Obama inauguration speech: a historic moment for gay and lesbian equality

Written by Marcus O’Donnell, Lecturer, Program Convenor Journalism at the University of Wollongong.

Obama wove the story of gay rights into the language of America’s founding fathers during his inauguration speech. EPA/Shawn Thew

 

Much has been made of the fact President Obama became the first president to mention the word gay in an inaugural address. But the significance lies not in what he said but how he said it.

In declaring, “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law” Obama not only declared himself abstractly for “gay rights”, he placed these rights at the heart of the central ideals of the American story.

Obama’s whole speech sprung from his reiteration of the much sung hymn to equality from the Declaration of Independence which he quoted at the start of his speech: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. Presidents and other American orators are fond of quoting this lodestone of the American dream, so it is not surprise that Obama should refer to it.

But his speech was much more telling because he made clear that he took those words as a call to action: “For history tells us that while these truths maybe self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth”.

Again, a rousing call to act for freedom and equality is common place in the American presidential tradition. Obama’s distinctive play on this came with his declaration that securing equality and freedom entailed both a steadfast commitment to the founding father’s vision and embracing intelligent changes in the light of contemporary challenges. “But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”.

Obama’s riff on gay and lesbian rights then begins in a very specific way which very skillfully links it to both adaptation to new challenges and collective action: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth”.

In this extraordinary declaration, Obama not only declares that adapting to, and fighting for, gay and lesbian rights is important, but that the fight for these rights, which stems from the 1969 Stonewall riots, should be placed on the same footing as the fight for women’s rights at Seneca Falls and the fight for racial equality at Selma. Here the president effectively placed the fight for gay and lesbian rights within the myth of the ongoing American revolution.

This leads to an explicit call for gay and lesbian equality in the next paragraph: “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”.

Obama goes further here than any of his predecessors would have dared. This is not just a call for equality under the law, it is a carefully phrased call for same sex marriage: “the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”.

Obama has recently declared his support for same sex marriage, so this is not a new statement. But his inclusion of such a statement in an inaugural address, a key ritual moment of American democracy, and his inclusion of this declaration in the context of the fight for women’s and civil rights marks yet another milestone in the story of gay and lesbian citizenship.

The fight for marriage equality faces several key tests in the US this year, the most significant of which are the cases before the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, both of which define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.

One of the ongoing pressure points in American public debate has been around so called “judicial-activism” on social issues. In opposing such “activism” conservative legal scholars often adhere to a doctrine called “originalism”, which proclaims that any constitutional judgement must aim to get as close as possible to the original meaning of the words of the founding fathers when interpreting the constitution.

In this carefully crafted speech, Obama not only laid a claim for gay and lesbian equality and same sex marriage; he was laying a claim that any constitutional value of equality does not have an original or fundamentalist meaning, rather one that constantly evolves.

This is fundamentally at odds with our own Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who appeals to the importance of tradition and “heritage” in her own refusal to acknowledge the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Australians.

Traditions only continue to have meaning when they are reinterpreted and made relevant by each generation. Obama’s inauguration speech was an inspiring attempt to do this. Let’s hope his actions over the next four years are equally inspiring.

Originally posted on The Conversation

Hate blood but want a career in medicine? Don’t worry, there’s a job for you

Written by Ian Wilson, Professor, Associate Dean – Learning and Teaching at University of Wollongong.

Some students come into medicine with a fixed idea of what they want to do – but this often changes. uonottingham

Just before I finished high school, my local general practitioner suggested I consider medicine. But the thought of blood made me feel squeamish, so I went to university to do maths and physics, and to try the new field of computer science. Needing a fourth subject, I opted for biology so that my friend who also did biology could give me a lift to campus.

I ended up becoming fascinated with biology, so much so that I wanted to study neuroscience, and I felt the best way into a research career was through medicine. Luckily, I was successful. As an undergraduate I discovered patients and shifted my focus to a career as a psychiatrist.

I was called up for National Service and ended up on a Defence Force Scholarship. During this time I became interested in trauma surgery and after discharge joined the surgical training scheme. After six months of surgery, I was bored with the technical side but still enjoyed the patient contact and interaction. Being married with one child and another on the way, I opted for general practice with a mental health and procedural focus.

I tell this story in some detail to highlight the meanderings that many students undertake in their career decision-making. Some students come into medicine with a fixed idea of what they want to do and spend their time achieving that goal.

But the majority are more like me and develop multiple interests. Where they end up generally depends on a number of factors such as available training posts, skill levels, controllability of lifestyle and to a very small extent, salary.

The Medical Schools Outcome Database and Longitudinal Tracking Project (MSOD) asks students about their career intentions on entry to and exit from medical school, and as interns (their first year working in a hospital) and residents (their second year of work). On entry to medical school in 2011, 25% of medical students had a first preference for surgery with paediatrics and general practice the next most frequent.

The preferences of those exiting medical school in 2011 were a little different: internal medicine and surgery were the most common career choices (18% each) followed by general practice and then paediatrics. Towards the end of the internship, the preferences changed again, with internal medicine the most frequently chosen (19%) followed by general practice and then surgery.

The least preferable career options tend to be rehabilitation, public health and palliative care – most students come into medicine to save lives, making these specialities less appealing.

With the growing number of medical graduates and the relative shortage of intern and specialist training positions, we have noticed a change in student behaviour.

Increasingly, students are attempting to ensure their undergraduate experiences provide them with the best advantage for their career selection process. Honours degrees or the publication of papers will add a few extra points in some speciality selection processes and students are working hard to achieve these goals.

Hospital choice is also seen as important, as there is a perception among medical students that undertaking an internship in a specific hospital increases their chances of being selected into a specific specialist training program. But these beliefs aren’t necessarily based on facts.

Some experts have suggested using career counselling to increase the number of students entering careers that are less appealing or where there are significant shortages. But there’s no evidence to show career counselling works in this way.

The best way to deal with this issue is around student selection and undergraduate experiences. Choosing students who are more likely to enter a given profession and providing them with experiences that are positive will work much more effectively in promoting careers in the generalist professions (medicine, surgery and rural general practice).

But often the impact of changes does not stop at the school level. Many professionals, including doctors, invest so much of their time and energy into their careers they are surprised that their practice takes on a sameness. Once you have delivered 200 babies or conducted 100 gall bladder operations the procedures lose their excitement.

This is the point at which many doctors start looking for something new and engage in medical politics, education, research, business ventures or artistic endeavours.

Some, like me, become dissatisfied with individual care and want to have a bigger impact on the world. Moving into academia to train the next cohorts of doctors seemed a logical step. In light of my original interest in research, this was a hugely positive for me.

Originally posted on The Conversation

The Private World of Carbon Reporting

Written by Corrine Cortese, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, and Jane Andrew, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Carbon reporting regulations are controlled by a select few. freefotouk/Flickr

Five years ago, we really didn’t have a clue what an organisation’s carbon impact might look like, and few firms had any sort of carbon-oriented business plan. Now, the trend is to fill this gap by producing carbon reports.

But within this story of emerging carbon reporting practice lies another story that has received little attention – how corporate elites have worked together to design their own self-regulations.

Before we get to that, it’s important we map out the story so far.

A brand new idea

Going back a few years now, there was a general feeling that organisations should tell us more about their carbon footprint, so that both insiders and outsiders could start to move towards more carbon sensitive decisions.

This was a kind of mobilisation phase – getting people on board with a new idea. Arguments were developed, suggesting reasons why organisations should tell us more about carbon. Some of these reasons offered a moral framing of organisational responsibility, while others articulated a more strategic need for good carbon data to manage climate change risks.

Carbon reporting soon became the focus of discussion, and we saw a rapid growth in the production and reporting of carbon-related data. Many organisations began to focus on the carbon disclosures they produced for outside users.

Such projects are technically difficult, and also very “market sensitive”. It’s understandable that firms didn’t want to get the measurements wrong, and most of us can appreciate that they didn’t want to get their carbon image wrong either. Outside of these organisations, there was a growing call for carbon information to be placed in the public domain to give us some idea of how organisations were managing carbon “risks and opportunities”. Firms began to respond.

The idea was simple; organisations provide information voluntarily, thereby signalling their good citizenship and strategic management of climate change abatement responsibilities.

Such a disclosure regime rests on the logic that a free market will provide the information demanded by participants without the need for regulatory intervention. “Good” organisations would be rewarded with greater investment and better borrowing conditions and “bad” performers would be disciplined (they’d be put out of business or reform their behaviour to attract necessary capital).

The problems with this kind of green capitalism that are well documented. So, for the purposes of this article, we’ll just focus on one tiny part: the practical reality of carbon reporting data and its potential role in climate change abatement.

Who designs the standard?

In reality, carbon reports are almost impossible to compare. There are now so many voluntary disclosure regimes and carbon reporting practices. These are based on a variety of frameworks and protocols. In effect, this means carbon information can look comparable, but in actual fact the output can be significantly different.

This has been frustrating. The frustration is particularly acute when trying to make the capital allocation decisions that have driven much of the carbon reporting agenda. These decisions depend on information that is comparable and standardised.

The existence of different reporting frameworks has limited the capacity for good market allocation decisions, and it has also limited our capacity to understand an organisation’s actual carbon impact.

The problem has not gone unnoticed. But up to this point, it has dodged any serious regulatory intervention, and has presented an opportunity for reporters to build a “standardised” framework themselves. It’s a scenario with obvious problems, but it has managed to fly under the radar and avoid much attention.

So who is designing the “global standards” for carbon reporting? The answer: perhaps disturbingly – is the private sector within the Carbon Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) leading this international initiative. It is important to note that the CDSB is a side project of the World Economic Forum (WEF), an organisation that is well known for its elite, private status.

This in itself is problematic. But the problems are amplified because the obvious exclusivity of membership within the WEF has been reproduced within the centres of the CDSB – without an eyebrow raised.

By way of example, the advisory board that guides the work of the CDSB is made up of representatives from corporations including Duke Energy, Praxair, Rio Tinto, British Telecom and Tokyo Electric Power Corporation. On the Board itself are representatives from groups such as CERES, the WEF, the Climate Registry, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the Climate Group, the World Resources Institute and the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA).

On face value, there appears to be an appropriate mix of “players” in the development of standards. But with a little further digging, it is apparent that within all of these groups, similar organisations are funding or participating in their activities in some way.

For example, the IETA has over 180 members from around the globe. The current Chairman is a Senior Climate Change Adviser for the Royal Dutch Shell Group, and a Vice Chairman is from Rio Tinto. Both Royal Dutch Shell and Rio Tinto have served on the Advisory Committee of the CDSB. Other members of the IETA that are also members of the CDSB Advisory Committee and Technical Working Group include Duke Energy, APX Power Markets, JP Morgan Chase, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Closed shop

Similar patterns of interconnectedness can be seen with other members of the board, advisory group and technical consultants. In other words, the same key players have a role in the development of carbon reporting initiatives. In effect, voluntary carbon regulation has become a closed shop. There are all kinds of reasons why this may be a reasonable space for regulatory development but we make a simple, yet important, observation.

Organisations like the CDSB are not neutral arbiters of best practice. They are vested with a wealth of political and economic power – and they are working hard to make sure carbon reporting regulation reflects the wishes of their members.

Given this, some researchers are now suggesting that the focus on reporting techniques has distracted attention away from more fundamental questions about environmental governance. In our rush to encourage a carbon sensitive market, there has been little room to pause and ask, who is behind all this? What will be the tangible environmental benefits that result? Are we ready to believe that publicly listed companies will formulate carbon regulations that serve the planet?

Originally posted on The Conversation

Four visions, three dimensions: the future of 3D printing

By Thomas Birtchnell, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Media and Communication at University of Wollongong, and Professor John Urry, Department of Sociology at Lancaster University.

Originally posted on The Conversation

 

Chances are you’ve heard about 3D printing – or additive manufacturing as it’s otherwise known: a process that turns computer-aided designs into three-dimensional, real-world objects with a range of uses, from a range of materials and on a range of scales.

But you’ve probably heard little in terms of the social impact that 3D printing and its associated technologies will likely have.

Those possible impacts are exactly what we’re investigating at Lancaster University and the University of Wollongong. We’ve identified four potential scenarios that could eventuate in a world that embraces 3D printing and, crucially, how those scenarios could affect everyday life.

Where we’re at

Walking around the 3D Printshow 2012 in London last month, the hype around 3D printing technology was palpable.

The first stall in view was MakerBot’s, and the company’s CEO and founder Bre Pettis was busy spruiking their Replicator 2 – Time Magazine’s Best Invention of 2012.

But it was in the other stalls out the back, populated by artists, entrepreneurs and researchers, where this innovation could be seen doing really interesting things.

In those stalls there were different intimations of the futures we have imagined in our project at Lancaster University.

In one corner there were a couple of children playing the game Minecraft. Their mother explained that they were actually creating 3D designs within the game (in between foraging for food and fighting spiders).

The game players design objects from cube-shaped blocks in the same way they might design in-game houses and caves.

A clever piece of software called Printcraft uploads designs made in Minecraft to a server, which automatically converts the designs into 3D-printable files. Then the player simply prints the design out on an adjacent 3D printer, in this case a MakerBot.

At another company’s stall a salesperson (the inventor was her dad) claimed her printer could print different colours at the same time – something that hasn’t been possible with 3D printers until now.

 Next to this one there was a 3D printer with a handle so it could be carried around – both printers drew on the open-source Reprap design.

An adjacent stall was a bit different in that it didn’t feature 3D printers. Instead, a team of designers and marketing gurus offered their 3D printing expertise for small product runs and trial inventions.

Further along there was a scale model of the Urbee 3D-printed car. There was also a chain-mail shirt made of tiny steel links, amazingly assembled by an expensive laser sintering printer.

And most impressively there was a row of 3D-printed mummified animals from an archaeological project rendered in near-perfect detail down to the bandages, as per the photo below:

Where we’re going

Our research has seen us explore four different social futures around 3D printing.

They were shaped by how corporate this new industrial revolution will be and how much individuals will engage with the technology. In particular we were interested in how 3D printing might influence the transportation of objects and the travel of people.

In order to find out what futures might be, where 3D printing has significance (or not), we held a workshop with the Futures Company in London, and picked the brains of engineers, consultants, policymakers and designers. The four possible futures are below:

1. Home factories

Everyone has a 3D printer in their home sitting next to their paper printer and making plastic jewellery, kitchen utensils, toys, models, homework projects and non-critical replacement parts.

People in this future no longer derive as much satisfaction from shopping in the high street for cheap products and are printing much more “stuff”, mostly made of plastic or resin.

2. Print shops

Manufacturing has “returned” to places such as the UK, the US and Australia.

Companies are integrating high-end 3D printers that print all sorts of exotic materials – from steel and titanium to sandstone and carbon fibre – into their supply chains and retail outlets.

As a result there are efficiency gains in how objects are transported and where they are made. Aeroplane parts and car dashboards, for instance, are made locally and customised to order.

3. Fab labs

Groups of people work together on not-for-profit or subsidised printers provided with support services and technicians.

The main focus is not new markets but rather new communities that craft objects they intend to use for recreation or for trading and selling in specialist “maker fairs”.

These communities hinge on open-source technologies and co-production ethics, and generally people are still relying on a global production system for much of what they need.

4. The 3D bubble

The market bubble has burst as inflated expectations have caused 3D printing to be severely over-hyped.

Many small entrepreneurs have gone bust and multinational corporations have not renewed their product lines. Consumers are dissatisfied with the appearance and unreliability of 3D-printed objects and design software is too complicated to master.

In this fourth future, 3D printing is still being used by specialists for prototyping, preservation of collections and high-end bespoke accessories.

 

 Will any of these futures happen? As always, time will tell. But we should be discussing the potential social impacts now, before the future arrives.

In the meantime, as the 3D Printshow 2012 ably demonstrated, there are already many exciting and inspiring uses of this technology.

Israel, Palestine and the benefits of waging war through Twitter

By Associate Professor Katina Michael. Originally posted on The Conversation.

Warfare, as we know, has gone digital, its volleys and counterattacks rattled out 140 characters at a time. Historically, nation states with superior military prowess have been in a position of influence, and are often dubbed superpowers.

But in the post Cold War era, such geopolitical giants have not had a monopoly in terms of technological interventionism. Terrorist regimes have lifted the veil on conventional warfare and sought non-traditional methods to attack their counterparts. So-called “rogue states”, such as Iran and North Korea, have been accused of hiding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and developing nuclear programs.

Today asymmetrical attacks can have the same psychological impact as a missile strike – we need only evoke the downing of the Twin Towers as a prime example. A state that has limited capital to fund its wars and limited resources to equip its armed forces does not necessarily need heavy artillery and sophisticated weaponry. Unconventional warfare can wreak havoc.

Who needs uninhabited spy drones for reconnaissance and guided missiles for precision killings? Who needs squadrons of fighters, bombers and attack aircraft and intercept missile defense systems? Who needs integrated soldier-system controls and night-vision goggles, smart-grip rifles, smart boots for direction and on-board computer packs for intelligent communications? Such military innovations are certainly useful in an all-out war but they are not the only way war can be waged.

Fingers on Keys, Not Triggers

Web 2.0 applications provide a complementary avenue for militaries to sway the hearts and minds of the international community, especially for the underdog. Why rely on CNN, BBC or Al Jazeera to report on what is happening during a crisis when militaries themselves can inform observers in real-time using Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube? Just mash it: share, republish and embed.

During the latest conflict in Gaza – which began on November 15 and came to an end following a ceasefire imposed in the early hours of this morning (AEST) – we’ve seen a war of words and images playing out before us. On the one hand, the State of Israel resorted to the use of Twitter to convey its message to its enemy and to the diaspora in what some have described as PR campaign “Brand Israel“. On the other, the Palestinian state responded by using its own Twitter account and threatening to retaliate with even greater force, uploading a record number of posts (more than 450 for the month of November alone). Surely we must rethink the socio-ethical implications around live-tweeting such events. Were the Israeli Defense Forces and Alqassam Brigades playing out an ultra-violent reality-TV show in this online war?

Without whatsoever belittling the crisis and seriousness of what unfolded, the online Twitter exchanges resembled the tone and language of squabbles overheard in a school playground:

I just did this to you because I am really mad at you … You shouldn’t have done that because what I can do to you is much worse!

@IDFSpokesperson/Twitter

No  Limits

Tweeting the image of an assassinated military commander with “ELIMINATED” stamped across it (as per the picture above) raises questions about what we can expect in the future. Automatic reporting from the bomb itself? And what of hoax texts? These can prove particularly dangerous with devastating consequences. And as if microblogging was not enough, we now have raw multimedia clips uploaded by both the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas on YouTube that show us the actual point of impact of an explosion (see video at the top). We can play these back as many times as we wish and even get the feeling of sitting on the pin-head of the missile or bomb as it is detonating. We are not so far, it seems, from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (see video below).

Our children shouldn’t be poisoned by images of war. Regardless, both of the combatants have been blatantly promoting violence and hatred and breaking with internet application policies of “objectionable material”. Soldiers in their twenties upload pictures on Instagram and blog about their experiences in real-time. “I was there when this happened.” It is their lifeworld. But it is also surreal.

 

Believe What You See

How can we be sure that what we are being fed on Twitter is a true and factual account? If the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts of the Israeli Deputy Premier Silvan Shalom can be hacked and filled with pro-Palestine status updates then anything is really possible. The central role being played by social media is not unique – and both states in this instance have had operational Twitter accounts for some time – but it does have interesting characteristics.

For one, it is not the citizens against the State, as was played out in the London Riots on August 6, 2011. No, this has been a conflict using social media between two states – and the citizens are its audience.  In the Vancouver Riots of June 15, 2011 there was an unprecedented amount of video footage and photographs taken by thousands of smartphone users in what has been termed crowdsourced sousveillance . Each of these phones could corroborate the events of the riots in Vancouver but when a military puts up a single video link the evidence is questionable.

Third, in the London Riots – unlike the Israeli-Palestinian online war – rioters and the supporters of rioters mainly used Blackberry Messenger to make it more difficult for their activities to be traced via public spaces such as Twitter.

 Data Capture

What might the motivation be for launching a Twitter war in the first place? Any social media consultant will tell you that the spread of ideas from person to person can be captured with data mining techniques: everything from social network analysis (TwitterFriends), to who is following who and who is being followed (TweetStats), to content analysis-based searches on keywords (TwitterVenn) and hashtags, to a geodemographic analysis of Tweets over time for a given account (UberTwitter).

A whole range of applications are now freely available to conduct these comprehensive analytics. (In fact, I’ve taken the time to compile some statistics from these applications and you can see the results in this PowerPoint presentation.) Is there a quicker way of capturing all Israeli or Hamas sympathisers in a uniquely formed social network based on a mix of politics, religion and nationalism? Israel and Palestine would now seemingly know more about one another than ever before. Opinion leaders have been ear-marked, as have their followers.  

This Nazi leaflet on the V-1 was dropped shortly after D-Day in 1944, showing scenes of apparent disaster in England. This can be contrasted by the use of social media for propaganda. German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College

What does this mean for national security? Everybody tweets, even the armed forces – how better to locate these individuals than by using a real-time geographic Twitter map? But how do we know that what is being said is factual? Who or what do we believe as outside observers?

Propaganda is an old tool to warm the masses. In the second world war the Nazis dropped tens of thousands of leaflets (see image above right) from the skies to convince those whom they were invading that all would be well under the Third Reich.

Today those same pamphlets have been turned into tiny bits and bytes, messages that can transcend time and space and go global in an instant via electronic networks. And we not only have Twitter but a whole host of tools at our disposal. Are they the new “weapons of mass destruction”?

Why not spread disinformation, or deliberately stretch the truth a little or a lot? Why not cause uprisings because that is what might suit us during any given month to deflect attention from elections, peacemaking and the like?  Those who see fit now have everything they need to measure opinion, conduct sentiment analyses and employ social media to sway opinion this way or that.

Our job, as always, is to be discerning.

The author would like to thank her collaborator Dr MG Michael, previously an honorary senior fellow at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia, for his insights and valuable input on the initial draft of this article.

Armageddon and its aftermath: dating the Toba super-eruption

By Richard (Bert) Roberts, ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Wollongong

No-one alive today has witnessed a volcanic eruption remotely as big as the Toba “super” eruption. But our ancestors may have done, tens of thousands of years ago, when northern Sumatra exploded, creating a caldera now filled by the largest volcanic lake on Earth, measuring 100km by 30km and 0.5km at its deepest. But when, exactly, did it happen?

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) my colleagues Michael Storey, Mokhtar Saidin and I have finally pinned a date on the Toba super-eruption. It happened 73,880 years ago, with an uncertainty of just 640 years (with 95% confidence).

The Eruption

This mega-colossal eruption was the third – and largest – in the last million years at Toba, and the most explosive on Earth for more than two million years.

More than seven trillion tonnes of volcanic material were ejected, of which at least 800km³ was spewed as ash across the Indian Ocean and the adjacent landmasses of South and Southeast Asia, covering several million square kilometres of the planet’s surface in debris.

The Toba blast pumped an equally staggering quantity of sulphurous gases into the atmosphere. The resulting chemical products were transported around the globe and are recognised as sulphate spikes in drill cores collected from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

The event dwarfs any other historical eruption, the largest of which was Tambora – also in Indonesia – in 1815. Despite being 100-times smaller in magnitude than Toba, Tambora led to a global drop in temperature of about 0.7 ºC and disastrous crop failures across the Northern Hemisphere the following year – dubbed “the year without a summer”.

Given the monumental size of Toba, surely it must have had a correspondingly catastrophic effect on the planet’s climate, landscape, flora and fauna?

And could it have also altered the course of human evolution, reducing the population to such a small size than our ancestors were squeezed through a genetic bottleneck?

Such questions and speculations have provided fodder for researchers since geological evidence for the Toba eruption was first reported at the end of the 19th century.

But, perhaps surprisingly, there remains no consensus at the present time on the climatic or ecological impacts of Toba, and this can be blamed, in large measure, on the fact that the exact date of this explosion had not been fixed to better than a few thousand years, at some point between about 70,000 and 75,000 years ago.

Such a wide margin of error meant that the Toba event could not be precisely aligned with the Earth’s climatic cycles, the comings and goings of animal and plant communities, the dispersals of our early ancestors out of Africa, or the disappearance of other human species in Asia and Europe.

How to date an eruption

My colleagues and I worked out the age of the explosion with high precision by dating crystals of the mineral sanidine using a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer at Roskilde University in Denmark.

Geochronologist Michael Storey measured the tiny amounts of argon gas built up inside the crystals since they were thrust out of the Toba volcano and deposited in adjacent Malaysia, where they now occur in thick beds of ash preserved in the valley bottoms.

In Malaysia’s Lenggong Valley, volcanic ash has buried stone tools that some archaeologists think were made by our early forebears, so our high-resolution age for the Toba eruption suggests that our ancestors were living in Southeast Asia before it erupted, more than 74,000 years ago.

Volcanic Impact

So, can we now answer all of the questions that have eluded researchers for so long? The answer, sadly, is no, but we can establish whether this mega-eruption led or lagged some of the most pronounced oscillations in Earth’s climate system, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

From temperature records extracted from the ice caps at both poles and from calcite formations in caves across Europe and Asia, we know that one of the longest periods of cold climate in the last 130,000 years began 74,000 years ago – when temperatures fell abruptly by several degrees centigrade – and ended 72,000 years ago.

The fall in temperature due to the eruption alone would have lasted no more than a few decades, but it may have accelerated or amplified a climatic cooling event already underway, providing positive feedback at a critical moment.

Although geologically brief, several decades of disruption to the climate and landscape could have had devastating ecological impacts, with potentially dire outcomes for humans living at the time of the blast.

The biota living in the vicinity of Toba would have been decimated over the 14-day duration of the eruption, and southeast Asia was then occupied by possibly four known species of human:

• Homo sapiens
• Homo erectus
• Homo floresiensis(the “Hobbits” of Flores)
• Denisovans – an enigmatic lineage discovered from genetic traces in fossil bones and teeth at Denisova Cave in southern Siberia and detected also in the DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians.

It could be that Toba played a role in shaping human interactions, extinctions and dispersals in Asia and Australia, and has left a legacy of the eruption in our genes.

Much remains to be understood about the aftermath of this exceptional geological event, but at least we now know when it happened – to within a few centuries – and can use its ash and chemical remnants to tie together diverse records of global climate, ecology and human evolution.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

The elephant in the chat room: will international students stay at home?

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By  Thomas Birtchnell, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Media & Communication at University of Wollongong

With free, quality online education from brand-name universities, will overseas students come to Australia? Elephant image from http://www.shutterstock.com

In 1923, a young boy leaves his small village in India and travels by boat to study at Columbia University in the United States.

This is a time when only five out of every hundred of India’s three hundred million people can read and write. His story, featured in a Boy Scouts’ magazine, was billed as “The Boy Who Would Educate India”. He would return to India with his degree to “teach the people something besides religion” and put India on the path to development.

The aim of the feature was to be an inspirational story for young Americans – they, too, should strive for an education and help others.

The Boy Who Would Educate India. Boy Scout Magazine, 1923

 

But not all goes to plan. His job at as a messenger boy at the Western Union falls through (most likely due to visa issues). In order to complete his degree, he takes up an informal job as a carer for a wealthy family’s children. And his own family need him back in India.

Unable to balance his lowly job with his study, he makes the long trip home without his doctorate, scrubbing the decks to pay for his passage.

This story will seem somewhat familiar for many international students from India today, who come to Australia expecting to earn a degree, find a secure job and eventually to apply for residency. This is the dream of a better life through mobility.

But in many cases they find themselves balancing study with poor work and living conditions and, once their degree is finished, they are told to head back home.

But does the arrival of free quality online education change all this? Had “The Boy Who Would Educate India” been a student today, would he have still made the journey?

Study Without Moving

New technologies are making their way into the global education system and may challenge the way universities operate.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for example, offer expert tuition from the world’s most prestigious universities for free — Stanford, Harvard, Columbia and now Melbourne to name a few.

Most seriously for education exporters, these new technologies appear to threaten the lucrative international student market, now a considerable slice of universities’ incomes. The market for Indian students alone is worth over $3 billion to the US, and was expected to grow exponentially alongside aspirant middle classes.

With MOOCs, rich students from poor regions can earn degrees from premier providers from the “comfort” of their own homes. In the future they may even interact with others through iPad Doubles (see video below). But at the moment this interaction mostly occurs in chatrooms and quizzes.

Face-to-face tuition could become a luxury commodity. University senior executives and policymakers need to consider this conundrum in how to target infrastructure, tuition, graduate placement, student experience and — much less publicised — pathways to residency.

A Better Life Through Mobility

There is a very good reason universities and policymakers are so far unfazed by MOOCs. They recognise that for international students the fantasy of self-betterment through a combination of learning and mobility is what motivates them to study abroad.

Universities are well aware of how much the dream of migration means to international students. They make significant investments in global road shows, which trumpet residency pathways, exchange programs and visa sponsorship deals in order to attract enrolments.

Indeed, research shows that up to three quarters of the Indian students coming to Australia successfully apply for permanent residency afterwards. Studying in Australia is seen by many as a way to get a residency outside India.

The show goes on despite domestic pressure on incorrect visas, overstayers, visa scams and dodgy colleges and agents. More worryingly, behind the scenes are exploitative “bodyshops”.

The issue here is that the dreams of students for a better life through mobility diverge considerably from the dreams of education providers. They want students they can enrol, educate, award and then wave off at the airport. But these students do not just want a quick degree and a short working holiday.

Hard Truths

Students often move internationally to escape the hard realities of life in countries such as India. Many are simply seeking amelioration in places with less poverty, greater job prospects, low corruption, better infrastructure, more safety and a higher Human Development Index.

Universities and policymakers dream of knowledge customers buying their prestigious degrees online in a global market divorced from migration. MOOCs seem to be progress in this direction. But for international students MOOCs is a non-issue.

The elephant in the (chat) room is that most international students pay exorbitant fees, undergo complex administration processes, live in austere conditions and satisfy local business demand for poorly regulated informal labour in the dream of a better life. Both the needs of students and providers demand critical thought in debating the future of education.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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