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tag:theconversation.com,2011:/articles English – The Conversation 2016-07-24T14:02:33Z tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62945 2016-07-24T14:02:33Z 2016-07-24T14:02:33Z Turnbull presses premiers for quick action on post-sentencing regime for terrorism prisoners
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has asked states and territories to finalise a post sentencing detention scheme for terrorism crimes so legislation can come in quickly.

The proposed regime will allow high-risk terrorist offenders to be held beyond their sentence. The court-supervised process will be similar to the arrangements in a number of jurisdictions for sex offenders and extremely violent criminals.

Turnbull has spoken by telephone to first ministers and is also writing to them.

The government stresses the measures need to balance community security and individual rights.

Turnbull's action follows his request for counter-terrorism coordinator Greg Moriarty to advise on lessons to be learned about lone attacker terrorists in the wake of the Nice killings.

In his letter to first ministers Turnbull says "our governments must do all we can to protect the community from individuals posing a high risk of re-offending and/or those in need of continued rehabilitation. The guiding principles of a post-sentence preventative detention scheme would be that it cover high-risk terrorist offenders and contain appropriate procedural protections and safeguards".

Turnbull has asked Attorney-General George Brandis to convene a meeting of attorneys-general as soon as practicable to consider the scheme and ensure legislation can be introduced quickly. The states and territories have earlier agreed in principle to the plan and work has started.

On Sunday Brandis warned about the use of language when speaking about terrorism. He said care had to be taken not to "spray the word terrorism around too loosely".

"Not every mass casualty attack is an act of terrorism. Not every premeditated act of violence is an act of terrorism. Our law has a very specific definition of terrorism. Terrorism is an act of violence or a threat of violence perpetrated for a political, religious or ideological cause, to coerce government or to intimidate the public," he told the ABC.

The young man who carried out last week's attack in Munich, killing nine people and wounding many others, is said to have been obsessed by mass killings. German police authorities have indicated it is unlikely his action was driven by Islamist extremism.

Michelle Grattan 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.
 Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62767 2016-07-23T12:13:01Z 2016-07-23T12:13:01Z Kaine was the logical choice as Hillary Clinton's vice president
Hillary Clinton has selected Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate.

While this news was not surprising – Kaine had long been suspected to be a top choice and made President Obama's short list in 2008 – it does raise questions about Secretary Clinton's choices. In an extremely polarized election contest where her own liberal bona fides were questioned, why would she pick a centrist Democrat as her running mate?

Those who study the vice presidency usually concede that the veep pick has a negligible impact on the ticket's eventual vote totals. John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin in 2008 may be an exception. Researchers estimate she may have cost the campaign as much as 1.6 percentage points. However, the choice of a running mate still reflects a nominee's judgment and sends signals about which groups campaigns they feel they need to target in a general election.

Both Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had to balance the demands of base constituencies with their own need to find complementary partners for the campaign.

What Pence does for Trump

As a political novice with a penchant for hyperbole, Trump's VP choice had to soften his ticket's rough edges and assure the base that experienced hands would be guiding this inexperienced potential president.

In both temperament and résumé, Mike Pence complements Trump. His experience in executive and legislative government, including foreign policy-related committee experience, and his even-keeled personality and connections to the evangelical Christian community assuage the fears of Republicans who worry that an inexperienced, bombastic candidate like Trump would ruin the government.

Clearly, no one is worried about Hillary Clinton's lack of experience. However, she has had to worry about attacks on her character and challenges to her positions from her left ideological flank. In addition, she is also factoring in down-ticket considerations, as she, unlike Trump, appears more focused on helping her party make legislative gains in Congress.

A few weeks ago, when polls showed that anywhere from a fifth to a quarter of Sanders supporters were contemplating supporting Trump, it made sense that Clinton was giving serious consideration to adding a clearly progressive running mate like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to the ticket. However, since then, Clinton has taken steps to mitigate the chances of a progressive revolt.

Clinton has reached out to progressives and given their concerns voice. She secured endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She welcomed Sanders supporters to help shape the Democratic Party platform. They played a role in moving the platform to the left on issues like the minimum wage. Based on this, Clinton may feel that she has sufficiently covered her progressive bases.

Now it is time for Clinton to shore up her right flank. Choosing a more centrist candidate signals a desire to try to appeal to the voter who is ideologically in the middle and most likely to cast the deciding vote for president. Clinton is betting that the median voter is disinclined to support Donald Trump.

Reportedly, Clinton's finalists were a roster of centrists: Kaine, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker – who, while being socially progressive, staked out a more conservative, neoliberal fiscal position as mayor of Newark. In light of the perception that Clinton is untrustworthy, these men's sterling reputations complement her. At the very least, they would not provide additional distractions to the campaign.

Admittedly, Tim Kaine does not add diversity to the ticket the same way Booker, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro would have.

However, Kaine is able speak to many different audiences.

What Kaine does for Clinton

Kaine is fluent in Spanish, having lived in Honduras with Jesuit missionaries in the early 1980s. His fluency is so strong, in fact, that he has delivered speeches in Spanish on the Senate floor and gives interviews in Spanish to networks like Telemundo.

He also served as mayor of Richmond, Virginia at the turn of the century. According to the 2000 Census, Richmond was about 57 percent black at the time.

Kaine's father-in-law is Linwood Holton, the former Republican governor of Virginia.

Finally, it is important to consider domestic geopolitics. Democrats don't want to just win the White House. They also want to regain control of at least one house of Congress. This year, 24 of the 34 senate seats up for reelection are held by Republicans, who hold only 54 seats in the chamber. The Cook Report suggests that seven of these seats are vulnerable. This week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee all but conceded that the Wisconsin seat, held by Senator Ron Johnson, was a loss.

Warren, Booker and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (who was also mentioned as a potential running mate) all hail from states with Republican governors – governors who could appoint Republicans to replace them should they be elected vice president. Fortunately for Tim Kaine, his state is led by fellow Democrat and longtime Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, who will almost certainly protect the seat for Democrats.

While some people may be disappointed in Hillary Clinton's choice of a running mate, there are good reasons for Kaine to join this ticket.

Andra Gillespie has received funding from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She has previously worked for a Democratic pollster. She is also from the metropolitan Richmond, VA area and has written a book on Sen. Cory Booker.
 Andra Gillespie, Associate Professor, Political Science, Emory University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62939 2016-07-23T06:36:19Z 2016-07-23T06:36:19Z Wong wins foreign affairs in Shorten's new frontbench line up

Bill Shorten announces his frontbench with deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek. AAP/Andrew Taylor

Bill Shorten has made some very sound decisions in his far-reaching frontbench overhaul, but the exercise contained some shockers as well.

Moving deputy leader Tanya Plibersek from shadow foreign minister to a beefed up education portfolio puts more heft into one of Labor's policy strengths.

Elevating Jim Chalmers to finance spokesman and into shadow cabinet is all positive. Chalmers is one of Labor's rising stars, with strong economic credentials and the real life experience of having worked for then treasurer Wayne Swan during the global financial crisis.

Penny Wong becomes shadow foreign minister. It might have been better to have her, like Plibersek, in a domestic job. One also wonders about combining foreign affairs with the highly demanding duties of being Labor's Senate leader, but the post in opposition doesn't involve anything like the travel of the foreign minister (unless you're Kevin Rudd).

Stephen Conroy has been moved from defence – which is a good thing, given some of his bellicose comments on the South China Sea recently – into special minister of state. This will be a significant area this term, when both sides are talking about electoral reforms.

Richard Marles, who as immigration spokesman shepherded through the ALP's reluctant acceptance of turnbacks, has been rewarded with the much more congenial shadow defence portfolio. Shayne Newman has drawn the short straw of immigration. Newman has been low profile in indigenous affairs – now he's in an area that is perennially fraught for Labor.

Jason Clare, who has yet to demonstrate his full potential, moves from communication to resources and northern Australia, as well as trade and investment. Trade is a testing portfolio for the ALP, which is often under union pressure to be more restrictive and protectionist.

Michelle Rowland is switched from small business to communications, while Katy Gallagher takes small business and financial services.

Tony Burke, who had finance, goes back to an area he held in government – environment – and also takes up citizenship and multicultural affairs. Mark Butler retains climate change and energy, but loses environment and water. It's an unfortunate squeezing of one of Labor's good public faces.

Linda Burney, just elected as the first Aboriginal woman to enter the House of Representatives, becomes shadow minister for human services; Clare O'Neil gets the justice portfolio, and Ed Husic is shadow minister for employment services and workforce participation.

Of those who stay put, the most obvious is Catherine King in health. While there would have been logic in moving this portfolio to a more high profile figure, there is also logic in leaving it with King, who did a good job last term. Health was a vote-deliverer for Labor at the election and it would have looked a little odd to jettison the shadow minister.

Chris Bowen remains shadow treasurer; Anthony Albanese stays in infrastructure; Jenny Macklin in families and social services; Brendan O'Connor in workplace relations, Joel Fitzgibbon in agriculture. Mark Dreyfus remains as shadow attorney-general.

Shorten has taken indigenous affairs under his own wing, with Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson his shadow assistant minister.

This should be a good pairing, especially with the indigenous recognition referendum coming up. But there are risks too, that must be handled carefully, when the person dealing directly with the area comes from the stakeholder community, has strong views, and is new to parliament as well. If he can avoid the hazards there are enormous opportunities for Dodson to make a difference for Aboriginal people. It will test to the limit his skills, and his ability to adapt to working in an unfamiliar environment.

The shocker aspects of the frontbench flow from Shorten's dealing with the Kim Carr problem. The left dropped Carr who then, as a veteran factional fighter, mounted a shock-and-awe campaign for survival, turning his several supporters into a new faction.

Shorten, who remains afraid of Albanese's ambitions, did not want to risk losing the backing of Carr, who supported him in the 2013 leadership contest, in case dangerous times arise in the future. Therefore Shorten had the shadow ministry expanded by two to allow for Carr.

This has put the total of shadow ministers in excess of the number who can get an extra allowance. So Andrew Leigh, who continues as assistant treasurer, cops a pay cut of $40,000. The diligent Leigh was a soft target simply because he is not in a faction. The decision is totally unfair. It would have been more appropriate for Carr to take the pay hit. The whole affair shows the disreputable side of factionalism.

In the changes, Carr retains the industry part of his old job although he loses higher education to Plibersek.

The jack-in-the-box Sam Dastyari becomes shadow minister for consumer affairs and manager of opposition business in the Senate. He also is in the shadow ministerial ''overflow'' and so he won't get extra money. In his case, it is not so bad – he's not losing any, and he gets a promotion which, given his ambitions, is worth a lot more to him than the dollars.

  Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62938 2016-07-23T05:28:13Z 2016-07-23T05:28:13Z Censored Thoughts on the Fate of Turkish Democracy
Written several days ago, the following thoughts on the unfolding crisis in Turkey began their strange life as a tweet. It read: 'failed Turkish coup shows that in the age of communicative abundance power doesn't rest only on guns, tanks, jets & state media.' Within hours, I received a message from a journalist working on the news desk at Istanbul's prominent Anadolu Agency. She told me her editors were impressed, and now wanted a thousand words, for quick publication in Turkish and possible translations into Farsi and Arabic. Within the tight deadline, to brief, I mailed her the piece, with a note of thanks. Aware of the mounting pressures faced by Turkish journalists, and bearing in mind that AA is a state-run agency closely linked to Erdoğan's government, I added my best wishes: 'I hope you will like it, despite the risks it may pose to you.' Radio silence followed. Several nudges later, the journalist confirmed her editors had turned down the piece. Why, I asked? Her words felt rather like a hail of bullets. I had 'totally misunderstood' the brief, the journalist said. She complained that 'Western media' are failing to understand 'what happened in Turkey'. She praised the thousands of citizens 'on the streets' and those in 'schools, mosques' standing 'against the heinous coup attempt'. She then added the important bit: AA's priority is to publicise the failed coup d'état, not to raise difficult questions about what comes next, or about the imaginary dangers posed to the republic by 'the post-coup measures'. Our correspondence ended with a cold goodbye: 'Warmest regards from Istanbul.' In my brief response, I posted a link to a fine piece in Amsterdam's de Correspondent on the puzzles surrounding the failed coup and the dangers posed by the current Erdoğan government crackdown. I asked the journalist whether she agreed that under these extraordinary, difficult and confusing circumstances, editors should edify, and not betray their profession by parroting official narratives, censoring authors and sucking up to state power. I await her reply.

 Pro-government protesters burning an effigy of the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, Taksim Square, Istanbul, 21 July 2016 Ozan Kose/AFP

The whole world is currently watching Turkey and wondering what will be its fate. If the Erdoğan government is to be believed, thanks to a political miracle last weekend, demokrasi was rescued from the clutches of a military coup d'état backed by an organised foreign conspiracy, a 'terrorist organisation' directed by Fethullah Gülen, whose extradition from the United States is now demanded, pending charges of criminal conspiracy to overthrow the republic.

President Erdoğan justifies the demand, and the large-scale arrests and crackdowns that are now happening, as 'swift and effective' measures to 'eliminate the threat against democracy'. Two days ago, he told al Jazeera that although these measures are 'necessary for the nation's peace and stability', Turkey 'will remain inside a democratic party system'. He added: 'we will never step back from democracy.'

Striking to outside observers is the fact that in Turkey, for the moment, everybody is a democrat. This fact is not to be mocked, or its consequences underestimated. For understandable historical reasons, to do with the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's secularism and brutal military rule, the precious language of demokrasi has managed to capture the hearts and minds of millions of Turkish citizens. That is why, a decade ago, the prospect of a post-secular Muslim democracy and a non-violent civil society raised hopes throughout the region, and the world. Many considered the Turkish republic a new political model, living proof that a Muslim majority society could successfully build a de-militarised and peaceful, power-sharing government, based on a tolerant 'religiously secular' civil society, within a region generally swallowed up by war, corrupt plutocracies and religious bigotry.

Wise Turkish citizens recognise that this potential is now under siege. It's true that the government led by President Erdoğan, buoyed by multiple election victories, is trumpeting its support for democracy. But in a world where everybody from Xi Jinping to Vladimir Putin and Robert Mugabe speaks in favour of 'democracy' and the 'sovereign people', wisdom dictates that citizens learn to judge words by actions, to read behind the breaking news headlines, and to think for themselves about what's going on.

The Life and Death of Democracy, my full-length history of democracy, still awaits a Turkish translation, but readers who know it will see that it offers some tips for making sense of the present wild convulsions. The book notes that during political dramas, language matters just as much as guns, tanks and jet fighters; and it recommends that the precious word demokrasi be handled with great care, not ceded to its enemies. The book shows why elections are no longer the defining principle of democracy, and why we're now living in times of 'monitory democracy'. In Turkey, as elsewhere, it notes, while democracy now means nothing less than free and fair periodic elections, it means in fact something much more: the continuous public scrutiny and restraint of arbitrary power, wherever it is exercised, by citizens who are supported by a rich variety of watchdog institutions, including free communications media, that stand outside the rhythm of electoral politics, and in opposition to the bossing and bullying of the rich, the violent and the powerful.

Judged by the standards of monitory democracy, dark clouds are gathering in the Turkish summer sky. It cannot be good for monitory democracy that scores of thousands of civil servants, policemen, soldiers, judges and academics have so far been arrested. It's a bad sign that many more are facing detention, travel bans, suspension and public suspicion; that public access to the WikiLeaks web platform is blocked; and that the enforcement of a three-month state of emergency has begun.

From the point of view of demokrasi, these are ominous developments. It may be (future historians will tell us) that the failed coup proves to be the trigger of a new push towards a power-sharing, rule-of-law monitory democracy with Turkish characteristics. Confronted by war, lawlessness and power-grabbing, the odds are against that scenario. Yet one thing is absolutely certain. Turkey is not sliding backwards, towards some kind of 20th-century 'authoritarian dictatorship'. It is not (as Roger Cohen claimed during the past few days in the New York Times) heading towards a system of 'one-party rule' in which 'one man pulls the strings'.

The spectre confronting Turkey is despotism. By this I don't mean what 18th-century European Orientalists meant when they denounced the Ottoman rulers as recklessly un-enlightened despots. The real threat to Turkish democracy is its bastardised, vulgar form, the kind of state rule that has descended on Hungary, Russia, China, Belarus, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. These new despotisms of the 21st century are without precedent. They are phantom democracies. Operating in the name of 'the people', they are media-saturated oligarchies backed by great concentrations of wealth held in a few hands. Their oligarchs cultivate patron-client relationships, preach law and order and spread paranoia. They resort when necessary to violence, and rule by mastering the forces of fear and nationalism.

These new despotisms are not old-fashioned dictatorships. They manage to defy the textbooks by wooing their subjects and winning their affection, and calculated support, all in the name of 'the people'. These despotisms are a strange new reality and a serious alternative to monitory democracy, which is why Turkish citizens must now be vigilant. Elections alone will not rescue the Turkish republic from the clutches of this despotism. Something else is needed. That something has happened before, and it surfaced once again during the past week. It's the spirit of Taksim Gezi Park: the powerful belief that the best form of government is based on the active consent of wise citizens, who refuse voluntary servitude because they know the dangers and follies of arbitrary power.

Sydney 21 July 2016

 Erdogan government billboard in Istanbul

 John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Sydney Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/48882 2016-07-22T22:46:40Z 2016-07-22T22:46:40Z What animal could a democracy be? Ape, fox, lion ... how about jellyfish?

The people in a democracy can be likened to the cells in a jellyfish. Mike Johnston/Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA

This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

Act I – The animals we are

"If a democratic state were an organism, which one would it be?" asks the publican.

Silence. Some among the pub's patrons – wanting a better view of the evening's action – turn in their heavy chairs.

"Well," speaks a man with a moustache so large it could provoke envy among walruses, "although völkerpsychologie, the idea that a state could have a personality, proved bunkum in the 20th century, it could help us answer this riddling question of yours."

"Thus!" he booms between a gulp of beer, "if a democratic state were an organism it would be a bonobo – for these gentle cousins of ours are the democrats of the ape world!"

"Peaceful and co-operative the bonobos may be," interrupts a lanky stork of a woman as she rises out of her chair, "but democratic states are often duplicitous. David Pritchard reminds us that the ancient Athenians used their slave-owning democracy as a war-propellant, a conquest machine. Similarly, John Dinges recounts America's promotion of democracy as a means to cover its imperial ambitions."

She flicks her hair. "I dare say then that a fox best represents the democratic state for they are cunning, realist survivors."

There's a loud noise as a septuagenarian pushes back his chair.

"It may be true," he says, "as some think and have thunk it, that Machiavelli still walks the halls of parliaments. But, no offence to the fox, the idea of a democratic state as duplicitous, conniving or untrustworthy smears its good name."

He stands to offer his conclusion.

 A roar of equity? Tambako the Jaguar/flickr

 "No, a democratic state cannot be a fox. A democracy is a proud beast. It is a shining beacon in a world of threatening darkness that not only upholds, but beams the light of civic virtue, peace, economic prosperity and deliberation throughout the lands, seas and airs.

"A democratic state," he pronounces, "is nought but a mighty lion whose roar is equity and whose bite is justice."

Without pause he continues: "As it was said of England's proud democracy in the Belfast prose of 1794:

Most noble and redoubted Lion bold,

Know that the glories which you here behold,

Beneath this temple's venerable dome,

Are to the proudest boasts of Greece or Rome –

Even as the spacious firmament on high,

Is to the frail crust of a mutton pie:

The wonder of all nations centres here,

Thy mighty image fills the world with fear;

What isle or desert, has not heard the story,

Of England's Lion and of England's glory!"

A chorus of applause, charging drinks and cheers follow as the man, wearing a cravat so large and fine it might serve as his mane, sits down.

Act II – The animals we aren't

As the evening's opening arguments were being made, two young female students – wearing matching hats that give them that hard-to-achieve "twin penguin" look – had come into the bar and sat down to listen.

"I'd like to raise a point," speaks the first student-penguin over the din of discussion that only busy pubs seem able to create. "We should talk about what organism a democratic state might be without relying on the dangerous fable of völkerpsychologie."

Somewhere in the room a moustache twitched.

"For it was this Prussian lie that all Germans were iron tigers, Czechs fat sausages, Poles stuffed cabbages and Russians vodka leftovers that led generations to their doom."

"Let's ask instead," she continues, "as Jacques Derrida perhaps would if he were here, what organism a democratic state would resemble if it saw its reflection in the tain of an enormous mirror."

The second student-penguin adds: "I agree. What would a democratic state see if it looked at itself in the mirror?

"It would see the reflection of its people," she answers. "Thousands upon hundreds of thousands upon millions of individual souls. For a democracy, as Thomas and Lidija Fleiner or Michael Zürn remind us, is naught but the product of the people that once lived, that now live and that will live within its territorial boundary."

 A democracy is a reflection of its people. hobvious sudoneighm/flickr

Murmuring.

"So a democratic state is like a flock of birds, a hive of bees, or a society of ants?" asks a red-haired woman with a mousy face from the back of the room.

"Surely not," stork-lady rebuts, "for the question is asking us to name an organism. A flock of birds, nest of ants or whatever leads us to talk of many organisms."

"Isn't a democratic state irreducibly plural yet whole at the same time?" returns mouse-face; a little louder now. "It's like Artemy Magun writes in Politics of the One: we can think of a democratic state as a choir collected around a conductor, or the sum of all the things that a unity of peoples – not necessarily just citizens – produce within its borders."

Moustache-man re-enters the fray: "I will invoke Reuven Hazan and Gideon Rahat to cut this discussion to the bone. A democratic state is like a political party: it is a plurality, but all members act together as one. This is how a plurality can be, conceptually anyway, a single organism."

"But," the first student-penguin chimes in, "a political party, a choir, or even the logic of production suggests that there's a central power overseeing the unity of peoples. It suggests there's something controlling the democratic state other than the people.

"Lions, foxes and bonobos," she rattles off, "fall into this trap too: they have brains, central nervous systems and biological command centres. Surely no democratic state has any structure or process similar to this?"

"Are you saying that democracies are brainless?" pipes cravated-man. "Such an idea would be absurd, for a unity of peoples makes decisions all the time. Democracies have parliaments and institutions and elected leaders who serve as the brain and vital organs of the state!"

She volleys back: "It seems the Pernod you're drinking has dulled your mind. The things you mention are not the sum of all peoples in a state, nor do they represent or serve all people equally. If a democratic state were your vision of an organism it would, due to its insipid institutions and governmental malfunctions, have long ago gone extinct – eaten perhaps by dinosaurs such as yourself!"

This stab stirs the crowd and the debate becomes heated.

Act III – It came from the publican's barrel

At this moment, the publican walks briskly into a small side room and rolls out a barrel toward his head table, then pulls it upright. Fetching a small tool from the bar, he uses it to pop open the barrel lid.

He plunges his arm into the briny liquid and pulls out a massive wet blob of a creature. Holding it up high, he yells over the commotion: "This is what a democratic state is!"

The publican then slams the blob – a jellyfish – down on his table, splattering those nearby.

Silence. Grins. Hands wipe off brine. Incredulity. All eyes on the publican.

"As you were debating," he says, "I couldn't help but think of something the good president Barack Obama wrote back in 2008.

 Barack Obama: a democracy is more than the sum of its parts. Pixabay

"He wrote that a democracy is 'more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one'. And so, I thought, how can that be, given a democratic state has no equivalent of a nervous system, a brain, or a personality?"

He looks around the room.

"Then it struck me! If a democratic state were an organism, it would be a jellyfish." He gestures to the blob on the table. "I then remembered I have one of the damn things in my storeroom!"

Paled by the thought that he may have already eaten jellyfish (it appears nowhere in the menu, which, to his mind, suggests the publican must blend it into other dishes – using it as a spice perhaps, or a thickener for puddings … who knows?), cravated-man interjects: "I'm not convinced that a democratic state hasn't the equivalent of an organism's central intelligence and nervous system. They have governments and bureaucracies, rules and procedures. How can you discount that?"

"Well, let's examine how a jellyfish works," the publican responds. "It's a living organism with a defined boundary: a jellyfish has shape, texture and contours like any other living being. It lives, yet it doesn't have a brain or a nervous system like other animals. It thrives in the oceans and seas but has no eyes or ears. It reproduces. Has different life stages. It eats and it swims."

The publican warms to his explanation: "A jellyfish is the product of millions of individual cells. They are constantly and simultaneously communicating with one another, not only about the external environment that they're in, but also the condition of their internal environment."

He pauses, collecting his thoughts.

"The cells," he resumes, "group together to form all of the parts the jellyfish needs to grow and survive. Cells, to keep the organism strong, are renewed as they age or reverse their ageing as need be. At least one species of jellyfish is even "immortal". Cells sacrifice themselves by fighting off parasites and attacks and so on, all for the good of the whole. But a cell can also go rogue by turning cancerous which, of course, threatens the whole.

"I think, then, that if a democratic state were an organism it would be a jellyfish, because the people in a democracy are like the cells in a jellyfish. The people conceive of, build, run and repair governments but also the other institutions in their state. If they avoid the cancers, and avoid being eaten by predators or squashed by nature's random violence, they might even be immortal. It is the people of a democratic state who define and defend their territorial boundary. And they, the ones that lived, the ones that live and the ones that will live, do this together."

 Can the people of a democracy, like the cells of a jellyfish, group together to form, to grow and survive indefinitely? Teddy Hartanto/flickr

The publican turns to cravated-man. "If you take the people away, and leave only the government and the state's bureaucracies like the military or what-have-you, the democratic state would not exist. It would be like a dead jellyfish, still able to sting, but ultimately lifeless."

Nodding and cracking a smile, cravated-man says: "Fair enough. But I'll barter my surrender for a truth. How the hell do you know this much about jellyfish?"

"Ha!" the publican laughs. "It was off this label of the strangest scotch I've yet procured. The drink's got a jellyfish preserved right there in the bottle. High-end stuff!"

Sensing his opportunity to close the night's discussion (and to rid himself of this strange brew), he adds: "Shots of it are on the house!"

Expecting cheers of approval and a charge to the bar, he gets silence instead. You could hear a mouse fart.

"No offence, publican," cravated-man breaks the silence, "but you've got a jellyfish on the table, a jellyfish in the bottle, and I've a fair suspicion that you've been sneaking jellyfish into the menu…"

"The menu?" the publican interrupts, surprised. "I've heard that jellies are nice if prepared right, but goodness no. No, no…" he trails off, trying to remember what the briny blob is for.

"Ah! Of course," he recalls. "It adds body to the beer!"

And, somewhere in the room, a moustache fell over.

Jean-Paul Gagnon 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.
 Jean-Paul Gagnon, Assistant Professor in Politics, University of Canberra Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62884 2016-07-22T22:28:40Z 2016-07-22T22:28:40Z It'll take more than tech for Elon Musk to pull off audacious new Tesla master plan
Elon Musk – CEO of Tesla Motors – has just revealed the second part of his master plan for the company. And it's a doozy. Not content with producing sleek electric cars (which to be fair, was only ever a stepping stone to greater things), Musk wants to fundamentally change how we live our lives. But the road to Musk's techno-utopia may be rocky.

In 2006, Musk announced his "Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan." Steps one to three were simple and elegant:

Build [a] sports car

Use that money to build an affordable car

Use that money to build an even more affordable car.

But cutting through these was a fourth step that had a much stronger social goal in sight: to develop and "provide zero emission electric power generation options."

 Step One: complete. Tesla, CC BY-ND

This desire to change the world for the better is apparent in "part deux" of the master plan. Steps one to three of the new plan are superficially technological goals:

Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage

Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments

Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning.

Yet underpinning them is a revolutionary vision for transforming society. Elon Musk doesn't just want to fast-track the transition to renewable energy and self-driving cars – he wants to rewrite the rulebook on how we build a futuristic sustainable society.

Shifting the culture with new technologies

This comes through loud and clear in his fourth step in the new master plan. Once there are enough privately owned fully autonomous Teslas on the road, Musk wants to co-opt them into the "Tesla shared fleet." The concept is as simple as it is audacious: Instead of your Tesla sitting idle in the garage or parking lot when not in use, it would become part of a network of fully autonomous ride-share vehicles – providing driverless lifts for customers on-demand and income for individual vehicles' owners.

Musk's concept is a natural fusion of several trends in technology: autonomous vehicles, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, the sharing economy, to name just a few. Technologically, it makes perfect sense – especially when you throw in innovative solar and battery technologies to keep the fleet mobile and energy-efficient.

Yet to succeed, it would require a seismic shift in modern culture – not only in how we live our lives, but also how we think about possessions and ownership. Importantly, this brave new world would have to navigate our existing values and cultural norms.

And here's the rub: While Musk and his teams have the technical know-how to implement the master plan, it's not clear yet whether they have the social and political savvy to make it work.

Engineering the social and political landscape

We recently saw a hint of what's to come when a Tesla driver was killed while his car ran on autopilot. Through a combination of factors, neither the driver nor the car's autonomous systems managed to detect and avoid a tractor-trailer across the road, leading to a fatal crash. Despite claims of the autopilot feature reducing the chances of crashes occurring, the incident has got people thinking about the socially acceptable use of cars that remove responsibility for life-and-death decisions from their occupants.

Just going by the numbers, Tesla's autopilot technology makes sense. According to Musk, Tesla occupants using the autopilot feature are statistically safer than those not using it. And the more the feature is used, the better it will get at ensuring the car's occupants are safe – thanks to the machine learning that is constantly enhancing the fleet's auto-capabilities.

But when it comes to technology innovation, numeric logic is often trumped by what we intuitively think and feel is important. As we've seen in discussions around autonomous vehicles, how many people are likely to be killed or injured is often less important than who might be killed (whether driver, passengers or pedestrians), how, and who (or what) makes the decisions. Here, even the argument that autonomous vehicles save lives (and are safer than human-driven vehicles) faces an uphill struggle.

That's not to say that the hurdles Tesla and Musk face in implementing their master plan are insurmountable – they're not. But as Musk begins to implement part two of the plan, he's going to need to become increasingly adept at navigating an ever more complex social and political landscape.

 Developing the technology may be the easy part. Road image via www.shutterstock.com.

Innovating through the wicked problems

Musk appears to be aware of this. In 2015, through the Future of Life Institute (FLI), he backed a US$11 million research program to support the robust and beneficial development of artificial intelligence – an important technology for carrying out his master plan. Included in this initiative is the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center – a collaboration between Oxford and Cambridge universities that aims to help develop policies to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits from artificial intelligence.

The tea leaves suggest Musk is thinking broadly about what it takes to develop societally successful technologies. Yet to succeed in his master plan, I suspect he'll need to think more broadly still – and fast.

Part of the issue is that the relationship between technology and society is highly complex and constantly shifting. Successfully developing transformative technologies while benefiting society as a whole leads to what some are fond of calling "wicked" problems – problems that are so slippery they change and shift in response to attempts to solve them. (If you want an example, just look at the introduction and use of genetically modified foods.) Changing society through new solar technologies, autonomous vehicles and driverless car-sharing will take a lot more than smart technologies, safety research and policy recommendations.

To navigate what is a wickedly complex social and political landscape, Musk is going to need to make friends with people in a whole bunch of new areas, from responsible innovation and the governance of emerging technologies, to technology assessment and risk innovation – an emerging approach to thinking and acting differently on risk. Here, I'm admittedly a little biased, as this is what we do in Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society. But we're just a part of a growing global community of experts who are developing the know-how to ensure that emerging technological capabilities are developed responsibly and successfully.

To be sure, Elon Musk's master plan for Tesla Motors is nothing if not inspired. It's visionary, elegant, likely to improve lives and technologically within reach. Yet without coming to grips with the increasingly complex social and political challenges it faces, the plan runs the risk of not getting much further than the metaphorical paper it's written on.

And that would be a shame. Because – implemented responsibly – Musk's vision could be a game changer for how we go about building a more sustainable world.

Disclosure

Andrew Maynard is a professor in the Arizona State University School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda "metacouncil" on emerging technologies.
 Andrew Maynard, Director, Risk Innovation Lab, Arizona State University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62883 2016-07-22T20:22:20Z 2016-07-22T20:22:20Z The one Roger Ailes hire that changed American politics forever
Roger Ailes' 20-year reign as the chairman of Fox News ended this week, the result of a sexual harassment scandal.

He will be remembered by journalism ethicists as the poster boy for conflict of interest. But of Ailes' many departures from journalistic norms of impartiality, the most egregious was his hiring of a cousin of presidential candidate George W. Bush during the 2000 election.

Partisan journalism, redefined

We talk a lot about conflict of interest in my journalism ethics class: why travel writers shouldn't accept free trips to Disney World. Why food critics shouldn't write about their sister-in-law's restaurant. Why no journalists should actively support or work against any causes or organizations that they may be called upon to write about.

And, especially, why no news executives should assign stories that promote their allies or attack their enemies.

The prohibitions are grounded in the belief in the importance of journalistic independence – the belief that journalists' first allegiance should be to the public they serve.

It gets complicated, of course. If everyone who has an opinion about abortion rights is disqualified from covering a march for or against abortion rights, there would be no news of such protests. If, as is increasingly the case, the news organization is owned by a corporation that also owns a movie studio, how should the news organization handle a new release by the studio?

Classic cases help us see how such conflicts play out in the real world: the political reporter who was having an affair with the mayor, the news anchor who spoke at a Democratic Party fundraiser and the business reporter whose coverage of a company he owned stock in caused that stock to rise.

Then there's Fox News, which is in a whole different category.

From one perspective, a conservative-leaning TV news source was needed as a counterweight to all the liberal-leaning sources. From another, the arrival of Fox was part of a two-pronged right-wing strategy: First, relentlessly discredit what were actually more or less impartial news sources as having a liberal bias. Then, offer your own news shows as the "fair and balanced" alternative.

The giveaway was Rupert Murdoch's 1996 appointment of Roger Ailes, a former adviser to the Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush campaigns, to build the operation. Where individual journalists or newsroom executives might have a conflict of interest covering particular stories or issues, Ailes brought a political agenda to an entire news organization. The master propagandist became a master news producer, enjoying 20 years of powerhouse ratings.

Tilting the 2000 election?

But Ailes' signature moment was bringing John Ellis on board to analyze the data provided by the Voter News Service on Election Night 2000.

To this day, some claim the networks suppressed Republican turnout by prematurely calling some states for Al Gore; others argue the networks, starting with Fox, influenced the outcome by prematurely calling the election for Bush.

One thing is known: Ellis was on the phone with the Republican nominee and his brother Jeb throughout the evening, and it was Ellis' declaration that his kinsman was the winner that influenced all the projections that followed.

Before the gig at Fox, in a column he wrote for the Boston Globe, Ellis recused himself from coverage of the election, acknowledging that his first loyalty was to his cousin.

"Dwell on this for a moment," Tim Dickinson wrote in a 2011 Rolling Stone article. "A 'news' network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives – including those that helped elect the candidate's father – declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts."

A clip from the documentary 'Outfoxed' details how Fox News erroneously called the 2000 election for Bush – and the other networks fell in line.

Once Bush took office, Dickinson wrote, Ailes frequently served as an informal adviser to the president. And when Obama succeeded Bush, Fox News reverted to attack mode, raising doubts about his citizenship and his religious affiliation.

With Ailes at the controls, Fox News has been fair and balanced only if you believe that all other news coverage is so biased that an entire network is needed to counteract it. In other words, in the face of the supposed liberal slant at the other networks, Fox needed to be unfair and unbalanced.

Instead, Ailes has reigned in an era of unprecedented political partisanship. Other networks tried to mimic Fox News' success; the result has been a proliferation of partisan outlets that have only further polarized viewers, while the public's trust in the media is at a historic low.

Give Ailes credit. His experiment with overtly partisan news-like programming has been wildly successful for Fox's bottom line. But his tenure – epitomized by his appointment of John Ellis – has grievously harmed journalism.

Russell Frank 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.
 Russell Frank, Associate Professor of Communications, Pennsylvania State University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62921 2016-07-22T16:11:03Z 2016-07-22T16:11:03Z Trump and the Ugliness of the Charm Defensive
I'm a political scientist with a bit of a masochistic streak. Of course I was going to watch the Republican Convention.

Of course I was going to sit through speeches by bronzed crackpots with lacklustre understandings of economic data, crime statistics and globalisation.

Of course I was going to wince through speeches by gay men not only unwilling to lend a hand to their maligned brothers and sisters, but even happy to kick dirt at them.

And of course I was going to ache through shonky used-car spiels from "stars" like Antonio Sabato Jr - best known for playing Mike in All I Want for Christmas - and Chachi of Bob Loblaw fame.

I was however, much less prepared to hear from Tom Barrack: Trump's Lebanese-American BFF. While I have few doubts that there's a Craigslist page where you can rent swarthy gents for a game of Ethnic Besties, for the purposes of this article, I'll give Don the, um, benefit of the doubt.

Barrack's speech was genuinely lovely. He was eloquent and warm and he convincingly sketched a man very different to the one I dismiss as chock-full of bluster and seeping confected piss and vinegar.

It was gentle and sweet and, alas, another vomitous insight into all that's wrong with contemporary politics.

Tom Barrack speech at Republican National Convention (21 July, 2016)

I've written about the celebritification of politics elsewhere. Of the heinous horror movie, for example, of a politician cruising around poor neighbours in a Batmobile. Undoubtedly there's similar shenanigans present in this trainwreck. And BFF Barrack's speech highlighted yet another scungy strand.

Sure, he helped add a splash of brown to the speakers list. But Barrack's real function was as another bit player in one very weird attempt to humanise a monster. This very same spectacle shoved Melania on stage to pilfer the play of every political wife in history: to convince us that her husband is likeable enough to sleep with. And it's why his offspring turned up: to let us know that, of course, they'll loudly love him and no, inheritance plays no part whatsoever in their suckery.

Each of these players - the surprisingly appealing oldest daughter, that scarily automoton younger one, that holy roller nutjob from Liberty "University" - comprised a shiny bait-and-switch strategy. Sure, Trump might lack charm, eloquence, grace, insight, warmth, wisdom, kindness, compassion, intelligence, coherence, but hey, that's okay because look what else we get! No, not quite an opportunity to put Charles in charge of our days and our nights, but the cast nonetheless conveys the illusion of a package deal. Peddled to all those stars-and-stripes-bedazzled, gun-totin', crucifix-fondlin' audience members is one very slick ensemble; that everything will be A-okay because this motley crew will make America great/whole/white/hooded again.

The day before the Australian federal election, I was a panellist on a radio program. A question was posed as to which leader we'd rather have a meal with. I was asked last and, uncharacteristically, I made everything all dry and dour. Instead of answering, I identified my problem with the question.

I don't want my candidates to seem nice. To seem friendly. To be someone I want to be BFFs with. I don't want to see them burning calories publicly, kissing babies or sitting in their local having a brew. I don't care if they do or don't bake cookies or remember to fill their bloody fruit bowls. I do not - not under any circumstances - want to partake of this revolting game of faux rapport; of believing I'll ever know these people. This isn't Australian Idol, I don't care about fabricated journeys.

Outline your values. List your policies. Detail your implementation strategies. Price your despicable wall. Name your team.

That's it.

Yep, Barrack made me a little gooey. But I'm a soft touch: I feel that way watching videos of rompin' pandas and television commercials of puppies dressed as lions. Equally, I know too well that I'd give a similar speech/fake alibi if any of my kin needed it. Doing so wouldn't bolster their leadership credentials.

Gooeyness shouldn't get a vote. Neither should wannabe pollies who surround themselves with handsome sprog, affable besties and former soap star desperados. Act like a leader, the rest is rubbish.

And decades on and she's still made to regret it.

 Lauren Rosewarne, Senior Lecturer, University of Melbourne Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62911 2016-07-22T15:28:12Z 2016-07-22T15:28:12Z Will Roger Ailes's departure after sexual harrassment allegations hobble Fox News? Don't count on it

Onward! Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr, CC BY-SA

Just as the US media struggled – along with everyone else – to make sense of Donald Trump's nomination at the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio, one of its biggest pillars was shaken to the core. The resignation of the chairman and chief executive of Fox News, Roger Ailes, sent shock waves through a media industry already exhausted by reacting to seismic events on an almost daily basis.

Events began on to take shape on July 6 when Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox newscaster, filed a lawsuit accusing Ailes of sexual harassment. She is the highest-profile of several women to come forward with allegations of sexual harassment against him; some of the accusations that have been levelled reportedly date back to the 1960s, decades before Fox News was even founded. Carslon's allegation triggered an internal investigation by Fox News that led to the resignation of its CEO.

At this stage, of course, the allegations against Ailes are just that: allegations. And in his resignation letter to boss Rupert Murdoch (shared with right-wing bastion the Drudge Report), he was at pains to claim personal credit for elevating women's position in American journalism. He wrote:

I take particular pride in the role that I have played advancing the careers of the many women I have promoted to executive and on-air positions. Many of these talented journalists have deservedly become household names known for their intelligence and strength, whether reporting the news, fair and balanced, and offering exciting opinions on our opinion programs.

Ailes suggested that he was leaving his position so as not to become a distraction and said he would be remaining at Fox News's parent company as an adviser. The particulars of the departure are still a little obscure but the New York Times reports that Ailes departed with around a US$40m settlement agreement.

The 76-year-old Ailes has enjoyed decades of remarkable influence in US cultural and political life. As a former advisor to Richard Nixon and George H. W Bush, he reputedly had the power to make or break presidential campaigns. He is credited with building Fox News into America's most watched cable news channel with unquantifiable value to the Republican party. His resignation is nothing short of the end of an era.

So where next for the beleagured network?

Righting the ship

It's fair to say that the US news media in general, and not just Fox News, is heavily gendered in favour of men. In 2015, a Women's Media Center report into the status of women in the industry revealed that media on all platforms were failing women. The report found that women in news media were assigned to report stories at a substantially lower rate than men, and in evening broadcast news women were on camera 32% of the time. Looking at the 2012 presidential election, it found that on network TV, 77% of political news show guests and experts were men.

But according to the millions-strong progressive campaign group CREDO, Fox News specifically has an ingrained internal culture of sexism and misogyny, which it will need to address.

And then there's a separate HR problem. David Bauder writes that heavyweight hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity (no strangers to controversy themselves) have close ties to Ailes and reportedly have contract stipulations which allow them to leave should their boss do so. On the face of it, though, this seems unlikely – but that's where Fox's fractious relationship with Trump comes in.

Though former presidential candidate Ted Cruz accused Ailes of turning Fox News into the Donald Trump network, 24/7 Trump himself has on a number of occasions spurned the network with open contempt – which means that for once, the network is not an indispensable part of a Republican nominee's election strategy.

But then again, as Roger Yu observed, a Hillary Clinton presidency – on balance, the most likely outcome – could greatly invigorate Fox, which would undoubtedly go after her in the same venomous way it has gone after Obama.

And in other good news for Fox News, the Pew Research Center reports that its finances are in remarkably rude health. Its business model is commercially admired and ratings are at an all-time high, with profits of more than US$1billion a year. Notwithstanding the Ailes controversy, which saw the network's share prices fall by 3% in a week, Fox is well-placed to face the challenges of adapting a 24-hour-news channel to the volatile digital age.

And then there's the return of Murdoch, executive chairman of the channel's parent company, 21st Century Fox. Ailes' resignation letter began with the words "Dear Rupert", and on July 22, Murdoch visited Fox News studios in Manhattan. There he announced, to an understandably shocked workforce, that he himself would be taking over from Ailes for the foreseeable future.

But at 85, the old man is slowing down, and he's probably just clearing the ground for his sons Lachlan and James, who are currently 21st Century Fox's executive co-chairman and chief executive officer. The pair are known to have had their differences with Ailes, whose combative style and political rigidity they found jarring and outdated.

But even though public allegations of sexual harassment may have rocked the company, and even with Trump still going his own unpredictable way, Fox News clearly has what it takes to last a long time yet.
 John Jewell, Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62913 2016-07-22T15:00:28Z 2016-07-22T15:00:28Z France, Turkey and human rights: is a state of emergency the new normal?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has declared a state of emergency in the wake of the failed coup of July 15. It's not yet clear how the President intends to interpret the powers awarded to him in this situation but there are ongoing concerns that his government will clamp down on human rights.

Indeed, explaining the decision, deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmuş said:

Turkey will derogate the European convention on human rights insofar as it does not conflict with its international obligations.

Kurtulmuş added that Turkey was acting "just like France" in taking this action – referring to the extended state of emergency that has followed the terrorist attacks of the past year there.

A situation that was originally meant to last three months following the Paris attacks of November 2015, has been extended to last another six months following the July attack in Nice.

Both cases raise serious questions about how long a state of emergency is supposed to last in this day and age, and how ordinary people are affected while they are in place.

What is a state of emergency?

Under Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) a country can declare a state of emergency, "in time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation". Once an emergency is declared, however, a state is not given free rein to do as it sees fit.

The measures taken must still be "proportionate to the exigencies of the situation". To protect human rights, Article 15 has a triple lock. To derogate from the convention, an emergency must exist; the measures being proposed must be proportionate; and some rights can never be violated. Torture or inhuman and degrading treatment, for example, are never permissible, no matter how extreme the emergency.

The ECHR is vague about the conditions that constitute an emergency, so in some ways, it's not clear whether what is happening in Turkey constitutes one.

The European Court of Human Rights has never found that an emergency did not exist in a state that declared one. It has taken a very hands off approach to this issue, deferring instead to each government's assessment of the situation in their country. A large amount of trust is placed in a state's government on this question.

Emergencies, however, are not just about the facts on the ground that give rise to an extreme crisis; they also reveal a lot about the person or body declaring a state of emergency and what their motivations are.

While the European Court of Human Rights has never found that a state of emergency did not exist in a country, the now defunct European Commission of Human Rights (a tribunal body that prior to 1998 would make preliminary decisions on a case before the Court heard it) has.

The Commission rejected a 1967 declaration of a state of emergency in Greece by the military dictatorship that governed at the time. The Commission found that no "threat to the life of the nation" existed and that the military dictatorship had fabricated the emergency in order to crack down on the communist opposition.

Unlike the government in the Greek case, Erdoğan was democratically elected. But we have to ask ourselves whether we can simply assume that because a state's government has been elected, it will protect human rights.

Indeed, faced with an emergency, a government might clamp down on human rights to prove to a fearful public that it is "doing something", whether that something is effective or not. Emergencies are precisely when human rights are needed most.

Democracy also requires respect for the rule of law. All state power is exercised through the law, and nobody is above the law. An independent and functioning judiciary is fundamental to this. Erdoğan's purging of the judiciary in Turkey is deeply worrying, to say the least.

Democracy likewise requires free speech and the communication of ideas. While Article 10 of the ECHR, which protects freedom of expression, can be derogated from in an emergency, any infringement must still be proportionate.

The decisions to fire and detain academics, and prevent people from travelling abroad are an unprecedented violation of academic and democratic values in Turkey. And it didn't start with the failed coup.

How long can this last?

Erdoğan's declaration of a state of emergency is deeply suspect. Turkey's emergency has an initial time limit of three months; however, emergencies tend to be perpetuated. France's experiment with emergency powers – which Turkey is drawing parallels to – is a case in point.

The nature of the terrorist threat facing France makes assessing when it has been defeated incredibly difficult. The terrorist attacks that have caused this situation are not committed by an army in uniform but people only connected in the loosest sense by an ideology. That makes them hard to identify or engage.

In light of the challenges posed by Islamic extremist terrorism, the European Court of Human Rights, in a case involving the UK's declaration of a state of emergency following 9/11, has said that an emergency may be perpetual.

Again, this is reflective of the court's deferential approach to the existence of a state of emergency. It undermines the entire justification of declaring a state of emergency in the first place, which is to restore the status quo that existed prior to the declaration.

With the introduction of emergency powers comes the temptation for misuse. France's state of emergency was less than a month old when its emergency powers were used, not in the fight against suspected IS terrorists, but to place climate change protesters under house arrest during the Paris Climate Summit in December. And while the state seems to have made the most of its extended powers in this case, it still wasn't able to prevent the attack in Nice.

It will take some time before the European Court of Human Rights will get to examine Turkey's emergency. However, even if the emergency is eventually lifted, it is hard to imagine that "normal life" after the emergency will be the same as "normal life" before it.

States of emergency have a dark history of being used in a transformative sense to usher in tyrannical regimes in the guise of confronting a threat to the life of the nation. It would be wise to recall the warnings of British judge Lord Hoffmann that the real threat to the life of the nation comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.

Alan Greene 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.
 Alan Greene, Lecturer in Law, Durham University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62925 2016-07-22T14:04:29Z 2016-07-22T14:04:29Z Plibersek moves to high profile education job in ALP reshuffle
Labor's deputy leader Tanya Plibersek is to take the frontline shadow ministry of education, including both schools and higher education, in Bill Shorten's reshuffle announced on Saturday.

Many in Labor have been anxious for the popular Plibersek to switch from foreign affairs to a major domestic job, where she can do more of the policy heavy lifting and use her constant access to the media to maximum advantage.

Plibersek picks up schools from Kate Ellis and higher education from Kim Carr - who on Friday, thanks to Shorten's protection, successfully resisted a concerted move by the left to dump him to the backbench.

Plibersek's shadow ministry is being described as a new "super portfolio" because Labor had previously separated schools and higher education. The education minister, Simon Birmingham, has both.

Higher education is set to become a controversial area again this term as the government struggles to get a policy together after the debacle of its 2014 budget plan to deregulate university fees.

Ellis will be shadow minister for early childhood education and development, and shadow minister for TAFE and vocational education. She previously had early childhood and picks up the vocational area from Sharon Bird, who is no longer in the shadow ministry. Ellis stays in shadow cabinet.

Shorten will keep small business in shadow cabinet, playing up the contrast with Malcolm Turnbull who in his reshuffle this week took the portfolio from Kelly O'Dwyer and dropped it to the outer ministry, where it is now held by the Nationals Michael McCormack.

Education, especially schools policy, was at the centre of Labor's election campaign, together with health.

Shorten in a statement said he was "determined to keep the issues important to Australians at the top of our agenda – better schools and education, Australian jobs and protecting Medicare.

"We're not going to take a backward step fighting for these things. There are few issues as critical to our nation's future prosperity than education – which is why I am giving it such priority".

He said the appointment of Plibersek was "about putting a great policy thinker on the political frontline".

Caucus elected the shadow ministry after the factions put forward their tickets. Shorten allocates portfolios.

Michelle Grattan 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.
 Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62721 2016-07-22T13:21:09Z 2016-07-22T13:21:09Z Why driverless cars still need driving tests
Joshua Brown was reportedly watching a Harry Potter film when the "autopilot" function of his Tesla Model S drove the car into a truck, instantly killing him. This incident, the first time someone died from an accident involving self-driving car technology, doesn't prove autonomous vehicles are inherently unsafe. But it does serve as a reminder that the technology isn't yet at the stage where we can take our eyes off the road.

Prior to Tesla's crash a few weeks ago, I interviewed 12 experts from across the driverless car world as part of my PhD research project looking at issues of trust in automated vehicles. The experts included academics and industry professionals, all with vast experience in automated vehicle technology and design. They said, as research suggests, that until the autopilot can fully take over, we need to treat self-driving cars with a certain amount of distrust, otherwise we could be putting ourselves in serious danger. The issue was so serious that drivers shouldn't be allowed to use this technology without specific training.

Moving up the gears

Although it's on the horizon, a future where humans have no interaction with a car's driving system (known as level 5 automation) is still far away. To get there, we need to get through several transitional stages of technology (levels 2, 3 and 4) that can take increasing but not complete control of a vehicle. Tesla's autopilot, for example, is typically seen as level 2 to 3 automation because it can take control of at least two functions such as steering and acceleration, but still needs the driver to monitor the car and its environment.

These levels of transition actually pose many of the biggest challenges for the technology. More and more vehicles come out of the production lines with combined automated features, bringing them to levels 2 and 3 of automation. Most of the car manufacturers are offering either as a standard or as a premium functionalities such as parking assist, Adaptive Cruise Control, Autonomous Emergency Braking systems, and so on – automated features that added and combined year-after-year create an incremental path towards driverless vehicles.

Self-driving cars require a suite of technologies such as radar, LIDAR (like radar but works with light waves instead of radio waves), video cameras, GPS and inertial navigation systems, among others, which build awareness of the car's surroundings. Drivers need to be able to trust that these systems can reliably work together in the potentially dangerous or unpredictable situations created by driving. Otherwise, they won't use them properly and miss out on the benefits they can provide.

Trust your car – but not too much

Despite some public fears about the safety of self-driving cars, a survey we conducted with 239 respondents last year found that people may actually be more willing to trust an automated system than other drivers. This is because humans are more unpredictable and susceptible to emotions. A self-driving car would never be guilty of road rage, aggressive driving or day dreaming.

But there's also a danger that people are already putting too much trust in self-driving technologies. The recent crash aside, the apparent reliability of Tesla's autopilot and similar systems could lead people to believe they can stop paying attention to the road and let the car drive itself – leaving them to do other things. But these technologies are not designed to take full control of the car and the driver is supposed to be ready to take over at any time.

As one of the experts we spoke to put it:

People will start trusting it, things will start going wrong, the drivers will not be able to resume control because they will have jumped into a false sense of security.

When a driver has even partly been relying on an autonomous system, they lose their awareness of what is going on on the road around them. To safely take back full control of the vehicle in a potentially dangerous situation, they need to regain their situational awareness and this takes time. For example, research using a driving simulator test has shown that it takes drivers using level 3 driving automation (where the car controls steering and acceleration and monitors the environment) around 15 seconds to resume control of the car.

According to another robotics expert we spoke to, the loss of situational awareness is made worse the longer the driver has been using the automated technology. They suggested that using a basic adaptive cruise control function, which simply adjusts the car's speed to keep a safe distance from other vehicles, for an hour or more would effectively lower the driver's awareness as much as if they were using a fully self-driving car.

Read the manual, take the test

So how can we make sure drivers don't overtrust partially automated vehicle technology in a way that puts themselves and others in danger? For one thing, it's well-known that people rarely read instruction manuals or the information screens that feature in new software.

Most of the experts we spoke to thought drivers should be given specific training before using these systems. This could involve changing the current standard test for new drivers, retraining classes, obliging manufacturers to provide demonstrations of new technologies before they sell them, or even the use of driving simulators. These could be provided in either dedicated centres or even car dealerships.

As automated vehicle technologies become more popular, it is vital that people learn when it is safe to trust them and when it is not. If they don't, we could imagine a situation where a spate of accidents could make people lose faith in the safety of these systems and force the industry to take a step backwards.

George Filip is supported by the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Nottingham (RCUK Grant No. EP/G037574/1) and by the RCUK's Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (RCUK Grant No. EP/G065802/1).
 George Filip, PhD Researcher, Horizon CDT, University of Nottingham Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62873 2016-07-22T12:40:27Z 2016-07-22T12:40:27Z Qandeel Baloch: stricter Pakistani laws have not deterred honour killings
Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani social media celebrity, was killed on July 16 2016. Her brother, Waseem Azeem, was arrested the next day, confessing to the murder in the name of honour.

Public opinion about her death is polarised. A section of Pakistani society condemned the murder of "an independent woman". Others voiced support for the killing of – to put it in generic terms – a non-conformist with outspoken views on social media. Many others have remained apathetic.

Honour killing is a significant social problem in Pakistani society and is on the rise. A recent report from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan found that 1,096 women were the victims of honour crimes in 2015, up from 1,005 in 2014 and 869 in 2013. Victims include both men and women but female victims far outnumbered male victims.

Getting away with murder

The Pakistani Penal Code incorporates two kinds of law – qisas (the Islamic fixed law of life for a life) and tazir – where the court has a discretion as to the amount of punishment. These are both a key part of the way the penal code is constructed.

Until just under ten years ago, the legal treatment of honour killing was a grey area and it was possible for perpetrators to get away with a murder in the name of honour or get a light sentence. Courts handed down light sentences because the perpetrators claimed that they were provoked by the "immoral or sexual behaviour" of the victims and somehow they were partly to be blamed for their own deaths.

Courts accepted the element of "provocation" as a mitigating circumstance. Perpetrators could also easily get away with honour-based murder because they were forgiven by the heirs of the victim under qisas law.

As the perpetrators of honour killings happen to be close relatives – parents, brothers, uncles and sometimes the whole family is involved – the victim's heirs would were unlikely to want to send their close relative to prison or face a death sentence. So their crimes were forgiven.

Changes to the law

All this changed in 2004 when a new scheme of law was introduced. An amendment introduced to the penal code (section 302) now treats killing in the name of honour as murder punishable with death under qisas.

Honour-based murder was also then made punishable with the death penalty or life imprisonment under tazir law. But a murder which is judged not to be honour-based is still treated as a compoundable offence under qisas, meaning heirs of the victim may forgive the perpetrator or accept blood money subject to judicial approval – although not if the heir happens to be the perpetrator himself.

Under the amended law, parties in honour-based killings still retain their right of compromise and forgiveness under qisas but crucially it must be assessed by the court to ensure that the interests of justice are not defeated and that the rights of any children are protected.

Another amended part of the penal code, section 311, now also treats honour-based murder as what's called fasad-fil-arz (mischief on earth) which is a crime against the state that cannot be forgiven by an heir. So if the prosecution reaches a conclusion that a murder is honour-based, the state is required to prosecute perpetrators under section 311 which allows the court to hand down the death penalty or life imprisonment.

So the effect of the 2004 law is derived from a mixture of both qisas and tazir law. Under qisas law, a perpetrator does not enjoy the benefit of forgiveness if he himself happens to be the heir of the victim. Forgiveness by other heirs is allowed but the court must be satisfied that forgiveness is in the interests of justice. But under tazir law, if the prosecution considers a murder to be honour-based, it will be caught by the fasad-fil-arz principle and the perpetrator may be prosecuted.

In principle, this means that if a court judges that a murder was not honour-based, it means that the murder could be forgiven by an heir, but if it is judged to be honour-based then it can be forgiven, by an heir, only with the court's approval.

Making the law a deterrent

Baloch's brother confessed to the police who are treating the murder as honour-based. Her parents, who are her natural heirs, have spoken out against her killing. Even if they forgive their son, it is unlikely that the court would accept this as it would amount to letting him get away with her murder.

Under Pakistani law, then, Azeem could face either the death sentence or life imprisonment.

While a clear law against honour-based murder exists in Pakistan, it has so far not proved to be an effective deterrent for these crimes, as their rise since the laws were introduced in 2004 suggests. Perhaps more education and public awareness of women's human rights, together with the stringent application of the law on Pakistan's statute, might help in reducing the incidence of honour-based murders.

Niaz Shah 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.
 Niaz Shah, Reader in Law, University of Hull Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62851 2016-07-22T12:11:32Z 2016-07-22T12:11:32Z Trump promises America law and order, but he is a dire threat to both
Donald Trump is not a normal American presidential nominee, and there has been very little normal about the Republican convention that has now officially confirmed his nomination.

Trump's defining attributes have always been intemperance, divisiveness and indiscipline, so it should surprise no-one that "his" convention was so intemperate, divided, and close to outright farce.

But however "eventful" the convention might have been, Trump's formal nomination was always to be the centrepiece of the occasion. With due respect to the cast of reluctant colleagues, relatives and d-list celebrities spread out over the days before, Trump was always centre of attention.

Likewise, it was during his acceptance speech that the largest part of the general public tuned into proceedings – many perhaps paying full attention to the campaign for the first time.

For his committed supporters, meanwhile, Trump played exactly the tunes they wanted to hear, his performance coloured by a dark intensity. He painted a bleak (and inaccurate) picture of an America overwhelmed by violent crime, before declaring himself "the law and order candidate" and promising that upon his election "safety will be restored".

He told tales of Americans tragically killed by illegal immigrants, affirming one of his longest-standing pledges: to build a "border wall" and find and deport those already illegally in the country.

He blamed his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state during president Obama's first term, for the rise of Islamic State and other agents of radical militant Islamism. Lamenting that "America is far less safe and the world is far less stable" than it was when she took charge of US foreign policy, he reassured the crowd that he would "defeat them fast" if he were elected.

He warned of the threat of terror attacks in the US, but pledged to neutralise them in part by suspending immigration from any country "compromised by terrorism" – without specifying what countries this would include.

And he extended sympathy to the plight of workers whose jobs had been taken away by "disastrous" trade deals, promising to get rid of current "bad" agreements with the likes of China and replace them with "great" ones instead.

In short, Trump used his address to stoke fear, to blame his political opponents for that which is frightening, and to offer himself as the singularly capable agent of change and renewal demanded by the times.

Scorning any imperative to offer realistic solutions to the problems he railed against, Trump delivered a clear pitch: that, flying in the face of a "corrupt" establishment, he alone can speak for the "forgotten" working men and women who have suffered at the hands of a "rigged" system. "I am your voice!" he proclaimed.

As the blogger Andrew Sullivan summarised it: "Everything is terrible. I alone can solve [everything]. Just don't ask me how."

A crisis in waiting

That Trump should present himself as the candidate of law and order is darkly ironic, since his campaign has provided ample evidence that in office he would be a threat to both.

Even many on the right have questioned whether his proposal for a ban on immigration by Muslims is constitutional. He has threatened to use the law to curb media organisations that subjected him to unfavourable reporting. He has encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies and offered to pay the legal fees of those who commit it (not reassuring in someone who if elected would acquire the power of presidential pardon).

In his discussion of foreign policy, he has demonstrated at best ignorance and at worst active hostility to the institutions and arrangements that underpin the liberal world order. He has said that he would order those under his command to commit torture and war crimes in pursuit of his security policy. He has, in effect, threatened to mount a trade war against China and others.

He has suggested that the US might not live up to its security commitments to Europe under NATO, while cultivating mutual admiration with Vladimir Putin, Russia's authoritarian strongman.

His discussion of the national debt and how he might seek to renegotiate it suggests a dizzying ignorance of the rudiments of how national and international economics work.

In short, if Trump wins, a major global crisis – whether economic or military, and whether caused by design or by cluelessness – would become dramatically more likely.

Fear and loathing

One of the most disturbing themes of the convention was the sheer venom with which Trump Republicans attacked Hillary Clinton, whom they regard as not merely a political opponent but a criminal. And not just a petty one; in Trump's phrase, she is guilty of "terrible, terrible crimes" that have been swept under the carpet by a corrupt FBI.

"Lock her up" was an enthusiastic chant, reappearing during Trump's speech but originating in New Jersey governor Chris Christie's audition for the job of Attorney General in a Trump administration, in which he staged a mock show-trial of Clinton for supposed crimes ranging from corruption to "bad judgment" skirting the edges of treason.

As others have noted, demands for the jailing of opponents do not form a normal part of politics in a healthy democratic society, and for good reason. That they are now the stock-in-trade of a major party's nominee speaks to a serious erosion of the US's liberal democratic norms.

Experts are uncertain about just what has to happen at a convention to benefit the nominee, but this was an especially unedifying week, with enough unpleasant surprises and unforced embarrassments to give any professional political stage manager an ulcer.

And Trump, obliged to adhere more closely to a fixed script than in his free-associative primary-night rants, was at times strained and halting in his delivery. But we won't know how it has been received by the public until the first post-convention polls come in.

Whatever they say, the most important point is abundantly clear: Trump is a terrifying candidate.

He is skilled in the dark arts of fear, agitation, and insecurity; he is duly marketing himself as an avenger of law and order to meet the demand he has inflamed. His constituency is shockingly large. But a Trump presidency would be a greater danger to American security than any threat it proposes to address – perhaps even an existential threat to American democracy itself.

Adam Quinn has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
 Adam Quinn, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Birmingham Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62850 2016-07-22T11:02:43Z 2016-07-22T11:02:43Z Labour leadership election: meet the candidates
Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected victory in the party leadership contest last year moved Labour to the left, and the rejection of austerity that came with it has helped to stop the "Tory-lite" and "they're all the same" accusations being levelled at the party.

But now that former shadow business secretary Angela Eagle has triggered a leadership contest (before stepping aside for Owen Smith), Labour members have to consider whether somebody else should carry its new leftist banner.

As leader, Corbyn has successfully challenged the Tories' austerity narrative, overseen a dramatic growth in party membership and changed Labour's outlook. The party's leftward shift means that this year's leadership contest is being fought by two socialist candidates, albeit of different shades of red. The end of the New Labour era is upon us.

The incumbant

Early indications are that the incumbent leader Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North since 1983, starts in the strongest position. His promise to deliver a "new kind of politics" is being credited for the huge increase in party membership.

He is maintaining his position on the key issues, believing that members who voted overwhelmingly for him last time expect the party to continue to fight for the "things that matter": rejecting austerity, battling poverty and protecting the NHS.

And as the Chilcot report hangs heavily over some in the party, Corbyn's principled opposition to the Iraq war may feature in foreign policy debates.

Corbyn won significant support last year and appears to still have the backing of the membership and trade unions, although there is some suggestion that this may be changing.

However, losing the support of the parliamentary party remains a significant problem and he still has work to do to convince the wider electorate.

The challenger

Owen Smith is less well known than Corbyn. He has only been MP for Pontypridd for six years. This opens him up to the charge of not having the necessary experience to be leader. However, David Cameron had less parliamentary experience before he became Tory leader.

His relative newness could even be an advantage. Smith can portray himself as the "change" candidate who will move Labour on from the past as he is untainted by the Iraq War and was not in parliament during the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years.

Smith was Corbyn's shadow work and pensions secretary, voted for increasing welfare payments and against the bedroom tax. And his campaign has put tackling inequality at the heart of Labour's programme.

His past role as head of policy for a drugs company and his vote to renew nuclear weapons system Trident will not play well with left-wingers. His experience outside parliament, however, could be an advantage with an electorate that has grown sceptical of MPs who have only ever been part of the "Westminster bubble". Smith won the support of 90 Labour MPs to stand in this contest, even when Eagle was still in the running, but as yet party members aren't convinced.

The issues

Both Corbyn and Smith agree that fighting inequality must be central to Labour policy, and both are against the Tories' austerity policies. Smith wants a £200 billion new deal to build social infrastructure, such as hospitals and education facilities.

Corbyn, meanwhile, has made fighting austerity an integral part of his leadership. He has forced the government into u-turns over aspects of welfare policy.

One of the main differences between the two candidates at this point is their approach to Brexit. Corbyn has been widely criticised for not committing to the Remain campaign ahead of the referendum and, the day after the vote, called for Article 50 to be immediately invoked, so that negotiations on leaving the EU could begin.

Smith, on the other hand, has promised to hold a referendum on Brexit negotiations, arguing that many people feel they made a mistake in voting to leave and should be given another chance to decide if they want to go ahead with leaving after seeing the terms on offer for Britain's future relationship with the union.

The big question

A broader philosophical question also needs answering: what's the point of the Labour Party? Careful consideration of this could allow Labour to move on from some of its more divisive issues. If members decide that it is to effect change – radical or gradual – from the top down when in government, then Smith will win. If they believe that building a mass movement which stays true to its principles at all costs is just as important, then Corbyn will continue as leader.

Members must now decide who is best placed to unite the parliamentary party and the wider Labour movement. They must also consider who will appeal most to non-Labour voters. In short, which of the candidates looks most like a potential Prime Minister to the wider electorate?

Both Corbyn and Smith now have an opportunity to show that Labour has a coherent vision for the party and the country. This will need to capture the imagination of supporters as well as non-Labour voters if the party is to return to power. They must make Labour's identity clear, demonstrate what it believes in and what it is for, and ultimately prove that the Labour Party still matters.

Jonathan Davis 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.
 Jonathan Davis, Principal Lecturer in History, co-director Labour History Research Unit, Anglia Ruskin University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62864 2016-07-22T10:43:44Z 2016-07-22T10:43:44Z The unforeseen cost of Brexit – customs

  shutterstock.com

"Take back control" was one of the Leave campaign's main battle cries in Britain's referendum on EU membership. But reintroducing customs controls on UK-EU trade will have a cost for both business and government. Although it is not yet clear what Brexit will look like, the added costs from trade-related red tape that will result from leaving the EU are certain. And these costs are likely to be significant without adequate reform to customs procedures.

At present, all goods entering the UK from outside the EU require an import declaration. The most common and practical way of complying is to use the logistics providers carrying the goods as agents. Their fees are often dependent on the specific commercial arrangements, but can range from just a few pounds to £25 plus for declaring a sea container. Once Brexit is in place, UK-EU trade will be subject to similar costs.

According to the World Customs Organisation's latest Annual Report for 2015-16, the UK made 70.5m import declarations and 6.5m export declarations per year. Based on current trade figures it would be fair for UK Customs (HMRC) to expect the number of customs declarations to double once Britain leaves the EU. A corresponding increase in declarations would also arise on the continent since each export declaration at one end of the supply chain is followed by an import declaration at the other. Further analysis is required, but it is easy to imagine an additional cost to UK-EU trade in the order of several billion pounds per year.

Then there is also the risk of physical inspections. Depending on the nature and duration of the inspection, these costs could be anywhere between £52 and £1,540 per consignment. Ports would need to accommodate the increased demands for inspection facilities. This would be at the expense of losing valuable space for commercial activities.

Reams of red tape

It is likely that any post-Brexit agreement with the European Union will require businesses to comply with additional documentary requirements – as is, for example, the case for preferential trade between the EU and Norway, Switzerland or within the Customs Union with Turkey. Additional requirements might include documents (or their electronic equivalent) to prove origin – which can be technical and complex – or that goods are free from customs control.

Unfortunately, the adverse impact of trade-related red tape does not stop here. UK businesses require HMRC to give the highest levels of service. The UK's location as a place to do business depends in part on HMRC's ability to clear goods through the ports and border within hours rather than days. Whether HMRC's infrastructure and supporting electronic systems at ports and elsewhere in the private sector are up to the job is anyone's guess, especially since applicable laws, rules and procedures still need to be agreed.

 There could be hold-ups to trade ahead. www.shutterstock.com

Additional red tape from other non-customs border agencies, such as for quarantine and health-related controls, remain unclear, too. An extended period of uncertainty about rules and procedures, as well as the necessary supporting systems, is inevitable. This will be further compounded by the fact that putting the systems that support trade and customs in place, tends to take years, rather than months.

Last but not least, there will be resourcing issues for HMRC. According to the World Customs Organisation's Annual Report, the UK has about 5,000 customs staff. But the actual figure of staff with experience in the administration of international trade related customs procedures is likely to be significantly less. This compares poorly with similar-sized countries, such as France (16,500 customs staff). An extra 5,000 officers, for example, with relevant overheads such as office space and pension contributions, could easily amount to £250m per year (£4.8m per week) for the government to fund.

One further concern is that HMRC has very few experts in key technical areas, such as in "valuation" or "origin" – two prerequisites for determining the correct amount of tariff duties. Business practitioners who I have spoken to and deal with customs on a regular basis have highlighted that several of these individuals are close to retirement.

With UK-EU trade in goods worth £354 billion, appropriate measures must be put in place. An increase of buffer stock to counter administrative and inspection related delays at ports and borders is one option; but the resulting costs would undermine competitiveness. Significant investment in staff and a system to accommodate the new trade and customs landscape might be another.

The overall scale of additional costs still needs to be assessed – on behalf of the businesses that will be affected, but also for HMRC's development. As so often, the devil is in the detail. And unless innovative solutions to cutting the red tape resulting from the UK leaving the EU can be found, end consumers are likely to bear much of the cost.

Andrew Grainger has been the recipient of research funding from UK and international sources. On occasion he will also work with relevant International Organisations and lend advice to Governments and Companies on Trade Facilitation related issues.
 Andrew Grainger, Assistant Professor in Logistics and Supply Chain Management, University of Nottingham Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62853 2016-07-22T10:10:30Z 2016-07-22T10:10:30Z Can the menopause really be reversed?

  Eskymaks/Shutterstock

Scientists in Greece claimed recently to have reversed the menopause. They did this by injecting blood plasma that contains platelets into the ovaries of eight women who had not menstruated for around five months in order to stimulate ovarian regeneration. The scientists later recovered eggs from the ovaries. The eggs were able to mature and reach the stage at which they could be fertilised. Does this mean the end of menopause? At this time, the answer would almost certainly be "no".

The work was presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Helsinki earlier this month. Importantly, it has not been peer-reviewed and there is no independent verification of the findings.

But that's not the only reason to treat the results as preliminary. This is a small study, which lacked appropriate controls. For example, one might reasonably expect a comparison with a group of perimenopausal women who did not have any treatment.

The fact that this work was first done in women is also potentially worrisome as limited data on safety of the technique was reported. A more traditional approach would have been to test the technique in a laboratory – so-called in vitro testing. Ovarian follicles, the part of the ovary in which the egg develops and which also secretes key hormones that influence the menstrual cycle, can be cultured in the laboratory and so an obvious experiment would have been to grow follicles in the presence of the platelet rich plasma. This could have been followed with testing on animals to prove that the procedure is safe.

Not an overnight change

Almost everyone is aware that women are born with a finite number of eggs, and that when this store runs dry, the woman enters menopause. But, like so many concepts in physiology, the devil is in the detail. Menopause is not a sudden overnight change, but a gradual process than can take many years. The first sign is a loss of regularity of ovulation and menstruation. This might last for ten years before the final menstrual period, so a break in cycling is not that uncommon and this is what might have been seen here – a break and then a temporary resumption of menstrual cycles, coinciding with the treatment.

Maybe a more accurate description of this work would have been "possible slight extension of perimenopausal phase", but of course that is much less interesting than a reversal of menopause.

Is it even possible?

The method itself is biological plausible. In 2010, a research group in the US, led by Jonathan Tilley identified cells in the adult ovary that, with the correct stimulation, could produce new ovarian follicles and new eggs. Others have reported that platelet rich plasma can cause stem cells to differentiate. This is presumed to happen because this plasma contains a rich mix of "goodies", including cytokines, which are small signalling molecules important in cellular communication.

Adding these two pieces of knowledge offers one possible explanation for the findings, but in biology, 1+1 rarely equals 2 and where it does, extensive work is required to prove it. For example, infusing the platelet rich plasma into the ovary would have caused an inflammatory response. Might this have been the cause of the resumption of the menstrual cycles reported?

The danger with reports such as this is that they offer hope which may prove to be false, especially when they enter mainstream media. Menopause is a stressful time, indicating a transition in life, which has physical and emotional impacts. This is amplified in the few women who experience early menopause. In addition, the average age of motherhood is rising steadily. People are looking at options for prolonging reproductive lifespans; options including banking eggs or embryos. Delaying menopause would be an amazing breakthrough, but there is a very long way to go to achieve this.

Roger Sturmey has previously received funding from Medical Research Council.
 Roger Sturmey, Senior lecturer, University of Hull Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62647 2016-07-22T10:09:52Z 2016-07-22T10:09:52Z How the Victorians brought famous artists back from the dead in seances

Georgiana Houghton, The Eye of God (c.1862), watercolour. Victorian Spiritualists' Union, Melbourne, Australia / Courtauld Gallery, London.

In the 19th century, in a dim gas-lit seance parlour, the spirits of Titian and Correggio returned to the mortal world to guide the hand of a medium artist, Georgiana Houghton. Claiming to be under the direction of her spirit guides, Houghton drew extraordinarily vibrant and colourful expressions of spiritual abstraction unlike anything seen before in art. As Houghton herself declared, her work was "without parallel in the world".

Georgiana Houghton's spirit drawings are pioneering examples of abstract art and a selection of these are now on display at the Courtauld Institute in London. The exhibition contributes to an emerging area of art historical re-evaluation of this period, which intends to change our understanding of 19th-century art.

A new spiritualism

Modern Spiritualism began as a movement in America in the 1840s, and its origin is often attributed to the Fox sisters of Hydesville. Spiritualists believed that the human spirit survives death and continues to take an active interest in the mortal world. Central to this movement were spirit mediums. A medium was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to spirit communication, and through whom it was believed such communication across the two worlds was possible. Spiritualism arrived in Britain in the early 1850s where it gained widespread popularity and caused a considerable cultural impact. This included a form of creative mediumship in which drawings and paintings were produced during seances.

Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) was one of many artistic British mediums. At the age of 45, she first became interested in spiritualism after the death of her younger sister and began attending seances. In 1861, she developed her skills as an artistic medium and throughout the 1860s and 1870s produced hundreds of symbolic artworks.

 Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance, 1882.

Only 40 of these now survive and a vibrant sample have been chosen for display at the Courtauld exhibition. In 1871, Houghton also chose to exhibit her work and she rented a gallery in Old Bond Street to present her spirit drawings to a London audience. This indicated that Houghton wanted her seance work to gain merit as art in itself, but she also used the exhibition to expose spiritualist ideas to the general public.

Among other British mediums who painted or drew in trance-states or during seances, reportedly under the influence of spirits, were Anna Mary Howitt, Barbara Honywood, Catherine Berry, David Duguid, Jane Stewart Smith, and William and Elizabeth Wilkinson. Importantly, these medium artists were significant contributors to a major 19th-century movement – Modern Spiritualism – which spanned across the globe from America to Australia, from Scotland to South Africa. Their work ranged from abstract shapes to figurative forms, yet while their styles differed they were unified by the same goal, which was to use artistic mediumship to convince the viewer of the "truth": that the spirit world existed and that spirits could interact with the living.

Life after death

Seance drawings and paintings were deemed to be spirit artefacts by fellow spiritualists. In order to understand both the visual language and the spiritual status of such artworks there was an emphasis on the way in which they were created. The medium would often go into a trance, during which it was believed that he or she would channel the spirit who would then author the artwork.

Experiencing the seance and watching the creation of spirit art was to allegedly witness the engagement of spirits with the mortal world, and was often deemed as evidence of life after death. Therefore, the artworks produced during seances were also thought to be evidence of spiritual interactions with mortals. These mediums' works were intended to be understood by spiritualists who had sacred knowledge of the spirit world, and for those who did not have such an insight, the medium was necessary to further mediate the artwork's meaning to the viewer.

 Georgiana Houghton, Glory be to God (1864), watercolour. Victorian Spiritualists' Union, Melbourne, Australia/Courtauld Gallery, London.

An inscription on the back of one of Houghton's drawings explicitly makes this point. On the reverse of The Eyes of the Lord (c.1866) her caption explains the concept of her symbolism:

The Trinity is represented throughout by my having always drawn three Eyes conjoined, but that will not be perceptible to those who have not seen the drawings in progress.

Houghton was aware that viewers who attended seances gained an advantage in understanding the sacred message. The verso explanations on many of Houghton's works and her daily attendance at the exhibition in 1871 were practical measures to help the viewer access the meaning of the drawings. It also ensured that the sacred knowledge of the spirit world was imparted to a wider audience, an audience whom Houghton hoped would become convinced of the teachings of spiritualism.

A forgotten art form

The collective work by medium artists is an overlooked area of 19th-century artistic output. It was forgotten by the mainstream mainly due to a lasting scepticism of the practices that produced the "spiritual" oeuvre. Fraudulence was often rife among mediums, and most of the British medium artists listed above attracted their share of suspicion and scandal.

The curators of the current exhibition draw attention to a 19th-century critic's response to Houghton's 1871 exhibition. From a position of distrust toward spiritualism, the critic stated:

We should not have called attention to this exhibition at all, did we not believe that it will disgust all sober people with the follies which it is intended to advance and promote.

Subsequently, such sceptical views contributed to the rejection of spirit art as a subject unworthy of consideration. Instead, this genre of outsider art faded into obscurity. This was irrespective of its legacy on automatic drawings practised by French symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists.

Despite this, there have been recent attempts to re-examine the importance of these spiritualist works as innovative and pioneering for their time. One approach is to introduce new audiences to this different type of art in gallery exhibitions, including both the current exhibition of Houghton's drawings at the Courtauld Gallery and the recent exhibition on Hilma af Klimt: Painting the Unseen at the Serpentine Gallery, also in London.

Three decades after Houghton produced her spirit drawings, Hilma af Klimt, a Swedish spiritualist and theosophist, produced large abstract paintings also allegedly under the influence of spiritual forces. These recent exhibitions in London have given new consideration to the colourful and abstract art forms of these medium artists, which precede Mondrian and Kandinsky.

A review of Houghton's exhibition in 1871 pronounced it to be "the most astonishing exhibition in London at the present moment". If the 2016 exhibition at the Courtauld can convincingly redefine our assumptions of 19th-century art, which it is sure to do, that review is as relevant today as it was 145 years ago.

Michelle Foot 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.
 Michelle Foot, Doctoral Researcher in History of Art, University of Aberdeen Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62758 2016-07-22T10:09:39Z 2016-07-22T10:09:39Z Are gifted kids more sensitive to screen violence?

What's the impact of violence on screen? Donnie Ray Jones, CC BY

The past few weeks have been full of several unfortunate violent events: the massacre in Orlando, the killing of black men by police officers, the sniper attack in Dallas, the Bastille Day attack in France, the violent coup attempt in Turkey and the shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

While many of us may not have been directly affected by these events, we watched the news as it unfolded on broadcast and social media. Witnessing such violence on media can take a severe toll on us even when our near and dear ones are not directly affected.

Surprisingly, what research is beginning to uncover is that impact on young children – especially young gifted children – can be worse.

Impact of violence on adults and children

A large body of research has demonstrated a link between exposure to violent media and aggression and violent behavior across multiple countries and cultures. A synthesis of this literature found different reactions in adults and children. The short-term impact of watching violence on screen was greater for adults, while the long-term effects were greater for children.

Research specifically related to children has shown that violent media events like the ones we are currently seeing can frighten and worry them. Scholars have discussed how witnessing violence harms children's mental health.

However, this impact can vary. We are researchers who study gifted children and violence. Although definitions of "gifted" vary, gifted children can be generally defined as those high in general intelligence as indicated by a standardized test score.

 Gifted kids show greater motivation, memory, moral reasoning and development. US Army Garrison Red Cloud - Casey Follow, CC BY-NC-ND

Based on this definition, gifted children tend to have many advantages. For example, higher intelligence is linked to greater achievement, motivation, memory, moral reasoning and development, social skills, sense of humor, educational and occupational attainment, leadership, and even creativity. Higher intelligence is also linked to lower impulsive behavior, delinquency and crime.

However, research also shows that higher intelligence is linked with greater emotional sensitivity. Scholars studying gifted children have argued that because of this, they are not necessarily advantaged in all contexts.

Studying the impact of violence on gifted kids

But what things might gifted children might be more sensitive to? One factor that might play a role is violence – even violence depicted in something as seemingly harmless as cartoons.

Along with Cengiz Altay, a doctoral student at Fatih University, we tested 74 "gifted" children and 70 children from Turkey who were "less gifted" or had relatively lower intelligence scores. The "gifted" group were those students scoring 130 or higher (top two percent) on the intelligence scale. The school from which these students were drawn had a gifted students unit and were initially screened for higher intelligence than the general population.

The study was conducted in 2015 over a period of half a year. At the time of the study, these children were 10 years old. We examined whether exposure to media containing violence compared to media that did not contain violence differently affected the verbal ability of children.

To do that, we asked all students to take a verbal test before (pre-test) and after (post-test) watching a video. Participants were asked to generate words from a different set of letters for both these tests.

The most common letters in the Turkish alphabet were randomly divided into two groups for the pre-test and post-test. In the pretest, participants were asked to generate words starting with the letters A, L, M, S, C, E, B and H. In the post-test, participants had to generate words starting with the letters I, D, N, O, F, K and T. They had one minute to list as many words as possible that began with the particular letters.

Between the pre-test and post-test, participants in both the gifted and less gifted groups were randomly assigned to watch either a nonviolent cartoon or a violent cartoon. We used two animation shows that are commonly watched by children.

 Even animation series that depict violence can have an impact. Loren Javier, CC BY-ND

One was "Bakugan Battle Brawlers," a series with episodes that depict violence in a battle, and the other "Arthur" – a story that revolves around the many friend and family issues of a young boy named Arthur. This latter series does not have any episodes of screen violence.

What our findings show

Our research, published recently in Gifted Child Quarterly, a leading journal on the study of giftedness, shows that children's abilities could be negatively impacted by exposure to violence, especially gifted children.

We found that gifted students generated more words than the other students when they were asked to generate words prior to watching the video. However, the gifted students assigned to the video which showed violence generated slightly fewer words than the less gifted group after they had watched the video.

Conversely, when gifted students were shown the cartoon without violence, they outperformed the other students on both the pre-test and the post-test. This suggests that it was the violence in the cartoons that reduced the gifted students' mental performance rather than simply watching a cartoon.

Overall, all kids under performed after watching the violence, but gifted kids showed a greater performance drop.

Are gifted kids more sensitive?

One commonly held belief is that gifted students don't need help and will do fine on their own. This perception may be due to the empirical evidence showing that many gifted students do end up quite successful later in life.

Scholars, however, have argued that it is a myth that gifted students don't face problems and challenges. Our study adds to the evidence that gifted children do face disadvantages or challenges, specifically when it comes to exposure to screen violence. Violence in the media impact children generally, but our study shows this negative impact is amplified for students with higher intelligence.

We are just beginning to explore the reasons for this surprising finding. Perhaps greater sensitivity of the "gifted" group leads them to react with more anxiety to the violent media. And perhaps exposure to such media lowers their working memory capacity, reduces their attention to the mental task and thus lowers their performance. In our study, gifted children thought the violent cartoon was more violent, liked it less and saw it less frequently at home than did the other children.

Screen violence and harm

Our findings have implications for parents, educators and policymakers who need to be aware that violence on screen may have a negative impact on kids, and in particular gifted kids. The impact of violent video on verbal tasks could be particularly important given the heavily verbal nature of schools.

 Screen violence could lead to nightmares and other sleep disturbances. Boys image via www.shutterstock.com

A just-released statement from The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended, along with attention to children's "media diets," that "parents should be mindful of what shows their children watch and which games they play." Other experts too have warned that screen violence, whether real or fictional, could lead to nightmares, sleep disturbances and increased general anxiety.

Our findings support this earlier evidence. In general, the violence depicted in our videos was quite small compared to the violence that children are often exposed to, such as in the news. So, it's possible our study provides a lower estimate on the impact of violent media on the mental performance of children.

Optimal educational development requires not only including positive impacts but also reducing and removing negative impacts. Such risk factors could be greatest for talented but disadvantaged students who likely live in neighborhoods with higher rates of violence, which might accumulate and contribute to their eventual underachievement.

With the rise of digital devices and constant switching of tasks, it is difficult to control student exposure to violence. However, more attention needs to be paid to media diets that could detract from educational development over a period of time.

The authors do 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.
 Jonathan Wai, Research Scientist, Duke University Brad Bushman, Professor of Communication and Psychology, The Ohio State University Yakup Cetin, Head of the Department of Foreign Language Education, Fatih University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61545 2016-07-22T10:09:37Z 2016-07-22T10:09:37Z Africa's growing and neglected cancer problem: We will all suffer
Uganda's only radiation treatment machine broke down in April earlier this year, provoking widespread public criticism and leaving an estimated 30,000 new cancer patients stranded.

Yet the lack of adequate cancer care was hardly unique in the region: 80 percent of Africa's one billion people have no access to radiotherapy although half of all cancer patients need it.

The lack of adequate cancer care also is hardly unique to Africa. Worldwide, it is estimated that an additional 5,000 radiotherapy machines are needed to treat cancer.

While infectious diseases like AIDS and Ebola have received the lion's share of Western media attention, noncommunicable diseases, including cancers, are surging in Africa and other low- and middle-income countries. This is fueled by population growth, longer lifespans, related infectious diseases, and health and environmental factors, such as increased urbanization and smoking. Cancer, which kills one in eight people worldwide, is on the verge of becoming a global pandemic with a staggering economic toll: Cancer treatment already costs almost US$1 trillion a year.

Yet developing countries lack the resources – from machines to trained personnel to operate them – to cover more than a small portion of today's cases, let alone the rising numbers projected for the future. About 15 African countries have no radiation therapy available at all.

Our studies and research on nonproliferation of nuclear weapons actually led me to investigate this problem further, as it has an effect not only on millions of people but also on the world's security and safety, as I will explain in greater detail.

Lack of radiation therapy equipment will cost lives and money

Tackling this challenge is important from both a humanitarian and an economic perspective. Worldwide, two-thirds of the 8.2 million cancer deaths in 2012 occurred in developing countries, with that proportion anticipated to grow dramatically in the years ahead. Many of these deaths could be delayed or avoided altogether with adequate radiation treatment as well as better diagnostic and screening techniques. For example, the five-year survival rate for breast cancer in the United States is 90 percent, but it is only 50 percent in Uganda.

With 80 percent of the world's cancer burden, these developing countries receive only 5 percent of the resources directed toward cancer care.

Investing additional funds in cancer care will save not only lives but also money. It would enable a larger workforce able to contribute to the economy.

Increased radiation treatment, a recent landmark study concluded, could lead to savings in tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. After all, working-age patients who in developed countries would likely survive and continue to lead productive lives are essentially left for dead in poorer countries.

Unfortunately, the major public health and development communities have yet to focus sufficiently on the problem. To be sure, the United Nations last year approved sustainable development goals that called for a one-third reduction by 2030 of deaths from noncommunicable diseases, such as cancer, and increasing prevention and treatment.

However, when it comes to cancer, little money has been put behind this goal, and next to none of it for treatment. The major public development and health organizations, such as the World Bank and World Health Organization, and private donors, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have preferred to focus their funding on infectious diseases.

Some funders have begun to consider some near-term funding for forestalling some of the more preventable cancers, such as cervical cancer through the HPV vaccine. This is no help, however, for those who already have been diagnosed. The unfortunate victims who find out they have cancer have little recourse but to succumb to the disease – or to bankrupt their families to pay for palliative care.

Even in those few poor countries that have limited access to a radiotherapy equipment, the technology these countries are using is antiquated and less effective, from a medical perspective. Richer countries and better-off developing countries generally employ linear accelerators. These machines allow doctors to administer highly targeted doses of radiation to patients. They destroy tumors and yet limit damage to surrounding tissues.

But poorer countries have had to make do with old fashioned machines that use highly radioactive material (cobalt-60). Such machines not only provide less effective medical treatment, but also pose a security risk – cobalt 60 can be used to make a radiological weapon, such as a dirty bomb.

By helping countries acquire linear accelerators and train associated personnel, the international community therefore has the opportunity to improve public health and security simultaneously.

Not an easy fix – but a needed one

To be sure, it will face challenges in doing so, and not just financial ones. For example, it is more difficult to operate linear accelerators, which need steady supplies of electricity and water. This is particularly difficult in the challenging environments of some low- and middle-income countries. In addition, there is a shortage of trained oncologists and other cancer workers, and training them will take time. Sierre Leone, for example, has no oncologists, let alone a radiation oncologist.

But concerned groups are already working on ways to address these challenges. For example, the European laboratory CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, which operates the largest accelerator in the world, is looking at ways to make a more rugged and inexpensive accelerator for medical use.

Meanwhile, cancer professionals have launched an International Cancer Expert Corps to link medical experts in better off countries with their poorer colleagues. Last year, private companies launched an initiative supported by the White House to use smartphones and other readily accessible technologies in poorer countries to improve diagnostic and screening procedures. Such efforts could save lives and make radiation therapy more effective by catching cancer earlier. Today, many patients in remote areas only travel to cancer treatment facilities in major cities when the disease has progressed to a point where doctors can only ease their pain not cure the disease.

For example, a health care provider can take cellphone pictures of the cervix to screen for cancer. These images are then remotely analyzed by a gynecologist, which allows that doctor to see many women without physically being present. Such an approach, which has been utilized in a partnership between the University of Pennslyvania Perelman School of Medicine and Botswana, may also lessen sociocultural barriers to screening.

Given the scale of the current and future challenges, such initiatives, however inspiring, are simply not enough. Both greater political leadership and financial resources are needed from the international community to meet the sustainable development goals. Developing country governments, the major international development organizations, and major private public health donors all need to do more to tackle cancer in the world's poorest countries and help make a healthier and more secure world.

This article was updated on July 22 to change the names of foundations that focus on funding infectious diseases.

Miles A. Pomper receives funding from the US. National Nuclear Security Administration and travel support from the Stanley Foundation and a member of the advisory board of the International Cancer Expert Corps

Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress receives funding the US. National Nuclear Security Administration and has received support from the Stanley Foundation.
 Miles A. Pomper, Senior Fellow, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, Scientist-in-Residence and Adjunct Professor, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/56242 2016-07-22T10:09:32Z 2016-07-22T10:09:32Z Drunk driving laws don't match the research
Emergency physicians learn to be prepared for anything thrown at us in the clinical arena. Personal life is a different story. Last year a drunk driver with multiple prior offenses and no valid driver's license smashed a truck through the wall of my son's daycare.

Fortunately, the children and staff were in undamaged areas. But just minutes before, my son and I had walked through the exact spot in the art room where the truck came to rest in a pile of debris.

Having worked in the ER for years, I've seen the aftermath of drunk driving often enough before, but that was the first time I had seen an accident caused by a drunk driver up close.

Drunk driving is a major public health problem in the U.S. In 2014 nearly one-third of the nation's 32,675 traffic fatalities were alcohol-related. This means a completely preventable death happened every 53 minutes in this country.

My brush with a drunk driver made me wonder about what practices and policies can help prevent accidents and fatalities. Research suggests lower blood alcohol concentration limits and interventions like ignition interlocks can make a big difference.

Think you're OK to drive?

When drunk drivers come to the ER they often express surprise, disbelief or denial about their blood alcohol concentration (BAC) or their level of impairment. They often are drunker than they think they are.

Higher blood alcohol levels, no matter how "sober" you feel, can have a real impact on your ability to perform tasks that require concentration, such as driving. While people who drink more often may feel the effects of alcohol less acutely than someone who does not, their reflexes and judgment can still be impaired. And the more you drink, the harder it is to judge how intoxicated you are.

At least one study involving college students has shown that higher BACs are associated with an underestimation of an individual's level of intoxication.

Studies have also shown that increasing BAC is also associated with a decreased reaction time. For instance, one study pointed to an average decreased reaction time of 120 milliseconds, just over a tenth of a second, associated with a blood alcohol content (BAC) level of 0.08, the legal limit. Traveling at 70 miles per hour, a drunk driver would travel for an additional 12 feet before reacting to a roadway hazard.

Legal limit for blood alcohol is pretty high

In 2000 Congress passed legislation making 0.08 the national standard for impaired driving in the United States. Under the law, states that did not adopt 0.08 as the standard by 2004 faced cuts in federal highway funding. By the time the law was passed many states had already adopted the 0.08 standards, but some states used 0.10 as the standard.

The lowering of the limit was in response to a 1992 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report to Congress recommending this action as a way to reduce highway deaths. Implementation of these lower BAC laws has been associated with a decrease in alcohol-related highway fatalities. But 0.08 is still a fairly high BAC level compared to other developed countries.

Among the largest industrialized countries, only the U.S., United Kingdom (with the exception of Scotland, which sets a lower limit) and Canada permit BACs as high as 0.08. France, Germany, Italy and Australia currently set their BAC limit at 0.05. Japan has the lowest requirement of this group at 0.03. European countries in particular have sought lower BAC requirements in the past decades as part of an effort to decrease traffic deaths

When the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, made its recommendations to change EU laws to recommend a BAC of 0.05 as the per se limit for impaired driving, they included supporting data, including fatality reductions, from countries with existing 0.05 BAC laws.

There's a big difference between 0.05 BAC and 0.08

It might not take as many drinks as you think to slow your reaction time and make safe driving harder.

For the purposes of standardization, a drink is defined as 12 ounces of 5 percent alcohol beer, five ounces of 12 percent alcohol wine or one and a half ounces of 80 proof (40 percent alcohol) liquor. To account for an individual drinking over a longer period of time, subtract about 0.01 percent for each 40 minutes of drinking time.

 How many drinks does it take to get to the limit? Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a 160-pound man, two alcoholic beverages can bring about some loss of judgment, decreased ability to rapidly track a moving target and result in decreased ability to multitask. Women generally weighing less than men, would see a higher BAC per drink.

Three alcoholic drinks will bring a person's blood alcohol level to a level of approximately 0.05 percent, which can impair the ability to rapidly focus vision, lower alertness, and decrease coordination to the point that steering becomes difficult and response to driving emergencies becomes blunted.

After approximately four alcoholic drinks, balance, vision and reaction time are often affected. It becomes harder to detect roadway dangers. Reasoning and information processing are often measurably impaired. This corresponds most closely to a BAC of 0.08 percent, the limit set by most states for legal operation of a vehicle.

A blood alcohol of 0.10 percent is generally associated with a clear loss of reaction time and control. There will be reduced ability to maintain proper lane position or brake appropriately.

Not surprisingly, as the BAC level climbs higher than 0.10 percent, it is associated with the progressively deteriorating ability to drive a vehicle safely.

Studies going back to the 1960s have demonstrated the correlation between BAC and accident risk. The relative risk of being in a crash is 1.38 times higher at a BAC of 0.05 than 0.00. At 0.08, the risk is 2.69 times higher. At 0.10, the crash risk climbs to five times higher.

When you consider the medical evidence, including the physiological effects, and the relative risk of crash, you can understand why some countries set the legal limit at 0.05 and why in 2013 the NTSB recommended that 0.05 become the new limit in the U.S.

Ignition interlocks could stop drunk drivers

Drunk driving is a tough problem to solve. One solution is to focus interventions on those who have a prior alcohol impaired driving arrest because they are at higher risk of doing it again. The reasons for this are not clear, but many drunk driving episodes are linked to binge drinking and not simply social drinking.

Ignition interlocks, which are essentially breathalyzers connected to the vehicle's ignition system, could also make a difference. These devices ensure that the vehicle can only be started by a sober driver. They've have been around for many years and modern versions have features to resist tampering, and require intermittent rechecks to ensure the driver doesn't drink after starting the vehicle.

All states use ignition interlocks to some degree, but as of January 2016, only 23 states require interlocks for all DUI offenders, which are sometimes called universal ignition interlock laws. The NTSB recommended the use of ignition interlocks for all first time offenders in 2012.

A 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health, found that states with these laws have fewer alcohol involved crash deaths. Researchers compared data for 18 states which implemented universal ignition interlock laws to 32 states that had not. In those 18 states, universal interlock laws saved 918 lives, a 15 percent reduction in deaths related to drunk driving.

It is every driver's responsibility to understand that there is no "safe" BAC level. It's simple: The more you drink, the less you are able to drive safely, and the higher the likelihood of an accident. For those who ignore the evidence and the law, at least there is a technical solution that could help stop further loss of life to this preventable problem.

This article was updated on July 22, 2016 to correct information about BAC in the United Kingdom.

Brad J. Uren serves on the advisory board for the Michigan chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
 Brad J. Uren, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62405 2016-07-22T10:07:57Z 2016-07-22T10:07:57Z Why calls for 'unity' are not enough: Look at the 1930s and 1940s

Preaching unity in 1948 on the Freedom Train US National Archives and Records Administration

The U.S. is in the midst of a tepid economic recovery following a catastrophic downturn, but millions of Americans continue to feel left behind. Some turn their anger on corporations and Wall Street. Others target nonwhite immigrant workers. A charismatic media personality with a populist message attacks religious minorities. Conservatives denounce the president and his allies for flouting the Constitution and steering the United States toward socialism. Meanwhile, many on the left warn that fascism is taking root in America.

This may sound like 2016, but in fact it describes the U.S. toward the end of the Depression decade.

The parallels between the two eras aren't perfect, but in the late 1930s – as today – political rancor, social division and the threat posed by "alien" ideologies sparked widespread unease. And just as politicians and commentators in recent weeks have called for "unity" in the face of political and racial strife, so too did their counterparts in the late 1930s.

These earlier Americans acted on their words.

During the late 1930s and 1940s, an array of American elites from business executives and government officials to clergymen and Hollywood tycoons launched a variety of efforts to build civic unity and national consensus. These efforts continued into the early 1960s.

Indeed, such campaigns are one reason that many Americans today think of the immediate postwar decades as a golden age of harmony and concord.

As a historian who has looked closely at these midcentury efforts to cement national cohesion, I believe that while they offer a model, they also offer a warning.

A nation divided

In November 1936, Americans went to the polls and awarded Franklin Delano Roosevelt a second presidential term. It was one of the most lopsided elections in U.S. history, with Roosevelt winning almost 61 percent of the vote.

Any sense of unity that the election provided, however, rapidly unraveled in the face of a new economic downturn, a Supreme Court crisis and emerging divisions in the Democratic Party.

The late 1930s were marked by sit-down strikes, violent repression of workers, and attacks by vigilante groups on Jews, Catholics, racial minorities and leftists.

 Picket line at 1937 strike in Flint, Michigan Walter P. Reuther Library

Father Charles Coughlin, the charismatic "radio priest" whose economic populism had attracted an audience of millions (one in 10 American families with a radio tuned in regularly), turned in 1938 openly and stridently anti-Semitic. Coughlin's followers and members of other newly formed anti-Semitic groups held mass rallies, stockpiled weapons and beat up Jews.

Meanwhile, Communists, preaching a mix of class and racial equality, made inroads in the labor movement, among artists and intellectuals, and in minority communities. They could claim 82,000 members and many more sympathizers by the close of 1938.

All this alarmed American elites across the political spectrum.

Those on the left saw in union-busting, red-baiting and surging intolerance evidence of what The New York Times and others called "an American brand of fascism." Those on the right believed trade unionists, leftists and, above all, New Dealers were ushering in "state socialism."

Members of both groups urged Americans to unite around "shared" national values, although they often disagreed on precisely what those values were.

Temporary unity came with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into World War II. But in 1943 – and again in 1946 – the U.S. was rocked by massive strikes, race riots and other forms of social unrest.

One of the worst wartime race riots occurred in Detroit in June 1943. By the time federal troops were called in to quell the riot, 25 blacks and nine whites lay dead. Nearly a thousand people had been injured.

Unity campaigns

U.S. elites responded to this turmoil with numerous initiatives designed to promote social harmony and consensus. They were aided by a new infrastructure of institutions – some public, others private – that emerged immediately before and during World War II.

For instance, during the war, the National Conference of Christians and Jews preached interfaith tolerance in military installations and USO canteens from Norfolk, Virginia to Nome, Alaska.

 Institute for American Democracy, Poster, 1945. Local History & Archives, Hamilton Public Library

After the war, the NCCJ and several other groups worked with the newly formed Advertising Council on a long-running public service campaign dubbed "United America." Using radio spots, car cards and other forms of advertising, they urged Americans to "keep America strong" by "isolating and quarantining group antagonism," not only between religious, racial and ethnic groups, but also between management and labor.

The Advertising Council played a key role in the most ambitious "unity" campaign of the era, the Freedom Train.

 The Freedom Train gets a visit in Los Angeles, February 1948. Los Angeles Daily News

Between September 1947 and January 1949, a red-white-and-blue locomotive carried more than 120 original documents and artifacts – ranging from Thomas Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration of Independence to the flag planted at Iwo Jima – through hundreds of cities in all 48 states.

The train's journal was coordinated with hundreds of local celebrations dubbed patriotic "revival meetings" and a nationwide media blitz. Conceived in the attorney general's office, organized by movie and advertising executives and financed by America's largest corporations, the Freedom Train portrayed a nation that was unified, consensual and inclusive.

This veneer of unity, however, concealed a behind-the-scenes contest over America's core values.

Which documents should be included in the exhibit? How should they be interpreted? Should a train displaying the Emancipation Proclamation allow segregated viewing in stops below the Mason-Dixon line? Even the word "democracy" – which had both political and economic overtones – was ultimately deemed too controversial to be used in slogans and press materials.

As these examples suggest, "unity" campaigns often promoted civility rather than real social change.

The 'race problem'

After race riots exploded across the country in 1943, hundreds of cities, states and community organizations set up committees designed to defuse racial, religious and ethnic tensions.

The "Civic Unity Movement," as this campaign was called, focused attention on the "race problem" in America and achieved some real gains. The Toledo board, for instance, persuaded local hospitals to hire black nurses.

Too often, however, these groups shunned tactics that risked increasing tensions by antagonizing racists. In Chicago, for instance, black efforts to move into neighborhoods claimed by whites led to hundreds of racial incidents – vandalism, arson bombings and full-scale riots – between 1944 and 1949.

 A car burns in Detroit riot 1943 Detroit News, Walter P Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Yet, as historian Arnold Hirsch has shown, these events were barely covered by the city's metropolitan dailies. City unity commissions convinced Chicago's white-owned newspapers that covering such episodes would only fan the flames of racial unrest. This helped to sustain an image of racial harmony and consensus that was often at odds with events on the ground.

Such unity-building efforts did help to discredit open prejudice against both religious and racial minorities. For the most part, however, they failed to address the structural inequalities of race and class that have haunted this nation for decades.

By marginalizing dissenters and casting all who disrupted national unity as somehow un-American they shored up existing power structures and left intact the social and economic status quo.

By the mid-1960s, the resulting tensions could no longer be contained. A new round of race riots in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit and other cities called attention to America's continuing economic and racial inequalities. This is a lesson that our current national leaders would do well to remember.

Wendy Wall receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has also received grants from a number of archives and foundations, including the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, the Rockefeller Archives Center, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Harry S. Truman Library Institute.
 Wendy Wall, Associate Professor, 20th century American history, Binghamton University, State University of New York Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62866 2016-07-22T09:49:50Z 2016-07-22T09:49:50Z AIDS conference 2016: the gains, the gaps, the next global steps

Young women who attended the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa. International AIDS Society/Rogan Ward

As the 21st International AIDS Conference wraps up in Durban, South Africa, Professor Linda-Gail Bekker, incoming International AIDS Society President, talks to The Conversation Africa health and medicine editor Candice Bailey about what was achieved and what still needs to be done.

What are the three interventions or innovations that stand out at the conference in terms of taking the fight against HIV forward?

There has been exciting work about how we do treatment better to make sure we get to the 34 million who are infected. And that's absolutely critical. We have to reach those 34 million people but we know that health systems, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, are struggling. So there was some wonderful work on differentiated models of care, how we can do business more effectively and efficiently and ways we can do the steps in the cascade more efficiently.

And I've loved some of the testing innovations. Addressing all the steps from testing is critical.

Secondly I'm passionate about primary prevention but I think we've got some gaps on how we can do it. I'm a great proponent of daily pre-exposure prophylaxis and I really think we should roll it out because it works. But I'm very excited about the prospect of what's coming down the road in terms of less frequent dosing for pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Number three is a fresh approach to adolescents. This conference has reinvigorated the notion that we have to get adolescents to the table. We have done well, I think, in getting adolescents to be really well represented. And it works. You feel their voice.

The message I have heard here is that we need to have an integrated approach. We can't just talk HIV treatment or just HIV prevention. It has to take into consideration structural issues, behavioural issues, rights, access – a lot of issues. And I think it becomes a model of how we really look after our adolescents around the world and HIV is a great catalyst within that.

Based on the discussions at the conference where are the gaps in the global HIV response?

At the moment it's money. There is a horrible funding gap that we have to address. We had so much money when we didn't have the tools. Now we have the tools and we don't have the money. I feel desperate about that.

In 2000 we missed opportunities because we didn't have our systems and our thinking right. I'm taking collective responsibility but there was a leadership gap and we lost lives because of that. Here we stand now and if we don't act in the way that we should, we will have lots of lost lives and infections that we don't have to. And I don't want that on my record.

When we get help from Sir Elton John, Prince Harry, Princess Mabel from The Netherlands and Charlize Theron to shine a focus on this we are eternally grateful. We need help from everyone to carry the message that the job isn't done. Otherwise we will miss the moment and we will have regrets. And I don't want to be in that camp.

I am very pleased that the Replenishment of the Global Fund Conference is being held in Canada because I think the Prime Minister of Canada is really showing that he can get the job done. Justin Trudeau's a great example of moving forward when he needs to move forward and doing uncomfortable things when they have to be done because it's right. I have a sense that he does what's right. So I'm excited about that because I think that's important.

We have to keep showing people that it's not only the right thing and the compassionate thing and the humane thing but that it makes good financial sense. We are bleeding where we don't need to bleed in terms of finance. And if we can shut it down earlier we will do the world a favour.

What is the message that is coming out of this conference?

The job is not done. We have tools that can be deployed; we have a lot of work to do. We have the energy but this is not the time to not have the resources. It's a collective global effort. And we're excited.

Durban has re-energised the whole sense of community and engagement. Now we need the rest of the world to get on board. And I think we can do it. The optimism that I have felt here is real. But the reality is that if we don't move forward from today that trajectory will flatten out.

As incoming International AIDS Society president what would you like your legacy to be?

I think the tagline of the conference is the legacy: access and equity and making sure no-one is left behind. The best bang we can get for our buck is that we don't make HIV languish because in the long term it will cost more. If we want to see a good response we have to be speedy about it.

Traditionally this conference has not always been the place where new science is shown. But it was brought to our attention beautifully that there is hope in vaccines and there is hope in treatment remission and so the ongoing innovation is still critical. We can talk about minimising disease and reducing statistics but if we really want to talk about eradication, we are going to have to find ourselves a vaccine that works. That is the ultimate investment.

I'm so excited that my country is playing such a significant role in that solution. I'm really proud to be South African. We have 54 million people in a very big world of people but we are playing a significant role. We have made lemonade out of lemons.

We have the biggest burden. In some ways we were the pariah in 2000 – we were failing on so many levels. But we have changed that and we are contributing, we are not only surviving and that is an extraordinary privileged position to be in. And I'm hoping young people in South Africa will get that and will get on board. It's a mission and we are all looking for a mission. We fought for our freedom and now we are fighting for our futures and that's significant.

Linda-Gail Bekker 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.
 Linda-Gail Bekker, Professor of medicine and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62733 2016-07-22T09:36:10Z 2016-07-22T09:36:10Z Trump's Republican convention was farcical, vacuous and terrifying
After the shocking and unprecedented rise of Donald Trump, who overpowered 16 rivals to clinch the Republican presidential nomination, the Republican Party's 2016 convention was destined to be quite unique. It didn't disappoint.

Even his most ardent fans know that candidate Trump has zero political experience, and to win the White House, he will have to appeal to many Americans beyond the 45% of Republican primary voters he won in the first half of this year. For any normal candidate, the convention would be the perfect time to turn the ship around, to start looking statesmanlike and sounding serious.

Instead, the Twittersphere could hardly contain itself when it beheld The Donald's grandiose wrestler-style entrance on Monday evening, complete with dramatic lighting and high-decibel music. Hillary Clinton aptly compared it to the Wizard of Oz: "You know, lots of sound and fury, even a fog machine. But when you pulled back the curtain it was just Donald Trump, with nothing to offer to the American people."

Trump deviated from the traditional convention formula by speaking in person before the night of his formal nomination, popping in to introduce his wife on the first evening. His third wife Melania should be a crucial asset to a campaign that has yet to win over most female voters. She delivered her 15-minute script without incident, and for the most part, the content was fairly bland.

But almost immediately after she left the stage, the internet was awash with video clips comparing her musings on family, truth and integrity to a remarkably similar, at times identical, passage from Michelle Obama's rather more charismatic 2008 convention turn.

The argument over how it happened took a series of bizarre turns, ending with a Trump-affiliated speechwriter owning up to the mistake. But was the plagiarism incident simply a case of carelessness, chutzpah or something else?

In any other campaign, this might simply have been a miscalculated attempt at the notorious Lynton Crosby tactic of "throwing the dead cat on the table", deliberately creating a distraction which gets everyone so animated that they forget what it was they were originally supposed to be concentrating on.

That may be giving the chaotic and unsubtle Trump campaign rather too much strategic credit. But the plagiarism farrago did help distract from the fact that shockingly few of the Republicans' many superstars (or even mid-ranking luminaries) had shown up to the convention at all.

Steering clear

The Bush family were absent, along with former nominees Mitt Romney and John McCain. The only other living Republican to have topped a presidential ticket who attended was Bob Dole, at 90-years-old too frail to make a speech (assuming he wanted to).

Even John Kasich, governor of the crucial battleground state where the convention was held, was nowhere to be seen, instead ending up in a row over whether Trump's staff offered him a role as the "most powerful vice-president in history".

Many others who did attend clearly haven't quite drunk the Trump kool-Aid, but were obliged to appear regardless. A case in point is the house speaker and former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, a respected and very high-profile GOP figure who has vocally criticised Trump over the last year.

How to take the stage then, and fill 12 minutes of airtime, without sounding utterly hypocritical? By barely acknowledging Trump at all. Ryan made a decent enough speech, extolling the virtues of his party and its enduring ideas; he mentioned its nominee only twice.

This atmosphere of mortified avoidance was the subtext for the whole week. That the second day's news cycle was consumed with Melania Trump's speech meant little attention was given to her odd prominence as the keynote speaker on a night whose theme was "Make America Safe Again", topping a bill of actors and reality television stars.

To be sure, there were a couple of war veterans on the stage; Montana Representative Ryan Zinke and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton both spoke, the latter mentioning the candidate only once. But notwithstanding Rudy Giuliani's rant on the theme of terrorism, by the end of the evening there was still little indication of how a president Trump would make America "safe".

In fact, the only time in the past year that the candidate has offered any information regarding his foreign policy plans was in his April 2016 speech. Even then, his "America First" theme was heavy on criticism of the current administration. It was significantly lacking in any apparent insight or comprehension of the complexities and challenges that come with the role of being America's commander-in-chief.

Living in infamy

On day two, Trump's children provided some vital pathos, with 22-year-old Tiffany sharing personal anecdotes about the comments her father wrote on school reports. Considering the farce of her stepmother's appearance, the next generation of Trumps did well enough in their task to humanise the candidate as a family man.

The other speakers continued the slow drip of faint praise. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and hardly a lily-livered compromiser himself, was booed by an audience unimpressed with his earlier lack of support for the candidate.

Probably the most vocal supporter of candidate Trump was New Jersey's Chris Christie, who infamously endorsed Trump after crashing out of the campaign himself. His convention speech was delivered in the style of a court trial against Clinton, requiring full audience participation. It took little to rouse the crowd to chants of "guilty" and "lock her up". At best, it sounded like a raucous open-mic standup comedy night; at worst, a shameless effort at poisonous rabble-rousing.

And again, there was no hint of what a president Trump's policies might be.

Friends and enemies

Beyond the high-profile no-shows by many Republican grandees and the early-onset loyalty of VP hopefuls such as Christie, there was a third way for those wondering how to navigate such treacherous waters. Enter Senator Ted Cruz, who delivered a speech without endorsing Trump at all.

Like Nelson Rockefeller's 1964 convention speech, which was met with jeers when he criticised the uber-conservative nominee, Barry Goldwater, the crowd vociferously heckled Cruz with shouts of "vote for Trump" and "say it!" The telling difference between then and now is that until he dropped out of the primaries, Cruz was 2016's Barry Goldwater, and he's been one of the Senate's most extreme hardliners. So if he cannot endorse the nominee, then the party has run out of political road.

By the third evening, the convention was running out of time for unity pleas from the podium. In a 72-hour period, the event had lurched from farce to pantomime to something really quite dark: a threatening and belligerent crowd screaming "traitor!" at one of their own.

And then there was Trump's chosen running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who faced the unenviable task of taking the stage after the Cruz debacle.

Certain holders of the vice-presidential role have apocryphally dismissed it as "not worth a bucket of warm spit", but now that Trump is formally the nominee and has a real chance of winning in November, his choice of future vice-president suddenly seems genuinely meaningful.

To his credit, Pence presented himself as the not-unhinged social and fiscal conservative that he is. He eulogised candidate Trump as a tough, genuine, charismatic doer, and offered an extensive critique of the Obama administration, specifically the role that Clinton played in it.

And yet, apart from the briefest mention in his closing remarks of Trump's plans to cut taxes, strengthen borders and grow the economy, there was once again, not a single policy specific. This went over well in the room – but it's highly dangerous.

In a world all but consumed by violence and uncertainty, many American voters are furious, frightened, and desperate for an alternative to the status quo, and just as the Tea Party movement did, Trump has tapped into some very powerful forces that cannot be ignored. But all he offers is a megaphone for poisonous sentiments, rather than a remedy for the pain and confusion that stirs them.

Ever more akin to a bad reality TV show, the Trump campaign proved once again that it can make a truly deafening noise, but is utterly bereft of substance.

Clodagh Harrington 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.
 Clodagh Harrington, Senior Lecturer in Politics, De Montfort University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62848 2016-07-22T09:19:59Z 2016-07-22T09:19:59Z Your genes can help predict how well you'll do in school – here's how we cracked it

Scientists are hoping genetic scoring could help identify children who may develop learning difficulties. Syda Productions/Shutterstock

Understanding why some children naturally excel at school while others struggle – and working out what to do about it – is a major goal in many areas of research. Previous studies have shown that genetics plays a big role in these differences but, of course, environment matters too. We know from twin studies, which compare genetic similarity between twins to estimate the effects of genetic and environmental effects, that 60% of the individual differences in educational achievement is down to genetics, and 40% is explained by the environment. However, these studies do not tell us much about individuals' genetic risk and resilience.

In our study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, we showed that almost 10% of differences in exam results at age 16 can be explained using individuals' DNA, using a new method called polygenic scoring. This marks a tipping point in the science of prediction, as 10% is the strongest prediction from DNA alone of any behavioural trait so far. In comparison, a previous education polygenic score only explained 3% of the differences in educational achievement, and only 2% of the difference in intelligence.

Genetic scoring

We used participants from a UK representative sample called the the Twins Early Development Study.aspx). This includes almost 6,000 unrelated individuals (it includes just one member of a twin pair) who have had DNA information analysed.

To create genetic scores, we inspected each individual's genome for thousands of genetic variants that have previously been linked to educational attainment. We then summed them up to create a score for each participant, which is what we call the polygenic score. Polygenic stands for "many different genes", as the score often includes thousands of genetic variants. In our study, the polygenic score included more than 20,000 variants. A higher score meant that an individual carried more of the education-linked genetic variants, and a lower score meant that an individual carried fewer.

We then used this genetic score to make predictions of other outcomes that were measured in our sample, for example GCSEs exam grades taken at age 16. We found that individual genetic scores can explain almost 10% of why individuals differ in their GCSE exam results.

Clearly, 10% is a long way from 100% but it is a lot better than we usually do in predicting behaviour. For instance, when we think about differences between boys and girls in maths, gender explains around 1% of the differences in exam results. Another example is "grit", which describes the perseverance of an individual. This only predicts around 5% of the individual differences in educational achievement.

The study.

To put this prediction into context, those with the highest polygenic score (in the top 15%) would obtain a grade between A and B, whereas those in the lowest 15% would get a C to B. This is actually quite astonishing as it's an entire grade below those in the highest polygenic score group. What's more, 65% of people in the higher polygenic group went on to do A-levels, whereas only 35% from the lower group did so.

Implications for the classroom

Knowing that educational achievement is influenced by genetics helps us to better understand differences in students' performance in the classroom. It shows us that these differences are not just due to environmental factors such as school or teaching quality.

In the future, polygenic scores could be used to give us information about academic strengths and weaknesses. For example, it might flag up the risk of a child developing learning problems early on, which could enable tailored support and early intervention to maximise a child's individual potential. Personalised support of this nature could help to prevent developmental difficulties.

For this reason, it is important to do more research on how well and how early we can predict specific learning abilities, such as reading and mathematical ability. This would help us to estimate the risk for specific difficulties in children that are at particular genetic risk. As molecular genetics is a fast developing field, hopefully we will be able to create more powerful polygenic scores in the near future to predict even more of the individual differences in educational achievement.

However, before the use of polygenic scores in the classroom becomes a possibility, it is important to create a dialogue between researchers and policymakers to start thinking about how genetic information could be applied in the classroom the best possible way to benefit all children.

TEDS is supported by a program grant to Robert Plomin from the UK Medical Research Council (MR/M021475/1 and previously G0901245), with additional support from the US National Institutes of Health (HD044454; HD059215). Saskia Selzam is supported by the MRC/IoPPN Excellence Award and by the EU Framework Programme 7 (602768).
 Saskia Selzam, PhD Candidate in Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry, King's College London Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62756 2016-07-22T09:11:50Z 2016-07-22T09:11:50Z We must seize this chance to bring young people into the heart of British democracy
The whirlwind weeks after Brexit are calming and Britain has a new government, a new prime minister and a new direction. Of our fellow citizens, the youngest generation are likely to face the most uncertainty, just as they are facing the worst economic prospects of any generation since World War II.

The roots of young marginalisation run deep. How can we bring young people into this process, and how can British politics win back the trust of young voters, particularly those who are angry at the result of the EU referendum?

Update our morse code politics

As Birkbeck's professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose wrote this month, both sides of the EU referendum campaign were cursed by male-dominated politics and by the language and rhetoric of anxiety. There was a "media circus of exaggerated claim and counter-claim" as elites told us on TV what we were to believe and what was the best decision to take.

No matter what your age, on the day of the referendum you had access to a world of information at your fingertips, but you could only transmit one bit of data back to your leaders: remain or leave.

We can do better. To do so, we need to move away from morse code politics and into the broadband age. For young people, marginalisation is about distance from elites and alienation from decision-making processes. The politicking of senior government officials, media elites and economic assessments could hardly have been further from the nature of young people's politics.

This is a can-do generation that prefers to keep their political options open. For them, party loyalties and the formal process of voting take a back seat to getting out, volunteering, signing petitions and wanting to see effective change in their everyday lives. We talk about democracy giving young people a voice, but it must also be about giving them power.

How to do it

Whatever happens to Britain, we should seize this opportunity to bring young people into the heart of British democracy. Political parties need to be involving their youth wings in developing policy.

For instance, Theresa May has shifted responsibility for higher education, apprenticeships and skills to an expanded Department for Education under the oversight of Justine Greening. Ahead of the 2015 general election, a report by the think-tank Demos found that apprenticeships for the unemployed and reducing the cost of higher education would be the most attractive policies for young voters. Yet the government's recent commission into their vaunted new apprenticeships scheme was failing to enthuse young people to enroll. Now is the time for the Conservatives to bring young people into the formulation and execution of policy.

In my ongoing research with young people aged 14-26 across the UK, they have been enthusiastic about involving themselves in local issues but put off by the feeling that no-one was listening. A push for constituency MPs to welcome young people to surgeries – perhaps to hold them in schools, or to advertise constituency visits to local sixth forms or students unions – could help MPs represent young voices more directly.

For Labour in opposition, as at the last general election, the message should be clear that young people want politics to be about the cost of living, affordable housing, defending a public NHS and the gap between the rich and poor. They should take note to avoid exacerbating the perception that political parties are just in it for short-term, media-driven gains.

An increased membership – more than 180,000 signed up to vote in the new leadership election – should be a source of pride for Labour. So, involving young members at the heart of the way it makes policy should be its pitch to young voters. One practical step could be to name a 50-50, gender equal shadow cabinet following the ongoing leadership election.

Another is to get young people, often on insecure contracts and suffering poor working conditions, mobilised into affiliated unions. This should include the unemployed and unwaged carers, such as young mums. This would be win-win: young members would benefit from local support networks while the party would gain a renewed relevancy in everyday lives.

A young union and a young constitution?

The next two issues on the horizon are likely to be the future of the union. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon indicated we will more likely than not have a second referendum on Scottish independence, while some are calling for major constitutional reform. We must be clear on these issues: young people should be at the heart of deliberation, and young needs included at the core of policies.

Our democracy is a complicated mechanism for giving the people of Britain control over how it is run, primarily through representation, but also by other means like protest and petitioning, boycotting and ethical consumerism, charity work and online activism. Young citizens have a greater diversity in the way they participate in political acts. We can think creatively about democratic reform, and a participatory and deliberative democracy is within our grasp.

The LSE's 2013-2015 Constitution UK project and the attempt to crowdsource a constitution in Iceland are two recent practical experiences of participatory democracy to take note of.

Most of all, updating politics is not just about bringing young citizens into British democracy. It is about resolving issues in British democratic institutions in a way that can benefit all citizens. Practical methods for participatory local governance may well help bring young people into the decision-making process, but they can also include local voices across ages, backgrounds and communities. Hope, voice, and political power for young citizens means a healthier democracy for us all.

Benjamin Bowman 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.
 Benjamin Bowman, Teaching Fellow in Comparative Politics, University of Bath Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/58448 2016-07-22T08:25:32Z 2016-07-22T08:25:32Z What would a British revolution look like – and how would it happen?
In the days after Britain voted to leave the EU, a febrile, volatile atmosphere took hold. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned, the Parliamentary Labour Party began an attempt to unseat its left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the pound hit an all-time low. For a moment, it seemed that fundamental change was on the agenda – but as has happened so many times in Britain, the country stopped well short of a truly transformative moment. A British revolution, it seems, is not yet on the cards.

This is not all that surprising. Revolutions don't come about on the back of raw anger or sheer will: all the necessary forces must come together, and certain conditions have to be in place. The crucial thing is for would-be revolutionaries to recognise them. So if we want to imagine a British revolution, we should look at what created the country's last two near-revolutionary eras.

The first one began brewing in 1910, went through a brief intermission for the first two years of World War I, then picked up again from 1916, and came to a head in 1919 as various crises and campaigns converged. The other ran from 1968 through to 1975 or so; it peaked in around 1972, with the Fisher-Bendix factory occupation, a national miners' strike, a national dockers' strike and Bloody Sunday all beginning or taking place in one month alone.

Both these restive periods came at moments of global upheaval that swept Britain up in a wider revolutionary wave. After World War I it seemed briefly as if Europe might follow Russia's lead and embrace revolutionary socialist and anti-colonial politics; 1972, meanwhile, came halfway through the era bracketed by the French "evenements" of May 1968 and the end of the Portuguese Revolution in 1975.

 The Easter Proclamation of 1916. Wikimedia Commons

In Britain, these times drew together a range of different movements. George Dangerfield famously described the combined Home Rule crisis in Ireland, revolts of workers and the campaign for women's suffrage before 1914 as signalling "the strange death of liberal England". After receding at the start of World War I, all three factors soon resurged, starting in 1916 with the Easter Rising in Dublin, the engineers' struggle against dilution and the Glasgow rent strikes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, meanwhile, Irish Republicanism, militant trade unionism and what was by then called radical women's liberation were all in play, but accompanied by the anti-Vietnam War movement, new student and gay rights movements, and Britain's first genuine revolutionary leftist movements since the Stalinist darkness fell in the late 1920s.

Finally, the events of both 1919 and 1972 were coloured by the struggles of trade unionists, whose mass strikes and occupations posed the biggest threat to the capitalist system. Even combined, the other forces involved did not amount to a comparable threat.

But with the assembled forces unable to seize state power – something that distinguishes all true revolutions – our rulers were able to restore control and secure lasting victories. The order established endures to this day.

So what prospect is there, really, for another revolutionary crisis in Britain?

The stars align

Some of the global conditions are clearly in place. As in 1968, we live in a faltering world economy; as in 1914, the UK is being battered by growing geopolitical instability and great power rivalry, with assorted conflicts and proxy wars underway – especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

There's also a new factor: the existential threat of catastrophic man-made climate change, which many political theorists describe as inevitable while capitalism continues. Together, these three factors have produced another: mass migration and resulting human misery on a scale unseen since the end of World War II.

The next question, then, is whether Britain is actually primed for an epochal change.

The shattering result of the EU referendum and its chaotic aftermath shows that the British ruling class is deeply divided in a way that it wasn't in 1919, or in even in 1972. And while the reign of neoliberalism has weakened the labour movement and enriched the wealth of the ruling elite and its hangers-on, it hasn't restored profit rates on any consistent basis, and no obvious alternative form of capitalist organisation to propose as a way of answering the mass discontent.

But if another revolutionary situation arises, it won't be because everyone wakes up one morning with the intention of overthrowing the system; it'll be because a significant minority of the population respond to a much more localised and specific attack on their interests.

The spark

The Leave vote confronts the political representatives of the British establishment with dire uncertainty. If they put a foot wrong or overplay their hand, they could overreach themselves beyond the point of retreat.

For the moment, it seems reasonable to assume that the Conservative party will hold the reins throughout the post-referendum chaos – but we can imagine the sort of miscalculation that might provide the spark. Perhaps restrictions on in-work benefits or healthcare could be extended not just to migrants but to "native" Britons who haven't paid into the system for whatever reason. The NHS could face full privatisation. Britain could get involved in a war between Russia and the NATO states.

The forces involved, though, might be very different from the UK's last two revolutionary moments. Today, not just Ireland but also Scotland threatens the integrity of the union; among the oppressed, migrants are likely to be at the forefront of the struggle for rights.

The working class remains essential to any revolutionary project – not the caricatured "white working class" supposedly in thrall to racism and xenophobia, but the actual multi-ethnic working class employed in call centres, shopping malls and transportation hubs across the country. This potentially revolutionary class is very different to the industrial proletariat of old; it incorporates a vast mass of private sector workers who aren't currently in trade unions.

That rather changes the mechanics of what revolutionary mobilisation would mean. Mass unionisation is obviously one component, and also relevant here are the three sustained community-based mass mobilisations that have rocked Britain since the defeat of the miners in 1985: the campaign against the "poll tax" (1987-90), the Iraq War (2002-04), and the grassroots independence campaigns "from below" in the Scottish Referendum (2014).

But while the sort of self-organisation that arose at these moments is likely to re-emerge, we might also expect the process to involve such random explosive and damaging episodes as the riots of 2011 – for which there are a great many competing explanations.

One thing is certain: the British capitalist state has entered a deep crisis, one that's territorial, political and economic all at once. Revolution may not be a utopian solution – but it's not hard to imagine a group or groups of dissenters deciding it's the only way out.

Neil Davidson 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.
 Neil Davidson, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Glasgow Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62716 2016-07-22T08:20:50Z 2016-07-22T08:20:50Z French kissing to lesbian orgies: the origins of the myth of the debauched French court

Passion in Paris Eleazar/flickr, CC BY

Snog, pash, knutschen: there are terms in many different cultures for what we in English call "French kissing", or kissing with tongues. But why do we associate this kind of intimate kissing with the French? Indeed, why do the French have a reputation (at least in Anglo cultures) for being more sexually daring and uninhibited?

Anyone who's watched the BBC2 costume drama Versailles (or, like me, struggled merely to get through the trailer) will have been informed that the celebrated court of the Sun King was a place of non-stop sex, intrigue, glamour, and more sex. Success at the French court, it would appear, required an appetite for ambition matched only in size by an appetite for sexual acts considered outrageous for the time. But were French courtiers any more sexually audacious than anyone else? If not, then where does this stereotype of the French court as debauched and dangerous come from?

Probably the most infamous figure of kinky courtly conniving is the French queen Marie Antoinette. Best known for the apocryphal comment "Let them eat cake", Louis XVI's consort had her character relentlessly assassinated by bloodthirsty revolutionary critics, who claimed in countless contemporaneous libels, engravings and songs that she (as well as betraying the country to its enemy Austria, her birthplace) organised orgies at Versailles, enjoyed lesbian encounters with her ladies-in-waiting, and even committed incest with her own son.

In fact, Marie Antoinette suffered so many accusations that Stanford University's French Revolution Digital Archive has a whole section devoted to attacks and libels on her private life. Some historians argue that these attacks contributed to a "pornographic desacralisation of monarchy" that led directly to the executions of the king and queen.

 Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in the 2006 film. Mary Alice/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

However, such accusations against French courtly women actually came 200 years earlier. We find all of the same motifs of sexual deviance being used in the 16th century to attack the ladies-in-waiting of the French queen mother Catherine de Medici, de facto ruler of France during the Wars of Religion. As the kingdom descended into civil war between the Catholics and Huguenots, Catherine tried to steer a middle ground. But it backfired: each attempt to mollify one party provoked the other, and all sides attacked her inability to achieve peace. She was portrayed as an ambitious, untrustworthy, Machiavellian schemer (unfortunately for her, Machiavelli dedicated his treatise, The Prince, to her father Lorenzo II de Medici).

 Catherine de Medici: not quite the poster girl for a raunchy French court.

The obvious next step was to accuse her of sexual deviance. However, since the untimely death of her husband King Henri II in 1559, Catherine permanently adopted severe black mourning dress, which made it difficult to portray her as a stereotypical "lusty widow". Instead, critics targeted her ladies-in-waiting, accusing Catherine of running a harem made up of young beautiful women whom she could use to seduce influential noblemen. This myth of the "flying squadron" – Catherine's legendary crack team of sexual pawns – is, of course, nothing more than a heterosexual male fantasy that reduces her tireless negotiations for peace to a tired notion of powerful women using "sex as a weapon".

Such ideas were in fact as old as literature itself: the Renaissance era, which saw the "rebirth" of the ideals and writings of Antiquity, also revived the misogynist works of writers like Juvenal, whose Satire 6 portrayed wives as so lust-crazed that cuckoldry – being cheated on by one's wife – was inevitable for all married men.

Foreign imports?

The irony is that the French of the early modern period would not have identified themselves as sexually voracious. Instead they would have pointed the finger at the Italians, who were widely believed to be the importers, via Catherine's Medici family, of all manner of depraved sexual practices and appetites.

Sodomy was believed by the French to originate in Italy, and while syphilis was known in many lands as the "French pox", in France it was believed to have been contracted in Italy by soldiers fighting in the Italian wars. Ronsard, France's most celebrated poet of the Renaissance, wrote obscene poems portraying Catherine's son, King Henri III, as a pederastic sodomite, engaging in homosexual relations with boys. The poet claimed that this penchant was due to the king's mother's Florentine origins. So while Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance, it also lends its name to the French term for tongue kissing, the "baiser florentin".

In 1913 the poet Apollinaire wrote about the bitter flavour of love's kisses:

Amour vos baisers florentins

Avaient une saveur amère

Qui a rebuté nos destins

Translated as: Love, your Florentine kisses/ Left a bitter taste/ Which has undermined our fates.

So if the French thought it was the Italians who were the voracious lovers then what are we to make of shows like Versailles? The truth is, of course, that no one nation or culture can lay claim to any greater proclivity to outrageous sexual practices than any other, although the French appear to have borne the brunt of popular misconception.

Each country's culture perpetuates myths about its closest rivals that often have no basis in reality and which puzzle those from elsewhere (I remember my bemusement at being informed by English friends of the "fact" that Germans are more likely to monopolise sunbeds on Mediterranean holidays – no other culture shares this belief, by the way). How we engage in sexual activity is a private, individual choice, and nothing about someone's appearance, accent or origins today will be a reliable guide to what they really get up to in the boudoir.

Una McIlvenna 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.
 Una McIlvenna, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, University of Kent Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62788 2016-07-22T08:16:04Z 2016-07-22T08:16:04Z The BFG reminds us that wordplay is part of learning and mastering language
Now that Roald Dahl's 1982 novel The BFG has finally been transformed into a big screen feature film courtesy of Disney and director Steven Spielberg, one aspect of the book that has delighted children and adults alike will be made more obvious: the Big Friendly Giant's tendency to gobblefunk, the BFG's own term for the malapropisms, spoonerisms and nonsense words that litter his speech.

But while the BFG's words are judged errors by the human beans that he meets, Dahl shows how his confusion is often due to the ambiguity of a language where one word may have multiple meanings, or different words the same pronunciation. As the BFG offers in his defence: "I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right."

The BFG's gobblefunking belongs to a tradition of language play and nonsense writing best known from the works of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Lear's poetry, limericks and prose writing bubble over with nonsense words: perhaps best-known is the runcible spoon with which the Owl and the Pussycat dined on their mince and slices of quince.

Carroll's books, poems, diaries, and letters to children are littered with enigmas, charades, acrostics, palindromes, conundrums, cyphers and riddles, testifying to his love of word play. His coining of nonsense words is densest in the poem, Jabberwocky, encountered by Alice when she passes through the looking-glass.

 Beware the Jabberwock! John Tenniel

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

Some of the strangest of these are decrypted for Alice by Humpty Dumpty, although his explanations – brillig means four o'clock in the afternoon when you begin broiling things for dinner – are not always convincing.

Readers of The BFG must fall back on their own ingenuity to explain his neologisms, many of which draw upon genuine techniques of word formation, which offer real insights into how words are formed and their meanings decoded. The BFG's language includes words coined for their sounds, drawing upon both onomatopoeia – where the word imitates the sound it describes – and phonaesthesia – where clusters of sounds become associated with specific meanings.

Phonaesthemes in English include sl-: slug, slurry, slimy, all of which carry a sense of greasiness and unpleasantness. To these the BFG adds slopgroggled, to describe a sticky situation. Words like ucky-mucky and thingalingaling play on the reduplication of vowel sounds, while others tap into the connotations of certain syllables. Although we may never have encountered words like, for example, grobswitchy, rotsome, bogrotting, muckfrumping and grizzling, we can be sure that they signal something unpleasant. In contrast, we are sure to enjoy anything that can be described as phizz-whizzing, squiffling or wondercrump. Other words, like whoopsey-splunkers, fizzwiggler and fluckgungled play on the way children enjoy rolling unusual and amusing sounds around their mouths.

Other words the BFG coins are from errors. For example, in spoonerisms snapperwhipper, dory-hunky and catasterous disastrophe, the initial syllables have been swapped. Others, like biffsquiggled, are compounds of genuine English words that can be understood by analysing the component parts. Other words still are formed by blending two standard English words, such as "delicious" and "scrumptious" to form delumptious. One example, the BFG's scrumdiddlyumptious, is a word that, despite its unwieldy length, has passed into general usage.

Play leads to mastery

These processes of associating sounds and senses, and disassembling and recombining word elements to recover their meanings, are valuable ways of promoting a child's understanding of word structure – what linguists call morphology. Studies of child psychology and education have shown the importance of play in putting a child's developing linguistic skills into practice. Children have a natural propensity to play with language from an early age, as seen in the nonsense rhymes that accompany playground games, an enjoyment of riddles, puns, knock-knock jokes and so on.

Despite the prophecies of doom about the impact that the abbreviations, clippings, initialisms and emoticons used in "txt spk" and electronic messaging will have on child literacy, research has shown the opposite effect. Playing with language is an important means of developing metalinguistic awareness – an understanding of not just how to use language, but of how it works. It offers a chance to step back and consider a language's structure and properties. As the linguist David Crystal puts it: "Language play actually helps you learn your language."

Recent controversies about the emphasis of teaching of English grammar, spelling and punctuation and the associated tests suggest that we're in danger of losing sight of the pleasure in learning about language in primary classrooms. We need to rediscover the joy of gobblefunking.

Simon Horobin 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 Horobin, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62830 2016-07-22T07:18:24Z 2016-07-22T07:18:24Z How Russian doping could lead to Rio 2016 ban
The Russian Olympic team could be banned from competition at the Rio 2016 Games after revelations of widespread state-sponsored doping of its athletes. Described as the Disappearing Positive Methodology, the doping scheme had officials swap dope-contaminated urine for another athlete's non-doped sample to later render a clean test result.

According to an independent report resulting from an investigation by respected sports lawyer Richard McLaren on behalf of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the scheme involved the Russian Ministry of Sport and the Russian Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB.

The IOC will decide shortly whether all Russian athletes should be excluded from the Rio Games, or more specifically, whether the Russian Olympic Committee will be expelled – thereby banning all athletes on the Russian team.

How would it work?

Teams enter the Olympic Games via a contractual arrangement with the organising authority, in this case the IOC. Expulsion is a legal matter.

To expel a team without an acceptable reason would involve a breach of contract and potentially expose the IOC to lawsuits that could involve damages in the billions of dollars. From the Russian perspective, media and television rights, sponsors and supporters have all paid large amounts to follow the Russian team – not to mention the sacrifices of individual athletes.

So before there can be a ban the IOC must first identify a legal right to expel Russia from the Games. Under the Olympic Charter, the Executive Board of the IOC may:

take appropriate decisions for the protection of the Olympic Movement in the country of an NOC [National Olympic Committee] including suspension or withdrawal of recognition from … a NOC if the constitution, law or other regulations in force in the country concerned, or any act by any governmental or other body cause the activity of the NOC or the making or expression of its will to be hampered.

The second step requires proof of an offence; the McLaren report provides this. The third step requires the party facing expulsion to be informed of the reasons supporting the potential penalty. In part, this has been provided through the publication of the McLaren report.

As a matter of natural justice, the expelled party must then be given an opportunity to answer a charge. A decision must be made by the Executive Committee without bias and with regard to the "protection of the Olympic Movement".

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) yesterday upheld a decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to exclude 68 Russian athletes from its Association.

Without membership of the IAAF, a country's athletic team cannot, under Olympic rules, compete at Rio. The IOC seemed to have made a tough decision to exclude the Russian athletic team, but in reality it was made by the numbers.

To exclude the whole Russian team is a different and more complicated exercise.

Of course, there are broader issues here. To exclude an entire team is unfair to those athletes who did not dope; there can be no argument about that. Western legal systems abhor collective punishment – the sins of the parents are not visited upon the children.

But there are other competing issues, not the least of which is to protect the health of athletes by discouraging governments from undue interference in sporting affairs.

Not the first time

There is an unfortunate catalogue of governmental manipulation of sports and athletes, led by communist East Germany where, for a period of nearly 30 years, athletes – mostly young girls – were "supplemented" with a cocktail of steroids that ultimately led to heart disease, multiple organ damage, birth defects and male-like features in women, to name just a few effects.

In the 1990s, communist China doped many athletes, particularly female swimmers, with steroid-based substances that distorted their bodies.

Sometimes, governments interfere in other ways. A string of reports record that Uday Hussein (son of Saddam) tortured Iraqi soccer players after the team missed World Cup qualification in the 1990s.

And just this year, the Kuwait Olympic Committee was suspended from the Rio Olympics because of undue governmental interference, one act of which was to cancel the visa of an Israeli official from judging in the Asian shooting championship in Kuwait City.

One can imagine many Russian athletes coerced into a doping program they wished to avoid. Of course, others may have willingly embraced what was offered.

In either case, the only control exerted over some governments is the risk of expulsion of their team from a sporting tournament. Governments and politicians unanswerable to the rule of law should have no part in sport. For this reason – unfortunate as it may be for Russian athletes – their team must be excluded.

To re-test dopers after a banned substance and its metabolites have passed through their system is useless. Known dopers cannot compete alongside legitimate athletes and were this to occur, retribution is on the cards.

There is scope for clean Russian athletes to compete as "neutral athletes". But as the CAS noted in the IAAF decision, acceptance is unlikely as a "sufficiently long period for the athlete to have been subject to other (fully adequate) anti-doping systems outside of the country of his/her National Federation".

Meeting such criterion will be beyond many Russian athletes.

David Thorpe 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.
 David Thorpe, Senior Lecturer in Sports Law, University of Technology Sydney Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62897 2016-07-22T06:58:21Z 2016-07-22T06:58:21Z Turkey's almost coup and the need for perspective
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quick to quell the attempted military coup on July 15 and to accuse the Gülen movement of being responsible. This accusation has since dominated the news on the coup.

Even Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said it was speculated that "Gülenists" were behind the attempt. This simple and uncritical reiteration of Erdoğan's accusations is problematic because Turkey is a land fond of conspiracy theories and Erdoğan's labelling of people as "Gülenists" may simply be code for anyone who opposes his autocratic rule.

What is the Gülen movement?

So what do we know about the Gülen movement? Founded in the 1960s in Izmir, the movement is led by former Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen, who seeks to blend modern secular education with religious values. In 1999, he went to America shortly before being charged for treason. He was tried in absentia and has been living in exile in Pennsylvania, United States, ever since.

Like its reclusive leader, the Gülen movement is a large opaque organisation with operations in around 160 countries and an estimated worth of US$25 billion. It is speculated that the movement may have as many as 8-10 million followers and until 2013 it was closely aligned with Erdoğan's ruling Justice and Development Party. Given its size and assets, one can understand how such an organisation could make Erdoğan uneasy.

But the Gülen movement preaches neither hate nor violence and explicitly values the democratic process. At its core it is a transnational educational movement with more than 1,000 secular schools around the world. It prizes the combination of science and religious values, and interfaith dialogue, with a view to creating pious yet modern Muslims who can actively participate in and shape the modern world.

This is one reason why Erdoğan's accusation seems so unlikely. The second reason is that the movement is on its knees in Turkey.

Sustained crackdown has sapped opposition

Since 2013, there has been a spectacular falling out and the Gülen movement has been brought low by Erdoğan.

A corruption scandal erupted in December 2013, which saw several ministers resign (and implicated both Erdoğan and his son Bilal in the embezzling of funds). This also resulted in the judiciary and the police force being purged. As with the recent coup attempt, Erdoğan alleged that the Gulenists were behind the corruption probe in an attempt to topple his government.

Following the 2013 scandal, about 500 so-called Gülenist police were sacked or reassigned. The prosecutors who presided over the case were later charged with terror offences and fled the country to Armenia. By early January 2014, at least 2,000 police and prosecutors had been dismissed or reassigned.

Alongside these purges Erdoğan has systematically stripped the Gülen movement of its bank, media holdings and flagship university. In 2015, the government seized Asyabank, which was founded by movement followers, and placed it in a fund that answered directly to the prime minister. The movement's TV channel Samanyolu (among others) was dropped in 2015 from the Turksat satellite-TV platform as part of a crackdown on media outlets that were critical of the government.

Then, in 2016, the Gülen movement's flagship newspaper, Zaman, was seized and shut down. Hot on the heels of this closure, the movement's premier university, Fatih, was placed in the hands of trustees.

In no state to mount a coup

This prompts the question: How could an organisation that had already been humbled so dramatically organise a military coup?

Such a notion becomes even more implausible when one considers that historically the military, a traditionally anti-religious institution in Turkey, has been hostile to the Gülen movement. Suspected Gulenists were systematically purged from both the military schools and the military itself during the 1980s and 90s.

This is not to say that such an alliance is impossible. But strong evidence is required to substantiate such an assertion, because history tends to suggest otherwise. This has been the line of US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has asked for "evidence" rather than allegations to support the Turkish government's request to extradite Gülen.

One of the alleged coup plotters has reportedly confessed to being a Gülenist. However, there are also reports suggesting this confession may have been coerced.

Therefore, the need for reliable evidence is paramount. Otherwise it is simply grist for the mill for both Erdoğan and conspiracy theorists.

David Tittensor 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.
 David Tittensor, Research Fellow, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62909 2016-07-22T06:48:17Z 2016-07-22T06:48:17Z Shorten provides Kim Carr with life raft
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has intervened to save left ally Kim Carr from being dumped from the shadow ministry by expanding his frontbench.

The move, which is seen as Shorten sandbagging his leadership because Carr and his several followers voted for him in 2013, has infuriated the ALP left. The left held firm in refusing to put up Carr on its ticket, leaving the right to back him.

Shorten's intervention followed Carr responding to the left move against him by setting up his own breakaway faction of himself and three others to demand a position.

The accommodation of Carr has cost frontbencher Andrew Leigh a $40,000 pay cut.

Under the arrangement, two extra frontbench positions have been created, of which one has gone to Leigh and the other to up-and-coming senator Sam Dasyari.

But the maximum number of shadow ministers who can get extra pay is 30 so Leigh, who was shadow assistant treasurer in the last parliament, drops money and Dastyari does not get a rise.

There are five new faces in the shadow ministry including Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the House of Representatives and a former member of the NSW parliament. The others are Ed Husic (NSW), Clare O'Neil (Vic) and Carol Brown (Tas), as well as Dastyari (NSW). Brown's inclusion reflects the strong Labor showing in Tasmania.

Two former shadow ministers have been dropped: Sharon Bird and David Feeney. Feeney was an embarrassment to Labor in the election campaign – first when it emerged he had failed to declare a $2.3 million house and then during a television interview when he could not answer questions about Labor policy.

The factions put up nominees for the shadow ministry who are then elected by caucus. All the left leadership, including Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese, were adamant that they would not include Carr on their ticket.

Carr tweeted: "Thank you for the support from citizens, Trade Unionists across Australia, party members & particularly those comrades in VIC."

Earlier this week Carr got backing from the Socialist Left executive in Victoria.

Those who have followed Carr into the new faction are senator Gavin Marshall, Lisa Chesters and Maria Vamvakinou. The left wants to strip Marshall of his position of deputy Senate president, but a vote on this post was deferred.

While caucus elects the shadow ministry, the leader allocates portfolios and also chooses the shadow parliamentary secretaries. The portfolio allocation will be announced on Saturday.

Michelle Grattan 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.
 Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62785 2016-07-22T06:29:45Z 2016-07-22T06:29:45Z Government needs to get balance right in regulating agriculture
The Productivity Commission's latest draft report on the regulation of agriculture highlights the need to get the balance right, as to when the government should and shouldn't intervene in this industry, and then how to intervene.

The report is part of a nine-month public inquiry into the regulatory burden on farm businesses. It covers a wide range of issues from land and water use to labour and foreign investment.

Agriculture is fairly unique in that market competition is pervasive. Competitive markets provide the incentives and rewards for businesses to find cost-effective production methods, develop new products valued by buyers, and to adopt technology. At the same time, agriculture has to compete against alternative uses of limited national natural resources, labour and capital, and the sector has to pay market rates for these inputs.

Markets work well only with well-defined property rights, ranging from weights and measures for the products produced, through to the rights and responsibilities of owners in the use of land, water, labour, transport infrastructure, and other key inputs. Here, the Productivity Commission's report questions current regulations on some property rights. For example, they restrict decisions on the potential use of land for agriculture versus for the environment, urban use and mining, and they restrict the opportunities for non-resident investment in agriculture much more than investment in mining and manufacturing.

The commission proposes that regulations should balance the opportunity costs of alternative uses of land, or restrictions on the use of land. For example, the value of land regulated for use for agriculture should be compared with the value to society if instead the land was restricted to the provision of the environment, mining or urban growth.

It also proposes the government intervene to correct market failures. This could include for example the effects of the exercise of market power, external costs and lack of information necessary for buyers and sellers to make informed decisions.

Examples of external costs include run-off of chemicals to rivers and the ocean, irrigation in some areas increasing salinity downstream, and biosecurity. Often Australian food markets do not provide buyers with required information about the production systems used, for example organic or GMO, about food safety and nutrition.

As the Productivity Commission notes, regulation is not the only form of government intervention and often it is not the best way to correct a market failure. For example, the creation of government environmental water managers with water property rights similar to those used by irrigators for the Murray-Darling Basin seems to be a more effective way to restore a balance of water use between irrigation and the environment, than previous restrictions on water available for irrigation.

Sometimes government failure, either from lack of information or the dominance of political considerations, can result in regulations with larger social costs than those for the market failure. Essentially this is reflected in the report's argument that some regulations are counter productive, such as the banning of GMO and regulation the sugar industry again.

Where regulation is a proposed solution to the market failure, a next step is to design the regulation. The objective is to balance the benefits and costs to society, and not just for agriculture, of the restrictions imposed on the products produced and the production methods used.

In many cases these social benefit cost assessments will be very challenging and with legitimate debates on key costs and benefits. Regulations on animal welfare illustrate. There are challenges in providing robust measures of animal welfare and even in obtaining estimates of the different values and attitudes people place on different levels of animal welfare.

Forthcoming information about the side effects of new chemicals and production methods, as well as the evolution of society preferences, likely will justify adapting and changing regulations over time as new information becomes available.

A particular area of excessive regulation cost affecting Australian agriculture identified by the Productivity Commission concerns over-lapping, and sometimes conflicting, regulations across the three levels of government.

Greater inter-government cooperation over the design and conduct of regulations is what the Productivity Commission draft report proposes and the government would do well to listen.

John Freebairn 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.
 John Freebairn, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Melbourne Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62306 2016-07-22T06:25:03Z 2016-07-22T06:25:03Z How to build a 1,000mph car (by the scientists behind it)
It was a staggering feat, a car that went faster than the speed of sound. On October 15 1997, Andy Green travelled across the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, in the Thrust SSC at 763.035 mph, or Mach 1.02. Two decades on, that record remains unchallenged. Until now.

Back in 2007, a small team of British engineers headed up by Richard Noble and Andy Green decided to have a pop at the world land speed record once more. This time, their sights were set on 1,000mph. A rocket scientist was brought in to design the largest hybrid rocket system ever developed in the UK, a structural engineer was brought in to design the car's internal structure and I was invited to join the team along with Ron Ayers to ensure that this car would, indeed, remain a car and stay firmly planted on the ground. Ron and I would be responsible for the aerodynamic design of the car. It would be called BLOODHOUND.

I must confess that none of us anticipated back then that it would take quite so long to get to this point. Ambitious engineering projects, however, do have a habit of overrunning. This particular one, completely dependent on sponsorship and operating through a major global recession, has been no different.

A leap of faith

So, here we are. We have completed the extensive seven-year design process, including multiple design iterations and optimisation cycles.

We have built the car and revealed the real thing to the world. We have even practised the loading of the car onto the transporter plane soon to take us to our high speed test site on the Hakskeen Pan in South Africa.

Building BLOODHOUND in 90 seconds.

We have also recently signed a major new sponsorship deal which means that the funding is now in place to start the vehicle testing. We will finally discover whether or not all of our design and modelling work has been correct. This is the moment that the adventure gets real. Did we get it right?

You might be concerned that we are about to attempt a 1,000mph land speed record when all of our understanding of the car's aerodynamic behaviour has been done using computer modelling – in a "virtual wind tunnel". We have not done real world wind tunnel testing or rocket sled testing to double check our results. Bear in mind that if we've got this wrong then we could easily generate sufficient lift to project BLOODHOUND SSC skywards. Equally, too much downforce and we might find ourselves with the world's fastest plough.

Back in the 1990s, when computer modelling was the primary tool for the aerodynamic design of Thrust SSC, extensive validation of the computer model was undertaken using a scaled model of the car strapped to a rocket sled. Comparison of data originating from the scaled rocket sled model and the computer predictions gave the Thrust SSC engineers the confidence they needed to press ahead and build the car.

This time we are doing things differently. Computational aerodynamic modelling has come so far in the last 20 years that this time around we will be using the car itself to validate the computer model that was used to design it.

But don't worry, we won't be heading out to our test site in South Africa and telling Andy to "put his foot down" straight away. Over the next couple of years, starting with "low speed" runway testing at Newquay's AeroHub in Cornwall we will slowly be increasing the speed of our test runs. The surface of the car itself is covered with about 200 pressure sensors and data from these sensors will be compared with the computer model predictions that were used to design the car in the first place.

Driving through the sound barrier

One of my jobs after each run will be to check this mass of data and help decide whether or not we have the confidence in the computer model to try going a little faster on the next run. Of course, my hope will be that the computer model predictions and the car's sensor data track neatly next to each other as we increase the car's speed. But this is now the real world and there might be times when we have to (metaphorically) put on the brakes and ask ourselves some difficult questions. This, perhaps, will require us to tweak the computer model or even tweak the car's design itself.

BLOODHOUND SSC testing date is announced.

And we want to keep everyone involved and engaged in this process. All of the data coming from the car's sensors will be made available to the public after every run so that you can help us with this data analysis. We will be streaming the test runs live across the internet so you can follow our progress every step of the way.

The adventure is certainly now getting very real indeed …

Ben Evans receives funding from RAEng, EPSRC and Fujitsu. He is affiliated with EESW (Engineering Education Scheme in Wales).
 Ben Evans, Lecturer, Swansea University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62784 2016-07-22T05:10:48Z 2016-07-22T05:10:48Z Asia's 'shoot-to-kill' republic? The rising body count of the Philippines' 'war on drugs'
Here's a snapshot of what a coalition of Philippines human rights groups describe as a "surge of extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals and drug offenders".

2.50am July 14: Unidentified drug suspect #43 | San Juan City, Metro Manila | Found dead, hogtied, face wrapped with packaging tape and with eight sachets of suspected shabu [crystal meth] strapped to the body

5.00am July 13: Evangeline Tan, suspected drug user but not on the city's drug watch list | Dasmariñas City, Cavite | Found dead, body full of stab wounds and hands tied with an electric cord; found on the body was a paper saying, "Wag tularan, tulak ako (Do not imitate, I'm a drug pusher)."

Those fatality reports are from the Philippine Daily Inquirer's twice-weekly "Kill List", which tallies the killings of suspected drug dealers and users by police and unidentified vigilantes.

The "Kill List" records a "marked and unmistakable" rise in such killings amounting to 265 deaths between June 30, the day President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office, and July 18.

Official statistics support assertions of an alarming increase in police killings of drug-related criminal suspects. Philippines National Police data indicate that police killed at least 192 such criminal suspects between May 10 and July 10.

That death toll in the two months following Duterte's electoral victory dwarfs the 68 killings of suspects that police recorded during "anti-drug operations" between January 1 and June 15, 2016.

Police have attributed the killings to suspects who "resisted arrest and shot at police officers", but have not provided further evidence that they acted in self-defence.

Duterte's rhetoric

The Duterte administration has not put forward any policy proposals on criminal justice or crime control. He has been in office less than one month.

But the government's rhetorical stance on the upsurge in police killings of criminal suspects shows that the disregard Duterte showed for Philippine law and international human rights standards during his campaign has become the presidential reality.

He had told his supporters on the election trail:

If I make it to the presidential palace … you drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better get out because I'll kill you.

At a pre-election campaign rally he promised a supportive crowd the mass killings of tens of thousands of "criminals", whose bodies he would dump in Manila Bay.

At his inauguration, Duterte identified illegal drugs as one of the country's top problems and vowed his government's anti-drug battle "will be relentless and it will be sustained".

Now in office, Duterte has praised the killings as proof of the "success" of the anti-drug campaign and urged police to "seize the momentum".

Against check and balances

After calls for a Senate probe of those killings, the Philippine National Police (PNP) chief, Director-General Ronald dela Rosa, on July 11 slammed these as "legal harassment" and said it "dampens the morale" of PNP officers.

That same day, Duterte's top judicial official, Solicitor-General Jose Calida, defended the legality of the killings and opined that the number of such deaths was "not enough".

The PNP will soon make it easier for Calida to track the number of those killings. On July 18 it announced plans to erect outside the PNP's Manila headquarters a large electronic billboard that will provide an updated tally of drug suspects either arrested or "neutralised" by police.

Complicit in serious crimes

Official statements calling for what is effectively the extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects could make the officials responsible complicit in serious crimes. And an unwillingness to investigate alleged unlawful killings would be dereliction of duty.

There are already indications that some local politicians have taken inspiration from some of Duterte's rhetoric during his election and enacted potentially abusive "anti-crime" measures.

Days after Duterte's May 10 electoral victory, the mayor-elect of Cebu City in the central Philippines, Tomas Osmeña, announced he would pay a 50,000 peso (US$1,080) bounty for each "criminal" killed by his police force. Osmeña didn't specify how police would determine the legality of such killings or the identity of the suspects.

The most sinister articulation of this approach has been the rise of "death squads" in cities in the southern Philippines linked to local police and government officials.

Human Rights Watch exposed in a 2009 report the operations of a death squad that operated in Davao City with the support of city officials and police. Hundreds of people deemed to be "undesirables" – petty criminals, drug dealers and street children as young as 14 – were killed.

Duterte, who served as Davao City's mayor for 22 years, publicly applauded such killings.

There have been no prosecutions related to the Davao death squad operations and a federal inquiry was called off. There is evidence that the Davao death squad inspired a similar operation in the nearby municipality of Tagum City. This was linked to hundreds of killings and operated as a salaried arm of the municipal government.

Eroding the rule of law

In his inauguration speech, Duterte pledged that his "adherence to due process and the rule of law is uncompromising". The gruesome daily toll of police killings of criminal suspects demands that he deliver on that promise.

Duterte needs to demonstrate his commitment to due process and rule of law. He should urgently order a credible and independent inquiry into those deaths.

The government needs to make clear that the human rights protections embodied in the constitution apply to all the people of the Philippines — even those that police may consider "criminals".

Phelim Kine 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.
 Phelim Kine, Adjunct Professor, Roosevelt Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, City University of New York Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62761 2016-07-22T04:19:21Z 2016-07-22T04:19:21Z In acceptance speech, Trump embraces role as hero of the forgotten
Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for the presidency in a speech destined to be remembered by history as the "I am your voice" speech – a phrase that Trump repeated several times to tie together his themes of economic revitalization, military strength and government honesty.

As a scholar of American political rhetoric, I have written about how presidential candidates will often use campaign speeches to depict a nation in crisis, with themselves as the saviors. True to tradition, Trump's speech contained a narrative of crisis and heroism.

He also fulfilled the expectations for a typical presidential nomination speech by arguing for a united party, explaining his political philosophy and appearing presidential. Of the many topics addressed in his wide ranging speech, he was at his best when he railed against government corruption.

Make America isolationist again?

The culmination of four days of speeches organized around the themes of keeping America safe, putting America to work, putting America first and making America one, Trump's speech offered a new version of American Exceptionalism. Since 1980 our understanding of American Exceptionalism has been framed by Ronald Reagan's famous Republican Party acceptance speech:

"Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely."

Trump's version was less tied to this sort of "divine" exceptionalism that's welcoming of all people.

Nor was his American Exceptionalism grounded in America's unique role as an "exemplar of liberty," as this year's Republican Party platform declared.

Instead, Trump's American Exceptionalism was more isolationist and protectionist, devoting the first half of his speech to this theme under the guise of "America First."

"Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo," he said.

Speaking for the neglected and ignored

Consistent with his campaign so far, the speech was largely vague about his plans for accomplishing his campaign promises and specific about his criticisms of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His overarching criticism of Clinton is that she is "corrupt," and rhetorically, his speech was most coherent in its critique of Clinton's and government's corruption.

His motivation for seeking office is to protect the "forgotten men and women":

"Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned.… These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice."

Perhaps drawing an analogy between the hardships of the Great Depression and the hardships of the Great Recession, Trump may have borrowed the "forgotten man" figure from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's April 7, 1932 Fireside Chat in which he explained:

"These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid."

Like FDR, Trump positioned himself as an empathetic leader as well as defender of the downtrodden: "I AM YOUR VOICE," he boomed.

Corrupted logic

We don't see the word "corruption" used frequently in presidential nomination addresses. To the best of my knowledge, only Al Smith and Dwight Eisenhower used the word. Smith used it to talk about Prohibition, and Eisenhower used it to rail against the federal government:

"Our aims – the aims of this Republican crusade – are clear: to sweep from office an administration which has fastened on every one of us the wastefulness, the arrogance and corruption in high places, the heavy burdens and anxieties which are the bitter fruit of a party too long in power."

Like Eisenhower, Trump argued that he is motivated to become president because our current politicians are too corrupt to help people:

"I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens."

He then pointed his finger directly at the establishment.

"Remember: all of the people telling you that you can't have the country you want, are the same people telling you that I wouldn't be standing here tonight. No longer can we rely on those elites in media, and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place."

So far, so good: Trump has laid out his argument that there's widespread corruption and we know who to blame for it. However, what makes Trump the right hero to save the nation from corruption?

He never really gives a coherent answer.

According to Trump, he's the nominee even though corrupt media and pundits said that he would not be; therefore, Donald Trump has been right all along and the system is "rigged." It's an awkward logical construction that equates his detractors being wrong with their being corrupt – which, of course, isn't the exact same thing.

What evidence does Trump give to support that he is the right hero for stopping corruption? Again, his speech makes an odd logical leap. Trump argues (with a wink) that because he once got involved in corrupt dealings himself, he knows how it works.

He doesn't specify how or why he's no longer corrupt, however, and the audience is left to wonder whether and if his "conversion" has taken place. "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it," he boasted. "I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance."

Despite reverting to some of his vague rhetoric, Trump did a much better job, stylistically, of performing his speech from the teleprompter than in the past. Only going off script occasionally, he delivered the speech with great energy, rousing the crowd to chant, at various points:

"USA! USA! USA!"

"Build a Wall!"

"Lock Her Up!"

To that last chant Trump responded, "Let's defeat her in November."

Jennifer Mercieca 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.
 Jennifer Mercieca, Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Aggie Agora, Texas A&M University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62816 2016-07-22T03:27:34Z 2016-07-22T03:27:34Z Is the end of Zika nigh? How populations develop immunity
The Zika outbreak, arriving on the heels of Ebola and just in time for the Rio Olympics, has challenged global health agencies to respond rapidly and effectively. Determining the appropriate response is far from straightforward, though, as there is much we don't yet know about the Zika virus.

A pair of papers published recently in the journal Science have reviewed current evidence about the spread and control of Zika. These studies use mathematical models to help understand how the virus may spread. Insights from these models can help to prioritise efforts to control Zika and minimise the harm it causes.

One conclusion from these models is that little can be done to contain the current Zika outbreak in South America. Vaccines are under development, but may arrive too late to have a substantial impact on this outbreak. Long-term control of the mosquitos that transmit Zika, among other diseases, remains an ongoing challenge.

Despite this, the models suggest the outbreak will die out of its own accord in around three years from now. After that we may not see further outbreaks for at least a decade.

How do populations become immune?

When we are exposed to a pathogen, our body produces an immune response to defend itself. This immune response not only clears the pathogen, but often provides protection against further infection even after we recover, so we're not susceptible to being infected again.

Infectious diseases spread when a pathogen (a virus, bacteria or parasite) is transmitted from an infectious person to a person who is susceptible to infection. During an outbreak, lots of people can become infected in a short time and develop immunity.

As a result, the number of susceptible people left available to be infected is reduced, making it harder for the pathogen to keep spreading. The number of new infections declines and the outbreak ends, without it being necessary for everyone to have been infected. The current models suggest this will occur with the Zika outbreak over the coming years.

After a large outbreak has run its course, there may no longer be enough susceptible people in a population to allow a further outbreak to occur. Even if an infectious person enters this population, most people they meet will be protected, due to past exposure, and the disease won't be able to spread very far. This inability for the pathogen to spread then provides indirect protection for those who remain susceptible. This population-level phenomenon of protection is known as "herd immunity".

While we usually aim to achieve herd immunity through vaccination, in the case of Zika the models predict that herd immunity will be achieved through natural infection.

So how could Zika ever return?

There are two ways a population can become "outbreak-ready" again. First, people who have recovered from infection may eventually lose the protection gained from their immune response and become susceptible again.

How long this protection lasts varies from disease to disease. For some diseases, such as chlamydia, it may be very short-lived or even non-existent. For others, such as measles, protection may be near lifelong.

 Protection against measles is near lifelong, which is why most outbreaks have historically occurred in children. Sue Clark/Flickr, CC BY

Second, infants are typically susceptible to disease when they are born. Over many years, the birth of enough susceptible infants may create the conditions for a new outbreak to occur.

This is why, before the development of vaccines, measles outbreaks tended to occur every two to three years, predominantly involving young children. During an outbreak, almost all of the susceptible people in a population would be infected. It would then take two or three years for enough children to be born to provide enough susceptible people for a further outbreak.

The first outbreak of a disease in a new population, as we are observing with Zika in Latin America, is a special case. Because few people in the population are likely to have immunity from prior exposure, there will be more susceptible people and the outbreak will be much larger. We might then expect an even longer gap before the next outbreak.

Planning ahead

We don't know how long people are protected after being infected with Zika virus. Comparison with other similar viruses suggests immunity might be lifelong. If this is the case, the expected time before another outbreak can be estimated by considering how long it will take for enough newly susceptible people to be born. The Science article estimates this to be at least ten years based on currently available data.

Many other factors can influence the waiting time between outbreaks. Changes in the genetic structure of the Zika virus may lead to a more rapid loss of herd immunity. Geographic variation in the spread of disease could leave some populations relatively unaffected and vulnerable to outbreaks.

If climatic change extends the range of disease-bearing mosquitoes, new susceptible populations may be exposed to Zika. Changes in population demography and behaviour may also affect the epidemic dynamics.

Mathematical models such as the one used in the Science study enable exploration of many scenarios, helping to make sense of how these factors interact. By testing out alternative outbreak response strategies, models can inform decisions about which interventions will most effectively minimise harm. Models also enable us to quantify our uncertainty about which future course of events will come to pass.

Importantly, these models also show researchers where the most important gaps in our knowledge are. In the case of Zika, these studies identify an urgent need for better data on who has been infected in the past, not only in Latin America, but also in other regions that may be at risk, such as Asia.

This is challenging because many people infected with Zika virus will not become sick. Those who do may experience symptoms that could be mistaken for those caused by other diseases such as dengue or chikungunya. Better diagnostic tests are needed to estimate the current level of herd immunity to Zika in different populations and identify those most at risk.

Nicholas Geard receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

James McCaw receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council, Commonwealth Department of Health and Defence Science Technology Group that supports his research on infectious diseases.

James Wood receives funding from the NHRMC through the PRISM CRE, and project grants in relation to tuberculosis and pneumococcal disease and from UNSW in relation to pertussis.

Jodie McVernon receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, including through the Centres of Research Excellence in Infectious Diseases Modelling to Inform Policy (PRISM) and the Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies (APPRISE)

Cameron Simmons 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.
 Nicholas Geard, ARC DECRA Research Fellow, Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne Cameron Simmons, Laboratory Head, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne James McCaw, Associate Professor in Mathematical Biology, University of Melbourne James Wood, Public health academic, UNSW Australia Jodie McVernon, Professor and Director of Doherty Epidemiology, University of Melbourne Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62837 2016-07-22T02:43:00Z 2016-07-22T02:43:00Z How gross inequality and crushed hopes have fed the rise of Donald Trump

The GOP establishment may not be too disappointed if Trump never becomes president. Reuters/Rick Wilking

Donald Trump is now the Republican nominee for president of the United States and millions of people are asking: "How could this happen?"

There is no single answer to this question, but there are some explanations. For while the nomination of a reality-TV star and businessman with no executive experience is unprecedented, the economic, social and party-political conditions that have made a Trump candidacy viable are certainly not.

The rise of Trump is explicable when we consider three factors. First, the living standards of America's middle and working classes have been declining in real terms for many years. This has fuelled a second factor, namely economic and social fears about the impact of immigration on the prospects and safety of "real" Americans. And third, the Republican Party has been unable to control these anxieties or at least convince voters that the policies its preferred candidates are offering are the best available solutions to their problems.

In this respect, the "Grand Old Party" is finally reaping what it has long been sowing. Twenty years of bashing minorities on Fox News, coupled with 35 years of support for "trickle-down" economics, has drawn voters to a populist candidate who marries economic nationalism with racist nativism.

All of this has happened before, on several occasions. Let's start with the economic woes of millions of Americans. We are familiar with the problem of the growing army of poor and working poor Americans. The struggles of the middle classes have also been noted, if not addressed, by President Barack Obama.

Since the global financial crisis, everyday Americans have paid the price for the debts of the finance industry. While the US Treasury has paid off the self-incurred losses of the surviving mega-banks, these banks have driven up the price of commodities through speculation, devastating regional economies and denuding state and local governments of vital revenue.

In the face of this crisis, right-wing administrations have sought to deflate costs by driving down public-sector wages. Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the global economy, the United States is now hollowed out, in debt and failing to provide prosperity and hope to millions of its citizens. It has become what American writer Ross Perlin has termed an "Intern Nation", requiring legions of graduates to labour without pay or purpose, just to qualify for the privilege of work.

These economic conditions have been widely compared with those of the Gilded Age, the period between the American Civil War and 1900 that is remembered as a time when capitalist "robber barons" dominated the economy and politics. Before the civil war, the richest third of citizens held more than half the nation's wealth. Just a generation later, this same portion of wealth had been concentrated into the hands of the barons, the richest 1%. This distortion of wealth and opportunity essentially remained until the post-war boom of the 1950s.

The distribution of wealth in the US today has returned to historical extremes. This is the direct result of tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations. Corporate and top-tier personal income taxes fell steadily between around 1960 and the early 1980s, while payroll taxes increased just as steadily.

When he was president, Ronald Reagan delivered nearly US$200 billion in tax relief to the affluent. In the first decade of the new millennium, income inequality reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2005, the top 10% of earners collected 44.3% of national income, compared with 32.6% in 1975, but about equal to 1929's 43.8%. Similarly, in 2005, the top 1% of earners took 17.4% of national income, compared with 8% in 1975 and 18.4% in 1929.

Such a monumental transfer of wealth would not have been possible had business not colonised regulatory agencies. Yet while plutocrats shared control of such agencies in the "Roaring Twenties", Goldman Sachs dominates regulatory bodies today: the US Treasury, the New York Federal Reserve and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission have all been run by former Goldman executives.

Thus in 2008, while the US plunged into its greatest recession in 80 years, Goldman Sachs paid US$14 million in federal taxes, one-third the amount its chief executive officer was gifted. More broadly, two-thirds of corporations paid no taxes at all between 1998 and 2005.

Not surprisingly, the failure of the major political parties to prevent these excesses has spawned insurrections, as it did in the Gilded Age. Hence Donald Trump has won the Republican presidential nomination, as a populist from the right, while Bernie Sanders very nearly won the Democratic Party nomination with a redistributive economic program. This tells us that Democratic power-brokers are more in control of their party than their Republican counterparts.

In the Gilded Age, it was the Democratic Party that was convulsed by populist insurrection. Three times, in 1896, 1900 and 1908, Democratic power-brokers were forced to accept the nomination of William Jennings Bryan, a great orator who opposed the gold standard and the political power of banks. Bryan's popularity was a running sore for the "Bourbon Democrats" who ran the party.

But if the Bourbons could not prevent Bryan's nomination, they could derail his campaigns and they did, with half-hearted fundraising and by tacitly supporting imperial expansion abroad. With no election war chest and too little to distinguish him from the imperialist Republicans, Bryan was safely barred from the White House. Not until the arrival of Woodrow Wilson, who posed no threat to boss rule of the party, could the Democrats' controlling interests risk a genuine tilt at the presidency.

During the Gilded Age, the major parties' differences were trivial. So were the margins in presidential elections. Hence the British historian Viscount Bryce lamented that neither Republicans nor Democrats possessed "any principles, any distinctive tenets".

Today, journalist Matt Taibbi writes, the presidential election has again become an event that Americans "have learned to wholly consume as entertainment, divorced completely from any expectations about concrete changes" in their lives. Trump's campaign has risen on his promise to break the major parties' corporate consensus. His racist decrying of immigration – a recurrent populist policy since the Irish Catholic influx of the 1840s – is embarrassing for establishment Republicans. But what they and the party's most important supporters will not brook is Trump's opposition to deregulated trade and labour markets.

As the presidential campaign gets into full swing, look for signs that the Grand Old Party is doing all that it can to prevent Trump from winning the White House. Like the Democrats of old, they will not be too distressed by a Hillary Clinton presidency. After all, Trump has pledged to break up the biggest banks, but Clinton has not.

When the Trump insurrection is defeated, the party will be handed over to a safe candidate, with more appeal than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. At least, that is the plan.

Nick Fischer 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.
 Nick Fischer, Adjunct Research Fellow, Monash University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62900 2016-07-22T02:41:54Z 2016-07-22T02:41:54Z VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the frontbench reshuffles
Just as there were winners and losers in Malcolm Turnbull's ministerial reshuffle at the beginning of the week, there will be frontbench promotions and demotions in the Labor Party in the coming days.

Michelle Grattan tells University of Canberra acting vice chancellor Frances Shannon that the left of the Labor Party would like to make room on the frontbench for other people, including NSW MP Linda Burney.

"There are also some resentments about Kim Carr in the left. He voted for Bill Shorten in 2013, in the leadership ballot, took a couple of his sub-factional mates across with him and that was pretty important in Bill Shorten's victory," Grattan says.

Michelle Grattan 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.
 Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62833 2016-07-22T01:36:53Z 2016-07-22T01:36:53Z What we really need from innovation in Australia

The need for innovation, but what does it mean? Thomas Hawk/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The tone of commentary about the appropriateness and effectiveness of innovation as a centrepiece of Australian government policy has turned from one of enthusiasm, particularly among the start-up community, to pessimism and even rejection.

Just a day after the federal election, it had already been pointed out that innovation politics had paid out some harsh lessons for the Coalition. The issue was not only the loss of Wyatt Roy, the assistant minister for innovation, but the electorate appearing unreceptive to the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's "ideas boom" mantra.

It seems the message of an exciting future through innovation and high-tech start-ups has palpably failed to engage the Australian community.

Should we be surprised? Did innovation ever have sufficient potency or reach as a concept to transform the Australian economy?

The need for innovation

First, it is important to reiterate that the many arguments made over the years, and myriad research findings, emphatically support the role of innovation in the modern economy.

The globally competitive nature of the modern economy requires companies to continually improve their products, services and business processes if they are to survive.

Innovation makes immediate sense in the corporate environment because of this competitive pressure. Doing the same thing over again just invites imitation and displacement.

Not that producing and managing innovation is easy. By its very simple definition of "doing new and better things", innovation does not lend itself easily to rule-based procedures.

Innovation is inherently rule-breaking. Hence the myriad top ten tips for innovation are almost invariably pointless. If you are following someone else's rules, you are not innovating.

At a national level, establishing effective and enduring systems of research, development, engagement and commercialisation remains a significant challenge.

This is shown not only by Australia's relatively poor performance in international comparative measures of innovation performance, and the fact that it's last out of the 34 OECD members for economic complexity, but also by the high level of analysis and policy reform in countries that outperform Australia.

What inspires innovation?

The lessons we have learnt is that innovation arises from an uncertain combination of creative minds, space to experiment and fail, modest financial support, a supportive environment, passion and risk-taking, in relatively small portions.

The current intense activity and hype in the start-up space is less about creating a new generation of billionaires, and more about realising a new, intensive approach to the pursuit and capture of innovation.

But when we move into the policy context, and even more importantly the political context, the meaning and role of innovation becomes far more problematic. The American astronomer Carl Sagan said:

We've arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology […]

I would paraphrase this to say we live in a society exquisitely dependent on innovation, in which hardly anyone knows anything about innovation.

Innovation is such a loose, umbrella concept that it can mean many different things to different people. More significantly, innovation is only ever a means to an end. New products, jobs, economic growth, profitability are what we want from innovation.

But too often innovation is treated as an end in its own right, implying that if we only change something – anything – life will be better. It reminds me of the possibly apocryphal manager demanding of his staff that they increase their innovation production rate from two to three and a half per week – "just get out there and innovate!"

What the public want

What do we know of public attitudes to innovation? Reliable opinion poll data are scarce.

But if we draw on politicians, whose central survival skill is understanding people's interests and concerns, we find Ed Husic, Labor's innovation spokesman who said:

If I went and had this (innovation policy) debate in the Mt Druitt library I don't think many people would get what we are talking about. A lot of those people think what you do and what we argue for is a job killer […]

The other issue that is contentious is whether technology is only going to make rich people richer. Is it only going to accumulate benefits to one portion of society that is already doing well?

All the positive arguments about the need to transition from a resources-based to a knowledge economy (not that the two are mutually exclusive) will require a much broader framing than facilitating start-ups and venture capital investment.

It involves a profound reshaping of the understanding of what is and will be the nature of a job, what skills are necessary to be able to get that job or deliver that service, and how that provides the basis for the desired life quality. A much larger narrative is waiting to be written.

Throughout history, there have always been winners and losers in times of great change. At least some of our commitment to innovation needs to be in finding new ways to ease economic, social and psychological transitions

Ron Johnston 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.
 Ron Johnston, Executive Director, Australian Centre for Innovation, University of Sydney Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62680 2016-07-22T01:12:07Z 2016-07-22T01:12:07Z Calls for deradicalisation programs after Nice attack should be met with caution

There are calls for Australia to focus on early intervention strategies to steer young people away from the path to radicalisation in the wake of events like the Nice attack. Reuters/Eric Gaillard

A heated Q&A panel this week managed to agree on one thing: in the wake of the horrific terrorist attack in Nice, there is a greater need in Australia for early intervention strategies to steer young people away from the path to radicalisation.

Given the serious threat Australia and many other countries face from Islamic-State-inspired terrorism, it is difficult to disagree with the idea that prevention is better than cure. When a 15-year-old radicalised boy can shoot an innocent man in broad daylight on a city street, something clearly needs to be done to ensure vulnerable youth do not become radicalised and commit acts of terrorism.

At the same time, calls for greater investments in deradicalisation programs overlook the significant problems that can be caused by national policy strategies for countering violent extremism.

The UK's experience with its Prevent strategy over nearly a decade urges caution in how Australia should approach its own efforts to counter the threat of radicalisation.

What do the programs aim to achieve?

Countering violent extremism programs became a focus of domestic counter-terrorism strategies after the London bombings in 2005.

They are receiving renewed funding and attention in response to terrorism associated with Islamic State (IS).

These programs supplement coercive counter-terrorism powers by tackling terrorism's underlying causes. They encompass a variety of policy measures, ranging from community-run projects and cultural activities to more targeted intervention programs aimed at deradicalising young people who show early signs of radicalisation.

What's happening in Australia?

Australia came relatively late to the idea that its coercive counter-terrorism laws should be supplemented with a national program to counter violent extremism.

In the 2010 federal budget, the Rudd government allocated A$9.7 million over four years to such efforts. Much of this supported a community-based grants scheme for "building resilient communities".

The Abbott government initially dropped this funding, although it later announced $64 million in response to the ongoing terror threat. Nearly $20 million of this was allocated to community-based and diversionary approaches, with $1.9 million supporting a "Living Safe Together" grants program similar to that introduced by Labor.

Details on deradicalisation programs in Australia are scarce. However, the attorney-general's department notes they are either established or being developed across Australia.

What is the UK's strategy?

The UK's Prevent strategy is the key overseas example of such a national program.

It is one of four core strands of the UK's national strategy for countering terrorism, known as CONTEST. Prevent was supplemented in late 2015 by a national Counter-Extremism Strategy that tackles the threat of IS-associated terrorism.

Community-based work under Prevent began in 2007. The strategy has since come under continual criticism for aggravating perceptions of surveillance and discrimination in Britain's Muslim communities.

Recurring concerns with Prevent relate to the strategy's disproportionate focus on Muslim communities, the heavy role police play in overseeing the strategy's delivery, and its close association with coercive approaches to counter-terrorism.

A police-led intervention program, Channel, is a major driver of these concerns. Under the program, police collect information and conduct risk assessments to determine whether individuals should be referred to a multi-agency support panel. Teachers, health workers and community members are encouraged to identify individuals who might be at risk of radicalisation and refer them to the program.

More recently, significant concern has been expressed about Prevent's impact on free speech and academic freedom. Teachers in British schools and universities now receive training to help identify signs of radicalisation in their students. Similar debates are playing out in Australia.

The Cameron government identified and sought to remedy many of these issues in a 2011 review of Prevent. However, significant concerns remain.

Recently, the UK's Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation called for an independent review of Prevent because it "has become a more significant source of grievance in affected communities" than the UK's counter-terrorism laws.

What next for Australia?

It seems uncontentious to suggest that coercive counter-terrorism laws should be supplemented with community-based programs to counter violent extremism.

However, the UK's experience demonstrates that such programs are not unproblematic. They can equally generate perceptions that governments are unfairly targeting Muslim communities.

It is likely that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will develop a more constructive dialogue with Australia's Muslim communities about the threat of terrorism than his predecessor did. But given the significant ongoing threat, the push for more targeted approaches to deradicalisation in Australia is likely to be strong.

Calls for greater investments in deradicalisation need to be followed by a careful discussion as to how Australia will approach its national efforts to counter violent extremism.

It is important to remember that such programs are not one type of strategy. They can emphasise a community-led approach, or they can emphasise the need for police to identify and deradicalise young people who pose a potential security threat.

The UK's experience would urge strongly against the latter. What is needed is genuine consultation with Australia's Muslim communities as to how young individuals at risk can best be provided with the support they need to avoid being radicalised.

Keiran Hardy 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.
 Keiran Hardy, Lecturer, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62703 2016-07-22T00:55:57Z 2016-07-22T00:55:57Z How we lock accounts on The Conversation
I dislike locking people's accounts on The Conversation. I want as many people as possible to leave as many comments sharing as many opinions as possible on our articles.

But, on occasion, we have locked accounts. It's worth explaining how and why. In part so the process is understood by everyone and in part so we can have a discussion about that process.

An account can be locked for two reasons: repeat violations of our community standards or upon user request.

Violating our community standards

Commenters who violate our standards receive two warnings and, if they continue to violate our standards, the account will be locked.

I try to allow some flexibility about when and why warnings are given out. I, for example, treat abusive or discriminatory comments more seriously than comments that are just off-topic.

Both are violations of our community standards and are worth removing but you're more likely to receive a formal warning after your first abusive comment than you are for your first off-topic comment. Context and severity are important considerations for how we lock accounts.

When someone's account is locked their profile is removed from public view. That means their name on their comments will be black — the link to their profile has been removed. Comments posted on our articles will remain in place.

User accounts are for The Conversation as a global platform. That encompasses all of our regions, current and future. This means commenters can't have an account locked for commenting on articles commissioned in Australia and then make an account for The Conversation US.

Warnings

There are circumstances where a commenter mightn't get two warnings. If they're violating our real names policy they, generally, will only get one warning. If a commenter violates our standards in an extreme way they may only get one warning. If a commenter has their account locked and then makes a new account they won't be warned at all.

All warnings will come via email. It's your responsibility to have a valid, working email attached to your account. Our being unable to contact you won't stop us from locking your account if need be.

How long are accounts locked for?

Accounts that are locked for violating our standards are locked permanently. Commenters may, in rare cases, receive a temporary ban before being banned permanently but, thus far, this has been the exception rather than the rule.

User request

Users can request to have their accounts locked. This process is explained in our content removal policy:

If you no longer wish to use your account on The Conversation it will be locked so it's no longer viewable by the public. Your comments will remain on the site with your name attached to them – your name will no longer link to your profile. If you are an academic author your name will continue to appear on any articles you've previously published.

People are welcome to return at a later date. They can get in touch with us and ask to have their accounts unlocked.

Staying inclusive

Creating an inclusive space where as many people can have conversations does, inevitably, require saying some people are no longer welcome to take part. There will always be people who have no interest in following our community standards.

We set ourselves a lofty goal for our comments:

We want the discussion of an article to be, if anything, more illuminating than the original article and we need your help to do that.

Locking accounts is part of our attempt to achieve that goal. Hopefully this post helps explain our approach.
 Cory Zanoni, Community Manager, The Conversation Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62821 2016-07-22T00:44:34Z 2016-07-22T00:44:34Z A snapshot of Australia by income, gender and work

How has working life changed?  Shutterstock

At face value Australians are doing well. Since 2001 mean disposable income has increased by almost 32%, and weekly wages have been consistently rising.

But the majority of growth was prior to 2009. Since the global financial crisis household incomes have stagnated. And not everyone has benefited equally from the boom years – men have done disproportionately well out of wage increases.

This is revealed in the latest release of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, which collects information on Australian households, focusing on economic and subjective well-being as well as labour market and family dynamics.

And when it comes to work, while policymakers concentrate on tax cuts for smaller companies, HILDA shows small business is not a big employer overall and tends to employ older workers in traditional fields. In fact, if you want to be well-paid, you are better off with a larger employer.

  The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey: Selected Findings from Waves 1 to 14, CC BY-ND

This infographic is part of a series on the recent release of HILDA survey data.

Click through to read:

Professor Roger Wilkins' article on the growing divide between young and old as Australian household incomes and wealth stall

What HILDA has to tell us about wealth and poverty

 Helen Westerman, Business + Economy Editor, The Conversation Emil Jeyaratnam, Multimedia Editor, The Conversation Wes Mountain, Deputy Multimedia Editor, The Conversation Declan O'Hara, Editor, The Conversation Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62348 2016-07-22T00:28:45Z 2016-07-22T00:28:45Z Five tips to get the government started on real health reform
Since the election, the Turnbull government has received a great deal of advice on how to counter the pervasive public scepticism about its ongoing commitment to the universality of Medicare.

While the impacts of the so-called Mediscare campaign, the Medicare rebate freeze and the "zombie" policies left over from the 2014-15 budget have driven these calls for Coalition action, the real issue is that the previous Abbott-Turnbull government had no health policy agenda, other than budget cuts and the covert exploration of privatisation and competition in the delivery of health-care services.

In this new term, the government must do more to deliver the health-care system we need for the 21st century – not just to improve its standing with voters, but to meet the health needs of all Australians. Much of this can be achieved through new ways of thinking about policy development and implementation rather than new spending.

Even so, some new funds will be needed. The government and its bean counters must move beyond seeing the health-care budget as a drain on finances and treat it as an investment in the health, productivity and prosperity of the nation. This approach will help concentrate efforts on evidence and value rather than ideologically based, slash-and-burn approaches.

1. Patients must be the centre of the health system

The health-care system exists primarily for the benefit of patients, but their voices are so rarely heard. Every policy, budget measure and proposal must be considered through the patient lens.

That does not mean the impacts on providers (hospitals, clinicians and health insurers) should not be considered; they are also stakeholders and usually the decision-makers. But the government's first instinct has been to consult with privileged groups such as the Australian Medical Association and private health insurers, rather than with the public, patients and providers at the coalface.

Importantly, viewing health reform through a patient lens will help policymakers identify disadvantaged groups so they can target their specific needs.

2. Invest in health promotion, not just illness treatment

Prevention is as much a responsibility of government as it is for individuals. This is particularly the case for obesity.

As a nation, we all bear the substantial and growing economic and social costs of obesity and its consequences, especially diabetes. Every day, 12 Australians have an amputation related to diabetes at a cost of A$875 million a year. Almost all of this is preventable.

The investments made in prevention must be proportional to the burden of disease in terms of resources and commitment. Concerns about sensible budget policies must override ideological concerns about the nanny state.

3. Make health-care reforms sustainable

This means ceasing the start-stop approach of small-scale pilot programs that never go beyond three years and are evaluated only after they are concluded in reports that never see the light of day. Real reforms will also require time frames well beyond those of the election cycle.

Labor has proposed a promising way forward: a permanent Australian Healthcare Reform Commission, which would include a new Centre for Medicare and Healthcare System Innovation to embed continuous reform into the health-care system.

This type of approach – where models can be seamlessly developed, implemented, assessed, adjusted and expanded – is essential for reforms such as the government's proposed Health Care Homes trial to better manage chronic disease, and for complicated issues such as mental health reforms.

4. Apply a whole-of-government approach to health

The health and well-being of the population depend on issues well beyond the health portfolio and require a health-in-all policy approach in all government portfolios. This is a matter of leadership and cultural change, not new expenditures and regulations.

"Wicked" issues such as obesity, mental health, healthy ageing and Closing the Gap on Indigenous disadvantage can only be effectively addressed through such whole-of-government approaches.

5. Data is key

Research, data analyses and evaluation are key to health-care reforms.

The antipathy of the previous government to evidence-based policymaking was exemplified by the scrapping or downgrading of key agencies and the defunding of the Primary Health Care Research, Evaluation and Development (PHCRED) Strategy and the Better Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) study.

These losses must be rectified, but it is also time for the Department of Health to start mining the archives. There are mountains of reports, papers and evaluations, together with significant, policy-relevant primary health care research commissioned by the department through the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute, to be used in improving the delivery and financing of health-care services.

At the same time, there should be a moratorium on shunting off difficult problems to committees as an excuse for inaction. There will be occasions when it is necessary to convene advisory groups. That should be done using the experts who will provide the advice that is needed, not the usual hacks who provide the advice the government wants.

So where do we start?

I rate the following as the key issues:

the renewal and revitalisation of the commitment to Close the Gap, with the inclusion of a social justice target and meaningful involvement of Indigenous communities

federal leadership in the implementation of mental health reforms to improve access to treatment and care, and to tailor responses to individuals' needs. Such mental health reforms have been left to flounder between the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Primary Health Networks

the effective implementation of patient-centred medical home models of care for people with chronic illness. This means patients have a regular general practice that coordinates all their primary, specialist and allied health care

fast-tracking the review of the 5,700 items on the Medical Benefits Schedule, removing items that aren't evidence-based or no longer reflect good clinical practice, and adding necessary new items. Progress on this important work is too slow

tackling inequalities in access to specialist out-patient care, including high rates of out-of-pocket costs

containing the cost blow-out of the private health insurance rebate and ensuring health insurance provides value to consumers who purchase it.

In 2007, my colleagues and I outlined the challenges to health care facing the incoming Rudd government. Regrettably this nine-year-old document could serve the same purpose today, so little has changed.

Will Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull now bring to the health-care sector the innovation he says holds the key to Australia's future?

Lesley Russell 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.
 Lesley Russell, Adjunct Associate Professor, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62688 2016-07-22T00:26:12Z 2016-07-22T00:26:12Z FactCheck Q&A: has the Grand Mufti of Australia condemned terrorist attacks overseas?

Pauline Hanson, speaking on Q&A. Q&A

The Conversation is fact-checking claims made on Q&A, broadcast Mondays on the ABC at 9:35pm. Thank you to everyone who sent us quotes for checking via Twitter using hashtags #FactCheck and #QandA, on Facebook or by email.

 Excerpt from Q&A July 18, 2016 – watch from 3:31.

Isn't it funny that your Grand Mufti won't even come out and condemn the terrorist attacks that's happened overseas… – Senator-elect Pauline Hanson, speaking on Q&A, July 18, 2016.

Senator-elect Pauline Hanson faced heavy questioning on Monday night's Q&A program during a broad-ranging and often heated debate about Islam, radicalisation and terrorism.

Hanson criticised the Grand Mufti of Australia, a senior Islamic scholar, for not condemning recent overseas terrorist attacks. In response to a question from a Muslim audience member, Hanson said that "your Grand Mufti won't even come out and condemn the terrorist attacks that's happened overseas".

Is that right?

Checking the source

The Conversation asked Hanson's spokesman for sources to support her assertion, but did not hear back before the publication deadline.

However, we can test her statement against publicly available evidence.

Who is the Grand Mufti and what has he said about terrorism?

The Grand Mufti of Australia is Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, an Islamic scholar from the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC). ANIC is made up of Imams from across Australia representing their respective communities.

Following the Paris attacks in late 2015, ANIC issued a statement that said the Grand Mufti "mourned the loss of innocent lives due to the recent terrorist attacks in France". It also said that:

We would like to convey our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the deceased. We reiterate that the sanctity of human life is guaranteed in Islam. These recent incidents highlight the fact that current strategies to deal with the threat of terrorism are not working. It is therefore imperative that all causative factors such as racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention must be comprehensively addressed.

Critics said at the time that this initial response to the Paris attacks didn't go far enough or appeared to blame Western society for the attacks.

Two days later, ANIC issued a clarification saying that:

We wish to emphasise it is incorrect to imply that the reference to causative factors provides justification for these acts of terrorism. There is no justification for the taking of innocent lives. The sanctity of human life is guaranteed in Islam. Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed and ANIC have consistently and unequivocally condemned all forms of terrorist violence. The Grand Mufti on 15th September 2014 said about ISIS that: "These criminals are committing crimes against humanity and sins against God."

Previous and subsequent statements issued by ANIC and the Grand Mufti have condemned terrorist acts and other forms of violence committed overseas.

The Grand Mufti also used Facebook to condemn the July 2016 attacks in Nice:

  Facebook page of the Grand Mufti of Australia.

More generally, the Grand Mufti has supported a fatwa (or Islamic legal ruling) against joining Islamic State.

"Your Grand Mufti"

It is worth noting that the phrase "your Grand Mufti" is also misleading. It may convey the idea that the Grand Mufti of Australia represents all Muslims in Australia. That is not the case. In Australia, Islam has no easily defined hierarchy and ANIC is not the only body representing Muslims or Islamic scholars in Australia.

According to my research, many Muslims in Australia support and respect the position of the Grand Mufti; however, they do not always support the person in the position or respect their religious credentials.

Australian Muslim communities are not homogeneous and are made up of many different culturally diverse groups. A 2015 report on the demographic and social profile of Muslims in Australia, prepared by Professor Riaz Hassan from the University of South Australia, noted that:

According to the 2011 Australian Census there were 476,290 Muslims in Australia, of whom about 40% were Australian born. The rest came from 183 countries, making Australian Muslims one of the most ethnically and nationally heterogeneous religious communities.

There are also significant divisions in faith. The same report said that while most Australian Muslims are Sunni, there is a significant minority of Shi'ite Muslims and smaller numbers of Bektashis, Ahmadis, Alawis and Druze.

Lastly, many commentators and observers have advanced the view that it is unfair to expect Muslims and Muslim public figures to repeatedly publicly condemn every incident involving Muslims around the world.

Verdict

Pauline Hanson's statement that "your Grand Mufti won't even come out and condemn the terrorist attacks that's happened overseas" was not correct. – Clarke Jones

Review

This is a sound analysis. I have read this FactCheck, which is written in a fair and impartial manner, accurately conveying in its entirety the real situation with publicly available evidence. – Jan Ali

 Have you ever seen a "fact" worth checking? The Conversation's FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at email@example.com. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

Clarke Jones is the co-director of the Australian Intervention Support Hub, a collaboration between the ANU, Alfred Deakin University, the Attorney-General's Department, the Australian Federal Police and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to work with community groups in developing appropriate responses to violent extremism. He has worked for over 15 years in several areas of national security, including policing, military and intelligence. His research covers violent extremism, radicalisation and prison radicalisation, deradicalisation and intervention.

Jan Ali, with colleagues at WSU, has in the past received funding from NSW Police to conduct research on de-radicalisation.
 Clarke Jones, Co-Director of the Australian Intervention Support Hub (AISH), Australian National University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62868 2016-07-21T23:31:42Z 2016-07-21T23:31:42Z How we discovered infectious diseases in 2,000-year-old faeces from the Silk Road

Personal 'hygiene sticks' used in toilets on the Silk Road. Hui-Yuan Yeh. Reproduced from the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports., CC BY-SA

Once travelled by famous historical figures such as Marco Polo and Genghis Khan, the Silk Road was a hugely important network of transport routes connecting eastern China with Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. It came to prominence during the Chinese Han Dynasty (202 BC to AD 220) and remained a key transport route for the following 2,000 years.

Given that the Silk Road was a melting pot of people, it is no wonder that researchers have suggested that it might have been responsible for the spread of diseases such as bubonic plague, anthrax and leprosy between China and Europe. However, no one one has yet found any evidence to show how diseases in eastern China reached Europe. Travellers might have spread these diseases taking a southerly route via India and the Middle East, or a northerly route via Mongolia and Russia.

But our team, including researchers at the University of Cambridge and China's Academy of Social Sciences and Gansu Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology, has now found the earliest evidence for the spread of infectious disease organisms along the Silk Road. The results have been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports.

 Extent of Silk Route/Silk Road. Red is land route and the blue is the sea/water route. NASA/wikimedia

We investigated latrines at the Xuanquanzhi relay station, a fortified stopping point along the Silk Road that was built in 111 BC and used until 109 AD. It is located at Dunhuang, at the eastern end of the Tamrin Basin, an arid region that contacts the fearsome Taklamakan Desert. When the latrines were excavated, the archaeologists found sticks with cloth wrapped around one end (see lead image). These have been described in ancient Chinese texts of the period as a personal hygiene tool for wiping the anus after going to the toilet. Some of the cloth had a dark solid material still adhered to it after all this time.

Faeces under the microscope

We realised that this material was faeces when we looked at it with a high-powered optical microscope. We also found the eggs of four species of parasitic intestinal worms in it. This may seem surprising but the eggs of many species of intestinal worms are very tough and may survive thousands of years in the ground. This indicates that some of the people using this latrine 2,000 years ago were infected with parasites. The species included roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), Taenia sp. tapeworm (likely T. solium, T. asiatica or T. solium) and Chinese liver fluke (Clonorchis sinensis).

Roundworm and whipworm are parasites found right across the world in the past and indicate poor personal hygiene, as the worms are spread by the contamination of food and hands by human faeces. Taenia sp. tapeworm is spread by eating raw or undercooked meat such as pork and beef, and again has been found across large areas of the world in the past.

Meanwhile, Chinese liver fluke – which can cause abdominal pain, diarrhoea, jaundice and liver cancer – is only found in regions of eastern and southern China and Korea, as it has a complex life cycle. It is restricted to areas with wet marshy countryside, as the parasite must pass through the intermediate hosts of a water snail and freshwater fish before it can infect humans. The humans have to eat the fish raw if it is to infect them. In modern times, the closest area to Dunhuang where Chinese liver fluke is found is 1,500km away, and the region where most cases of infection are found is 2,000km away.

 Egg of Chinese liver fluke discovered in the latrine at Xuanquanzhi, viewed using microscopy. Dimensions 29 x 16 micrometers. The Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports., CC BY

Discovering evidence for Chinese liver fluke at a latrine in the arid region of Dunhuang was really exciting. The parasite could not possibly be endemic in that region as there are no marshy areas needed for its life cycle. Instead, it shows that a person who became infected with the liver fluke in eastern or southern China was able to travel the huge distance to this relay station along the Silk Road – at least 1,500km.

Our finding suggests that we now know for sure that the Silk Road was responsible for spreading infectious diseases in ancient times. This makes more likely previous proposals that bubonic plague, leprosy and anthrax could also have been spread along it.

Piers Mitchell 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.
 Piers Mitchell, Affiliated Lecturer in Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62662 2016-07-21T20:35:09Z 2016-07-21T20:35:09Z Is the Constitution at stake in this year's election?
If Senate Republicans are true to their word, the next president of the United States will nominate Justice Antonin Scalia's replacement.

Given the age of several other members of the Supreme Court and rumors of others' retirement, it is likely the next president will make as many as four nominations.

This potentially dramatic change in the makeup of the court could transform how our constitution is interpreted, an issue on which the court effectively has the last word. At stake: voting rights, how elections are conducted, requirements for abortion providers, union dues for public employees and claims to religious exemption from anti-discrimination laws, among other issues.

The court could move dramatically to the left in the event of a Clinton victory in November, disrupting the conservative trend of the last two decades. In a little-reported speech last March in Madison, Wisconsin, Clinton made it clear she would nominate progressive justices. She has also said she would want justices committed to overruling Citizens United, the case that invalidated much of the federal regulations on election spending.

Many voters may vote for Trump solely to prevent that from happening.

A Trump victory would ensure a move further to the right. Donald Trump has said the future of the Supreme Court is at stake in this election, and has released a list of reliably conservative potential nominees.

The Republican platform, approved at the party convention on July 18, says:

"…a new Republican president will restore to the Court a strong conservative majority that will follow the text and original meaning of the Constitution and our laws."

As a constitutional law professor for more than two decades, I have observed the ways in which court doctrine can fluctuate as one constitutional vision or another commands a majority.

It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the Supreme Court, and of our constitutional system, turns on the outcome of the November election.

Different constitutional visions

Republicans and Democrats have different visions of how our Constitution is best understood. One fundamental disagreement is about whether the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when written or whether it evolves over time. Justice Scalia said the latter view is "idiotic." Justice Stephen Breyer, usually on the liberal side, believes in a "living constitution."

The conservatives have held a fairly reliable if tight majority since 1990. The Supreme Court started to trend in a conservative direction with President Richard Nixon's appointment of William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell in 1972. It was consolidated by President George H. W. Bush's replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas in 1990. Replacing the archconservative Antonin Scalia with almost any Democratic nominee is anathema to Republicans, as it would shift the balance of power to the liberal bloc.

Any nominee of a Democratic president will be far more liberal than was Justice Scalia. Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee whom the Republican leadership in the Senate has decided to ignore, is more likely to join the liberal bloc on the court. A Clinton nominee is likely to be even more reliably progressive.

On the other hand, if Donald Trump defers to the Federalist Society when it comes to judicial appointments, as he has said he will, a Trump nominee could be expected to join the conservative bloc and, for now, preserve the ideological status quo.

Decisions that could go the other way

Many difficult constitutional questions in recent years have been answered by the court in close, usually 5-4, decisions. The conservative bloc, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist before him, has been dominant on many issues for more than two decades.

The conservative bloc has dominated on the relationship between the national and state governments, on the right of individuals to file suit, on the use of race in governmental decision-making, on voting rights and on the right to keep and bear arms.

Affirmative action is illustrative. Conservative textualists claim that any governmental use of race is race discrimination and violates the equal protection clause. Liberals, on the other hand, believe it is the purpose of the equal protection clause to invalidate racial classifications only when they are used to exclude (for example, denying someone service because of their race) and not those used to include (for example, taking a person's race into account in university admissions to achieve diversity).

The court, adopting the conservative view, has held that the Constitution prohibits the government from taking race into account unless correcting its own constitutional wrongs, with the possible exception of the use of race in higher education admissions. In other words, the government may constitutionally do nothing to redress societal discrimination on the basis of race for which it is not responsible.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, in which the Supreme Court rejected the consideration of a student's race in making K-12 school assignment decisions, the "way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejects that abstract approach to equality as unrealistic. Dissenting in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, in which the court upheld the decision by Michigan voters to prohibit the consideration of race in public university admissions, she wrote:

the "way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination."

These are two very different views of how the Constitution is best understood: as colorblind, regardless of the realities of the world around us; or as permitting color consciousness, because of the realities of the world around us.

The next president, in nominating, and the Senate, in confirming the next justice, has every right to ask whether the nominee shares the originalist constitutional vision of the late Justice Scalia or the progressive constitutional vision of Justice Breyer. If Justice Scalia were to be replaced by a similar justice, little would change in the short run. But if Justice Scalia's replacement is as different in constitutional vision as Justice Clarence Thomas was different from Thurgood Marshall, much could change.

The court, and so our constitutional doctrine, could be ideologically transformed. This is not because judges are ideologues promoting their own political preferences, but because the constitutional vision of the justices has been vetted and approved through a political process of nomination and confirmation.

Patrick Wiseman 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.
 Patrick Wiseman, Professor of Law, Georgia State University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61738 2016-07-21T20:17:54Z 2016-07-21T20:17:54Z Friday essay: secrets of the Delphic Oracle and how it speaks to us today

The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the wisdom of the oracle was dispensed. Janet Lackey/flickr, CC BY-NC

Imagine a place to go in times of doubt and uncertainty, where one can find out what to do and what to avoid, straight from a reliable source. A place where all questions have tangible answers and all problems a solution.

Unfortunately, such a place does not exist today. But did it once?

In the ancient world, oracles such as the one at Delphi famously promised to reveal the past, present and future. They were the apex of a sizeable pyramid of institutions and individuals dealing in futures (of the non-economic kind), which also included itinerant seers and personal oracle collections.

Yet Delphi and its like rarely provided simple answers. Take the famous example of King Croesus of Lydia. Croesus asked at Delphi whether he should wage war against the Persians. He was told that he would destroy a great empire. Taking the response to predict victory, he launched a military confrontation with Xerxes, Persia's mighty king. Croesus did end up destroying an empire – his own.

This example is by no means unique. The ancient historian Herodotus, who reports it in the Histories, cites many similar stories of prediction and fulfilment. And the picture does not look much different in many other ancient reports of Delphic prophecies.

More often than not, it seems, those drawing on the gods to know the unknowable did not receive a straightforward answer. Instead, they faced a new question: did they understand the real meaning of the prophecy?

A voice of authority

In the ancient world, the Delphic Oracle was the highest religious authority. Nestled on Mount Parnassus in Phocis in central Greece, the oracle was open for business once a month except during winter.

 Veduta Of Delphi, With A Sacrificial Procession by Claude Lorrain, (1645). Wikimedia Commons

At the core of the oracle's operations was a priestess, the Pythia, who delivered the responses directly to the enquirer from the inner sanctum of Apollo's temple. She was considered a mouthpiece of the omniscient god of prophecy.

On consultation day, people flocked to Delphi to enquire about an eclectic mix of concerns: politics and warfare, of course, but also religion, health, lovesickness, and offspring – to name just a few issues.

 The Priestess of Delphi by John Collier, 1891. Wikimedia Commons

Among those consulting the oracle were some of the most (in)famous and illustrious individuals of the ancient world. Socrates's friend Chaerephon enquired whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. Apparently he was told that no-one was.

Yet what did this really mean – that Socrates was indeed the wisest person in the world or that there was someone equally knowledgeable? Another predictable question is the one Cicero asked: how to become famous.

The neurotic Roman emperor Nero, meanwhile, tried to learn the timing of his own death from the Delphic oracle. He was told to "beware of the seventy-third year" and so considered himself safe, but was murdered shortly after by Galba who was – you guessed it – 73 years old.

Alexander the Great did not even get to ask a question, arriving at the oracle on a day it was closed and the Pythia declined to deliver prophecies. Yet "no" was never an option for Alexander.

When he tried to drag the priestess into the temple by force, she cried, "You are invincible, youth!" – whereupon Alexander turned around and left. He had the prediction he wanted.

Everyone, it seems, got the oracle they deserved. The questions asked at Delphi and at the numerous other oracular centres of the ancient world reveal as much about the enquirer as the capacity of the Pythia to anticipate past, present and future events.

How did it work?

How did the Pythia deliver the prophecies? Modern visitors to the oracle are obsessed by the question. Surely there is a secret to be revealed? A mystery to be uncovered? Or at least a clever trick to be unmasked? Interestingly, the ancients themselves seemed entirely oblivious to the "how". They did not ask – let alone answer it for us in any satisfying way.

 King Aegeus consults the Pythia, who is seated. Attic red-figure kylix, 440–430 BC Wikimedia Commons

Was the answer obvious to them? Or was this, perhaps, a religious secret not to be discussed? Whatever the case, for years, the theory that the Pythia was "inspired" by vapours emerging from the ground has fascinated present day visitors of the ancient oracle.

This theory, based on late, unreliable and misunderstood evidence, has once again been reignited by new geological research in the area of Delphi demonstrating the presence of light hydrocarbon gases, which are known to have hallucinogenic effects. The mystery lives on – as do the vapours.

One thing, however, is clear as soon as one considers the prophecies themselves. The oracles that have come down to us – around 600 questions and answers from Delphi preserved in a wide range of historical and literary texts and in the form of inscriptions – are not the result of some drug-induced state of mind. Most likely they are the product of oral tradition spun around events that may or may not have really happened at Delphi and elsewhere.

As a result, many oracles are like poetry in the often astonishing and exhilarating ways their central images and metaphors always and invariably find a specific referent in the world: figurative and concrete, allusive and illusive.

Phalanthus of Sparta, for example, received a prediction that he would win both a city and a territory "when rain falls from cloudless sky". After several failed attempts to take a city, he remembered the oracle. Surely it was impossible for him ever to win military success – just as unlikely as for rain to fall from clear sky.

  Wikimedia Commons

In despair, he laid his head in his wife's lap and bemoaned his fate. His wife, however, felt such sympathy for her husband that she started to cry.

Her name, we learn, was Aethra (ancient Greek for "clear sky") and her tears the drops of rain that fell seemingly out of the blue. The same night Phalanthus sacked the city of Tarentum in southern Italy.

The real and the imaginary

Oracles like this one typically feature paradoxes, metaphors and images that are also the heart of poetic language. The reading of these prophecies, then, requires extraordinary diligence, a special sense for words and their meaning, and the willingness and capacity to look at the world in new and creative ways.

The exiled king Arcesilaus enquired at Delphi about the possibility of returning to Cyrene. The oracle foretold that his family would remain in power for eight generations but added a personal message to the king:

As for yourself, when you return to your country, be gentle. If you find the oven full of jars, do not bake them but send them off with the wind. But if you do heat the oven, enter not the land surrounded by water, for otherwise you will die, and the best of the bulls with you.

After his return to Cyrene, Arcesilaus took great care to sidestep the prophecy but readily took revenge on his adversaries. When some of them fled into a tower, he had wood stacked around it and set it on fire. Too late he registered that in doing so he had "heated the oven full of jars". Arcesilaus died soon after in the coastal town of Barca.

Some oracles and the accounts told about them are not authentic. The Pythia cannot possibly have predicted the events leading up to Arcesilaus' death. Yet this does not mean we can simply dismiss this evidence as the stuff of literary fiction.

 Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia by Eugene Delacroix, 1835/1845

Questions of authenticity are relevant to the social and political histories of the ancient world and the role of oracles within them. The cultural historian and historians of religions also want to know: What kind of questions did the ancients put to the oracle, real or imaginary? How far into the future did they look? And what religious beliefs, insights and general truths are contained in the stories told about the oracle?

For the ancients, Delphi was as much a place of the real as the imaginary. It was a site to which one could travel and ask questions. But it was also – perhaps even more so – an imaginary site around which meaningful religious narratives could be spun.

 Remains of the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona. Wikimedia Commons

The evidence from another oracular site confirms this. At the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona, enquirers at the oracle wrote their questions onto lead tablets, which were then folded and submitted to the sanctuary. Hundreds of these tablets have been found, giving very good insight into the questions actually asked at that oracle:

Did Dorkilos steal the cloth?

God. Gerioton asks Zeus concerning a wife whether it is better for him to take one.

Cleotas asks Zeus and Dione if it is better and profitable for him to keep sheep.

And, somewhat more sensitively:

Lysanias asks Zeus Naios and Deona whether the child is not from him with which Annyla is pregnant.

In their straightforwardness, these questions resemble those oracles from Delphi which were inscribed in stone right after the consultation and so less likely to be subject to embellishment. Taken together, this evidence illustrates that in the main, very simple questions were asked at oracles – relegating the elaborate tales of prediction and fulfilment to the realm of the imaginary.

Note also that to answer these questions does not require great predictive capacities. Good common sense and, perhaps, some insight is all that's needed. Nor do these questions really concern the deep future: mostly they reflect simple concerns of the day to day.

Delphi's modern legacy

Unfortunately, the Delphic oracle is no longer in business – at least, not of the oracular kind. In 390/1 CE the Roman emperor Theodosius I closed it down in a bid to end pagan cults. However, the excavated site is now a booming tourist destination and well worth the visit.

 Altar of Apollo. Andy Hay/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Every time has its own oracles. The legacy of Delphi lies not so much in fortune-tellers, soothsayers and horoscopes: the central and authoritative role of the oracle in the ancient world is reflected in more serious ways we try to anticipate the future.

We have an enduring desire to enquire into what is beyond the here and now, which manifests in our – frequently futile – attempts to control what comes next.

Economic forecasts try to model future expectations based on past experiences, but – much like ambiguous oracles – they are usually vague enough to allow for a way out if things go wrong: past returns do not indicate future gains…

 A modern oracle? Jeffrey L. Cohen/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Google and other search engines invoke the idea that the entire, collective knowledge of humanity – everything that can possibly be known – is only a few clicks away. This is, of course, mere illusion. As with the ancient oracles, answers provided in this way are only ever as good as the question asked.

Finally, the language in which many politicians cloak promises of events to come is directly reminiscent of the metaphors and ambiguities of many Delphic responses. The example of Croesus' "great empire that will be destroyed" seems uncomfortably apposite in light of modern-day conflicts and international politics.

Know thyself!

Given that the oracular is still very much alive we may wonder how Delphi still speaks to us today, which insights remain relevant and what kind of knowledge stands the test of time.

The ancients themselves asked the oracle that last question. Both Croesus of Lydia and Chilon of Sparta enquired at Delphi about what was best to know. Both received a response saying that to "know thyself" (gnōthi seauton) was best.

Know thyself! In many ways this is the tag line of the Delphic brand. The motto was inscribed into the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, clearly visible to those wishing to consult the oracle.

 Head of Nero (reign 54–68 CE). After 64 BC. Wikimedia Commons

It is also the implicit moral message of many accounts of oracle consultations recounting the (frequently unhappy) consequences of misinterpreting the oracle's words. Overconfidence ends in downfall. If only Croesus had looked beyond his own circumstances… If only Nero had considered the world in more complex terms…

Oracles did not provide simple answers to simple questions – nor do their modern counterparts. Rather, all attempts to look into the future provide the incentive for us to examine our own expectations, to confront our own desires and our own ways of make-believe.

If we rise to the challenge we find more often than not that things are different from how they first appear. Delphi continues to remind those of us prepared to listen that, to be successful in the world, we must consider other realities which may look very different from our own.

Have you ever been to "Delphi"? If not, check out the online Homeromanteion.

Julia Kindt receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
 Julia Kindt, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Sydney Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62418 2016-07-21T20:17:06Z 2016-07-21T20:17:06Z What Australia can learn from England's plan for vocational education

The plan involves establishing two educational tracks for students to take. from www.shutterstock.com

The UK has set out a plan to reform English vocational education. It's post-16 skills plan will establish two educational tracks for students over 16 years old by building a technical education route to go alongside the well-established academic track.

The aim is to strengthen vocational education – now called "technical education" – which a series of reports found to be an incoherent mishmash of vocational, general and academic studies with weak educational and employment outcomes.

Two options within technical education

The technical route will have two options: college-based technical education, which will include industry placements, and employment-based technical education, such as apprenticeships, which include at least 20% college-based education.

College-based technical education will extend to diploma level and employment-based technical education will extend to baccalaureate level, incorporating the 1,000 degree apprenticeships which have been established since 2013.

This would reverse the blurring of academic, general and vocational education, which has been a major trend over the last few decades in England, as it has been in Australia, the US and elsewhere.

 How the academic and technical options would work. Post-16 Skills Plan report, Department for Education

Fifteen education routes

The government will establish 15 technical education routes, which group occupations with shared requirements.

The routes were derived from an analysis of current labour market information and projections of future skills needs, which were reviewed with employers, academics and occupational bodies.

The technical education routes are based on related occupations rather than sectors. For example, the digital route includes many occupations such as web designer and network administrator, most of whom are employed outside the IT sector.

These technical education routes will help streamline the education system, providing clearer options for students in Years 11, 12 and 13.

Reject the market in qualifications

In England, vocational qualifications are designed and awarded by 158 different awarding organisations. Many of these are private for-profit companies, which seek to increase their business by multiplying qualifications.

In 2015, there were over 21,000 vocational qualifications. Prospective plumbers, for example, have to choose from 33 qualifications offered at three different levels by five different awarding organisations.

The government expressed concerns about the qualifications market:

Instead of competition between different awarding organisations leading to better quality and innovation in the design of qualifications, it can lead to a race to the bottom in which awarding organisations compete to offer qualifications which are easier to pass and therefore of lower value.

Reject competency-based training

In a move that should provoke deep reflection by Australian policymakers, the UK government's panel rejected the competency-based training of Australian vocational education qualifications:

We considered whether the current National Occupational Standards (NOS) could form the basis of technical education. However, NOS have been derived through a functional analysis of job roles and this has often led to an atomistic view of education and a rather tick-box approach to assessment. As such we do not consider them to be fit-for-purpose for use in the design of the technical education routes.

Public funds should not be allocated to for-profit providers

The panel estimated that at least 30% of government funding for English vocational education is allocated to private providers.

But there was a strong view that public funds should not be allocated in this way:

Given what appears to be the highly unusual nature of this arrangement compared to other countries and the high costs associated with offering world-class technical education, we see a strong case for public funding for education and training to be restricted to institutions where surpluses are reinvested into the country's education infrastructure.

It was suggested that publicly subsidised technical education should be delivered under not-for-profit arrangements and that new government funding should be "prioritised towards colleges and training providers who intend to reinvest all surpluses into education infrastructure".

Implications for Australia

This has direct implications for Australia, where private providers now offer 46% of government-funded vocational education. This is an extraordinary increase on the 29% share they had in 2011.

Australia might also consider the UK's apprenticeship levy, which will be introduced from April 2017.

The levy will require employers with a payroll of over £3 million (A$5.2 million) to spend 0.5% of that on approved apprenticeships.

This will be similar to – but more rigorous than – the training guarantee Australia introduced in 1990 as part of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS).

While training levies work well in 62 developed countries such as Austria, Denmark and France, Australia withdrew its training guarantee in 1994 because it was unpopular among employers and was weak.

But the collapse in apprenticeship numbers and the 31% cut in government funding per vocational education student since 2005 may prompt the government to consider following England in introducing an apprenticeship levy.

Gavin Moodie is an adjunct professor of RMIT University which offers vocational education. He received funding from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
 Gavin Moodie, Adjunct professor, RMIT University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives. tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62539 2016-07-21T20:16:51Z 2016-07-21T20:16:51Z Italians again migrate to Australia, but experience work exploitation

Italian migration to Australia is more temporary this time. Flickr/Dave Kellam, CC BY

Increasing numbers of young Italians are following in the footsteps of previous generations in migrating to Australia, but up to 40% report feeling exploited at work, and found it difficult to have their skills recognised, new research has found.

Any suggestion that there is a new exodus of Italians to Australia is probably overblown. In broad terms, the Italian share of the Australian Temporary visa program between 2004 and 2015 was a very small 1.5% of the national total.

In terms of the Italian contribution to the Australian Migration Program, the figure is slightly lower at 0.5%, with 8,711 visas granted of the total of 1,832,548.

But in the last decade, the numbers of both temporary and permanent visas granted to Italians to visit and reside in Australia has gradually increased. Italians have taken advantage of Working Holiday arrangements introduced in 2004 and also sought job opportunities away from an economically troubled Europe.

While the previous cohort of Italian migrants to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s is well documented, this new and more "mobile" migration based on temporary grounds is less understood.

In our analysis of 126,233 Italian temporary visa holders, we found 40.7% fall into the working holiday visa program category, while 24.3% were on visitor visas. Partner visas accounted for 42.4% of the Italian share of the Migration Program from 2004 to 2015.

Employer-sponsored migrants was the second-largest group (37%), while the third largest group were those applying for a skilled independent visa (9.1%).

However, the aggregate figures of the three visa subclasses are still very low (the first two represent 0.8% of the national total, while the third one only 0.2%).

As part of our research, we also surveyed 600 Italians who had arrived in Australia after 2004. Focus groups were also conducted with new Italian migrants and migration agents in order to ensure the validation of the results of the survey responses.

The analysis of the survey data confirms almost 50% of Italians arrives in Australia through the working holiday visa program, followed by 13% on a student visa and 12% on a 457 skills visa.

The survey found 83% were in the 18-40 age bracket and highly educated, with 60% holding either a Bachelor Degree, a Masters Degree, or even a PhD.

Interestingly, only 9% were unemployed before moving to Australia. The survey indicated 24% had been white-collar employees, 17% professionals, 15% were students (without scholarship) and 12% blue-collar employees.

While many respondents indicated that one of the main reasons for coming to Australia was to find better job opportunities, 52% indicated it was to "to have a new life experience".

But this has come at a cost for a number of Italians. The ABC's Four Corners program revealed what it described as "gangs of black market workers run by unscrupulous labour hire contractors operating on farms and in factories around the country" that included new Italian arrivals as its victims. More recently, a Senate report, A National Disgrace: The Exploitation of Temporary Work Visa Holders focused on this particular situation.

Our study confirms this previous research. More than 40% of all Italian respondents reported a difficult work experience in Australia where they felt they had been exploited.

The focus groups confirmed the existence of a variety of difficulties experienced by new Italian migrants from the initial visa application to more complex settlement issues.

Although many of these young and highly skilled migrants viewed the idea of settling permanently in Australia positively, they were concerned at the lengthy and complex process of obtaining permanent residency.

Most in the focus groups complained about their dealings with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), about unclear and at times conflicting information provided by the DIBP as well as difficulty in actually speaking to a person for guidance.

Despite recognising the functional aspects of Australian society and the efficiency of public services, very few had high expectations in terms of assistance from the Australian government.

The one area of dissatisfaction was the failure of the government to recognise professional qualifications, especially in the field of architecture, nursing and engineering.

This study sought to address a new dimension of Italian migration, a completely different cohort which has little in common with those of the past except for the origin country – Italy.

Despite some noise about a new exodus of Italians to Australia, this study demonstrates that much of the Italian interest in Australia is in short term stays and that number of Italians coming to Australia are significantly inferior to the levels of the 1950s and 1960s.

Bruno Mascitelli received funding for this study on Italian migration from the Italian Government and specifically from the Italian department of Foreign Affairs.

Riccardo Armillei received funding for this study on Italian migration from the Italian Government and specifically from the Italian department of Foreign Affairs.
 Bruno Mascitelli, Assoc. Professor, European Studies, Swinburne University of Technology Riccardo Armillei, Research Fellow - Social Science, Deakin University Licenced as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.