image while still maintaining the persona that has helped him to make him a contender to replace the current prime minister.

Philip Catney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Philip Catney, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Keele University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60822 2016-06-24T12:40:18Z 2016-06-24T12:40:18Z Do CT scans really cause cancer?

  bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock.com

Computerised tomography (CT) scans are being increasingly used for medical diagnoses. In the UK, about 3m CT scans are carried out each year, and the rate per person is around five times higher in the US. However, concerns have been raised about the increased risk of cancer in people who have undergone these scans.

A CT scan (or "CAT scan") provides doctors with a much clearer picture of what is happening inside the body than conventional X-rays. But they also deliver a much higher dose of ionising radiation. Ionising radiation causes tissue damage and can increase the risk of cancer. The increase in risk is proportional to the amount of radiation received.

Risk accumulates with repeated exposure, and children are more susceptible than adults. Because CT scans require many images to be taken in the same body area, they deliver more radiation than a conventional X-ray. For example, 50 times more radiation in the abdominal area has been detected. But a 50-fold increase in a very small number is still a small number.

It has been estimated that an abdominal scan delivers about six times as much ionising radiation as a person would receive from the environment in a year.

Finding a link

Authors of a large UK study found that children exposed to higher radiation doses from CT scans faced threefold increases in their risks of developing leukaemia and brain tumours compared with those who received lower doses. The higher the amount of radiation the children received, the greater their chances of developing these cancers were.

The number of children diagnosed with either cancer over a 17-year period was about 200 out of 180,000 who were scanned. About 170 of these 200 children would, according to the researchers, have developed cancer as a result of having had higher radiation exposure from CT scans. (They were chosen because the authors considered them to be most affected by radiation exposure.) The overall estimated risk was therefore 170 in 180,000, or about one in a thousand.

But there are methodological problems with this and similar research. Some 30,000 children could not be included in the data analysis, mainly because their medical records were incomplete, and their omission might have affected the findings. And, although the researchers attempted to do so, we cannot rule out "reverse causation", that is, some children having had more CT scans because they had underlying health problems, rather than vice versa.

 Brain cancer cells. royaltystockphoto.com/Shutterstock.com

The researchers excluded children who were given CT scans because cancer was suspected.

As the authors acknowledge, this approach has limitations. Children who receive CT scans may differ from those who do not in unknown ways which also make the former more likely to develop cancer. The only way to definitively exclude reverse causation would be to do a randomised controlled trial. This would involve randomising children into higher and lower exposure groups and following them up over a long period to see how many in each group developed cancer. This would, of course, be totally unethical.

Also, the findings don't exclude the possibility that children who have CT scans become at greater risk of experiencing other diseases, or over longer time periods than were considered in the study. Reverse causation might result in the risk from scans being overstated because the children who had more scans might have been more likely to develop cancers even if they had not been exposed to extra radiation. On the other hand, exclusion of other conditions and longer time periods might lead to the risk from scans being understated. Overall, there is considerable uncertainty about the risk estimates generated by the study.

US study

Using UK data similar to that outlined above, researchers in the US concluded that about 2% of US cancers would be caused by radiation from CT scans. This conclusion is subject to the same cautions as detailed above. Also, the absence in the US of centralised databases of health records adds further complications to risk estimates.

If the estimate is approximately right, and current UK usage of CT scans in the UK is about a fifth of the US level, then about 0.4% of UK cancers would be caused by exposure to CT scans. Although readers may view this risk as acceptably low, it would mean that about 1,400 of the 350,000 annual new cancer cases estimated to occur in the UK would result from CT scans. Given the trend towards increasing medical usage, this rate can be expected to increase in the future.

Comparing apples with oranges

Most experts believe that the risks associated with CT scans are greatly outweighed by their benefits. This conclusion might seem worryingly tentative. However, most decisions about risks entail value judgements because like is not being compared with like, in this case the clinical benefits of having CT scans to the additional cancer risk faced by those who undergo them, including otherwise healthy people.

Patients and parents offered a CT scan should ask their doctor to explain why it's needed, and whether alternatives not involving exposure to radiation could be used.

Bob Heyman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Bob Heyman, Chair professor, University of Huddersfield Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61577 2016-06-24T12:34:22Z 2016-06-24T12:34:22Z After this miserable and divisive campaign, we need to talk about immigration
Britain has voted to leave the European Union. The weeks and months of highly spirited and at times rancorous political campaigning have shown just how deep the fissures that run through Britain really are. And the ultimate dividing line, the defining issue of the referendum, was not the economy, but immigration.

For all the other issues that were thrown up, this was a campaign about securing borders and controlling numbers. It was also about diversity. What mattered for so many people across the country from the once-great industrial heartlands of the UK, the long-ago thriving seaside resorts, fishing villages and mining towns, right through to the more prosperous and affluent parts of the country was the question about national identity – how comfortable citizens feel on the streets of modern Britain.

Many people, looking into a collective national mirror, were ill at ease with the image of Britain that stared back. The mood recalls the "too diverse" argument made back in 2004 by David Goodhart, who argued that the welfare state couldn't survive if a society were too diverse because citizens are less willing to pay into a system that serves people with whom they can't identify.

One of the central ideals of the European Union, the free movement of people across national state barriers for all its hundreds of millions of citizens, was among Britons' biggest concerns. That was especially true for older generations, who have seen the country twice transformed in the post-war period, first by large-scale migration from the countries of the former British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s and, in the past decade, by migrants from newer EU accession states.

Net migration from the EU stands at 184,000 (the combined figure including migrants from both inside and outside the EU stands at 330,000). David Cameron had, of course, pledged to cut net migration to the tens of thousands and failed to deliver. Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, spoke about there being no upper limit on immigration. Clearly Cameron's failure and Corbyn's rejection of calls to clamp down worried some voters and angered others.

For the Leave camp, "taking back control of our borders" was a key mobilising slogan. Brexiters argue that Britain will be more able to control immigration outside of the EU.

While they stressed high immigration depressed wages especially for low-skilled workers, the leavers built much of their campaign on the quality of life argument – the idea that immigration had stretched public services beyond the point of adequate delivery. The solution for the Leavers was clear: to quit the EU and implement an Australian-style points based system for all newcomers from inside and outside the EU.

The remainers tried to talk around the immigration question for as long as possible, focusing instead on the economy. But faced with the blunt force of the Leave campaign's message on immigration and genuine public anxiety, they could avoid it no longer.

A nation divided

They argued that EU migrants contributed more to the UK economy in tax than they took out in benefits. They said Britain could (and indeed Cameron had) negotiated a deal to restrict the benefits for EU migrant workers. And rather more half-heartedly, they argued that immigration was on the whole good for the economy.

But what good is a few extra quid in your pocket, the Brexiters argued, when within a generation your entire world has become unrecognisable? People feel out of place in their own country. Britain, as Goodhart said, is simply too diverse.

This message was delivered most explicitly by Nigel Farage's poster of a serpent of dark-skinned migrants heading Britain's way simply read "Breaking Point". It was identified by some as the lowest point in the increasingly rancorous campaign.

The referendum is over, and its message is clear: this is a nation divided, polarised along old faultlines of class, wealth and geography that have been driven open by globalisation. Those who have benefited from the free movement of information, capital, goods and people have little in common, it seems, with those left behind.

While some on the Remain side saw most Brexiters as parochial little-Englanders mired in false nostalgia and withdrawing into defensive insularity, many on team Leave were equally contemptuous of their rivals, who they saw as rich denizens of a cosmopolitan elite who dabble in difference when they fancy it, knowing they can always afford to shut it out. The pressure on public services, school places, the NHS, and so on is only felt by those who cannot afford to go private.

This was a de facto referendum on immigration and its attendant cultural anxieties about the changing face of Britain. These feelings are sincere, and they will not go away. Its verdict is clear: we can no longer put off an informed, robust and open-minded conversation about immigration, diversity and identity – however painful.

Parveen Akhtar has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy.
 Parveen Akhtar, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Bradford Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61590 2016-06-24T11:02:41Z 2016-06-24T11:02:41Z Northern Ireland prepares to enter a post-Brexit quagmire
Unlike the UK as a whole, Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU – and now it finds itself in a deep political and economic tangle.

The Northern Irish Remain vote had been anticipated, and as expected, support was strongest in border areas and in Belfast. But the margin of victory for the Remain camp was rather tighter than opinion polls had suggested, with Remain on 55.8% to Leave's 44.2%.

The political fallout has already started. As soon as results indicated that a Leave vote was likely Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister, called for an all-Ireland vote on unification, a so-called "border poll".

This will be furiously resisted by unionists, but the call has nonetheless been made. It can only dial up the tensions in Northern Ireland's power-sharing Executive, in which the Democratic Unionist Party, Northern Ireland's largest party, shares power with Sinn Féin.

The result challenges the executive and Northern Ireland in general on several other fronts. Northern Ireland will need to decide what interests it wants to see defended in the withdrawal negotiations and safeguarded under whatever new relationship replaces the UK's membership. That debate simply has not been had, and the Leave campaign was essentially silent on the issue.

Strikingly, the draft programme for government issued after this year's assembly elections doesn't refer to the referendum, much less the possibility of the UK leaving the EU. That will have to change.

There is also the question of how exactly Northern Ireland will get its interests onto the negotiating table. London will be obliged to listen to its views, just as it will have to listen to the views of the other devolved administrations, but will it actually take them forward?

In the overall context of the UK-wide vote, the outcome matters little. However the result and the prospect of the UK leaving the EU open up a multitude of questions and challenges for Northern Ireland.

Concerns have long been expressed over what leaving the EU could mean for Northern Ireland's economy. Forecasts suggest that the effects will be negative, at least in the short and medium-term – and under most scenarios to be greater than for most of the rest of the UK. Time will tell, but even Leave supporters acknowledge that there will be some short-term economic pain.

Together and apart

The question of what Brexit would mean for the border that Northern Ireland shares with the Republic of Ireland did come up during the campaign.

Both sides predictably offered different prognoses, but even some pro-Brexit voices acknowledged that the status quo could not be sustained, regardless of the Common Travel Area arrangements between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The UK's withdrawal means that in all probability, the current "soft" border between Ireland's two parts, barely detectable to those crossing it, will have to become "harder". Some forms of border control will have to be introduced to monitor and regulate the movement of people and of goods.

If the border on the island of Ireland is not made harder, then it could be that the Great Britain will become the de facto border, at least for immigration purposes. Taken to its fullest extent, this would require UK citizens living in Northern Ireland to go through passport controls on entering England, Scotland or Wales, just as they would if they were entering from outside the UK.

The Leave vote poses many questions, and for Northern Ireland they are particularly challenging. They also have the potential to be extremely divisive – a raw deal indeed for a region that voted to Remain.

David Phinnemore has received funding from the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council and the European Union. The views expressed here do not represent those of any of these funders
 David Phinnemore, Professor of European Politics, Queen's University Belfast Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61384 2016-06-24T10:25:18Z 2016-06-24T10:25:18Z Save the environment from posh crusties – it's a working-class issue too

  arindambanerjee / shutterstock

Environmentalism is often belittled as an indulgence for the affluent. This is not simply an existential criticism, but also a potent ploy to head off any environmental argument before it can gain traction.

The tactic has merit. Contemporary environmentalism's roots make easy targets, whether it is the bunny-hugging activism of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth born in late-1960s West Coast America or the more genteel concerns about ladies decked out in egret feathers which gave rise to the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) or the National Trust's rapture for "beauty and historic interest". Even today, a new Oxford study found the people most interested in environment news tended to be left-wing, older and highly educated.

If the charge of affluence was not awkward enough, the ammunition to defend the environment is often provided by these same boffins. Being an expert is now an automatic disadvantage in any debate, even before leading Brexit campaigner Michael Gove's recent assertion that "people in this country have had enough of experts".

 Fashionable feathered hats threatened many birds with extinction and inspired the RSPB. Everglades Digital Library

All too often, the environment's advocates can be portrayed as outsiders, an elite, out of touch. This antagonism is also a curse for the disadvantaged and excluded around the world, who have pressing environmental concerns, but maybe not the same as those of the experts.

In the early 2000s the Joseph Rowntree Trust worked with residents in poor areas of the UK. Their environment mattered dearly to them, but it was litter or dog poo, municipal tidiness and their immediate surroundings that were important. When asked about the likes of WWF or the National Trust, people responded: "Locally you have no contact with them". The burden of day-to-day problems was harsh enough, with residents explaining how: "I don't think in the long term … I live for the day and see what tomorrow brings". The Anthropocene can seem a long way away when you are struggling to feed a family.

In the developing world a similar outlook prevails. In equatorial Cameroon locals were once asked about attitudes to protected areas, forested peaks internationally famed for their endemic biodiversity: "We didn't even know the parks existed", people said, or: "We couldn't hunt where we used to hunt". Again, the burden of everyday survival trumps the long term conservation.

 Friend or foe? Utopia_88 / shutterstock

The same tensions cloud the use of big-game hunting as a device for conservation in southern Africa. If local people living next to large, dangerous, disease-carrying wildlife can have some financial reward maybe they will put up with the other costs and threats. This reward could be permits to legally hunt elephants, for instance. In the UK these huge animals are understandably popular, as they live in loving, protective families and are seemingly aware of their own mortality. Yet British people don't have to put up with elephants destroying their own family's reserves of food.

In each case the classic themes of environmentalism, such as climate change, air quality or biodiversity can miss a profound appreciation of the environment among local communities. One of my favourite examples is from my part of the world, documented by the photographer Chris Steele-Perkins in his book Northern Exposure. This is the white working class of north-east England, out in the countryside, enjoying the landscape and wildlife, but not bird watching or visiting historic monuments. This is the countryside of ferreting, rough shooting and whippet racing in an eerie rural periphery of industrial decay.

 Enjoying the countryside – but ignoring the tree-huggers. Chris Steele-Perkins / Magnum / twitter

This is not respectable environmentalism – not a world where academic expertise carries any credit – and yet it is a deeply ingrained and heartfelt culture, rooted in place and land. It is an appreciation of the natural world run through with violence and sentimentality, but one without much sympathy for outsiders who want to impose their version of the countryside.

For example a new opencast coal mine is planned for Druridge Bay in Northumberland, a wild coastline of big skies, North Sea fog and rare wildlife. The plan has met expertly argued opposition from the RSPB, National Trust and Wildlife Trust along with many local residents. De-carbonisation, climate change, protected species: opponents are able to call on a full house of expertise-led reasoning.

However other locals are vehemently in favour of the mine and dismissive of the opposition. As one resident writes on a Facebook group supporting the development: "the tree huggers give nothing and cost hardworking men their bonus and overtime at work, some of those depend on that extra money to look after their families". The criticism is not only of the opponents but essentially a conflict of class and culture.

These schisms are desperately sad and are exploited ruthlessly by powerful lobbies who have as little concern for the Cameroonian villagers, or County Durham ferreters, as they do for the environment. And experts are all too easy to portray as boffins in ivory towers, wasting taxpayers' money on daft research – people whose out of touch ideas hit orindary people – hardworking families.

Experts should be less surprised by this tactic – crocodile tears over their research are used to negate debate. But equally, experts might be more fun than sceptics realise, maybe invite a boffin out ferreting? Then those local environmentalists, who feel left behind may find they too have some powerful allies on their side.

Mike Jeffries does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Mike Jeffries, Teaching Fellow, Ecology, Northumbria University, Newcastle Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61597 2016-06-24T10:12:37Z 2016-06-24T10:12:37Z Four ways Brexit will hit personal finances
British people have woken up to the news that their country has voted to leave the European Union. Along with this, there has been turmoil in financial markets – the pound has hit a 30-year low and the FTSE dropped more than 8%.

Though the Brexit process will probably take two years (and the UK will remain a full member of the EU in the meantime), some aspects of the decision will affect British people straight away.

1. The pound in your pocket

There is inevitably going to be a period of uncertainty and turmoil. As the referendum result emerged, the pound fell 10% against the US dollar on the foreign exchange markets and 7% against the Euro. If this persists, things the UK imports, such as oil (affecting domestic fuel prices and petrol), foreign cars, coffee, bananas and clothing, will cost more. Overall, then, the general price level may rise meaning that your income will not stretch quite so far.

If you're holidaying abroad over the coming months and haven't bought your currency yet, the weaker pound means you'll also now pay more.

2. Your job and income

A weak pound affects industry as well and so may impact on jobs. Company costs will rise if they import their raw materials and most firms will be hit by higher fuel prices. But the fall in sterling makes it easier for exporters to sell their goods and services abroad. So some jobs and wages may be more at risk, while recruitment rises in other areas.

Longer term, economists have been remarkably consistent in predicting that UK growth is likely to be lower outside the EU than it would have been inside. Businesses do not like uncertainty, so they may put off investing in new plant, machinery and jobs, as being outside the EU trading bloc may make trading with other countries more difficult and some firms may decide to quit the UK. This could mean that jobs and wages will be lower than they might otherwise have been, though not necessarily lower than today.

Before the referendum, Chancellor George Osborne threatened a post-Brexit emergency Budget that would cut public spending and raise taxes. This seems an unlikely immediate response since it would further depress the UK economy just when it is reeling with uncertainty and MPs across all parties were quick to say they would not support such measures. A new prime minister, due from October, may well appoint a new chancellor with his or her own ideas.

3. Your savings and pensions

Uncertainty while markets adjust and firms decide how to respond means the UK stock market is likely to be volatile for some time. Anyone who has recently retired and opted to take an income using drawdown (periodic cashing in of a pension fund still invested in the stock market) may have to take tough decisions about drawing less income now or risk running out of retirement savings later on.

 Pensioners may face some complications. shutterstock.com

Savers have suffered since the global financial crisis of 2008 with rock-bottom interest rates. It's unclear what might happen to these. On the one hand, rising consumer prices may push interest rates up; and credit rating agencies have said they may downgrade UK government debt which means the government would have to raise interest rates to persuade savers to buy its debt. But, if the economy struggles to grow, the Bank of England – which has said it stands ready to deploy any measures to maintain financial stability – might embark on new rounds of quantitative easing to keep interest rates low to encourage economic growth.

4. Your home and mortgage

While savers would welcome a rise in interest rates, this would increase mortgage repayments for borrowers and could even trigger repossessions. The International Money Fund has predicted that UK house prices could drop sharply post-Brexit. You might be concerned about that if you are in one of the six out of ten UK households that own their own home. But this could be good news for younger generations who have been struggling to afford a home.

Jonquil Lowe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Jonquil Lowe, Lecturer in Personal Finance, The Open University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61456 2016-06-24T09:40:54Z 2016-06-24T09:40:54Z How the Battle of the Bastards squares with medieval history

  ©2016 Home Box Office, Inc.

This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones season six, episode nine.

A 12-foot giant, his unhuman features oddly familiar (almost homely, after two screen decades colonised by combat-ready orcs) wheels around a wintry courtyard, wondering at the thicket of arrow shafts now wound around his torso. He stops, sways somewhat, and falls, dead. So Wun Wun the Wilding met his doom in The Battle of the Bastards, the penultimate episode of this season of Game of Thrones.

One casualty which, with countless others in the scenes before and after, might have a claim to a place in history, apparently. "The most fully realised medieval battle we've ever seen on the small screen (if not the big one too)", is the breathless verdict from The Independent.

As a full-time historian of the other Middle Ages – Europe's, every bit as feuding and physical as the Seven Kingdoms but with better weather – I am struck by the irony that Martin's mock-medieval world might now be seen to set the bar for authenticity. There's no doubt that for much of screen's first century, medieval was the Cinderella era: overlooked, patronised and pressed into service for clumsy stage-adaptations, musical comedy and children. But over the past two decades – almost from the moment that Marsellus fired the line in Pulp Fiction (1994) – we have been "getting medieval" more and more.

Medieval millennium

Any connection between Braveheart (1995) and recorded history may have been purely coincidental, but its representation of the scale and scramble of combat at the turn of the 13th century set a new standard, pushing even Kenneth Branagh's earnest Henry V (1989) closer to the Panavison pantomime of Laurence Olivier's film (1944). Branagh had at least toned down the hues of his happy breed from the bold – indeed, freshly laundered – primary colours of Sir Laurence's light brigade, but his men-at-arms still jabbed at each other with the circumspection of the stage-fighters while noble knights strutted and preened.

Of course, at times it threatened to be a false dawn: First Knight (1995) and A Knight's Tale (2001) are undeniable obstacles in making the case for a new realism. But new epics have extended the territory taken in Mel Gibson's first rebel assault.

Now already a decade old, Kingdom of Heaven (2005) achieved a level of accuracy without reducing the cinematic to the documentary. For the first time, the scene and size of the opposing forces were not compromised by either budget or technological limitations. The audience is led to gates of the Holy City as it would have appeared to the Crusaders. The armies' subsequent encounter with one another is captured with the same vivid colour and fear that the contemporary chroniclers conjure them, catching especially the crazy spectacle of Christian liturgical performance – crucifixes, chanting priests – on the Middle Eastern plain. And descriptive details were not lost, particularly in the contentious arena of Crusader kit, now a hobbyists' domain into which only the brave production designer – and braver historian – strays.

Meanwhile, Peter Jackson painted energetically with his medieval palate in the Lords of the Rings trilogy, not, of course, pointing us to a place or time but certainly providing a superior visual vocabulary for the experience of combat in a pre-industrial age.

Back to basics

So, has Game of Thrones bettered this?

There are certainly some satisfyingly authentic twists and turns woven around The Battle of the Bastards. The most significant casualties occur away from the melee of the pitched battle in one of a number of routs (medieval battles always ended with a ragged rout, not a decisive bloodbath). And the principal actors in the drama do not readily present themselves for a tidy dispatch. The mounted forces of Westeros are rarely decisive and even fighters of the highest status do not see out the day in the saddle.

Also accurate are the individual acts of near-bestial violence which occur, are witnessed and go on to define the significance of battle. The deliberate breaking of Ramsey's face by Jon Snow is a point-of-entry into a central but still under-researched dimension of medieval conflict: ritual violence, such as the systematic, obscene dismemberment of the dead and dying English by their Welsh enemies during the Glyn Dwr wars.

 Before the fall. ©2016 Home Box Office, Inc.

Yet I suspect that these are not the snapshots that have won the superlatives. No doubt it is the standout features of the battle scenes: their scale, the weaponry and the "reality" of wounding in real time that have held most attention. And these threaten to turn us again in the direction of that Ur-Middle Ages which we had every reason to hope we had left for good.

Because medieval armies were always smaller than was claimed, far smaller than we see here. Weaponry was not fixed in time, but – more like the Western Front in 1917 than you might imagine – a fluid domain of fast-developing technology. It is time that directors gave space to firearms, which were the firsthand experience of any fighting man from the final quarter of the 15th century. They must also shed their conviction that "medieval" means hand-to-hand combat. It was sustained arrow-fire that felled armies, not swordplay, nor fisticuffs.

Life on the medieval battle path also meant poor health, rapid ageing and no personal grooming. So we are also overdue sight of a medieval fighting force as it might actually have arrived on the field: neither sporting sexy hairstyles, nor match-fit for action. They of course arrived after months of marching, if they arrived at all: dysentery passed through campaigning forces with fatal routine. They faced their foe in a youth that would have felt more like middle age to you and me.

And in the middle of this Ur-medieval battlefield there is a 12-foot giant, just to confirm that this not medieval Europe, by any means.

James Clark's research has been funded by UK Research Councils and charities.
 James Clark, Professor of Medieval History, University of Exeter Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61594 2016-06-24T09:32:43Z 2016-06-24T09:32:43Z Brexit resignation: why British PM David Cameron had to go
David Cameron has resigned as British Prime Minister, shortly after it was announced that his country had voted to leave the European Union. Emerging from Downing Street at around 8.30am, Cameron said that he would stay on for the time being but that a new leader would probably be in place by October.

While some polls had suggested the Leave camp might be victorious in the EU referendum, the polls in the immediate run up to election day suggested that the Remain side might well win a very tight vote. However, that was not the case. Turnout was higher than in a modern day general election, with approximately 72% of the electorate voting – 52% to leave the EU and 48% to remain.

These figures obscure the seismic impact of this decision, something which the financial markets immediately recognised, with almost 20% being wiped off the value of Sterling before 9am, with Sterling now worth a figure last seen in the mid-1980s.

With the decision now made, the question of leadership was on everyone's lips. Cameron staked his position as Prime Minister on a Remain vote, something he repeatedly told the British people was in their best interests.

However, it seems the British people did not believe him or trust his judgement – and that's a position no Prime Minister can survive. The question was not whether Cameron would continue as Prime Minister, but when he would resign and in what way.

On such a turbulent day, the question of who would replace him had not yet been fully considered. When Cameron approached the lecturn in Downing Street, the British public were expecting a speech that would ease minds and address worries in the financial markets – something which Bank of England Governor Mark Carney did soon afterwards. However, with the appearance of Samantha Cameron by the PM's side, it was clear almost immediately that this was not a speech simply to steady the ship. Instead, Cameron began by praising the Remain campaign, his opponents and the British people, before inevitably moving on to his own future.

Cameron has taken an unusual path out of Downing Street. With so much uncertainty and instability in Britain, and with renewed and invigorated calls for a second Scottish referendum, he couldn't simply resign and leave without damaging Britain's financial situation further. An immediate departure would also have left the political establishment, particularly the Conservative Party, in chaos.

Instead, he followed the template laid down by his predecessor as Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard. Cameron appears set to remain as leader, and Prime Minister, for several months, to deal with immediate issues arising from the referendum result, and to oversee the election of his successor. With his voice breaking, Cameron confirmed this should be completed by the Conservative Party conference in October.

The coming months will be dominated by negotiations, arguments and uncertainty, regardless of the outcome for Britain and the Conservative Party. Whether Boris Johnson or Theresa May, or another as yet unknown candidate, becomes party leader, they will have an uphill battle to unite the Conservatives and fight off calls for another general election.

Victoria Honeyman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Victoria Honeyman, Lecturer in British Politics, University of Leeds Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61399 2016-06-24T07:39:07Z 2016-06-24T07:39:07Z Brexit: global reaction to Britain's vote to leave the EU
The United Kingdom has voted by a close margin to leave the European Union. Here, experts from around the world react to the news which has sent shockwaves around the world and what it means for their country. This article will update.

France

Frédérique Berrod, professor of public law, Sciences Po Strasbourg and Antoine Ullestad, PhD candidate in European law, University of Strasbourg

It's no surprise that a sense of disaster dominated the French media's reaction to news that the UK had voted for a Brexit, with many underlying the "winds of panic" and the "start of a real cataclysm" in the markets. While some papers spoke of the shock of the decision, others were not surprised, talking instead about how it marked a defeat for the European Union, described as "complete" by the columnist Laurent Joffin in the left-leaning Liberation newspaper.

The independent website Médiapart used a brilliant oxymoron, describing the decision as a "welcome catastrophe" and arguing that Brexit offers a unique opportunity for reform of the long-criticised EU. The result highlighted how the political class in France remains very divided over Europe. On one hand the Eurosceptics, led by the Front National's Marine le Pen, have saluted the UK's "clear lesson in democracy" and called for a similar referendum in France. On the other side, those politicians on the left who are in power, such as French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, want Europe to "react and find the confidence of its people".

President François Hollande, after a cabinet meeting and talks with European Commission President Donald Tusk and his German counterpart Angela Merket, said the decision was "severely testing the European Union".

The secretary of state for reform Thierry Mandon said: "The referendum [in France] is scheduled, it's the presidential elections." The European project will be at the heart of the 2017 race.

Questions dominate the coverage in the regional press – with papers wondering what the impact will be on French politics, whether the EU can survive a Brexit, and what will happen next – reflecting the gamble on which the future on the EU now lies.

Clément Louis Kolopp contributed to this section.

United States

Scott Lucas, professor of international politics, University of Birmingham

One consequence of Britain's vote to leave the European Union will be damage to the US-UK "special relationship" that has been a pillar of Britain's political, economic, and military strategy since 1945.

Brexit campaigners have insisted that the UK can easily replace its economic position within the EU with the primacy of links with the US. That assertion – whether from genuine belief or political manoeuvring – is misguided.

From the interlinked creation of NATO and the EU's ancestors, such as the European Economic Community, to the support of Western Europe as a bulwark against Soviet Communism, America's economic and political strategists have built their approach on a UK inside Europe, not detached from it.

The current US leadership has not been shy about reasserting this. To the contrary, the US president, Barack Obama, made clear in March that the UK would be at the "back of the queue" for trade deals if Brexit triumphed. Former high-level officials – used as channels for the views of those who now hold their positions – spoke of the negative effects not only on Britain's economic future but on relationships within diplomatic, military, and intelligence partnerships.

The US-UK relationship rests on institutions which prefer security and certainty. Given that the UK – which may not be "united" in the near future if Scotland departs – is entering a period of protracted insecurity and uncertainty, Washington will not be looking at "Independence Day" in England and Wales as an asset, but as a problem.

Daniel Chirot, Herbert J. Ellison professor of Russian and Eurasian studies, University of Washington

After the referendum, British opinion remains badly split. The typical "Leave" voter is similar to supporters of Donald Trump in the US and National Front voters in France. Xenophobic, angry nationalist and isolationist parties have been rising all over Europe.

This is the revolt of the losers who feel marginalised by globalisation. Perceptions of economic insecurity, unwelcome cultural change, intrusion of untraditional, foreign ideas, and a sense of national decline have produced a massive backlash against ruling establishments.

Sadly, the closure to the outside world they demand, if carried out, would plunge much of the world into economic depression and cause immense international conflict. We would be back in the 1930s, heading for disaster.

Alarmingly, the losers' anger is also a revolt against the liberal Enlightenment values of tolerance and openness to progressive ideas that seemed, only 25 years ago, to finally have prevailed. Similar threats in the 20th century were ultimately reversed by the defeat of first fascism and then communism, but are now back.

Only reinvigorated economic growth, better protection for the inevitable losers of globalisation and greater sympathy for their frustrations can ease their anger. Establishment parties of the moderate right and left have failed to help. Unless they do, the crisis will continue to worsen. The referendum's results solve nothing.

Germany

Isabelle Hertner, lecturer in German and European politics and society, University of Birmingham

In the early hours of June 24, when the results of the referendum were announced, German politicians maintained the same approach. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made only a short statement, calling the result a watershed moment for the process of European unification, and one that she personally regrets. At the same time, she warned against a kneejerk response to the referendum result, calling for calm and prudence in the EU's dealings with the UK.

She acknowledged that across the whole of the EU, many citizens have doubts about greater European integration. "Therefore", Merkel said, "we must ensure that the citizens feel that the EU can improve their lives. The EU is strong enough to find the right responses to today's problems." She added that it was now important for the 27 other member states to stand together and make sure that the EU finds a common solution.

There were few signs of complacency in German politicians' reactions towards the vote. Many fear a domino effect, citing the example of Marine LePen, the leader of the French far-right Front National, who has now called for France to hold its own "Frexit" referendum.

In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a Eurosceptic far-right populist party, is on the rise and predicted to win over five per cent of the votes and enter the Bundestag in the 2017 federal elections. Many German commentators fear the AfD and other similar parties across Europe will repeat UKIP's electoral appeal, which is based on bundling up opposition to the EU with a strong anti-immigration stance.

For more on Germany's reaction, click here.

Russia

Alexander Titov, lecturer in modern European history, Queen's University Belfast

The reaction to the Leave victory in Russia, which was alleged to be in favour of Brexit, centred on the likely impact on its relations with the EU and the possible economic fallout.

The finance minister Anton Siluanov said that Brexit was likely to be less significant for Russia's economy than shocks it has experienced over the past two years. Aleksei Kudrin, an ex-finance minister and influential adviser to President Vladimir Putin, tweeted that there won't be an economic catastrophe, but both the EU and UK would be weaker economically in the long run.

Other Russian politicians have been less reserved in their reaction, with the nationalist-minded among them predicting that Brexit is only a start of the EU dissolution.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a firebrand leader of the main nationalist party in the Russian Duma, praised the Leave vote. "The people of Britain made the right choice – the rural, the working class of Britain said "no" to the union created by the financial mafia, the globalists and all others." He added: "Now we hope that Trump will win."

Moderate politicians were more cautious in their reaction. Konstantin Kosachev, an influential chairman of the Federation Council's (the upper chamber) committee for international affairs, said he hoped that Brexit would spur reforms to make the EU less politicised, more flexible and open to cooperation with international partners, including Russia. He also expressed concerns over possible economic fallout:

We have interest in the EU as a stable inter-generational project, because it's still one of our biggest trade partners. 49% of Russia's foreign trade is with the EU, and even under the sanctions regime it's still significant. Any shock in such an important trade partner will impact our relations in a negative way.

Poland

Aleks Szczerbiak, professor of politics and contemporary European studies, University of Sussex

The British EU referendum result has raised a number of concerns in Poland. There is uncertainty about what will happen to 800,000 Poles currently working in the UK. There are concerns about what impact the UK's exit will have on the EU budget, as Poland is currently the largest beneficiary of the EU's regional funding. More broadly, there are concerns that the departure of the largest non-Eurozone member of the EU could marginalise Poland if power is increasingly concentrated among the states that are part of the single currency.

The current Polish government, led since autumn 2015 by the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), will also lose its key ally among the large EU states. The government has shifted away from the previous administration's prioritisation of relations with Germany and has been trying to develop a strategic partnership with the UK. PiS sits in the same European Parliament group as the British Conservatives. It saw the UK as a natural ally given its shared stance on anti-federalism in the EU, and on particular issues of concern to Poland such as the EU's relations with Russia.

Australia

Mark Beeson, professor of international politics, Murdoch University

As the world reacts to the UK's decision to leave the EU, the significant and long-lasting economic damage that is likely to ensue will inevitably get most attention in the short term.

The rest of the EU will want to make life as difficult as possible for Britain to deter others from following in its wake. Young Britons looking to escape their insular, parochial and incredibly short-sighted and badly led homeland may need to look further afield than Europe.

The good news is that Australia might get a flood of applications from talented prospective citizens. The bad news is that Britain will be a diminished international force with limited capacity to play the sort of role some conservative commentators in this country fondly imagine. It is hardly a coincidence that those in Australia who want the country to become a republic have a renewed spring in their step as they consider political folly on an epic scale.

Greece

Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, College Associate Dean, Brunel University London

Shock, disbelief and fear. This has been the initial Greek reaction to Brexit. This time a year ago the Greek referendum was being announced and the threat of "Grexit" loomed over Europe. The banks closed, capital controls were introduced and the socio-economic and political trauma continues to haunt people today.

The country was, however, beginning to have glimmers of hope that a period of stability lay ahead. Brexit will prove them wrong. It has opened a Pandora's box, for Greece and for Europe. The impact on the Greek economy will be disastrous: between the 2009 global economic crisis and the post-Brexit crisis that is about to unleash its full force, the Greek economy has suffered terrible blows. To believe it will survive a protracted period of economic uncertainty in Europe is wishful thinking.

At least this time Greek politicians do not have any illusions. "The forecasts have been proven wrong. Hope has been denied. A great adventure begins," said Giorgos Koumoutsakos, spokesperson for the Greek conservative party, New Democracy.

On a dark day like this, we can rejoice at least that not everyone has given up on Europe. MPs from many political parties in Greece are speaking with one voice, about the need to stop the march of populism, create barriers to nationalism and build new bridges to stop isolationism in Europe. They call for a new vision for Europe, and want to be part of it.

But a spokesperson for Greece's right-wing fascist Golden Dawn party, congratulated the British people for saying no to the "German rulers of Europe" and "Brussels' scavengers".

Belgium

Clément Jadot, PhD candidate, department of political science, Université Libre de Bruxelles

As fervent federalists, some Belgians may have occasionally dreamed that a Brexit would open a new window of opportunity for deeper and faster integration within Europe without the UK dragging its heels, but the truth is that all the major political parties were strongly supportive of Bremain. From a Belgian perspective, Brexit is bad news, both economically and politically.

Economically speaking, Belgium is an open economy, strongly bonded to the UK, and political elites fear stress on the banking market as well as a deterioration of the national trade balance as a consequence.

The referendum's political consequences for Belgium are not straightforward. On the one hand, most of the country's political parties will probably call for a common front in order to go beyond the shock and to push European integration forward, as did the prime minister Charles Michel this morning.

On the other hand, regional ambitions and populism in the north of the country will certainly be nourished by the Brexit vote, as well as in the rest of the EU. On a short term basis, the Flemish nationalists of the N-VA, will be the first to be impacted by the Brexit. With the departure of the British Conservatives from the EU bloc, they lose a strategic ally and an ideological model.

In the past, Belgium and the UK always looked very differently at the EU. Yet, because they are historical, political, strategic and economic allies, it is in their mutual interest that this friendship never ends.

Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos is founder and firector of the Brunel-University based Britain in Europe think tank.

Aleks Szczerbiak, Alexander Titov, Antoine Ullestad, Clément Jadot, Daniel Chirot, Frédérique Berrod, Isabelle Hertner, Mark Beeson, and Scott Lucas do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Antoine Ullestad, Doctorant en droit de l'Union européenne, Université de Strasbourg Aleks Szczerbiak, Professor of Politics and Contemporary European Studies, University of Sussex Alexander Titov, Lecturer in Modern European History, Queen's University Belfast Clément Jadot, PhD candidate, Université Libre de Bruxelles Daniel Chirot, Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, University of Washington Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Brunel University London Frédérique Berrod, Professeure de droit public, Sciences Po Strasbourg Isabelle Hertner, Lecturer in German and European Politics and Society, Deputy Director of the Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61457 2016-06-24T06:01:57Z 2016-06-24T06:01:57Z Scottish independence back in play after Brexit shock – with a note of caution

Bring it on? YouTube

One question that was omnipresent in the EU referendum debate referred to Scotland: what would happen if it voted to remain in the EU but was pulled out on the back of votes from elsewhere in the UK? Would it lead to a second independence referendum and then a vote for independence?

In the aftermath of the result, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has given the clearest indication of what the answer will be. She told a press conference it is now "highly likely" a second independence referendum will be held.

It comes after a clean sweep of Scottish local authorities voted to remain in the EU but faces being forced out by the Anglo-Welsh Brexit vote. She said the Scottish government would begin drafting legislation to make such a referendum possible.

It was a bold move by the SNP leader, implicitly daring Westminster to suggest such a vote will have no legal basis. Yet she was cautious, too. She cleverly hasn't committed to a timescale and said the Scottish government will look to open channels of communication with the EU and other member states. This will buy her time while the UK gets its Brexit negotiations underway, allowing her to showcase to Scottish unionists her competency in standing up for the nation's interests in this fraught period.

The debate about Scottish self-government intensified from Margaret Thatcher's time in office in the 1980s, when Scottish support for the ruling Conservatives fell away sharply. Much was made of the complaint that what the electorate in the south of England voted for was imposed in Scotland against the people's democratic will. It was one of the driving forces in the creation of the Scottish parliament in 1999 and a key argument for Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum.

The EU referendum result has brought this issue to the fore in perhaps the most acute manner yet. This result represents what was described in the SNP's manifesto for the Scottish election in May as the kind of "material change in circumstances" in Scotland's status as a constituent part of the UK that would justify a second referendum. As such, Sturgeon referred to it in her press conference.

One reason why EU membership has long been given this status by Sturgeon and her senior colleagues is that during the 2014 referendum campaign, the pro-UK Better Together campaign argued Scotland was more likely to stay a member of the EU as part of the UK. Far from being allowed to continue, Better Together claimed the EU would make Scotland apply for membership from scratch and be denied some of the UK's favourable conditions – how ironic this looks now.

Treading lightly

So now that the unionists have played right into the SNP's hand, why the need for caution? First, the party will want to wait and see how the post-Brexit negotiations play out. The deal that the UK is able to secure with the EU, whether it is some sort of continued membership of the single market or something much looser, will be crucial for the Scottish electorate when it comes to making a cost-benefit analysis of what Brexit actually means.

A number of devolved policy areas such as fisheries and farming are in actual fact Europeanised in the sense that the major decisions are taken at an EU level. Taking the Common Fisheries Policy as an example, Marine Scotland would take sole responsibility for the management of fish stocks in Scottish territorial waters, with its operations under more direct scrutiny from the Scottish parliament as a result.

 Mackerel: important to Scottish economy. Thiradech

Brexit therefore actually enhances some of the powers and competencies of the Scottish parliament, something that those who back devolution over independence may well take into consideration. Having said that, there are questions for the Scottish government and Scottish parliament regarding the oversight and scrutiny of these policy areas in future.

Secondly, if Scotland was to vote for independence and was able to remain a member state of the EU, it would share its land border with a non-member. The last independence referendum campaign threw up a number of difficult questions about a shared currency and cross-border trade that will be even more tricky to answer in a post-Brexit contest.

The mechanics of the possible relationship between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK are therefore significantly altered to what they were in 2014. This requires a rethink from the Scottish government and the wider pro-independence movement on what shape and form Scottish independence ought to take.

The Quebec precedent

The third and probably most crucial reason for holding off from the point of view of the SNP is that there is little evidence to suggest that support for independence would receive a significant boost as a result of Brexit. The SNP's leadership is keen to avoid Scotland "doing a Quebec" where a second referendum on independence took place and was defeated, and over 20 years later the prospects of it holding another are all but dead.

The fiscal and economic conditions that an independent Scotland would be subjected to are significantly worse than they were in 2014, with the North Sea struggling due to the low price of oil. This would leave Scotland with an estimated fiscal deficit of £11.9bn (7.8% of GDP) compared to the UK's fiscal deficit of £59.8bn (3.3% of GDP). It is also unclear how important Scottish voters feel membership of the EU is and whether or not it is more important than economic risk – one of the most important factors that led to a No vote.

That the SNP had not yet persuaded the Scottish electorate to choose independence in spite of these problems is highlighted by a paradox in the party's 2016 election manifesto: while the "material change of circumstances" clause has clearly been triggered, another SNP referendum test has not. The manifesto talks about requiring clear and sustained support amongst the Scottish electorate for independence before a second referendum would go on the table. A source within the SNP has previously stated that support for independence would have to consistently remain at about 60% for this to be satisfied.

Clearly the SNP felt such a clear Scottish mandate to stay in the EU could only be met with a strong signal that the second referendum is now all but irresistible. Yet Nicola Sturgeon's caution, preceded by a round of interviews by former leader Alex Salmond, shows that victory is far from in the bag – even in the face of such a difference of opinion with the English and Welsh.

In the timeframe available, she will hope that the pro-independence movement can awaken again and mobilise with the same vigour as last time – and that Brexit really does tip enough Scottish unionists towards supporting independence. The SNP will then have to win the argument or potentially face the same fate as their counterparts in Quebec.

This article was updated post-publication to reflect rapidly moving news events

Craig McAngus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Craig McAngus, Lecturer in Politics, University of Aberdeen Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61541 2016-06-24T05:33:45Z 2016-06-24T05:33:45Z Brexit: Europe's new nationalism is here to stay
It is something of a tragic irony that the European Union – originally constructed to lay to rest the atavistic nationalist impulses of the 20th century – is today behind the resurgence of such feelings across much of Europe. The British referendum that has delivered a vote for "Brexit" is the latest, dramatic indication that this nationalism is here to stay.

This nationalism has brewed largely in reaction to how the EU has evolved over the past few decades. What started as a common market grew to embrace a single currency, the Schengen area and integration in justice and home affairs. All this has diluted core aspects of national sovereignty: states have less control over macro-economic policy, borders and people.

The EU also enlarged to embrace Central and Eastern Europe. The inclusion of 12 new member-states with distinct histories, economic structures and democratic traditions has rendered the decision-making process at the EU level all the more cumbersome. At the same time, it has made EU policy all the less responsive to public opinion. These transformations have been very disquieting for voters in certain countries – like the UK.

But what we have witnessed in the UK is part of a much broader shift in public attitudes towards the EU from what analysts have called a "permissive consensus" to a "constraining dissensus". In the past, European leaders quietly pursued integration in such areas as agriculture and the public paid little attention. More recently though, leaders have sought to take collective decisions in areas such as trade in services, banking or asylum. But they have to bear in mind that the voters back home are more likely to pay more attention and to be sceptical.

Nationalists of all stripes

This scepticism draws strength from the perception that the EU is responsible for the sundry ills that underlie the malaise felt by many European voters. Economic dislocation and industrial restructuring, austerity and privatisation, unemployment and job insecurity, fear of immigration, and a more general sense of vanishing influence over the decisions that affect their daily lives. All feed into the negative feelings people have about the EU.

Euroscepticism is found on the extremes of the political spectrum. On the left, voters and parties see the EU as a neoliberal plot. It exists only to serve the big businesses that lobby in Brussels for favourable legislation. For the right, the EU is a bureaucratic behemoth that imposes excessive regulation and threatens ancient national identities by encouraging labour migration. When these two viewpoints merge, as they have in UKIP's political base, they are powerfully toxic.

And UKIP is only one of many such parties. Similar rhetoric and patterns of political support underpin the success of others, too. The Front National in France, the New Democrats in Sweden and the Finns Party in Finland have all been watching events in the UK closely. Some have even called for their own referendums, hoping for a Frexit or a Swexit after Brexit. Some others tailor their euroscepticism to suit local idiosyncracies. Take the Dutch Freedom Party's virulently anti-islamic platform for example, or violent action promoted by Greece's Golden Dawn.

Rejecting the mainstream

But in all cases, what we have witnessed with the rise of euroscepticism is the recrudescence of a robust form of populist nationalism. It will endure because it maps onto and reinforces existing social fault-lines.

Most importantly, it depends on the existence of divisions between the winners and losers of globalisation in the 21st century. It thrives on the different experiences of the educated, well-travelled polyglots working in highly-skilled professions and the immobile and stunted individuals left behind by global economic transformations.

Whether they work in low-paid jobs in the port towns of Essex or claim unemployment benefits in Lille, those left behind share a common feeling of despair and frustration that has yielded a visceral rejection of foreign bodies.

In certain countries, such as Poland or the Nordics, social and ideological divisions also map onto geographical ones. Patriotic countryside dwellers view their effete metropolitan neighbours – and their liberal values – with suspicion.

And, in the absence of a credible socialist alternative to protect them, many have turned to the more basic instinct of solidarity with the native and dominant ethnic kin: the English, the French, the Germans. In all countries, what underlies this nationalism is the clustering of individuals with left-wing economic interests and culturally conservative values that diverge tremendously from the mainstream.

Not backing down

So, when these sentiments are bundled together by entrepreneurial political actors such as UKIP, they become endowed with a political flavour that is reminiscent of the nationalisms of the past. It holds a view of the country's history that glorifies national democratic control and it espouses a reactionary return to this past, no matter the economic costs.

It is sincerely anti-intellectual, offers facile solutions to complex problems, prefers what it calls "plain-speaking" over a well-articulated elocution and is utterly unapologetic in its disdain for the establishment.

The main difference is that, in contrast with the past, democracy is now the only game in town. The systems in which these nationalist parties operate are (fairly) stable, and generational turnover should lead to the predominance of liberal values, suggesting that there is a ceiling on the pool of support from which they can draw.

However, even if democratic institutions themselves are not in question, democracy currently offers the mechanism through which these nationalist parties' can contaminate the platforms of other mainstream parties. They can exert competitive pressures during local, national and European elections, forcing the bigger parties to shift their political offerings as they attempt to avoid losing voters.

So, unless significant domestic economic and social reforms can tackle the sharpening divisions upon which this populist nationalism is founded, it will persist for the foreseeable future.

And unless the EU can infuse its institutions with greater democratic legitimacy, it will continue to draw populist ire. Voters need to be able to identify with the people who make decisions on their behalf.

The UK may be the first country to leave the EU but it may not be the last. Europe's new nationalism is here to stay.

Simon Toubeau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Simon Toubeau, Assistant Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61576 2016-06-24T04:48:42Z 2016-06-24T04:48:42Z Brexit is on: Britain votes to leave the EU – experts respond
The United Kingdom has voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. It is a result which will have dramatic implications for the future of the global economy, international relations and the European continent. The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has given notice of his intention to resign. Here, leading experts offering explanations and opinions on what is an unprecedented geopolitical and economic situation. This article will update through the day.

Andrew Scott Crines, British politics lecturer, University of Liverpool

Now is the moment of truth for the Brexiters. They promised the world, and now must deliver. The voters were convinced that leaving the European Union is the best thing to do, entirely against the advice of numerous experts.

David Cameron has given notice of his intention to resign. He called the unnecessary referendum in the first place in order to deal with the apparent threat of UKIP; the Chancellor, George Osborne, will also likely leave his position; and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn will face questions over his lack of enthusiasm during the campaign.

Indeed, Corbyn's occasional comments that appeared to support leaving have led to suggestions of sabotage of the Remain campaign. Corbyn's failure to speak to Labour voters in the North East will also cast a huge shadow over his leadership.

The winners, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson will no doubt be basking in their success, however they should be cautious about inheriting a chaotic political, economic, and constitutional situation. Indeed, the pound is going through the floor, and the SNP and Sinn Fein are talking about referendums in Scotland and Northern Ireland, given they voted to remain in the EU.

At this point, British Politics is a mess. But, at the end of the day, the people voted for this. They believed the arguments of the Brexiters. Now it is up to the Leavers to provide the answers to the problems they have created.

Roger Scully, professor of political science, Cardiff University

David Cameron's decision to resign was inevitable. It was the only realistic choice for him, since this referendum was so closely tied to him personally. He is a shrewd enough politician to see the writing on the wall.

The three-month delay was perhaps also inevitable too, since the Conservative Party leadership election process requires this sort of timeframe. Boris Johnson now looks like the overwhelming favourite for the job. The question is whether anyone will stand against him. The likes of Theresa May might not be willing to risk the humiliation.

Some people were criticising the performance of the pollsters, but they got the relative positions of the different parts of Britain absolutely right. Wales voted to leave but was marginally more pro-remain than England. This is not that surprising, since Leave has been getting its vote out across England and Wales.

It's interesting, though, to see how many high profile politicians in Wales have seen their constituencies vote in the opposite direction to what they hoped, from Leanne Wood to Stephen Crabb. That's a general message that a lot of politicians are probably concerned about today. Welsh Labour should be particularly worried; most of its heartland voted to leave.

Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy, University of Kent

What should EU immigrants in the UK do now? We're told the 1979 UN Vienna convention will protect the current rights of those already in the country but that is unclear. The convention protects the position of governments under agreements, not individuals, and is not ratified by France.

Those wishing to come to the UK in the future can expect to see a skills-based points system imposed. For skilled workers, seeking better job opportunities than elsewhere, it's worth considering that immigration has contributed to UK growth and this impetus may now be weakened. The economy continues to grow, but slowly. The government has failed to meet the targets it set for deficit reduction, and this can't all be blamed on uncertainty about the referendum result. The UK might not be so attractive for skilled workers indefinitely.

For those attracted by the UK's culture and politics, the debate has unleashed much unpleasantness and lowered the threshold for what people feel it's acceptable to say in public. The campaign has turned on economic arguments about personal advantage and often on an ill-concealed dislike of foreigners. The strengths of Europe in relation to human, workplace and family rights and the benefits of diversity get very little mention. The debate hasn't changed UK politics but it's brought out some of the nastiness in our political life – something that potential immigrants might want to consider.

Paul Cairney, professor of politics and public policy, University of Stirling

The truth is we don't know what will happen in Scotland following the Brexit referendum, even though it is tempting to say that Scottish independence now seems inevitable. And, dare I say it, this is possibly the worst time – immediately after an emotionally draining campaign and result – in which to deliberate and come to a decision.

Certainly the UK vote provides the only plausible trigger in the short term to have a second referendum on Scottish independence. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has long argued that if most voters in Scotland vote to remain while most voters in the UK vote to leave, her party would demand one. At the time of writing, this case couldn't seem symbolically stronger: the vote to leave is 52% across the UK but in Scotland 62% voted Remain.

Yet it is too soon to tell if this result will prompt a major and sustained upswing in support for independence. This is partly because it is also too soon to predict Scotland's place in EU negotiations. The second referendum story requires a heroic and cosmopolitan Scotland fighting to leave the parochial UK to remain in the EU. We first need to know Scotland's likely status in the EU before we can identify the heroes and villains of our next story.

Bill Durodie, professor and chair of international relations, University of Bath

This is a triumph for British freedom and self-determination. The decision comes despite most predictions and the use of a politics of fear over more than 20 years on issues from health and the environment to child safety and international security.

The European Union as it was came into existence when the Cold War ended. Leaders the world over feared the uncertain consequences of the demise of the old politics of left and right. Avoiding risk rapidly became their new organising framework in a period devoid of other guiding principles. Their foremost – though rarely stated – fear was always that of their own people.

The European Union now stands discredited with an uncertain future. Other electorates will surely take their lead from the UK and demand their own referendums to leave too.

Of course, much remains to be done in the period ahead. This is only a first step. But it will lead to many other debates. It is those who do not fear change to whom the future belongs.

Simon Usherwood, senior lecturer in politics, University of Surrey

The UK is far from alone in harbouring people who want to change the direction and nature of the EU. Populists across the continent have seen the EU as both a symbol and a direct cause of what ails their countries.

The ultimate success of the long-running British campaign to secure exit will have given succour to counterparts elsewhere to continue and redouble their efforts. But this does not necessarily mean others will follow Britain out of the EU.

For one thing, the shock of the British vote is likely to concentrate a lot of minds. No longer merely an irritant, euroscepticism is now a clear and present threat to the union's future development. That means ignoring or trivialising the problem looks less and less viable as a strategy.

The British case is also likely to demonstrate the costs of exit. If the predicted economic costs begin to be felt, this might well give eurosceptics elsewhere second thoughts. This will only be strengthened by the likely desire of governments to offer the UK a less-than-generous deal, precisely so as to head off domestic demands.

For now, though, there is a scalp that eurosceptics from all countries can claim in support of their cause. They will now be looking for their next one.

The economy

Andre Spicer, professor of organisational behaviour, Cass Business School, City University London

Sterling has fallen to a 35-year low and share prices have taken a hit. Stocks in Asia have plummeted and the UK and US stock futures are tanking, signalling a rough day ahead. According to one projection, a vote to leave will have an even greater impact on other European share markets – with Germany taking the greatest hit.

All these changes are likely to create extremely unpredictable shifts on global markets. Such major economic changes can interact in strange and unpredictable ways. If we are lucky, it will work its way through the global economic system and Brexiters claim markets will soon adjust to this new normal. But this is magical thinking. Brexit has opened up a pandora's box of uncertainty. It is likely to take months if not years to work through it.

But there is a greater danger that falls triggered by Brexit will connect with other underlying economic problems. Brexit may also uncover economic issues which had previously been overlooked. If this happens, Brexit will change from a localised crisis to something more profound.

The question will now become what governments can do to ensure that this does not turn into a full blown economic crisis. When economic crises hit, central banks can lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. As interest rates are already at a record low, the Bank of England has little room to move. More quantitative easing may be in order.

David Spencer, professor of economics and political economy, University of Leeds

The repercussions of Brexit will be seismic – turmoil, followed by uncertainty. Things are never going to be the same again.

In the short term, a sliding pound will add to inflationary pressures, pushing down real wages. Any boost to exports from a lower-valued pound will depend on likely trade renegotiations with the EU.

The uncertainty surrounding the UK's exit from the EU will have a depressing effect on investment, both domestic and foreign, and will inhibit growth. Recession remains a real possibility. This would be in line with the prediction of the majority of economists.

The reaction of the Bank of England will be important. It will face pressure to raise interest rates due to the inflationary threat from Brexit. Any rate rise would put further downward pressure on the economy.

The government's stance will also be crucial. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, talked about an emergency budget in the event of Brexit. This would be the wrong course of action; more austerity at this stage will simply depress the economy and impose greater hardship on UK citizens. Osborne would do better to abandon his surplus target and to loosen fiscal policy. The task for the Labour Party is to promote an alternative (anti-austerity) economic policy that addresses the challenges of a post-Brexit economy.

One important message from the EU referendum is that a majority of the British electorate believe that economic policy and the economy is not delivering for them. Sadly, Brexit is not going to address people's real concerns; instead, it is going to mean more hardship and pain.

Swati Dhingra, lecturer in economic, LSE

We can expect three months of uncertainty while the political fallout settles down. Brexit supporters within the Tory party should spell out the options they are considering in terms of our future economic relationship with the EU.

A Norwegian model would contain the losses from reduced trade and investment over time. A Swiss model can be something to work towards for an a la carte deal, but it's unlikely to happen quickly. The short-term and medium-term uncertainty would be reduced if the politicians clearly articulate what the aims and potential plans for renegotiation and interim arrangements with the EU and other trade partners would be.

Richard Murphy, professor of practice in international political economy, City University London

The UK's vote to leave the EU takes the country into unknown political territory.

An election has been won by people who, it is already obvious, have no plan on how to deal with the situation they have created. What is now apparent is that the Brexit camp is demanding that a government committed to Remain must deliver Leave.

Markets are therefore right to react sharply. What they dislike most of all is uncertainty and that is the one thing we can now be sure that we have.

That immediate market reaction could just be speculative, but I doubt that. The fundamental uncertainty will flow through into a significant decline in investment, which will inevitably lead to recession.

The decline in the value of sterling should logically lead to an interest rate rise but that would tip many UK households, and in turn many UK banks, into financial crisis. Preventing this will require massive injection of funding from the Bank of England but not for investment, but just to keep banks afloat.

At the same time tax yields will fall, inevitably. Balanced budgets are now an impossibility.

The result will be political turmoil.

Economically, Brexit can for the time being only suggest massive financial stress is coming the UK's way. And no one, anywhere, will be wanting to offer us any help in solving it because we've just turned our back on the world.

David Spencer receives funding or has received funding from ESRC, EPSRC, and FP7 but any views expressed here do not reflect those of the research councils.

Peter Taylor-Gooby is a member of the Labour Party.

Roger Scully receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Simon Usherwood is Senior Fellow on the ESRC's "UK in a Changing Europe" programme.

Andre Spicer, Andrew Scott Crines, Bill Durodie, Paul Cairney, Richard Murphy, and Swati Dhingra do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Andrew Scott Crines, British Politics Lecturer, University of Liverpool Andre Spicer, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Cass Business School, City University London Bill Durodie, Professor and Chair of International Relations, University of Bath David Spencer, Professor of Economics and Political Economy, University of Leeds Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling Peter Taylor-Gooby, Professor of Social Policy, University of Kent Richard Murphy, Professor of Practice in International Political Economy, City University London Roger Scully, Professor of Political Science, Cardiff University Simon Usherwood, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Surrey Swati Dhingra, Lecturer in Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61460 2016-06-24T04:04:54Z 2016-06-24T04:04:54Z Britain is leaving the EU – will other countries follow?
The British decision to leave the EU has been a long time in the making, but it does not lessen the shock that many politicians in the UK and across the EU are feeling.

While London begins the long process of negotiating an exit from the European Union, some of our attention must now turn to the rest of the organisation and to the other member states.

Even though the UK has been an outlier, in terms of its attitudes towards the EU, it is far from alone in harbouring people who want to change the direction and nature of the union. The ultimate success of the long-running British campaign to secure exit will have given succour to counterparts elsewhere to continue and redouble their efforts.

To some extent, eurosceptics outside the UK have an easier time of things. The use of proportional representation means it has been much easier for them to gain seats in national parliaments. And because vocal eurosceptics are to be found right across the European political spectrum, they have a relatively good chance of making it into a coalition government. They come from the right, the left and even the centre ground, and they already occupy positions of power in Denmark, Finland and Poland.

Citizens in many European countries are also far more used to voting in referendums than the British, leaving their governments in a bind.

As the British debate has shown, it is very hard to argue a case against "giving the people a voice", especially while the EU continues to look so weak in its response to the refugee crisis and the continuing failings of the eurozone.

Populists across the continent have seen the EU as both a symbol and a direct cause of what ails their countries. They have found it a particularly convenient target for blame when it comes to austerity and immigration. After all, the EU is poorly placed to defend itself and there are very few people at the national level willing to devote political capital to shielding it.

The end of the EU?

However, this desire to continue attacking the EU does not necessarily mean others will follow Britain out of the EU.

For one thing, the shock of the British vote is likely to concentrate a lot of minds. No longer merely an irritant, euroscepticism is now a clear and present threat to the union's future development. That means ignoring or trivialising the problem looks less and less viable as a strategy.

Quite how the EU can engage with eurosceptics is not clear. It has not had a huge amount of success at becoming more democratic, despite good intentions. The best way to start is to build from a willingness to try to debate the issues. Eurosceptics might not have the answers to the EU's woes, but they ask many of the right questions.

The British case is also likely to demonstrate the costs of exit much more graphically than any speech ever could. With a strong consensus from economists that the UK is now about to take a hit to its bottom line in the coming months, this might well give eurosceptics elsewhere second thoughts. This will only be strengthened by the likely desire of governments to offer the UK a less-than-generous deal, precisely so as to head off domestic demands.

Of course, in the longer term if it does prove that the UK is better off outside the EU, then this can only be bad for those same governments and good for eurosceptics. The threat of economic ruin will recede and everyone will have to recalibrate their understanding of the benefits of membership. However, this is something that will not become evident for several years at least.

And this brings us to the final logic: the UK is different.

As was rightly pointed out during the campaign, the UK had a number of opt-outs from various EU policies, including the Schengen system of free movement, justice and home affairs and, most importantly, the euro. No other member state has such a degree of latitude.

This matters because the more a country is entangled in the EU, the harder it is to leave. Euro membership in particular is a degree of entanglement far beyond what the UK had.

Any eurozone country that voted to leave the EU would find that the resulting need to reintroduce its national currency would cause huge economic outflows (by those worried about a loss in value during any subsequent conversion process) that would dwarf anything we will see for the UK. With no easy solution to this problem, those who might push for an exit from the EU might feel that the cost is simply too high.

However, such practicalities are not the point, at least not at this stage. There is now a scalp that eurosceptics from all countries can claim in support of their cause. They will now be looking for their next one.

Simon Usherwood is Senior Fellow on the ESRC's "UK in a Changing Europe" programme.
 Simon Usherwood, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Surrey Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61420 2016-06-24T03:41:10Z 2016-06-24T03:41:10Z Britain votes to leave the EU, Cameron quits – here's what happens next
Britain has voted to leave the European Union. This is having an immediate effect on markets. It is also having immediate political ramifications. David Cameron has announced he will not continue in his role as British prime minister.

Legally speaking, though, the process of actually leaving will take some time. Britain will now enter a kind of phoney Brexit period. It is still a member of the EU. The referendum vote is not as such legally binding. It is advisory only – but if it is out it creates a political imperative for the UK government to arrange its exit of the EU.

The law governing Brexit is found in Article 50 of the EU Treaty. This is a provision adopted by EU member states in 2009 to govern Brexit-like scenarios. It puts a two-year time limit on withdrawal negotiations. When the two years is up (or on the date any agreement reached before this enters into force) the UK is officially out of the EU.

Article 50 requires the UK to trigger the exit process by notifying its intention to withdraw. Not one, but rather a cascade of agreements, will follow this Brexit notification:

The Article 50 exit agreement

A separate treaty governing the UK's future relationship with the EU – which could take many years to negotiate (and which, if it goes beyond trade, will require ratification by every single EU member state)

Trade agreements between the UK and up to 134 other WTO members

A tidying-up treaty between all the remaining EU states that removes all references to the UK from the EU treaties.

The initial main focus, however, will clearly be the Article 50 Brexit agreement.

How will it work?

The UK would be the first state to leave the EU but it is most likely that the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, will do the negotiating on behalf of the remaining 27 member states. They will no doubt cast a watchful eye on proceedings, before voting on the deal.

That vote will be by a weighted majority, with bigger states like Germany, France and Italy having a more powerful voice than smaller members (although in practice, strong efforts are made to ensure every member state can live with a deal before a matter is approved). Above and beyond this, should the Article 50 Brexit agreement venture beyond trade matters, it will then need to be ratified by every EU member state.

The European Parliament has a veto option, making it an important player too. Article 50 negotiations will thus have a lot of players with powerful voices – and many not necessarily be inclined to give the UK a very favourable deal lest "exiters" in their own countries get any ideas.

Could the UK delay giving Article 50 notification?

Legally, yes, the UK could delay giving Article 50 notification or avoid it altogether. But other EU states will probably refuse to negotiate until they get the notification.

Brexit campaigners have suggested adopting a swath of domestic laws so that the UK can short-circuit Article 50. But such measures would violate EU law and probably won't see the light of day. Enacting them would pointlessly violate EU and international law, alienate the UK's future negotiating partners and jeopardise the UK's future relationship with the EU.

Can the UK withdraw notification?

This might be attempted if, for instance, the UK doesn't like the way negotiations are going. It is unclear if it is legally permissible. The EU Treaty certainly doesn't prohibit it in so many words. Political misgivings would abound – but might possibly be met by having a second referendum to reject any Article 50 deal ultimately reached.

Ireland, after all, had referendum second thoughts on the Lisbon and Nice Treaties, Denmark had them on the Maastricht Treaty and France and Holland agreed to a Lisbon Treaty deal very similar to the 1994 Constitutional Treaty earlier rejected by both states in referendum.

What will the UK get from negotiations?

That depends on how (and who) conducts the negotiations for the UK, and what the other states are prepared to offer it. Even assuming they prove pleasantly amenable, the UK will be left with awkward choices.

Does it want continued access to the single market with its 500m consumers? If so, it is may have to make Norway-like concessions – including continued EU migration and cash payments for the privilege. Does it want to block out EU migrants? Then it may well have to say goodbye to single European market access.

No matter what the UK chooses, it will unavoidably find itself outside the corridors of power in the EU for the first time in over forty years.

Is there any way back in?

Article 50 does envisage the possibility of UK re-entry to the EU one day – but subject to a unanimous vote of member states. This pretty much guarantees it will only ever happen by the UK accepting the euro currency, participation in the Schengen area of free movement and no rebate.

Welcome to the brave new world of Brexitland.

Gavin Barrett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Gavin Barrett, Associate Professor, Jean Monnet Professor of European Constitutional and Economic Law, University College Dublin Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61320 2016-06-23T15:52:01Z 2016-06-23T15:52:01Z Slumming it: how tourism is putting the world's poorest places on the map

  joaolima/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Back in Victorian times, wealthier citizens could sometimes be found wandering among London's poorer, informal neighbourhoods, distributing charity to the needy. "Slumming" – as it was called – was later dismissed as a morally dubious and voyeuristic pastime. Today, it's making a comeback; wealthy Westerners are once more making forays into slums – and this time, they're venturing right across the developing world.

According to estimates by tour operators and researchers, over one million tourists visited a township, favela or slum somewhere in the world in 2014. Most of these visits were made as part of three or four-hour tours in the hotspots of global slum tourism; major cities and towns in Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai.

There is reason to think that slum tourism is even more common than these numbers suggest. Consider the thousands of international volunteers, who spend anything from a few days to several months in different slums across the world.

The gap year has become a rite of passage for young adults between school and university and, in the UK, volunteering and travel opportunities are often brokered by commercial tourism operators. In Germany and the US, state sponsored programs exist to funnel young people into volunteering jobs abroad.

 Takes all types. from www.shutterstock.com

International volunteering is no longer restricted to young people at specific points in their lives. Volunteers today are recruited across a wide range of age groups. Other travellers can be considered slum-tourists: from international activists seeking cross-class encounters to advance global justice, to students and researchers of slums and urban development conducting fieldwork in poor neighbourhoods.

Much modern tourism leads richer people to encounter relatively poorer people and places. But in the diverse practices of slum tourism, this is an intentional and explicit goal: poverty becomes the attraction – it is the reason to go.

Many people will instinctively think that this kind of travel is morally problematic, if not downright wrong. But is it really any better to travel to a country such as India and ignore its huge inequalities?

Mapping inequality

It goes without saying that ours is a world of deep and rigid inequalities. Despite some progress in the battles against absolute poverty, inequality is on the rise globally. Few people will openly disagree that something needs to be done about this – but the question is how? Slum tourism should be read as an attempt to address this question. So, rather than dismissing it outright, we should hold this kind of tourism to account and ask; does it help to reduce global inequality?

My investigation into slum tourism provided some surprising answers to this question. We tend to think of tourism primarily as an economic transaction. But slum tourism actually does very little to directly channel money into slums: this is because the overall numbers of slum tourists and the amount of money they end up spending when visiting slums is insignificant compared with with the resources needed to address global inequality.

 Would you? Wrote/Flickr, CC BY-NC

But in terms of symbolic value, even small numbers of slum tourists can sometimes significantly alter the dominant perceptions of a place. In Mumbai, 20,000 tourists annually visit the informal neighbourhood of Dharavi, which was featured in Slumdog Millionaire. Visitor numbers there now rival Elephanta Island in Mumbai – a world heritage site.

Likewise, in Johannesburg, most locals consider the inner-city neighbourhood of Hillbrow to be off limits. But tourists rate walking tours of the area so highly that the neighbourhood now features as one of the top attractions of the city on platforms such as Trip Advisor. Tourists' interest in Rio's favelas has put them on the map; before, they used to be hidden by city authorities and local elites.

Raising visibility

Despite the global anti-poverty rhetoric, it is clear that today's widespread poverty does benefit some people. From their perspective, the best way of dealing with poverty is to make it invisible. Invisibility means that residents of poor neighbourhoods find it difficult to make political claims for decent housing, urban infrastructure and welfare. They are available as cheap labour, but deprived of full social and political rights.

 Witness this. Sarah.Ahearn/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Slum tourism has the power to increase the visibility of poor neighbourhoods, which can in turn give residents more social and political recognition. Visibility can't fix everything, of course. It can be highly selective and misleading, dark and voyeuristic or overly positive while glossing over real problems. This isn't just true of slum tourism; it can also be seen in the domain of "virtual slumming" – the consumption of images, films and books about slums.

Yet slum tourism has a key advantage over "virtual slumming": it can actually bring people together. If we want tourism to address global inequality, we should look for where it enables cross-class encounters; where it encourages tourists to support local struggles for recognition and build the connections that can help form global grassroots movements. To live up to this potential, we need to reconsider what is meant by tourism, and rethink what it means to be tourists.

From 2012-2014 Fabian Frenzel was a Marie-Curie Fellow and has received funding from the European Union to conduct his research on slum tourism.
 Fabian Frenzel, Lecturer in the Political Economy of Organisation, University of Leicester Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61529 2016-06-23T14:26:22Z 2016-06-23T14:26:22Z Walking on water: the power and politics of installation art
Bulgarian artist Christo – who is best known for his massive "wrapping" of buildings and other monuments – has unveiled his latest installation, The Floating Piers. If you visit Italy's Lake Iseo before July 3, you can experience what it's like to walk on water.

On setting foot on the piers, a floating dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes which undulate with the waves, visitors will experience the closest approximation to what it's like to walk on water. Seem like a gimmick, or even more of an amusement park attraction than high art? Maybe, but installation art, in its relatively short history, has always been controversial.

The use of installation in contemporary art began to develop in the 1970s as a way of democratising the art experience. Installation enables the viewer to have a more active role in the consumption of the artwork, rather than passively viewing it. As such, the meaning of the artwork was no longer just about what the artist wanted to express, but about the viewer's experience of and interaction with it.

For example, one of Allan Kaprow's earliest installations, Apple Shrine, involved visitors navigating a basement labyrinth of chicken wire, newspaper, cloth and straw, at the end of which they were allowed to take a piece away with them. They had to choose between a real apple, which they could literally consume (eat), or a fake one, which they could keep and preserve forever.

Art in public

Installation artists seek to move art into the public space, so that those who don't usually frequent galleries could encounter it. This doesn't often pan out as expected. One infamous example was Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, a site-specific installation on New York City's busy Federal Plaza, constructed in 1981. The point was to alter the individual's path as she or he crossed the plaza. It sparked such a strong reaction — people were annoyed that they had to go around it, not to mention the fact that many found it ugly — that a public trial was held and a jury voted to remove it.

Because of its strong imposition on the landscape and in public spaces, installation art can also be effective in communicating a political or social message. At the end of last year, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, together with the geologist Minik Rosing, installed Ice Watch — 12 blocks of ice, taken from icebergs from a fjord in Greenland — in the Place du Pantheon during COP21, the Paris Climate Conference 2015. Over the course of 12 days, those 12 blocks, arranged in a clock formation, melted away. The artist made climate change and its effects, for which there are still many sceptics, visible to all — not just the scientists and experts inside the meetings of COP21.

 Time is dripping. Ice Watch Paris

In February 2016, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who is outspoken on the subject of human rights and whose work is often political, covered the columns of the façade of Berlin's Konzerthaus with bright orange life vests taken from Lesbos, the Greek Island that has become a gateway for refugees fleeing to Europe. The installation coincided with the Berlinale Film Festival. Although the intention was to commemorate those who died at sea in their attempt to escape war and persecution, the artist was criticised for the location of installation, seeing as Germany has taken in more refugees than any other European nation.

Art and beauty

But such "public" art does not always have to be political. The work that Christo – the walking on water artist – began creating in the 1960s with his partner Jeanne-Claude didn't aim to pander to particular debates. They maintained that their principle aim was to create objects of beauty. By intervening in a landscape or wrapping up a building in cloth, such as the Reichstag in Berlin, they invited the viewer to look again, see something anew, and appreciate the aesthetic qualities the new artwork brings. The artists continued to make installations together until 2009, when Jeanne-Claude died.

The Floating Piers is Christo's first installation since his partner's death. Similarly, aesthetics and emotion seem to be the principle message.

The public nature of all of these installations enables the beauty of contemporary art to be appreciated by those who wouldn't normally set foot into an art museum or gallery – and the placement of some of them allows for a social and political message to be communicated to a wider audience. While Christo's piece enables the visitor to walk on water, Eliasson's and Weiwei's works both bring home powerful messages about important social issues in a more visceral manner than perhaps a news item or report might. And that, after all, is the power of installation art.

Amy Bryzgel receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
 Amy Bryzgel, Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60589 2016-06-23T13:14:09Z 2016-06-23T13:14:09Z The way we work is changing, but the welfare state hasn't kept pace with the times

  tai11/shutterstock.com

Mechanisation. Robots. The digital economy. The gig economy. The sharing economy. The world of work is changing but our creaky welfare system is still based on a 20th-century model of work, designed when soldiers were returning from fighting World War II.

Then, memories of the great depression of the 1920s were still fresh – and all political parties agreed that, after four hard years of pulling together in the national interest, a return to the Hungry Thirties wasn't an option. Returning heroes deserved proper jobs – and proper jobs were conceived as permanent and full-time, with regular hours that paid enough to allow the worker (presumed to be a man) to support a stay-at-home wife who would look after the family.

The National Insurance system was designed to provide assistance in the case of temporary calamities – an accident, an illness, or an employer going bust. A welfare claimant was seen simply as somebody who had fallen (temporarily) on hard times – benefits were a right.

As the years have passed it has become clear that the ideal template of the proper job, worker and family that underpins this model didn't always fit the reality. Some jobs were low-paid and casual, some women refused to stay at home or couldn't afford to, families broke up or never formed in the first place. Economic restructuring that began in the 1970s led to the disappearance of whole industries, creating ghost towns where once there had been mines, mills or shipyards. Suddenly life on the dole looked worryingly long-term.

Fast forward 70 years and we find a labour market that would be completely unrecognisable to a time traveller from the 1940s. When and how men and women work has been transformed. Even those who still have regular 40-hours-a-week contracts may be expected to carry their work around with them, checking emails on their phone and taking calls wherever they happen to be. Others may be on zero-hours or temporary contracts, employed through agencies or online platforms, summoned unpredictably to work at a moment's notice via an app on a smartphone, or doing interminable unpaid internships before they can hope to receive a salary.

Moving with the times

For workers hovering precariously on the edge of survival trying to patch together a livelihood from multiple jobs, never sure when the next piece of work or income will show up, a benefits system in which the only categories are "employed" or "seeking work" is of little help. At the same time, daytime television programmes such as Saints and Scroungers, Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole, and Benefits Street drive home the message that there is no middle ground: you are either a hardworking taxpayer, or a lazy scrounger. In times of austerity, when governments aim to save money wherever they can, this is a convenient message. But the reality is not so simple.

Many workers are not taxpayers – they actually receive money from the state to top up wages that are too low to live on. The proportion of spending on benefits for unemployed people is relatively tiny – for every pound paid out in Jobseekers Allowance in 2013, five were paid out in working-age tax credits to top up workers' earnings. Tax credits are not really so much a subsidy to workers as to their stingy employers who get away with paying below-subsistence wages in the knowledge that the taxpayer will stump up the rest.

The current benefit system seems to have reinvented the 19th-century categories of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, using the carcass of the 20th-century welfare state as an administrative framework. But neither 19th-century values nor 20th-century structures are fit for purpose in the fluid, just-in-time conditions of 21st-century labour markets and an unpredictable, digital, globalised economy.

We should go back to the drawing board and develop a system that provides basic security and dignity for all while still allowing for work to be organised flexibly. One possible solution is to give everybody a basic income – a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, available as a right. This would raise the standard of living and reduce poverty among the most vulnerable, but would also allow workers to move flexibly in and out of paid work, education and care work without being subjected to the expensive, demeaning and dysfunctional inquisitorial procedures of the current benefits system that sees only the largely exclusionary categories of "work" and "claiming benefits".

Such a system would certainly be technically feasible as studies have suggested, and do away with much inefficient, stigmatising and expensive bureaucracy. But it is not a panacea. To be truly equitable it would require safeguards in relation to public services, minimum wages and immigrants' rights, which would not be easy.

Ursula Huws currently directs research projects which receive funding from The COST Association, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and UNI-Europa. She is a trustee of the Citizen's Income Trust.
 Ursula Huws, Professor of Labour and Globalisation, University of Hertfordshire Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/58258 2016-06-23T12:43:06Z 2016-06-23T12:43:06Z Here's why watching sport makes you cry

It all got a bit too much for Wales fan Jamie Collins. BBC Images

With the Euros now in full swing, and the Olympic and Paralympic Games on the horizon, some of the more sentimental sporting fans out there, will, I'm sure, have their tissues at the ready. Because, if the performance of a Wales fan who couldn't stop weeping when his team recently beat Russia is anything to go by, it seems that watching sport often goes hand-in-hand with a good cry.

When London hosted the Olympic games in 2012, the combination of patriotic pride and sporting success created an irresistible opportunity for crying – one that was taken not only by medal-winning athletes and audiences at home, but also even by the broadcasters interviewing athletes on television.

People have been crying at sports for years, particularly at the Olympics, where national pride further ramps up the emotion levels, for stars and spectators alike. The earliest examples of crying in the games I found, in researching my book about the history of weeping, were shed by medal winners at the 1956 games in Melbourne.

Come 1996, the number of athletes weeping in Atlanta, Georgia, earned that Summer Olympics the title of "The Crying Games". And in 2004, in Athens, the British rower Matthew Pinsent shed tears the "size of gobstoppers", according to the Daily Telegraph.

Rod Liddle, writing in The Spectator, was appalled: "Eton apparently taught Matthew Pinsent very little". He said: "It is all well and good to be able to row a small boat very quickly, but nothing excuses blubbing like a baby – or, worse, a foreigner – up on the medal podium in Athens".

The weeping man

It is the figure of the weeping man in particular that has repeatedly been held up in the media as an emotional exemplar, despite the protestations of dry-eyed dinosaurs like Rod Liddle.

This process was accelerated during the 1970s as a range of figures, including the agony aunts and journalists Marje Proops and Bel Mooney, celebrated the tears of men such as the Sunderland manager Bob Stokoe, who wept on the pitch after his side's FA Cup semi-final victory over Arsenal in 1973.

"I admire a man who can burst into tears", Marje Proops wrote in her column, "who clobbers the stiff upper lip image of the British male at a stroke by letting the tears flow, unashamedly unchecked. And remains undeniably manly."

The occasion is still remembered by Sunderland fans as one of the most emotional in their club's history. One of those who was there in 1973, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fzlICgAAQBAJ&pg=PT237&lpg=PT237&dq=an+elderly+man+%22threw+his+arms+around+me+and+then+broke+down+in+tears+on+my+shoulder%22,+saying+%22We%E2%80%99re+gannin%E2%80%99+to+Wembley+yer+bugga,+we%E2%80%99re+gannin%E2%80%99+to+Wembley!%22&source=bl&ots=Dg3_CCvmXS&sig=3IaPTe43Qo0ba9M6ch4GJ1ZvInY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQhcPCgb7NAhXHLMAKHaYbCn8Q6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=an%20elderly%20man%20%22threw%20his%20arms%20around%20me%20and%20then%20broke%20down%20in%20tears%20on%20my%20shoulder%22%2C%20saying%20%22We%E2%80%99re%20gannin%E2%80%99%20to%20Wembley%20yer%20bugga%2C%20we%E2%80%99re%20gannin%E2%80%99%20to%20Wembley!%22&f=false">recalls that as the final whistle sounded, an elderly man "threw his arms around me and then broke down in tears on my shoulder", saying: 'We're gannin' to Wembley yer bugga, we're gannin' to Wembley!'"

And just look at Paul Gascoigne and his famous "Gazza crying" moment. The tears rolled down his face at the 1990 World Cup, after he received a booking in England's semi-final against West Germany which would have ruled him out of the final if his side had got there. The nation's collective lower lip went all wobbly, and I'm sure many grown men had a good sob along with Gazza and his yellow card.

The age of crying

Tears may have been a rarity then, but today we live in a new age of sensibility. Crying is everywhere, televised tears run down the cheeks of soap actors, celebrities, and reality stars, while we sit on our sofas sobbing in response. We cry in our millions over history shows and makeover shows, singing competitions and baking competitions, while nostalgically asking ourselves whatever happened to the stiff upper lip.

In this respect, we resemble our 18th-century ancestors, who shed buckets of tears over sentimental novels, public executions and paintings of dying soldiers. The age of the stiff upper lip, meanwhile, only got going towards the end of the Victorian era, and enjoyed its heyday in the first half of the 20th century.

While it was often sermons or stage tragedies that moved our ancestors to tears, for us, modern sport is one of the spectacles that provides such an opportunity. For the sportsmen and women themselves, it may be that the thought of the sacrifices they made on the way to their moment of triumph, or an awareness of the fact that this fleeting victory may be the peak of their professional lives, that prompts their tears.

For those of us weeping among the spectators or on our sofas at home, what we are doing is not so different from someone who weeps over the grief of Mary Magdalene or the woes of Titus Andronicus – namely, experiencing our common humanity and performing it through our body. Sport can do that every bit as much as religion or theatre – two of the main routes to tears in earlier eras.

 Sport, it's enough to make a grown man cry. Wilson Araujo/shutterstock

Our tears are orators, announcing sometimes admiration, sometimes pity, for the achievements and sufferings of sporting performers. It is easy enough to see that crying is a social, and sociable, activity, arising from an identification and empathy with the life stories of others.

Nevertheless, the evolution and physiology of weeping remain something of a mystery. No one really knows why humans alone are capable of weeping, nor exactly what it does for us. There have been various theories over the years, including one shared by the BBC broadcaster Chris Evans with Paula Radcliffe when she ran her last, tearful, London Marathon in 2015. According to Evans, happy tears, unlike sad ones, don't taste salty.

I am not aware of any scientific research supporting Evans' theory, but it's something that can be put to the test by both athletes and spectators during the remainder of the Euros and the upcoming Olympic games – when we can all have a good cry, whether our team is winning or losing. Because it's clear that when it comes to crying, it's the taking part that counts.

Thomas Dixon receives funding from the Wellcome Trust.
 Thomas Dixon, Reader in History, Queen Mary University of London Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61130 2016-06-23T12:25:38Z 2016-06-23T12:25:38Z Controversial case shines a light on Germany's shocking rape laws
Gina-Lisa Lohfink, a well-known German actress and model, is on trial for falsely accusing two men of raping her. If found guilty, she will face a fine of around £19,000. One of the two men she accused was previously convicted for illegally sharing a so-called "sex video" online in which Lohfink appears naked, at times apparently semi-conscious or unconscious, while he and another man perform sex acts on her. She clearly shouts "no" and "stop" several times.

After the video was released, she accused the men of raping her – but her accusation immediately hit a snag: German criminal law has never recognised rape unless the victim physically resists the attack. Saying "no" or "stop" is not considered an indication that the woman refuses "sex". (There are some exceptions to this law, such as when the victim cannot fight back because of disability.)

And so Lohfink is now in court as the accused. On the first day of trial, she broke down in the courtroom after three men called her "whore" with impunity.

In her original allegation, Lohfink said she had met and slept with one of the men two nights before the events captured in the video. On the night in question, says she she met up again with him and a friend of his at a Berlin Club. The following afternoon, she said, she woke up in a flat with no idea where she was.

She testified that at first, the two men refused to let her go, and that when she was finally allowed to leave the apartment, she had no idea what had happened, just a feeling that something was wrong. She said she recognised the effects of a date-rape drug that she had experienced twice before in her life.

Meanwhile, the two men contacted multiple media outlets trying to sell the video they had shot. The outlets in question refused and informed Lohfink's manager, who hired a lawyer to report the men for violating her client's privacy. When the men couldn't find any buyers for their footage, they shared the clip online; it went viral.

It was only after watching the video, Lohfink said, that she realised she had been raped.

 Gina-Lisa Lohfink. Gina-Lisa Lohfink / BKC Consulting, CC BY-SA

Lohfink is a well-known actress and model. She found fame through Germany's Next Top Model followed by a series of reality TV shows and has since performed in a pornographic film. Even some of the more sympathetic reports on the case commented on her large and apparently surgically modified breasts and lips, and her peroxide bleached hair. Berlin's largest daily newspaper described her as "a double-D star". And despite her allegations, they all describe the footage released as a "sex video".

The prosecutor's office dropped the case against the two men after an expert had watched the video and assessed that there was no evidence that Lohfink had been drugged. The prosecutor then decided that Lohfink had lied and handed her what legal experts deemed an unusually high fine. Lohfink appealed the decision, and has been standing trial since June 1.

So, four years on from the furore over the video, Lohfink is once again in court over the events of that night. But this time, she is the accused. And in Germany, this is far from unusual: German criminal law has a long history of legally protecting rapists.

When rape 'isn't rape'

It was not until 1997 that rape in marriage was recognised. During the heated parliamentary debates leading up to the historic vote that passed that law, prominent German MPs emphasised "Beischlafpflicht" – the duty of the wife to submit to sexual intercourse.

This callous disregard for women and girls' sexual self-determination is deeply ingrained. In a widely cited 2006 decision, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany overturned a rape conviction of a lower court, arguing that while "the accused ripped off the clothes from the body of the co-plaintiff and had sexual intercourse with her against her explicitly expressed will", there was no evidence that he "forced the victim with violence".

Six months ago, German lawmakers were suddenly quick to act on sexual assault. After the events of New Year's Eve in Cologne, they authorised deporting refugee men accused of sexual violence in contravention of international law – even as reports of security guards raping and sexually exploiting refugee women in shelters went under the radar.

In a widely discussed op-ed, a prominent German journalist lamented that German society only cares about sexual violence when perpetrated by foreigners or Germans of colour. "We prefer to abuse "our" women ourselves," he quipped.

In recent weeks, as growing pressure on social media (#TeamGinaLisa) reached the opinion pages of some of the major daily newspapers, the German minister of justice announced that he was open towards making further changes to a draft bill he had been working on for a few months, which was supposed to add more exceptions to the existing requirement for the victim to physically resist – but which would still allow "no" to mean "yes" in most situations.

As pressure continued to build, the German government finally announced that it will at last change the law to state that "no means no", whether articulated verbally or non-verbally. But if the debates of the last six months are any indication, it is shockingly naïve to think that this will change the uneven way the law is actually enacted – or, for that matter, the tone of public opinion.

Melanie Richter-Montpetit does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Melanie Richter-Montpetit, Lecturer in Politics, University of Sheffield Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61329 2016-06-23T10:36:54Z 2016-06-23T10:36:54Z Year zero for British punk was 1976 – but there had long been anarchy in the USA

Sex Pistols in the Paradiso Club, Amsterdam, 1977. Koen Suyk; Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), CC BY-SA

Any talk of a "year zero" in any field should be eyed suspiciously: after all, nothing comes from a vacuum. However, such a labelling for the year 1976 has been commonly made in relation to so-called "punk rock". Just how suspicious of the label do we need to be, then?

Let's start by challenging the idea of 1976 as punk's year zero. Take the Sex Pistols as the most dominant example (the punk band, in the eyes of many people).

Actually, the Pistols' first gig takes place on November 6, 1975 (pre-year zero, then) and is peppered with covers of short, fast, fiery songs from the sixties by the Who, the Small Faces, the Monkees and so forth. The Pistols' own material is diatonic – simple – in harmonic terms and rhythmically unchallenging; their lyrics are interesting enough, certainly, but are not the most provocative lyrics ever set to post-Elvis rock music.

Born on the Bowery?

 CBGB club in the Bowery, New York: punk's nursery. Adam Di Carlo, CC BY

What about the fabled CBGB venue on Manhattan's lower east side? Again, things are well underway by 1975; indeed, key players from the Patti Smith Group, Television, Ramones and so forth are already familiar faces at CBGB by 1974. The Dictators' "Go Girl Crazy!" is issued in 1975 but much of it sounds uncannily like the stuff which started pouring out of the UK from 1977 onwards.

Punk doesn't come out of nowhere in 1976, then. The most widely name-checked precursors are the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, New York Dolls, MC5, perhaps the Kinks. Dig a little deeper and you'll find people referring to the raw, "garage" rock of the Sonics, the Kingsmen and, to give some more obscure examples, the Swamp Rats check out: "No Friend of Mine") or the Monacles (especially "I Can't Win").

Then there's so-called Krautrock: Neu!'s "After Eight" from 1975, for example, is remarkably close to the overall sound and feel of the UK punk rock which would proliferate around two years later. Meanwhile, punk archivists have uncovered innumerable obscurities in recent years, such as Hollywood Brats' "Sick On You" from 1973, which are uncannily close to the sound which would predominate in the UK and beyond a few years later.

Dr Feelgood, the Hammersmith Gorillas, Eddie and the Hot Rods – the list of pre-Pistols "proto punk" bands is in fact far too large to cope with for present purposes. In brief, there are countless examples of punk-sounding songs and bands which existed in the years prior to 1976.

'That' night in Manchester

Isn't all this only part of the story, though? Let's think about the fabled Manchester Free Trade Hall gig of April 1976. The Sex Pistols have drawn some attention from the weekly national music press (NME et al) but are not much established beyond a tiny milieu in London. The likes of the Clash and the Damned are yet to play their first gigs. Those bands, like countless others, will be energised into action by the Sex Pistols: unless we are prepared to discount the proclamations of the actual bands in question, the evidence in this regard is incontrovertible.

In attendance at the Free Trade Hall are individuals who will go on to form Joy Division/New Order, the Smiths, the Fall, Factory records, the Buzzcocks – groups (and a record label) which will gain worldwide fame and epoch-defining status in the coming years and decades.

If 1976 in general and the Manchester Free Trade Hall gig in particular were just random points on a lengthy continuum, we wouldn't speak of "pre-punk" and "post-punk" in the way that we do. If the Sex Pistols et al hadn't brought such a "shock of the new" to 1976, the vernacular claims to individual transformation wouldn't be so overwhelmingly common. Punk happened; you only have to listen to people talking about it to realise that.

This doesn't mean that there were no precedents for the "class of '76" – we have seen above that there certainly were. But none of these quite matches the impact of the Sex Pistols and most don't come anywhere near. Take The Monks: thanks to the internet, this band have become an "obvious" reference point for those who want to note the pre-Pistols existence of snotty lyrics, aggressive music and, in short, a certain aesthetic of negativity. The thing is, though, even though the Sex Pistols may not have sold all that many records relatively speaking, their sales nevertheless dwarf those of a band like the Monks, as does their cultural impact.

Nihilism doesn't come from nowhere

The Sex Pistols and the Manchester Free Trade Hall gig of 1976 are important, then – not as a year zero as such (as Derrida taught us, there is no "originary trace" – everything follows on from something – always) but as a particular and significant moment in time.

So the punk moment, some 40 years ago, was not a perfect or absolute singularity. It was, however, a clarion call: a felt-possibility – something that gave the feeling there was a chance to begin again with radical novelty. This new sense may not have brought as much of a nuisance to the powers-that-be as is often claimed. Nevertheless, it was – and is – worth something. So value it carefully.

Pete Dale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Pete Dale, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music, Manchester Metropolitan University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60802 2016-06-23T10:26:29Z 2016-06-23T10:26:29Z Save the planet – one festival at a time
As June draws to a close it's time for what is surely now a Great British tradition, as 135,000 music fans pack their tents and wellies for the iconic Glastonbury Festival. Hailed by many as a spiritual gathering, as well a musical event, Glastonbury gives off an air of being at one with nature – but just how ecologically friendly can such a large-scale festival be?

To answer this question, at least in part, Andrea Collins and I looked into the usefulness of ecological footprinting in managing the environmental impacts of large events. The ecological footprint of an activity is the land area required both to provide its resources and absorb its emissions in the long run. As a species we have exactly one planet's worth of land available, so we need our global ecological footprint to be less than or equal to one planet's worth of land. Unfortunately we have already overshot that target and, as it stands, we are all living on borrowed resources.

Our research found that a three-day trip to the annual literary and arts festival at Hay-on-Wye, near the English border in mid Wales, had an ecological footprint 86% greater than the average three days spent at home. Of this, 33% was accounted for by accommodation and 61% by transport to the festival (91% of which was by private car).

The organisers of Hay Festival are working hard to encourage their clientele to travel more sustainably, however. We found that 15% of the total footprint could be cut if everybody shared a car with at least three other people; 28% would be cut if all festival-goers were to travel by coach and 21% of the total ecological impact would be cut if the very small proportion (2%) of visitors who travelled by aircraft didn't come at all.

The UK in particular has far too large an ecological footprint anyway. If the rest of the world emulated the same lifestyle as the British Isles, our species would need 2.6 Earth-like planets to support the human race. Getting resource use down to a "one-planet living" level is going to take enormous efforts both in terms of technological progress and lifestyle change. Obviously this goes way beyond festivals – it is surely the biggest challenge to face the UK in the coming century – and the stakes are high, with the survival of our entire species depending on it.

But these facts should not dampen the mood any more than rain does at Glastonbury (which, for the uninitiated, it doesn't). To begin with, Glastonbury likely achieves a lower impact per head than the Hay festival, due to the larger proportion of people using public transport to get there (though that proportion could still improve) and the fact that everybody camps on site.

Camping will certainly have a lower ecological footprint than indoor accommodation, so long as the tents are reused rather than abandoned. After all, the manufacture of goods is one of the biggest ecological impacts our society has – and there is huge potential for reducing it if we only buy goods we need and don't waste the ones we have. Leaving perfectly good tents behind after the festival is a deplorably wasteful trend of recent years and one that the festival is trying to stop.

More fundamentally though, asking how we can minimise our impact on the world will only ever reveal part of the picture, as it fails to ask what we're aiming to achieve with our existence in the first place. If we want to view the future with any optimism at all, a better question to ask is: which choices can offer us the best lifestyle per unit of resources consumed? There is some interesting research on this, including the NEF's Happy Planet Index. That particular league table is topped by Costa Rica which combines high life expectancy with a strong measure of reported well-being and a low ecological footprint.

Glastonbury in particular has one major redeeming factor here: unlike most mainstream festivals, Glastonbury has a 60-acre Green Fields area, filled with everything from bicycle-powered smoothies to solar-powered soundsystems, promoting a wide variety of organisations focused on sustainability and hosting plenty of talks and debates.

Other event organisers have implemented their own green policies, encouraging revellers to take more steps to be eco-friendly, but more can still be done. Several events – albeit on a smaller scale than the giant that is Glastonbury – make use of 100% renewable energy, use local suppliers as much as possible and encourage their staff to lower their travel footprint too.

If having fun at a festival can have lasting impacts on our green behaviour, then it's surely a worthwhile use of resources, so long as we actually continue to cut the ecological footprint wherever we can.

Crispin Cooper does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Crispin Cooper, Research associate, Cardiff University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/59031 2016-06-23T10:15:49Z 2016-06-23T10:15:49Z The top six dinosaur myths and how we busted them

  Simo Q/Flickr, CC BY-NC

When the first dinosaur bone was described in 1676, it was thought to come from an elephant or perhaps a giant. Over a century later, scientists realised such fossils came from a creature they named Megalosaurus, portrayed as a sort of stocky, overgrown lizard. Then, in 1842, leading anatomist Richard Owen recognised Megalosaurus as part of a whole new group of animals, which he named Dinosauria, or "Terrible Lizards".

Since then, around 700 different dinosaur species have been described, with more found every month. Our ideas about dinosaurs have also changed radically. The dinosaurs we know today are very different from the ones in the books you may have read as a child.

Myth 1: Dinosaurs were all big

The name dinosaur tends to evoke images of giants – and certainly many were very large. Tyrannosaurus rex was around 12 metres long and weighed more than five tonnes, the size of an elephant, and it probably wasn't even the biggest carnivore. Long-necked, plant-eating sauropods grew to titanic proportions. The enormous Argentinosaurus is known from just a few bones, but its size has been estimated at 30 metres in length and 80 tonnes in weight. That's larger than any living land mammal and all but the largest whales. And dinosaurs are unique here. No other group of land animals before or since was able to grow as large.

But not all dinosaurs were giants. The horned dinosaur Protoceratops was the size of a sheep. Velociraptor was the size of a golden retriever and had to be scaled up for Jurassic Park to make it more terrifying. Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of small species discovered, such as the
 cat-sized raptor Hesperonychus, the rabbit-sized plant-eater Tianyulong, and the quail-sized insect-eater Parvicursor. The smaller species were probably more common than their giant cousins. It's just that the massive bones of a T. rex are more likely to have been preserved and a lot easier to spot in the field.

Myth 2: Dinosaurs were all scaly

When dinosaurs were first discovered, it seemed obvious that because they were related to crocodiles and lizards, they must have been scaly. And many dinosaurs – including duckbills, horned dinosaurs, sauropods, and armoured dinosaurs – do preserve scale impressions. But in the 1970s, palaeontologists began wondering if some dinosaurs might have been feathered, like their bird relatives.

This was considered wild speculation at the time, but in 1997 a small carnivorous dinosaur named Sinosauropteryx was found to be covered not with scales, but a soft, fuzzy down. Since then, feathers have been discovered on the plant-eating ornithopods, fanged heterodontosaurs, and many families of carnivorous dinosaurs including Tyrannosauridae- meaning that T. rex was probably covered in feathers, not scales.

 Soft and fuzzy A Gude/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Myth 3: Dinosaurs were all green and brown

Early paintings of dinosaurs favoured a drab palette, with monotone animals dressed in depressing shades of grey, green, and brown. If the Mesozoic era really was that dreary, no wonder they went extinct. But in reality the colours would have been much more vibrant, even garish. Studies of dinosaur scales and feathers have revealed traces of melanin, the same pigment that lends colour to lizard scales, bird feathers and our hair. Analyses show that dinosaurs came in a wide variety of colours including black, white, and ginger. A few show-offs even had an iridescent sheen to their feathers.

Not only that, but many dinosaurs were boldly patterned with spots and stripes, white bellies and dark backs. Some of these patterns probably evolved as camouflage, to help dinosaurs hide from predators and prey. But bright colours and conspicuous patterns would have served to draw the eye of potential mates, much like the tail of a peacock.

Myth 4: Dinosaurs were bad parents

Most reptiles simply bury their eggs and walk away, leaving their offspring to fend for themselves as best they can. This hands-off parenting is risky. A sea turtle must lay thousands of eggs over its lifespan to see a few grow up. Dinosaurs were once thought to use the same "lay 'em and leave 'em" strategy. We now know that's wrong.

Living dinosaur relatives – birds and crocodiles – guard their eggs and their young, so it's a reasonable assumption that the dinosaurs did as well. And there's now evidence of this. When expeditions to the Gobi Desert found a dinosaur atop a clutch of eggs, it was assumed to have died while plundering the nest. It was named Oviraptor, or "egg thief". But then more skeletons were found atop clutches of eggs, sitting on them like brooding birds. It turns out Oviraptor didn't eat eggs —- it was guarding them.

 We can go to the gift shop after you've eaten Dave Catchpole/Flickr, CC BY

Myth 5: Dinosaurs were doomed to extinction

Dinosaur extinction was long blamed on some failure of the dinosaurs themselves, a failure to adapt to the changing environment. In reality, dinosaurs were diverse for more than 100m years with fossils found in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and even Antarctica.

Although some argue this diversity was in decline, the fossils show that dinosaurs remained widespread, common and diverse until 66m years ago, when an asteroid struck the Earth in what is now Mexico. Debris from the impact blocked out the sun and plunged the world into darkness. The disappearance of the dinosaurs wasn't fated – it was a cosmic accident. If the asteroid had deviated by a fraction of a fraction of a degree, dinosaurs would still rule the planet – and we wouldn't.

Myth 6: Dinosaurs all became extinct

The asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, almost. T. rex, Triceratops and the rest disappeared, but a handful of small feathered dinosaurs, probably less than a dozen species, survived. They were birds — small, flying cousins of T. rex and Velociraptor and the direct descendants of the carnivorous dinosaurs. And they not only survived but thrived, evolving into some ten thousand species of birds.

Nick Longrich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Nick Longrich, Senior lecturer, palaeontology, University of Bath Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60874 2016-06-23T09:46:33Z 2016-06-23T09:46:33Z In a bid for the perfect profile pic, young men are increasingly turning to steroids

  Kzenon/Shutterstock.com

The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that around 60,000 people are using steroids to gain muscle, to become leaner and fitter, or to get stronger. But academics and experts who work with steroid users believe the real figure is much higher – probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Needle-exchange clinics across the UK report that steroids users are a growing group and, in some cases, even exceed other illegal drug-using groups. Recently, Merchants Quay Ireland, the largest needle-exchange clinic in Ireland, reported that over the past two years 50% more people have come to the service for needles and other equipment to inject steroids.

What is even more alarming is that a significant number of young men are consuming a range of performance and image enhancing drugs, including steroids and human growth hormone. While the use of steroids has traditionally been limited to professional athletes, bodybuilders, soldiers and police, it is increasingly becoming a mainstream choice for young men looking to bulk up or lose weight.

Distorted body image

A rising number of young people are unhappy with the way they look. Although social pressure to conform to idealised beauty standards is nothing new, the growth of social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook has exacerbated this focus on appearance. Young people spend several hours a day using social media, interacting with and comparing themselves with their peers, often in the pursuit of the perfect profile picture or to increase their number of followers and "likes".

While it is widely known that a distorted body image affects many females, there is growing evidence that males are under similar pressure – not to be thin but to be muscular. Television programmes such as "Obsessed with my body" and "Dying for a six pack" illustrate that there is a huge growth in male teenage vanity, from boys seeking to "get ripped" in the gym to men having invasive plastic surgery. For instance, the number of men opting for cosmetic surgery has almost doubled in the past decade in the UK, from 2,440 treatments in 2005 to 4,614 in 2015.

 In pursuit of 'likes'. Linda Moon/Shutterstock.com

There is mounting concern in the UK among healthcare professionals that males suffer from poor body image and its subsequent detrimental effects on health, well-being and confidence. For example, an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image reported that there are high levels of body image dissatisfaction among adults and young people in the UK. It is estimated that roughly two-thirds of adults suffer from negative body image and that 34% of adolescent boys have been on a diet to change their body shape or to lose weight.

In the UK and in other countries there is an alarming rise in obsessive weight training, with young men spending large amounts of money on supplements, exhibiting abnormal eating patterns and, for some, even the use of steroids and other image enhancing drugs such as clenbuterol (to lose weight) and melanotan II (tanning agent).

Not safe

Steroid use can cause major health problems including liver malfunction, heart problems and skin infections. They can cause psychological disturbances too, such as dependence, depression and body-image disorders. Also, in the UK there is evidence of HIV among steroid users, with an HIV prevalence of 1.5% in men who inject steroids, which is comparable to that in those who inject heroin, amphetamine and other street drugs.

Several studies show that steroid users often use other enhancement drugs, such as human growth hormone and weight-loss drugs, and recreational or psychoactive substances, such as cocaine and ecstasy. Mixing drugs can be harmful. For example, taking oral steroids and alcohol can cause liver damage. And, so-called "roid rage" can be exacerbated by mixing steroids and psychoactive substances, such as cocaine and amphetamine (speed).

Helping steroid users

Health workers and academics in the UK are urging organisations and politicians to increase help for steroid users. Public Health England has also advised local councils and healthcare professionals to engage more effectively with young men using these substances. But it is difficult to reach this group as they often don't see themselves as drug users. As such, users, especially younger ones, tend not to use local services because of the stigma of being seen as a drug injector.

To make matters worse, GPs often lack the specialist knowledge to meet the needs of people who use steroids. This forms a significant barrier for users to get the help they need. Instead, they tend to turn to the internet or their friends in the gym for advice.

What is needed are specialist steroid clinics run by local councils. As well as providing needles and syringes, such clinics should also provide education and health checks for steroid users.

There are some prevention and harm-reduction initiatives in the UK, such as the Steroid Educational Toolkit, the SMART method, the Human Enhancement Drug website, Nine Zero Five and several needle exchange clinics that provide such services.

Still, prevention and harm reduction measures lag far behind those for alcohol and other street drugs, not just in the UK but in most countries. The government needs to address the needs of this rapidly growing drug-using population and include steroid users in health interventions.

Kyle J.D. Mulrooney holds an Erasmus Mundus Fellowship for the joint doctoral programme, the Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology (DCGC), and receives funding from the Educational, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency of the European Union.

Katinka van de Ven does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Katinka van de Ven, Lecturer in Criminology, Birmingham City University Kyle J.D. Mulrooney, Ph.D. Fellow, Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology, University of Kent Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60938 2016-06-23T07:02:23Z 2016-06-23T07:02:23Z Is the productivity drive hurting employers as well as employees?

Are we slaves to futile endeavour? Presidio of Monterey/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Productivity is supposedly at the heart of any successful enterprise. We are told that we are in a global race to grab our share of the 21st century marketplace. Countries, nations and even individuals all must constantly enhance their performance if they are going to survive, let alone prosper.

It is not without its cost. Recent research has highlighted potentially negative aspects of this incessant drive for productivity, such as how the use of expanding performance measurements intensifies employee anxiety. Some of us might be painfully aware that rather than empowering workers, it can stoke insecurities leading to problems of burnout and a disengaged workforce.

Given the largely pro-market bent of the last three decades, this is far from surprising. But less considered is the thought that the pursuit of productivity might be taking its toll on employers. Can it threaten their profits and fiscal position by shifting the focus to short-term accounting practices and away from genuine innovation?

So, we must ask, what are the hidden costs of productivity for both employers and employees? And who is this new productivity culture benefiting? Anyone?

Counter-productive measures

It seems that companies everywhere are trying desperately to become more productive. At the heart of these efforts are new performance measurements that can "track" and help employees maximise their efficiency; doing more with less time and resources.

It looks like common sense. Using new technology, it is now possible to better account for how workers are performing in their job and discover where their performance can be improved. The idea is to perpetually monitor staff for the sake of eternally maximising their output. Revealed is a new vision of management that combines this technological monitoring with coaching in order to "free" employees to become more productive through coaching and advice.

But the worrying aspects of this culture soon emerge. It produces deep-seated anxiety among employees. Staff feel they are constantly being monitored, evaluated and judged – in short, they are not trusted. The productivity culture aims to create certainty, but it breeds uncertainty.

It is no better for employers. For them it represents a mirage of productivity, not the real thing.

 Judgment calls. Sutterstock/MilanMarkovic78

Futility of accountability

In the end, appearance trumps reality. Employees and managers alike discover ingenious ways to show they have made a positive difference on paper. The dangers of this false accounting culture were witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis as well as in recent corporate scandals like that of Volkswagen.

But the accountability culture has not monitored is its own effectiveness. Countries such as the UK which have embraced these techniques are still experiencing a substantial productivity gap and there is little evidence to suggest that these measures concretely improve profitability in the long run.

This raises serious questions. Even if these accountability regimes were successful, would they be worth it? Who are they meant to benefit?

 One more. marissaorton/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Improved productivity is meant to improve the welfare of everyone. It is a simple equation – the more things we produce, the more jobs, goods and services we have. However, over the last three decades massive increases in productivity have led to meagre improvement in the benefits for workers doing the producing. The conventional equation has been reversed. Productivity is now an end in itself for which everyone must work diligently to achieve.

HR people have tried to tackle this head on. They promote policies such as flexible working that highlight how improving employee welfare can directly increase their productivity and contribution to the firm. Companies now encourage employees to be healthy and well by providing them free gym memberships or give them greater freedom to mange their own schedule.

But these approaches often only serve to make the problem worse. What is created is a "boundaryless" organisation where employees and managers are "always on". Everything you do – inside and outside the workplace – is judged according to whether it is enhancing your productive potential. Just as it is impossible to be "employable enough" as we constantly update skills and experience in a competitive labour market, so we can never be "productive" enough, either at home or at work. By definition then, feelings of failure loom.

The cost of productivity

There is a relentless fear that countries and companies will fall into a prodctivity gap. However, we should be just as worried about the "productivity trap", when policymakers and managers promote harmful policies in the name of maximising productivity at all costs.

 It's a trap! Nicu Buculei/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The contemporary neoliberal mindset is particularly dangerous. It puts the responsibility for success squarely on the shoulders of individuals. This is unjust, and also very risky. Deeper structural issues are overlooked in the name of emphasising personal accountability. The ambition to make things better shifts to the game of figuring out who should take the blame. When no one and no organisation is ever productive enough, the emphasis is on managing failure, not transformational leadership.

There are other approaches. Many European countries – such as Germany and Sweden – experience high rates of productivity by providing citizens with greater worker rights, education opportunities, public infrastructure investments and social safety nets.

This issue goes beyond simply creating a "smarter" and more ethical form of capitalist productivity. It helps define the limits of social change at a time when the possibilities from technological advancements seem endless. While austerity and inequality bite, is there a chance for a new form of productivity linked to developments like robotics and the "redistributed manufacturing" associated with 3D printing that can herald a post-capitalist society where "machines do the heavy lifting and employment as we know it is a thing of the past"?

The stakes are high, but it is not just about becoming more productive. Rather we should ask the critical question: what type of society are we producing and for whose benefit? We might find the answer is that the cost of a productive society is simply too high.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Peter Bloom, Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Department of People and Organisation, The Open University Caroline Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, The Open University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60821 2016-06-23T02:12:47Z 2016-06-23T02:12:47Z Elon Musk says we're probably living in a computer simulation – here's the science

  Shutterstock

In a recent interview at the Code Conference in California, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested we are living inside a computer simulation. On first hearing, this claim seems far-fetched. But could there be some substance to Musk's thinking?

As founder of a number of high-profile companies, such as Tesla and Space X, Musk's business interests lie firmly in leading technologies.

Key to his claim is that computer games have evolved rapidly over the past 40 years to the point that, inside the next few years, they will be fully immersive, with a computer-generated and controlled world seamlessly merged with the physical world. In other words, we are on the verge of experiencing augmented reality (AR) combined with artificial intelligence. The end result is that what is real and what is simulated could become indistinguishable from one another. In his own words:

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

The idea that humans live in a reality controlled by external bodies, whether computers or otherwise, has been around for a while. This has been a question explored by philosophers and even physicists over the centuries. The philosopher Nick Bostrom drew the same conclusion in 2003.

The similarities between the arguments put forward by Musk and Bostrom go further than proposing we are part of a larger computer simulation, though. Both consider the development of artificial intelligence (AI) to be a dangerous field of technology. According to Musk, the result of progress in AI research and development will be the end of civilisation. Bostrom takes a similar standpoint should appropriate risk assessment not be carried out on development projects.

Fact or fiction?

But is this just paranoia? The claims carry more than a passing resemblance to science fiction movies, such as The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but are Musk and Bostrom voicing valid causes for concern?

The case that we are not living in a simulation is strongly supported by resource arguments. Consider the sheer computing power needed to run such a simulation. A simulation system would need to manage all the entities in the world and all their interactions. This would require a vast amount of processing. Further support can be found in arguments relating to quantum mechanics – to run a truly lifelike simulation of a city, with all its trillions of interactions, would require a city-sized computer. This makes the case for our existence in a simulation very unlikely.

Even if a machine existed that could simulate our existence then there would be a high probability that we would experience so-called "realism imperfections". These bugs in the simulation would be seen or heard due to glitches in the model. For example, stars may or may not exist when viewed through telescopes of varying magnification. Such errors would be inevitable in a simulation of this scale, but they have never been observed by humans.

Machines that use self-learning, super intelligent software are still very distant from the current state of the art, and systems that do make use of AI operate in very tightly defined fields. Current systems learn to optimise their performance within specific domains of work – not to take over the world.

For example, neural networks, which are sometimes referred to as electronic models of the brain, are used to predict changes in stock markets. These systems can be trained using existing data from stock trading to learn and identify patterns in live data streams that may indicate that something will happen. The result of this is that traders can take action to mitigate any negative outcomes.

Equally, there are systems that are developed using AI techniques to alleviate workloads by applying programmed rules and facts. These are known as knowledge-based systems. While the human users of these systems may not realise that they are interacting with a machine – such as Jill the online tutor of AI, which answers questions and provides feedback to students on an AI course – they are also developed to work on or within well-defined problems or domains.

 Virtual worlds Shutterstock

Taking the restrictive fields in which AI-type systems are developed, the danger of civilisation coming to an end because of the creation of AI would seem to be very small. Indeed, AI is used largely to support human decision-making and action rather than to replace it.

Alternative Reality

There are elements of Musk's thinking, however, that seem considerably more likely to happen in the near future.

One of these is the development of technology to aid human-machine interfaces. As everyday life becomes increasingly reliant on connected devices, the way in which we use them is constantly changing. Our desire to access data and communicate has driven the evolution of wearable technology.

Musk claims that we will become pets to AI should we not develop effective brain-computer interfaces. However, the father of wearable technology and AR, Steve Mann, promotes combining both technologies to benefit society. This carries more substance as much work in the area is focused on assistive medical systems. For example, one area of research looks at the creation of brain implants to harness electrical signals in the brain and stimulate movement in paralysed limbs.

Rest assured, however, that we are probably not living in a computer simulation and that the claims made by Musk are outlandish. There are, however, some elements of his thinking that do hint at technology developments in the future.

Future developments in AR and related technology will move us towards a world that is more connected. In these augmented realities we will have seamless access to data and digital representations projected into the physical world. AI techniques will help us understand the data; making decisions that are informed by computers. But while augmented, these realities will still be built on and in the real world.

Mark Robert Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Mark Robert Anderson, Professor in Computing and Information Systems, Edge Hill University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61473 2016-06-22T22:31:14Z 2016-06-22T22:31:14Z EU referendum: what if it's a tie?
If the most recent polls are to be believed (and as we all know, that's a very big "if"), the result of the EU referendum is likely to be very close. But what happens if it's a dead heat?

Statistically this is of course highly unlikely, but it's not impossible. It's more plausible that the difference between the two camps is just a handful of votes. The question is: how close would the result have to be to trigger a recount?

There is, perhaps surprisingly, no simple answer to this question. The general rules of the game are set out in the EU Referendum Act 2015, and there are specific regulations for conducting the poll. As for all elections in the UK, counting officers are responsible for the votes cast in their voting area and specific guidance rules for this referendum have also been published by the Electoral Commission.

There will not be a national-level recount if the result is close but there can be local-level recounts at any of the 382 counting areas.

Accurate local totals for each voting area are therefore fundamental to a clear result in which voters can have confidence, and counting officers will no doubt be painfully aware of the pressures on them to get things right.

So, what if the vote is locally safe but nationally extremely close?

Overseas voters

If this scenario does play out, overseas voters might just make the difference.

In the 2015 UK general election, there were many reports and complaints to the Electoral Commission relating to various problems with overseas postal votes. Some never arrived, or arrived late, meaning that many overseas voters' ballot papers were either lost or not counted.

If a significant number of overseas votes were to be similarly lost in the referendum, this could lead to legal challenges and petitions for judicial review by militant expats still smarting from the recent unsuccessful attempt to have overseas voting rights in this referendum extended to all British nationals resident in the EU regardless of when they left the UK. Under current rules, overseas nationals can only vote if they have been registered to vote in the UK within the past 15 years.

Any such legal challenges would obviously prolong and deepen the sense of political uncertainty which would necessarily flow from a very close result. But could it also make a difference to the final outcome?

There were 105,845 registered overseas voters in 2015, and the figure could well be higher for the referendum, given the high stakes for the 1.2m-2m British nationals estimated to be resident elsewhere in the EU. The potential impact is clear.

But since British overseas electors are dispersed across the various constituencies in which they are registered (based on their last UK address), there is no easily measurable "overseas vote", such as in countries where overseas voters have separate registration, like France or Italy, where they can potentially tip the final outcome.

If it were somehow possible to identify British overseas voters collectively at national level, it would be tempting to assume that (for those resident in the EU at least) the vote would be overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. Legal challenges regarding any lost votes would presumably have to be made individually at local level, with the collective aim of producing a multiplier effect that could clinch the result.

That would be a difficult task though. And, given the problems for overseas voters recorded in 2015, and no doubt mindful of the potential consequences for the referendum vote, the Electoral Commission has taken measures to avoid similar issues in this referendum. Electoral authorities have been encouraged to prioritise overseas voters in sending out ballot papers early. So it may be that there is nothing, or at least little, to contest.

Whatever the outcome, let's hope there is a clear result one way or the other – though even this may not in the long term resolve Britain's very uneasy relationship with the EU.

Susan Collard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Susan Collard, Senior Lecturer in French Politics & Contemporary European Studies , University of Sussex Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61346 2016-06-22T16:53:38Z 2016-06-22T16:53:38Z Football hooliganism's links to organised crime

Trouble. Shutterstock

Recent disorder at the European football championships in France involving fans from a variety of nations, is a stark reminder that an uglier side to the oft-termed "beautiful game" is still alive and, possibly, quite well.

For many in England, the images and footage of hooligans careering through the streets of Marseille will be familiar – for decades hooliganism has been a staple of England's domestic and international fixtures, earning it the unflattering metaphor of a "disease". As a result, English football fans have earned a dubious reputation for engaging in heavy drinking, antisocial behaviour and violence at matches.

Although one must always interpret statistical measures of crime with caution and recognise their various shortcomings, during the past several years football-related violence – or hooliganism – has officially declined in England. Occasional outbursts of visible disorder do still occur at football matches, but these are not as regular as they were during the late 1980s when levels of football hooliganism in England reached their peak. Since then, increased TV coverage and corporate investment as well as alterations to stadiums, security, policing and a concerted effort to market football as an inclusive, family-oriented sport, have stimulated some quite dramatic transformations within the game.

Importantly though, as several criminologists have pointed out, these have occurred in tandem with transformations in the nature of football hooliganism too, which has assumed a more "organised" character and has been linked to other forms of criminal activity that take place away from stadiums and their immediate surroundings.

Violent communities

Recent research suggests that football hooliganism does seem to provide potential fertile ground for more organised, acquisitive criminal activities in several ways.

While the personal backgrounds of men who engage in football violence are certainly not homogenous, in most cases those that gravitate to hooligan "firms" are individuals who tend to already have some familiarity with violence, usually as perpetrators, victims and/or observers. Some of the men I have interviewed who are regularly involved in football hooliganism first witnessed violence in the communities they grew up in, slowly cultivating their own incipient reputations on the streets of these communities and in the secondary schools they attended.

Those regularly involved in football violence are often already associated with networks of men with violent reputations and that may also be involved in varying forms of criminality. If not, through regular association with football hooligan firms, they will inevitably come into contact with a range of individuals who may be engaged in acquisitive criminality.

In my own research with men involved in violent criminality in northern England, I encountered several individuals who through football-related violence at both domestic and international fixtures had moved into more "organised", profitable forms of criminality, such as drug distribution. The violent reputations forged through engaging in football violence provided a personal resource that can be useful for ambitious, entrepreneurial men plying their trades in highly competitive and sometimes dangerous illegal markets.

 Cocaine used in football hooligan 'scenes'. West Midlands Police/Flickr, CC BY-SA

But football hooligan firms also offer ideal contexts within which to distribute illicit substances, particularly cocaine, or other goods. Research conducted by criminologists Tammy Ayres and James Treadwell reveals the voracious appetite for cocaine among men involved in football violence, which some of them felt actually improved their fighting abilities. I certainly found this during my own research. I observed at first-hand men who associated with a football firm in the north of England regularly purchasing and consuming cocaine provided by local criminals. Drug consumption was considered an important part of the match day experience.

The contexts of football hooliganism and what might be termed "organised" crime should not be considered distinct, but potentially interrelated in several important ways. The focus in this piece has been on English football at a time when the official evidence being gathered on it is indicative of a decline in hooligan activity.

But the scenes from France – and the recent suggestion that the Russian ultras who have been heavily involved in disorder at the Euros may be linked to the Kremlin – certainly raises some important questions about the nature as well as the extent of contemporary football violence globally.

Anthony Ellis has received research funding from the White Rose Network. He is also a member of the British Society of Criminology.
 Anthony Ellis, Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology, University of Salford Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61045 2016-06-22T15:58:24Z 2016-06-22T15:58:24Z Unity by design: why the EU needs a stronger visual identity

  from www.shutterstock.com

The UK's referendum on EU membership is upon us, and British people are weighing up a wide range of social, economic and political arguments as they go to the polls. But facts and figures wont be the only thing on voters' minds. How voters feel – and specifically, how European they feel – will play a significant role in their decision.

One of the ways citizens understand and express their identity and sense of belonging is through design. Designed goods and spaces – from slogan t-shirts, to government buildings, to the ballot papers on which votes are cast – make statements about who we are and how we see ourselves. Because of this, design is a political tool, which can communicate a great deal about national and regional identities.

Influential scholars tell us that nations are imagined communities, formed by the invention of tradition. Both state-sponsored and everyday design have a powerful role to play in the formation of national identities.

With the possibility of a Brexit looming, it is timely to ask how effectively design has been used to promote the idea of a united Europe, and whether EU citizens are really able to express their European identities in this way.

Bland brand

The EU and its predecessors have been consciously designed. The circle of stars on the EU flag symbolises different states coming together. The European parliament in Brussels forms a familiar backdrop to countless newscasts reporting on the policies that shape our lives. And the euro is replete with symbols of European identity; from the architecture featured on banknotes, to the maps of Europe and the national symbols on coins.

 Uninspiring. claireonline/Flickr, CC BY-NC

But while these designs clearly promote the ideals of European collaboration and governance, they are often criticised for being bland, and have failed to achieve anything like the popularity of the member states' unique visual identities.

With a few exceptions, Europe is largely missing a distinctive "design identity" – a coherent visual message, with which people can identify. Just as cars are branded in ways that make them attractive to consumers, so nation branding can persuade people to take pride in their national identity. Europe's struggle for a design identity may stem from the fact that the continent is home to some of the strongest national design identities in the world.

National pride

Germany is renowned for the calibre of its engineering and its design education system, demonstrated most notably at the Bauhaus (1919-33) and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm (1953-68). These initiatives underpin successful design education around the world.

 The Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany. Christian Stock/Flickr, CC BY

And while Italy industrialised relatively late, it has since entered the premier league of design, attracting the most talented designers from around the world to work in its creative hothouses of fashion, industrial and automotive design, among others.

Today, the UK exists principally as a service economy. But it still enjoys a world leading industrial heritage. The strength of the UK's design identity is demonstrated in its museums and trade fairs, in the international success of the UK's design graduates, as well as through the Design Council, which works to persuade businesses of the value of design. The economic strength of the creative industries – which include design – is measured by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport: in 2014, they accounted for 5.2% of the UK economy.

 De Stijl: Mondrian meets YSL (1966) Nationaal Archief/Wikimedia commons, CC BY-NC

Other European countries are less certain of the value of their design heritage. The Netherlands has a tradition of excellence from De Stijl to Droog (to name just two highlights). But we need more rigorous analyses of its design history. Similarly, design historians in Switzerland and Portugal are working on new national histories of design.

Design for Europe

This brief snapshot of the national design identities of some European countries highlights how little has been achieved in terms of a cohesive European identity. And although the EU has highlighted design as a critically important research topic, and is developing its own museum, these top down initiatives are no substitute for the widespread adoption by European citizens of designed goods which communicate European identity.

Clearly, national identities do not preclude European ones. Being British can be compatible with feeling European. Indeed, national design identities necessarily co-exist with local, regional and international identities in today's globalised design industry; for instance, Disney World draws on a wide range of European stories and settings and relocates them in radically different cultures around the globe.

 The Little Mermaid: from Denmark to Disney World. Brett Kiger/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

As long as citizens turn to national symbols for expressions of their sense of belonging, European identity will take second place. A stronger sense of design heritage for Europe would help to bring these different identities together, and to picture what a European design identity should look like. This would be useful for the common market, and the common good.

Grace Lees-Maffei does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Grace Lees-Maffei, Reader in Design History, University of Hertfordshire Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61123 2016-06-22T15:37:48Z 2016-06-22T15:37:48Z Childcare market is failing to provide parents with choice and quality

  FamVeld/www.shutterstock.com

On the face of it, free childcare sounds like a difficult policy to disagree with. Since 2013, parents of three and four-year-olds in England and those of disadvantaged two-year-olds have been entitled to 15 hours a week of free early education – now mostly referred to as childcare. From September 2017, this will be extended to up to 30 hours a week for children of "working parents".

But a new report from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee – responding to a March 2015 National Audit office publication – highlights how the childcare market is failing to deliver choice and quality for most children and families in England. The market is instead thwarting the government's twin intentions to boost educational outcomes for children growing up with disadvantage, as well as employment chances for parents.

Skewed incentives

The committee's report homes in on the weaknesses in the way universal early education is delivered within England's marketised system. Choice is limited for parents who only want the free hours for their three or four-year-olds. Nurseries are under no obligation to offer free early education and may not do so in areas where most parents are well-off.

In disadvantaged areas, three quarters of three-year-olds attend state nursery classes and schools, which mostly offer inflexible short sessions. But most English three-year-olds receive their free early education in private childcare provision: 64% in 2015 according to official statistics.

Yet parents looking only for free early education – rather than childcare – for their children are not especially welcome in private day nurseries, as the nurseries' business model relies on the childcare fees parents pay for hours over and above the 15 free hours. So if parents take up the 15 free hours for its educational value, rather than as part of their overall childcare plan each week, nurseries might be left out of pocket.

A 2014 study by Citizens Advice using mystery shoppers illustrated how this acts as a perverse incentive for childcare businesses to find ways of discouraging parents from using the 15 free hours of early education. For instance, they may offer this only in restricted sessions or over restricted days. Local government funding rates for the "free" hours range from £2.28 to £7.15 per hour for three and four-year-olds and are generally lower than childcare fees paid by parents direct. This means nurseries would rather ensure parents need their children to attend for more than 15 hours a week, in order to cover their costs.

In her evidence to the committee, one childcare entrepreneur honestly articulated the dilemma facing her:

If you are a popular nursery, which are you going to take: the child with just the free entitlement, with a gap in the hours that you have no income for, or the child with a parent who is able to pay for the full session? Private providers are only going to take what is best for them.

The committee recognised that early education subsidies to childcare businesses may not cover the costs of delivering early education, although this has been consistently denied by the Department for Education. Yet even a 2015 study for the department of those costs concluded that the amount the state paid per hour for childcare of two-year-olds was insufficient. The study also noted the degree to which childcare businesses with multiple locations cross-subsidised their loss-making operations.

Quality questioned

The committee pointed out that the Department for Education is unable to measure the impact of its investment in universal early education. A recent economic analysis goes even further. It reckoned that the use of private sector provision, whose quality compares unfavourably to that of the state sector, was responsible for the lack of measurable impact of early education on the educational outcomes of English children at the end of primary school.

The outlook for two-year-olds in disadvantaged families could be even bleaker in terms of outcomes, as 96% receive their 15 hours within the private childcare sector. The fact that only 58% of eligible two-year-olds took up a place under the scheme in 2015 reflects how badly the market is working for them and their parents.

As if things weren't already bad enough, the delicate equilibrium within this system is about to be destabilised even further when the government introduces the additional 15 hours of free early education for children of "working parents" in September 2017. This will be available where both parents (or a single parent) are working and each parent earns, on average, an amount equivalent to 16 hours at the national living wage (£107 at the current rate), and less than £100,000 a year.

This move also compromises the government's position on providing a universal pre-compulsory education service for all three and four-year-olds: calling it childcare is no defence. The extended offer compounds the lack of equity within the childcare market: it is a regressive policy which ignores the needs of the growing number of parents not in regular employment. It also virtually removes from childcare businesses the ability to cross-subsidise the "free" hours with the help of fees paid for additional childcare hours, as most parents use less than 30 hours for their three and four-year-olds.

Unintended consequences

According to the committee report, childcare businesses are considering refusing to offer the additional hours. Schools by and large won't, and parents are confused.

The government was warned of the policy's possible unintended consequences. It ignored a warning sounded in 2014 in the Institute for Fiscal Studies' green budget that the case for further extending universal provision of early education was less strong than generally assumed, given the surprising lack of evidence on its impact on increasing parental employment levels.

A 2016 Frontier Economics study considered the feasibility – and risks – of the plan to extend free childcare. It said that childcare prices could rise, places could dwindle for two-year-olds and for children whose parents were ineligible for the offer.

Paradoxically, given the government's aim of using early years education and childcare to improve the life chances of disadvantaged children, it will be they who stand to lose out. Extending the entitlement to early education to 30 hours a week may well result in one of the most complex, illogical and unfair early education and childcare systems in Europe.

Eva Lloyd has carried out research for the Department for Education and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
 Eva Lloyd, Professor of Early Childhood, Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60869 2016-06-22T15:33:00Z 2016-06-22T15:33:00Z Is psychology really in crisis?

I just can't seem to get my replication studies published. Photographee.eu/Shutterstock.com

Modern psychology is apparently in crisis. This claim is nothing new. From phrenology to psychoanalysis, psychology has traditionally had an uneasy scientific status. Indeed, the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, viewed Freud's theories as a typical example of pseudoscience because no test could ever show them to be false. More recently, psychology has feasted on a banquet of extraordinary findings whose scientific credibility has also been questioned.

Some of these extraordinary findings include Daryl Bem's experiments, published in 2011, that seem to show future events influence the past. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, revealed that people are more likely to remember a list of words if they practise them after a recall test, compared with practising them before the test. In another study, he showed that people are significantly better than chance at selecting which of two curtains hide a pornographic image.

Then there's Yale's John Bargh who in 1996 reported that, when unconsciously primed with an "elderly stereotype" (by unscrambling jumbled sentences containing words such as "Florida" and "bingo"), people subsequently walk more slowly. Add to this Roy Baumeister who in 1998 presented evidence suggesting we have a finite store of will-power which is sapped whenever we resist temptations such as eating chocolates. Or, in the same year, Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad Van Knippenberg showing that performance on Trivial Pursuit is better after people list typical characteristics of a professor rather than those of a football hooligan.

 Does thinking about him really make you better at Trivial Pursuit? Dragon Images/Shutterstock.com

These studies are among the most controversial in psychology. Not least because other researchers have had difficulty replicating the experiments. These types of studies raise concerns about the methods psychologists use, but also more broadly about psychology itself.

Do not repeat

A survey of 1,500 scientists published in Nature last month indicated that 24% of them said they had published a successful replication and 13% published an unsuccessful replication. Contrast this with over a century of psychology publications, where just 1% of papers attempted to replicate past findings.

Editors and reviewers have been complicit in a systemic bias that has resulted in high-profile psychology journals becoming storehouses for the strange. Many psychologists are obsessed with the "impact factors" of journals (as are the journals) – and one way to increase impact is to publish curios. Certain high-impact journals have a reputation of publishing curios that never get replicated but which attract lots of attention for the author and journal. By contrast, confirming the findings of others through replication is unattractive, rare and relegated to less prestigious journals.

Despite psychology's historical abandonment of replication, is the tide turning? This year, a crowd-sourced initiative – the OSC Reproducibility project – attempted to replicate 100 published findings in psychology. The multinational collaborators replicated just over a third (36%) of the studies. Does this mean that psychological findings are unreliable?

Replication projects are selective, targeting studies that are cheaper and less technically complicated to replicate or those that are simply unbelievable. Other projects such as "Many Labs" have reported a replication rate of 77%. All initiatives are non-random and headline replication rates reflect the studies that are sampled. Even if a random sample of studies were examined, we don't know what would constitute an acceptable replication rate in psychology. This is not an issue specific to psychology. As John Ioannidis noted: "most published research findings are false"". After all, scientific hypotheses are our current best guesses about phenomena, not a simple accumulation of truths.

Questionable research practices

The frustration of many psychologists is palpable because it seems so easy to publish evidence consistent with almost any hypothesis. A likely cause of both unusual findings and non-replicability is psychologists indulging in questionable research practices (QRPs).

In 2012, a survey of 2,000 American psychologists found that most indulged in QRPs. Some 67% admitted selectively reporting studies that "worked", while 74% failed to report all measures they had used. The survey also found that 71% continued to collect data until a significant result was obtained and 54% reported unexpected findings as if they were expected. And 58% excluded data after analyses. Astonishingly, more than one-third admitted they had doubts about the integrity of their own research on at least one occasion and 1.7% admitted to having faked their data.

The problems associated with modern psychology are longstanding and cultural, with researchers, reviewers, editors, journals and news-media all prioritising and benefiting from the quest for novelty. This systemic bias, coupled with minimal agreement on fundamental principles in certain areas of psychology, means questionable research practices can flourish – consciously or unconsciously. Large-scale replication projects will not address the cultural problems and may even exacerbate them by presenting replication as something special that we use to target the unbelievable. Replication – whether judged as failed or successful – is a fundamental aspect of normal science and needs to be both more common and more valued by psychologists and psychology journals.

Keith Laws does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Keith Laws, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology, University of Hertfordshire Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61445 2016-06-22T15:30:05Z 2016-06-22T15:30:05Z Getting to sleep in space is hard – and not exactly restful for the mind and body

  NASA

We've learned a lot about the effects on the human body of going into space by studying astronauts such as British astronaut Tim Peake, who has recently returned to Earth. Muscles wither, bones become lighter just as they do during the process of ageing and the cardiovascular system and vision are affected – all from the human body's lack of adaptation to microgravity. No wonder: we have evolved over millions of years on Earth with its comforting gravitational pull. But what effects does microgravity in space have on sleeping humans?

Life on Earth has evolved to adapt to the 24-hour cycle of light and dark that stems from the planet's rotation. From fruit flies to human beings, many organisms spend a significant amount of time resting or asleep. This urge to sleep is determined by the build-up of tiredness and our internal body clock that tells us when it's the right biological time to sleep. This process is regulated by the complex interaction of many factors such as light, temperature, posture, and feeding. So we tend to sleep when it's dark, we lie down when we sleep, we don't eat when we should sleep, and our body temperature drops to a minimum while asleep.

But for astronauts, these factors are disrupted during long-term spaceflight. The low gravity is one major difference: lying down no longer makes any sense, for example, as there is no "down". Our normal sleeping patterns are disrupted by the lack of feedback from our body's posture during cycles of rest and activity. In fact astronauts have to take steps to ensure they don't float around while sleeping in space – they tie themselves into sleeping bags. In order to sleep well, our core body temperature needs to cool. This process is also influenced by body posture and flow of blood around the limbs, which is also affected by low gravity and the absence of "lying down".

The absence of day and night is another major factor in space. Astronauts on the International Space Station orbit every 90 minutes, so the experience of cycles of light and dark is totally different to that on Earth. Light is the main synchronising cue for our internal body clock, and light also suppresses the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin. So exposure to – or absence of – light at inappropriate times disrupts our bodies' circadian rhythms and makes it difficult to sleep. The effect is the same with jet lag or shift work.

Not only this, but spacecraft are noisy, with noise levels of 65dB – somewhere between an air conditioner and a dishwasher – reported in the space station's sleeping quarters. Good ventilation is vital, otherwise astronauts can suffer oxygen deprivation as a cloud of their own carbon dioxide breath forms around them while they sleep. And of course, given the opportunity that only a handful of humans ever have to look out over beautiful views of the planet, it's not surprising that astronauts may stay up late to enjoy the scenery. But they still have to get up to work the next day.

Sleepless above Seattle

Is it little wonder then that most astronauts complain of problems sleeping while in space. A study in The Lancet of 85 space shuttle or ISS astronauts reported average sleep of only six hours, with crew using sleep-promoting hypnotics during more than half of nights spent on the shuttle and in 11% of those on the ISS. Assessments of sleep in space through recording brain waves, eye movements and muscle tone, have shown less and poorer-quality sleep compared to on Earth.

It is well established that poor sleep affects cognitive performance. Using a test sensitive to the effects of sleep loss, it has been shown how space shuttle crews' performance suffers. But we're also becoming more aware of the significant health problems associated with disrupted sleep and circadian rhythms: astronauts experience weaker immune systems and increased inflammatory responses.

 Participants spend a gruelling 60 days tilted head-down to simulate the movement of blood and fluid in the body under microgravity. ESA

As we venture further from Earth we must learn more about the effects of spaceflight in order to prepare astronauts for their pioneering journeys. One approach is to simulate spaceflight on Earth. With the European Space Agency and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, we are running studies in which participants spend 60 days in a bed tilted head-down to simulate microgravity to observe what disturbances their bodies experience and to better understand the underlying mechanisms so as to develop countermeasures to them.

It's interesting that many of the effects astronauts experience are also part of the body's normal ageing process, which means these studies could also give us insight into our ageing populations.

Are there any positive aspects to sleep in space? Well, astronauts snore less and have less sleep-disordered breathing in space because the low gravity prevents the airway narrowing or collapsing. And when back on terra firma, astronauts experience more REM sleep, in which we dream the most. We bid Tim Peake good night and sweet dreams – of being back in space, no doubt.

Simon Archer receives funding from the BBSRC (BB/N004981/1).

Derk-Jan Dijk received funding from the BBSRC.
 Simon Archer, Head of Biochemical Sciences, Reader in Molecular Biology of Sleep, University of Surrey Derk-Jan Dijk, Professor of sleep and physiology, director of Surrey Sleep Research Centre, University of Surrey Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61030 2016-06-22T15:26:48Z 2016-06-22T15:26:48Z Hospital life in Sierra Leone after Ebola

Magazine Wharf: home to some of Freetown's hardest-hit Ebola survivors. UK Department for International Development, CC BY

There are not many places in the world where you scrub your hands with alcohol getting off the plane before you enter the airport terminal; have a temperature gun held to your head every time you enter a hospital, and again every time you leave; where makeshift hand-washing facilities – large tubs with a tap and bucket – greet you seemingly at every corner. There are not many places in the world like Freetown, Sierra Leone in 2016. Ebola has gone, but its legacy lives on.

Large four-wheel drive vehicles continue to cruise the streets, logos slightly tatty but still legible: World Hope International, Save the Children, World Food Programme. The 2014 outbreak was declared over in January 2016, with no new cases for 42 days. However, we now know some people carry the virus for longer than previously thought, so there is always the chance they will pass it to somebody new: every few days a patient with a suspect fever needs investigating.

At the UK aid screening tent in Military Hospital 34 the Sierra Leonean nursing staff are relaxed. The last positive patient was months ago – and there is almost a party atmosphere as they joke and tease each other, a spirit that was captured in Bye Bye Ebola, a video that went viral after the country was declared free of Ebola.

In the adjacent tent is a survivors' clinic – 4,051 patients have survived Ebola virus disease and been discharged, declares the Ministry of Health and Sanitation's website, but that does not mean their difficulties have ended. Work led by my colleagues at the University of Liverpool, and others, has shown that Ebola survivors can be left with a whole series of problems, from joint aches and depression to blindness and deafness. I have come to help assess their neurological sequelae – the problems left over after their previous infection – working alongside the country's only neurologist, Durodamil Lisk.

I meet Amadu who is running a survivor clinic run by one of the non-governmental organisations: "First I examine the Ebola survivor certificate to check it is not fake," he declares. "Then I ask for additional photo identification to be sure they are who they say they are."

It seems bizarre that anyone would falsely claim to be an Ebola survivor, especially given the stigma, but Amadu explains: "We provide all sorts of services that people want – medical checks, support, counselling. But it is only for the Ebola survivors."

What if you didn't have Ebola, but all your family died from it and you need help?, I ask. Does that not make you a survivor? He starts to shake his head. "We bend the rules where we can," interrupts the clinic supervisor, a Brazilian woman with years of experience, "but where do you draw the line?"

Focused on just this one group of patients, the clinic has a calm and gentle feel. On the other side of town, at Connaught, the national referral and university hospital for adults, it is a different story. Built by the British in 1817, Connaught is a hustling bustling general hospital with patients and their families in every nook and cranny. This is the Africa I am used to. At the back, tucked away behind the medical ward I find a small office cramped with British medical volunteers from the King's Sierra Leone Partnership, established in 2011 by King's Health Partners, an academic health sciences centre in London.

"King's were here before the Ebola epidemic; when many other NGOs left we stayed to help run Ebola isolation and treatment services across Freetown, and now we are part of the rebuilding process", explains Paddy Howlett, a junior doctor from London who has taken two years out of his training in Britain. "The country has been devastated by the Ebola outbreak, but of course the roots of the epidemic are in poor health infrastructure, inadequate resources and a lack of trained staff; none of these has improved enough since the time of the civil war." His voice trails off thoughtfully. "Even before Ebola, being born in Sierra Leone your life expectancy was 45."

Howlett was in Sierra Leone as a medical student with Medicine Sans Frontiers almost a decade ago. Like many similar organisations their remit is emergency relief, not long-term development, and so they left soon after the war ended in 2002.

"Most people agree that the Ebola situation got so bad because of the poor medical infrastructure after the war," he says. "You can't help wondering how different Ebola would have been if all those emergency organisations had stayed to help build up the national health system." Once again, now that the crisis is over, many are leaving and the funding has dried except for a few specific areas. "It is the same everywhere," I tell him. "But imagine if these short-term relief organisations agreed to always reserve a small amount of funding for longer-term support – say 10% for ten years". Yes, wouldn't that be something!

I meet other doctors and nurses in the team. They are young and, although they all look thin and exhausted, their enthusiasm and passion beams from their faces. I have worked in some tough environments over the years, but Sierra Leone must be one of the most challenging. Even in the most deprived countries there is usually some kind of basic health provision for the poorest people; but here no money means no healthcare. "Even for those with money there are only a handful of investigations available," explains Fennella Benyon, an infectious diseases clinician, "and only a few drugs".

On the ward round we therefore resort to our basic clinical skills, taking a really thorough history and examining the patients very carefully. This is a million miles from the Walton Centre in Liverpool, where I usually work. At the Walton we have four MRI scanners. There is not a single one in the whole of Sierra Leone. Even CT scans are hard to get – and for each patient we weigh up carefully whether the additional cost is worth it. Many of the hospital staff are unpaid and the little equipment that is donated does not last because of power surges. It feels desperate, but the King's team remain cheery and focus on what they can do to help. Ruth Tighe, a critical care doctor from Brighton, proudly shows off the "oxygen factory" she has set up with the engineers. "It's not what I was trained to do, but it's making a difference." Piping oxygen to the intensive care unit, full of critically ill patients struggling to breath, has brought the mortality rate down by 20%.

 Nurse Hedda Nyhus working with Sierra Leonean colleagues (L-R) Bintu Sesay, Felicia Bangura and Cecilia Kamara. Nurses in Sierra Leone must work voluntarily for two years to qualify. DfID, CC BY

In the Emergency Department we meet Sister Cecilia. She has bright blue scrubs on and hair pulled back in a tight bun. "This is where we screened the Ebola patients during the epidemic. Hundreds of patients passed through here every week. Afterwards there was lots of money so we used it to refit the whole unit. Look, now we even have monitors," she laughs. We bump into Richard Lowsby, an emergency medic from Merseyside, who is looking for beds. "This is not like at home, where looking for beds means asking the nurses for empty beds that new patients can go into," he explains. "The surgical side of the emergency department is opening next week, so I am literally searching the hospital for any old unused beds to go in it." It is a hands-on approach to help the hospital make sustainable and steady improvements.

We wish him luck as he heads off down the corridor. Around the hospital "obituary" posters of doctors who died in 2014 are pasted on the walls. They are faded and peeling now, but I recognise some of the names from the Ebola Doctors Memorial outside the health ministry.

The Connaught internal medicine department, led by the charismatic Gibrilla Deen, has set up extra neurology and psychiatric services for Ebola survivors, to complement the clinics they offer other patients. Anna Walder, a psychiatrist from London, talks with us about the depression and anxiety she has seen in the survivors. "But the amazing thing is how well people are coping," she exclaims jumping up. "Just compare it with what you might expect for a disaster like this in the UK." Howlett agrees: "Sierra Leoneans have an incredible resilience and positive outlook on life. It's admirable and maybe a consequence of all they have been through."

I join Lisk, the neurologist, who is assessing survivors for long-term damage. He trained in the UK and we find we have many neurology friends in common. "The problem now is our doctors go overseas for training, but then they don't come back," he sighs. "And who can blame them?" A notice on his desk reads: "Imagine this hospital with all the medical and surgical specialties; an intensive care with ventilation and haemodialysis. This is not Connaught Hospital in five years' time. This was the hospital 20 years ago." "The war set us so far back," he explains.

 Sierra Leonean junior doctor, Marina Kamara, at the Connaught Hospital, Freetown. DfID, CC BY

We start the clinic. The survivors are greeted by the nurses like old friends, with hugs and laughter. Lisk looks midly uncomfortable as he dons his gown and gloves to examine them. "I don't feel good about it," he says to me apologetically, "but there is still so much we are learning about this virus." Given what we are now discovering about long-term carriage of the virus I have some sympathy with his predicament.

Like many Sierra Leonean women, our first patient Patricia looks magnificent in her glittering yellow clothes. But she is downcast and avoids eye contact as I introduce myself. However, once I ask her about where she is from, and we talk about this beautiful country, she brightens up. She caught Ebola from her husband, she explains, a policeman who died of the disease. None of her three children were affected but they are now living in an orphanage. With no job, and shunned by family and friends she has no means of supporting them. "They are better off there," she says. Although she tries to sound positive, her smile cannot hide the sadness in her eyes. Our next patient, Fatu, stayed behind on the Ebola treatment unit after she had recovered to help look after children affected by the disease. Her ongoing headaches and memory problems are slowly improving.

After my brief visit there is much to think about. I continue to be amazed by the dignity of the survivors, and the heroic efforts of some of the local and expatriate staff, as well as the patients. I don't think I have ever washed my hands so many times in my life, or had my temperature taken so often. The final check is just before I board the plane home – 36.3°C is scrawled onto my boarding pass and I am good to go.

Some of the names in this article have been changed.

Tom Solomon receives funding the Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging Infections and Zoonoses of the National Institute for Health Research. The views expressed are his and not necessarily those of the National Health Service, the National Institute for Health Research, or the Department of Health or Public Health England.
 Tom Solomon, Director of the Institute of Infection and Global Health, and NIHR Health Protection Research Unit, and Professor of Neurology, University of Liverpool Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61262 2016-06-22T14:56:33Z 2016-06-22T14:56:33Z Polls close: what you need to know about referendum night
The polling stations have closed in Britain's big decision on whether to leave or remain in the European Union. Here's what you need to know about the count now taking place. Conversation editors are updating this article through the night of June 23 and morning of June 24.

When might we expect a result?

If the vote is as close as opinion polls suggest, we'll be unlikely to get an official result before 8am UK time on Friday. Counting is taking place overnight. The first results were from 11pm onwards but around half will not be declared until after 4am. If counting proceeds efficiently and one side has built up a clear lead, it may be possible to project the outcome accurately by around 5am.

Will there be an exit poll?

There is no official exit poll. Polling companies have conducted referendum day polling but these are not exit polls. It is understood exit polls have been commissioned by hedge funds looking to make financial gains in international currency markets. These exit polls will not be published and their likely reliability has been questioned. Attempts to infer the results from movements in foreign exchange trading may be misleading.

Exit polls at general elections are based on measuring changes in support for parties from the previous election in a large number of carefully chosen polling districts. It is impossible to replicate this approach for a one-off electoral event such as a referendum.

Is counting the same as in a UK general election?

There are a few differences to how counts take place at a British general election. Counting is happening in 382 counting area (380 local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland, plus Northern Ireland as a whole, and also Gibraltar) rather than in 650 parliamentary constituencies.

Unlike a general election, what matters is not so much who wins in each counting area but how many votes are secured by the rival campaigns along the way. The totals for Leave and Remain will be aggregated at a regional level and declarations made by regional counting officers. Once all the regional counts are complete, the UK result will be announced from Manchester by Jenny Watson, chair of the Electoral Commission.

Will results be announced along the way?

Yes, each of the 382 counting areas are announcing their results. These local results will be relayed by the broadcasters – but it will be difficult to keep up once they start to come in thick and fast at around 3am. It should also be possible to track local results via council websites and Twitter feeds. There will also be rumours and speculation about local outcomes circulating on social media. They should be treated with a degree of caution in advance of official declarations.

Could any areas give an indication of the result?

Early results will require careful interpretation. Metropolitan areas outside London with very large electorates, notably Birmingham and Leeds but also Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester, could prove crucial and are expected to declare from 4am to 5am.

For Remain, low margins of victory or low turnouts in these cities could spell very bad news. If the totals remain close at 6am, when Cornwall (circa 400,000 electors) is due to declare, a clear lead for either side on a relatively high turnout may suggest which way the wind is blowing.

Key results to look out for?

Unlike a general election, there are no "safe" and "marginal" seats. However, the socio-demographic make-up of each counting area and past support for UKIP are expected to provide a strong indication of how individual areas will vote. On this basis, early results from Scotland and London could be seen as safe for Remain. Conversely, parts of the east coast such as Great Yarmouth, North Norfolk, Boston and South Holland should be safe territory for Leave.

Some counting areas come close to representing the socio-demographics of the country in microcosm. Swindon, often regarded as a barometer town in politics, is expected to declare at around 1am. A clear lead for either side here could be indicative of a wider pattern.

What amounts to a decisive victory?

Given how tight the polls have been, a ten-point margin of victory (for example, 55% to 45%) will almost certainly be interpreted as decisive. However, for the issue to be considered settled, at least in the short term, a margin of victory for Remain over Leave would have to be at least 60% to 40%. A narrow victory for Leave, for example 51% to 49%, could be one of the most problematic outcomes from a political perspective, particularly if secured on the back of a relatively low turnout.

What amounts to a close result?

Anything within the margins of 47:53 either way will probably be seen as close and the polls suggest that such an outcome is clearly possible. Ultimately, the vote can be won by a margin of just one vote. That is the nature of a referendum.

Recounts can be requested in individual counting areas but only prior to official declarations being made. There is no legal provision for a national recount. The only means of challenging the result will be via judicial review.

Should I stay up for the result or go to bed?

Staying up until breakfast time for the official result is possibly going to be the preserve of the political obsessive. Assuming the opinion polls are broadly correct (admittedly a big assumption after the last general election) and the vote is as close as expected, the real excitement is likely to be from 5am onwards, at which point it may be possible for broadcasters to project a winner.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg has previously received funding for research or consultancy on electoral matters from the UK Electoral Commission and the UK Cabinet Office. He is the Chair of Democratic Audit, an independent research organisation based at the London School of Economics which monitors the health of democracy in the UK.
 Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Head of Politics, University of Liverpool Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61177 2016-06-22T14:33:39Z 2016-06-22T14:33:39Z Funding cuts could leave victims of domestic violence with nowhere to go

  from www.shutterstock.com

Right across England and Wales, local councils have been coping with successive cuts to their budgets for the past six years. Between 2010 and 2015, cuts to local councils amounted to £18 billion in real terms, and a further £9.5 billion is expected to be slashed by 2020. Inevitably, public services suffer as councils try to absorb these shocks. And when public services suffer, so do the people who rely on them for support and protection.

For instance, Lancashire County Council announced in February that it needs to save £262m over the next four years. A portion of this is to be taken from the budget that sustains Lancashire's nine refuges, which provide safe accommodation and support for women and children who are experiencing, or at risk from domestic violence and abuse (DVA).

It is impossible to fully account for the immense human and emotional costs of such abuse, but we do know that the scale of the problem is huge; it represents 8% of all crime. Currently, two women are killed each week by their current or former partner in England and Wales. In the year to March 2015, 1.3m women and 600,000 men reported that they had experienced domestic abuse – research suggests that the real figure could be 60% higher.

Safe spaces

Against this backdrop, the value of refuges is undeniable. They provide provide a safe space for women and children, as well as support which can help prevent further abuse, harm and homicide. Without council funding, the refuges across Lancashire will have to find alternative sources of income. If they cannot, they may need to significantly reduce their service provision, or even close down completely.

Meanwhile, there are no clear reports about how much the cuts to refuges and other DVA-related services will save the taxpayer, or the council itself. Indeed, the high economic cost of this type of violence – in terms of the demands it places on public services – is widely acknowledged.

And although a public petition against withdrawing funds from these services has exceeded 8,000 signatures, the council has not reconsidered its position. It is undeniably shortsighted for the council to pass government cuts onto valuable community services.

Blame game

Since the announcement the prime minister, David Cameron, has "urged" the council to "do the right thing". But in fact, local authorities have no statutory obligation to provide refuge accommodation. Cameron's words mask the real issue at play here: the lack of stable, longer-term funding for DVA services.

 Unhelpful. The Prime Minister's Office/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The government has pledged millions of pounds to end DVA – as well as funding for early intervention work, to help prevent future cases. But a 2012 study found that cuts to national budgets have led to reductions in the provision of services at a local level, despite the introduction of these new national funding streams. Most importantly, the researchers also asserted that reduced services were likely to lead to higher levels of DVA. In light of this evidence, the government's funding arrangements seem rather self-defeating.

More recently, Polly Neate, chief executive of Women's Aid – a national charity working to end domestic abuse against women and children – issued a word of caution about the £15m of funding that is to be made available to women's charities from the UK's "tampon tax" (a 5% VAT charge on sanitary products).

In particular, Neate noted that smaller DVA charities lack the capacity to make competitive applications for funding, which take time and skill. She also highlighted the other, more subtle impacts of austerity measures on DVA victims, such as the housing benefit cap, which can mean that women who lack the resources to move out have limited choices beyond remaining in violent and abusive homes.

The Norwegian method

It's always worth looking at how other countries tackle social problems – especially when it comes to deciding whose duty it is to protect the vulnerable members of society. Take Norway, for example: in 2010, the nation passed a law which requires each municipality to create and follow an action plan, which includes providing refuge accommodation to those who need it, regardless of gender (in separate facilities).

So, right across the country, each municipality is responsible for making sure that no one in the local population is made homeless because of DVA, or forced to remain stuck in violent homes without the option to leave. This approach ensures that support services such as refuges secure regular funding, and that victims are not subject to a postcode lottery when seeking help.

Likewise, local councils in England should have a legal obligation to provide refuges and other DVA support to all victims – largely women and children, but also men, LGBTQ people and other groups who are affected by DVA. More importantly, giving local authorities a statutory duty would require central government to provide ringfenced funding. This might then enable DVA services to get on with the real task at hand: supporting the victims.

Michaela Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Michaela Rogers, Lecturer in Social Work, University of Salford Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61226 2016-06-22T12:31:00Z 2016-06-22T12:31:00Z Game theory offers a better way forward in Britain's EU drama
The way that the EU referendum campaigns – both for and against British membership of the bloc – have been handled has been redolent of game playing. As an academic who studies game theory, a number of parallels are evident. And, from the displays of nastiness on both sides of the campaign, it is clear that Britain needs to forge a more productive path forward in its relationship with the EU – whether it remains or leaves. My work on a new type of game theory may offer some insights.

From the moment David Cameron went to Brussels in February 2016 to secure better terms for Britain's EU membership, the games began. Having already promised a referendum on Britain's EU membership, he was no doubt hoping to use the shadow of a Brexit vote as a bargaining chip in his negotiations.

Essentially, he argued that if the other leaders agreed to the UK's demands for concessions, he would be able to convince the British public to vote to remain in the EU. If the UK didn't get what it wanted, the implication was that Britain would exit and weaken the EU for the remaining nations. The looming referendum was designed to increase the UK's bargaining power, but it fell flat and the other leaders called his bluff, making limited concessions.

A credible threat?

An important concept in game theory when it comes to winning negotiations is the idea of making "credible threats". For Cameron's threat to be credible (and therefore effective) it required the other EU leaders to believe he had such influence over the referendum outcome that he could determine a vote to remain or leave. With the referendum now looming and victory for Remain far from certain, it would seem as though his threat was not credible.

Meanwhile, members of the Leave camp appear to be using the referendum in similar ways – to secure better terms of EU membership for the UK. Former leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, has argued that the February negotiations failed and that, if the UK votes to leave the EU, this will "shake Europe's leaders out of their complacency". He said:

There would be a significant chance that they [the EU] would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.

So, in a sense, this Leave campaigner and the UK prime minister have been using the referendum in similar ways – to secure better terms of EU membership. Where they differ, however, is that Michael Howard is keeping his threat alive. Vote Leave on June 23, he says and use this as a bargaining chip against an EU desperate for Britain to stay.

With the polls neck and neck on the cusp of the EU referendum and no sign of further concessions being made by the EU, we appear to be witnessing another key game theory concept at play: the game of chicken.

 Game playing. Shutterstock

This is the well-known game where two players drive at speed towards each other on a single-track road. Whoever swerves first loses. Of course, if neither player swerves, then they crash into each other and both lose. Some have asked whether it is sensible for the UK to play this game with a 27-headed opponent.

Tapping into our emotions

Where traditional game theory falls down in analysing Britain's relationship with the EU is the way that it is based on the idea that humans are all fully rational, unemotional, self-interested people who get the most value out of everything we do, with no regard for others.

Step in behavioural economics and behavioural game theory, which incorporates psychology, emotions and social preferences – such as our sense of fairness, trust and empathy – into the standard economics models. It recognises that people may care about others – and particularly working with others for a common goal.

Take the classic prisoner's dilemma – where the obvious, rational strategy for each individual in the game results in the worst outcome for both. Research shows, however, that if we add empathy into models of the prisoner's dilemma – where each player cares sufficiently about the other – it can transform the game into one of mutual cooperation, enabling a win-win situation for both players.

This can be true for the EU and Britain. If both sides were to develop greater empathy for the other side – this would entail closer relationships between all of the nations, more awareness of each other's needs, greater kindness towards each other, softer negotiating approaches, and a better view of humanity – both will be better placed to reach a mutually beneficial outcome.

Richard Fairchild does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Richard Fairchild, Senior Lecturer in Corporate Finance, University of Bath Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61387 2016-06-22T10:39:56Z 2016-06-22T10:39:56Z If Scotland blocks England from Brexit, what happens next?

  Aquir

Scottish voters don't regard the EU referendum with the same importance as the independence vote of 2014. No one is suggesting Scottish turnout will be anywhere near the 85% of that poll – more likely 20 points below. Yet the EU referendum could have fascinating implications for Scotland.

All polls indicate a close result across the UK, but a very clear Remain vote in Scotland (and Northern Ireland). This leaves three realistic scenarios. Scotland could vote to stay in while the UK votes to leave – thanks to England. The UK could vote to stay in by a very narrow margin, with a Scottish Remain majority effectively blocking a narrow English vote to leave. Or the UK could vote Remain, with both England and Scotland in favour.

Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, and her senior SNP colleagues have long said Scotland being forced from the EU against its will would be the kind of "material change" that would justify a second independence referendum. But would they want to? The first minister has also openly stated the Scottish government would only call for a referendum if public opinion indicates a significant uplift from the 45% Yes vote of 2014 – probably towards about 60%.

 Sturge seeks surge. Twocoms

A large number of middle-class Scots voted No because of the economic uncertainty of independence. In the event of a Brexit vote, the same rationale may make them lean the other way if they thought an independent Scotland could remain in the EU. Current EU referendum polling certainly indicates the better off in Scotland are more likely to vote Remain. On the other hand, the fact that Scottish voters see the EU referendum as less important than the independence referendum suggests the EU result may not alter their opinion about Scottish independence.

Either way, the Scottish government is likely to be cautious. Since economic certainty is important for these swing voters, it may be a case of seeing what happens. The UK's exit negotiations with the EU may not run smoothly – the EU may wish to signal to the likes of the eurosceptic French that the exit path carries costs. That could boost support for independence among these middle class Scots, though how voters react to uncertainty is itself uncertain.

If so, we would then probably see debates about an independent Scotland's relationship to the remainder of the UK's "single market" and its currency – indeed, Sturgeon has already indicated there would be discussions about Scotland joining the eurozone in the event of a Brexit. Many would want to know how welcoming the EU would be to an independent Scotland and whether fast-track entry would be possible.

Even if the SNP did feel there was the momentum for another "indyref", bear in mind the power to hold a legally secure referendum is reserved to Westminster. In this UK Leave/Scotland Remain scenario, would it authorise another vote? My guess is it would depend on the strength of feeling. David Cameron may well resist one, but a post-Brexit leader might take a different view, perhaps in a bid to shelve independence for a generation. But they might play hardball with timing, the nature of the question and so forth.

The 'Scotland blocks Brexit' scenario

On one level there ought to be no problem with our second scenario. Leading Brexiters presented themselves as strongly British unionists during both referendum campaigns, so they shouldn't complain if the UK has voted as the UK. Yet it is still easy to imagine the idea of Scotland obstructing the will of England becoming a major political flashpoint.

How it played out would depend on whether David Cameron was prime minister. If he remained there would be little immediate change, yet it would be an era of even more political positioning and posturing than now. Cameron would probably face rebellions on European issues from pro-Brexit Tories similar to John Major's premiership post-Maastricht. He would be relying on opposition support for such votes, not least perhaps from the SNP voting bloc.

This could exacerbate the sense of injustice among English nationalists already decrying the EU referendum as a European version of the West Lothian question (the problem of Scottish MPs potentially holding the casting vote at Westminster on purely English issues).

 None shall pass. Rolf G Wackenburg

The situation could become more dangerous when the prime minister steps down. The new leader in a party whose root and branch is predominantly pro-Brexit would likely tack towards English nationalism – as Cameron himself attempted immediately after the Scottish independence referendum (his plan for English votes for English laws has led to some procedural changes in the Commons).

The substance of this nationalism would matter. Would it broadly focus on tolerance, democracy and respect for diversity? Or would it be more exclusionary and self-assertive, responding to what it saw as the threats to English society? If it were more the latter that might be distinctly unwelcome in Scotland, and might have implications for independence support.

On the other hand, it is not impossible to imagine an English nationalist UK government paying less attention to the devolved nations – particularly Scotland, where there are so few Tory MPs and the financial settlement with Westminster has already been agreed until 2020. The Brexiters have barely addressed the Scottish question during the referendum, so we're really in unknown territory.

Whatever the case, it would be unwise to assume that two referendum victories for Cameron would mean politics would return to the pre-2014 days. You only need look at the Scottish referendum to see that politics rarely plays out this way. Even if the vote is Remain both north and south of the Scotland-England border, there will be a Tory leadership election relatively soon and the party will have substantial divisions to heal following all the "blue on blue" hostility of the EU referendum.

A Brexit leader such as Boris Johnson as prime minister while the Scottish nationalists continue to look for another independence opportunity, would certainly mean interesting times. The outcome of the vote on June 23 could well be an important staging post to whatever happens between England and Scotland next.

Duncan McTavish does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Duncan McTavish, Professor of Public Policy and Management, Glasgow Caledonian University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61402 2016-06-22T10:28:52Z 2016-06-22T10:28:52Z Sound and furry in #EURef Twitter war

  Twitter/Lilian Edwards

Twitter was always going to be a major battleground in the EU referendum but the sheer number of hashtags being used in the debate has been surprising.

Both sides are linguistically inventive: for every pro-Leave hashtag, there's a pro-Remain equivalent. Virtually all synonyms of "Remain" and "Leave" – from #britin and #britexit to #votin and #voteout – have been used. There's even the somewhat clunky #brout and #brin, as well as whimsical phrases like #brexitandchill and #remainandgain.

Not all hashtags trend, of course. In fact, the vast majority don't. To measure resonance, the content of tweets must be taken into consideration; it is not just a numbers game. Hashtags aren't always used as a supportive device – a tweet that includes #GrassrootsOut, for example, might not necessarily endorse the movement.

To untangle the question of success, I have been gathering tweets containing 250 referendum-relevant hashtags since March 10. I've analysed the first three months of data from what has already become a collection of 10m tweets.

While Brexiters appear to be winning on Instagram, it's the Remainers who seem to be running Twitter. The Brexiters are making a lot of noise – but that doesn't necessarily amount to winning the war.

Hashtags and hijacks

From a pure numbers perspective, the Leave campaigners are in the lead. The most popular hashtag in my dataset is #Brexit, which is present in more than 2.5m tweets (roughly 33% of the data up until June 10).

Although this hashtag is arguably neutral – since it doesn't express any particular sentiment about leaving the EU – it is being used far more actively by the Leave camp, who did, after all, coin the term. Almost two-thirds of tweets that contain it support a British exit from the EU.

The second most popular hashtag is #VoteLeave (1.2m). The more obviously neutral #EURef comes in third (873,000), followed by #StrongerIn (531,000).

Use of #EURef is roughly evenly split among Leave, Remain, and neutral (with Leave and neutral being slightly more dominant).

Pro-Leave groups are also more actively subverting pro-Remain hashtags than the other way round – almost 20% of tweets containing #StrongerIn express pro-Leave sentiment, whereas only 4% of tweets containing #VoteLeave support remaining in the EU.

Although #VoteLeave is more than twice as frequently used as #StrongerIn, half of the top 20 hashtags are pro-Remain. This indicates that a number of pro-Remain groups are quite active in the Twittersphere. Moreover, #Remain is two-and-a-half times more popular than #Leave.

Users or bots?

A closer scrutiny of the profiles of the top 20 users reveals that 85% are pro-Leave. All have tweeted at least 5,500 times and most of these tweets are retweets. According to the Truthy project's Bot or Not, almost all are at least 40% likely to be a robot. They may be loud, but they don't seem to be producing much original content.

Celebrity support

Prominent individuals and brands on Twitter (those who have verified accounts) strongly favour #Brexit and #EURef over other hashtags. This might indicate that they prefer to take a more overtly neutral stance. Although, as noted above, #Brexit is being used far more actively by the Leave camp.

Most popular content

Remain campaigners are winning the Twitter war on one very important front. They are responsible for 60-70% of the ten most shared and liked tweets in my dataset (eight tweets appear on both lists). None of the top ten liked tweets and only one of the top ten shared tweets is pro-Leave.

The most shared and liked EU referendum tweet features a gif of a man trying to set fire to an EU flag, only to find that it won't catch light – because it has been produced according to European safety rules.

Another of the most popular tweets comes from pro-Remain actor Stephen Mangan, who imagines a meeting of eurosceptic minds. His tweet is a good example of how a hashtag (in this case #Brexit) can be subverted by people who support the opposite of what it implies.

So who is winning the Twitter hashtag war? Although Leave campaigners are more vocal, Remain campaigners are crafting more compelling content. In the Twittersphere, humour and wit prevail and are more persuasive than anger or statistics.

Cat pictures, of course, are the epitome of this – so it's no surprise that #CatsAgainstBrexit has become an instant viral success in the final days of the campaign.

Since June 18, thousands of people like Vix Leyton have shared pictures of their cats, explaining the implications of leaving the EU for the feline community. There is of course an emerging counter-movement of pro-Brexit pets (#PetsforBrexit, #PetsforBritain).

The bottom line with Twitter is that as political as it can be, ultimately people just want to be entertained. And where cats are involved, Remain is the clear winner.

Yin Yin Lu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
 Yin Yin Lu, DPhil Candidate (Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences), University of Oxford Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60953 2016-06-22T10:24:30Z 2016-06-22T10:24:30Z Why 'ethical' music festivals may put off revellers
Those who travel to Glastonbury this weekend will have forked out £228 (plus a £5 booking fee) per ticket for the privilege, and many will spend just as much once there. Many music festivals today tend to be associated with such significant sums.

The same cannot be said of Woodstock or the Glastonbury of the 1970s and 80s. Woodstock famously came free. The first Glastonbury in 1970 cost £1. By 1989 it had only reached £28. These festivals not only bring to mind images of revelry and era-defining music, but also hold prominent positions in the public's collective imagination as conveyors of political resistance and social change.

As live music takes on a greater economic significance for the music industry, and the festival scene accordingly explodes, this revolutionary aspect of live music is waning. Powerful images such as Jimi Hendrix protesting American imperialism with a guitar solo have been sanitised. Festivals are now generally imbued with messages of commercial aspiration. It's safe to say that attending live music events no longer represents the counter-cultural movement it possibly once did.

This hasn't stopped music consumers from signing up. And nor has it stopped music festivals, both big and small, from positioning themselves as beacons of social responsibility and ethical consumption in the hope of appealing to music fans. But there is evidence to suggest that this may now be putting punters off, not enticing them.

The benefits of positioning your music festival or live event in such a way are obvious in a crowded marketplace (there were 1,070 festivals in the UK last year). There is a sense of authenticity associated with ethical festivals that is perceived to be particularly attractive to consumers of the arts who seek the cultural capital that this can potentially provide. It is standard practice in the contemporary marketing of any product or service to highlight ethical or socially responsible features as a selling point.

 Festivals are becoming more and more conformist. stoneflower/flickr, CC BY-SA

Emotive sounds

Moving beyond the marketing, and the cynical viewpoint it inevitably brings, music and the arts are often presumed to be a powerful vehicle in which to advocate social responsibility because of music's capacity to move us. There is a long history of live music events that seem to be testament to this, from the performances of the famous 19th-century opera singer Jenny Lind, who gave much of her proceeds to charity, to more recent events, such as Band Aid's campaign to tackle famine and global poverty. Such examples demonstrate the power of live music to raise money and awareness for social issues.

But a question that has been rarely asked, particularly in academic research, is what the music fan/consumer thinks about the use of music events to promote socially responsible causes. Is music as suitable a vehicle for this as is generally presumed?

This is a question that myself and colleagues Todd Green (Brock University) and Julie Tinson (University of Stirling) asked in recent research. Our findings suggest that music fans have inconsistent levels of awareness, interest and support when it comes to socially responsible engagement in the music industry. We conducted 22 qualitative interviews that averaged 54 minutes with festival-goers from multiple cities across the UK and Ireland who represented a diverse population in terms of gender, age, and income level.

While many were able to identify "socially responsible" artists and events such as Bono and Glastonbury, they were unlikely to be able to elaborate in any detail how such artists and events were deemed to be this way, what particular causes they engaged with, or what charities they promoted.

It was also apparent that the participants only focus on socially responsible (or irresponsible) aspects of live music was if it directly impacted their own experience. While the value that comes with associating oneself with a socially responsible event was recognised, in general motivations such as price, quality of the music and convenience of the venue were deemed much more important.

 Glastonbury green times. 11694215@N00/flickr, CC BY

No strings attached

This may not come as a surprise to most music fans, who would prioritise such needs as a matter of self-interest. But what is surprising is the disdain that many of the participants have for the promotion of socially responsible causes. Many saw this as interfering with their leisure time, diminishing their experience of live events. "Don't be lecturing us on Middle Eastern politics when all we want to do is a have a dance", was a response we received that was a typical sentiment.

One may argue that the sample used may not have been necessarily engaged in social causes. But this same sample expressed strong concern for the ethical production/consumption of more everyday routine products, that you might find in a supermarket for example. This evidence contradicts the common presumption in previous research that matching a hedonistic product/service with an ethical message is more effective than with a utilitarian one.

Why is this the case? One theory is that the pressure to be ethical and socially engaged is something that is embedded in everyday routines, and increasingly reflected in the everyday purchases that we make. Live music events and particularly festivals are viewed as spaces in which people can escape from such pressures of everyday life.

This raises obvious questions about how events which are positioned in this way are promoted. But more importantly, it raises questions about the role that events such as festivals have in promoting and engaging social causes and whether the "power" of music is shifting as live music becomes more commercially important.

Gary Sinclair receives funding from the British Academy.
 Gary Sinclair, Lecturer in Marketing, University of Stirling Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60349 2016-06-22T10:02:53Z 2016-06-22T10:02:53Z Nanotechnology could make our food tastier and healthier – but can we stomach it?

Egg-straction Shutterstock

Every mouthful of food we eat is teeming with chemical reactions. Adding ingredients and cooking helps us control these reactions and makes the food taste better and last longer. So what if we could target food at the molecular level, sending in specially designed particles to control reactions even more tightly? Well, this is exactly what scientists are trying to do and it has already produced some impressive results – from food that tastes salty without the health risks of adding salt, to bread that contains healthy fish oil but without any fishy aftertaste.

But while this nanotechnology could significantly enhance our food, it also raises big questions about safety. We only have to look at the strong reaction against genetically modified foods to see how important this issue is. How can we ensure that nanotechnology in food will be different? Will our food be safe? And will people accept these new foods?

Nanotechnology is an emerging technology that creates and uses materials and particles at the scale of a nanometre, one billionth of a metre. To get an understanding of just how small this is, if you imagine a nanoparticle was the size of a football then an animal like a sheep would be as big as our planet.

 How big is a nanometre?

Working with such small particles allows us to create materials and products with improved properties, from lighter bicycles and more durable beer bottles to cosmetic creams with better absorption and toothpastes that stop bacteria from growing. Being able to change a material's properties means nanotechnology can help create many innovative food products and applications that change the way we process, preserve and package foods.

For example, nanotechnology can be used for "smart" packaging that can monitor the condition of foods while they are stored and transported. When foods are contaminated or going off, the sensors on the packaging pick up gases produced by bacteria and change colour to alert anyone who wants to eat the food.

The state of the art

Silver is already used in healthcare products such as dental equipment for its antibacterial properties. Nano-sizing silver particles improves their ability to kill bacteria because it increases the surface area of silver the bacteria are exposed to. Israeli scientists found that also coating packaging paper with nano-sized silver particles combats bacteria such as E. coli and extends product shelf life.

Another example of nanotechnology's use in food manufacturing is nano-encapsulation. This technology has been used to mask the taste and odour of tuna fish oil so that it could be used to enrich bread with heart healthy Omega-3 fatty acids. Fish oil particles are packed into a film coating that prevents the fish oil from reacting with oxygen and releasing its smell. The nanocapsules break open only when they reach the stomach so you can receive the health benefits of eating them without experiencing the odour.

Meanwhile, researchers at Nottingham University are looking into nanoscale salt particles than can increase the saltiness of food without increasing the amount of salt.

 Table salt crystals. Henri Koskinen from www.shutterstock.com

As with silver, breaking salt into smaller nanosize increases its surface area. This means its flavour can be spread more efficiently. The researchers claim this can reduce the salt content of standard crisps by 90% while keeping the same flavour.

Despite all the opportunities nanotechnology offers the food industry, most developments remain at the research and development stage. This slow uptake is due to the lack of information about the health and environmental impacts of the technology. For example, there is a concern whether ingested nanomaterials migrate to different parts of the body and accumulate in certain organs, such as liver and kidneys. This may then affect the functionality of these organs in the medium to long term.

Unknown risks

However, our knowledge of the risks associated with the use of nanomaterials is incomplete. These issues need to be better understood and addressed for the public to accept nanotechnology in food. This will also depend on the public's understanding of the technology and how much they trust the food industry and the regulatory process watching over it.

Research has shown, for example, that consumers are more likely to accept nanotechnology when it is used in food packaging rather than in food processing. But nanotechnology in food production was seen as more acceptable if it increased the food's health benefits, although consumers weren't necessarily willing to pay more for this.

In our recent research, we found no strong attitudes towards or resistance to nanotechnology in food packaging in the UK. But there was still concern among a small group of consumers about the safety of foods. This shows how important it will be for food producers and regulators to provide consumers with the best available information about nanotechnology, including any uncertainties about the technology.

Seda Erdem received funding from the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme of the UK Research Councils to undertake her research on Consumer Preferences for Nanotechnology in Food Packaging (RES-229-31-0003).
 Seda Erdem, Lecturer in Economics, University of Stirling Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.