On and on the trillion-dollar go-nowhere STEM #science #spend goes, its promoters, acolytes and politician dupes so ensconced, embedded, entrenched and convinced of their own virtue in both their ecologically devastating AND in their “innocuous” but tragically marginal, superficial, tokenistic or wrong-headed, frankly POINTLESS & ILLOGICAL & middle class aspirational-values & attitudes social studies, their high-end tourism, recreational, conservation and social welfare do-gooding, their VANITY PROJECTS, that the entire low-income world condemns, derides and is flatly ANGRY about.
As with the Old Testament Abrahamic saw Vanity, vanity/ All is useless, POINTLESS except of course to transfer hundreds of millions of PUBLIC funding – or working people’s tax contributions – not upper middle income people’s let alone those of the rich – Series 3?/ unintelligible deliberately obscure acronym/ slogan/ catchcry/ rhetorical flourish/ Sky News high-paid cookers – to plainly unaccounted for churches, charities, grifter business enterprises, frankly corrupt (on the take/ ‘living the life of Reilly’/ answerable to none) public authorities and VERY high-priced technically, scientifically & sociologically off-the-air #AADs, #CSIROs & #BoMs to name but three… in a nutshell Mr Albanese’s now faltering 2013 #infrastructure “mates.” Rob Sitch? Good grief – an entire nation at the mercy of grifters who don’t get stuff, we’re flying high and flying blind, Oi-oi
But NO-ONE in “developed” industrial countries dares whistleblow this VAST barking-mad deflection of funds from decarbonisation and authentic bottom-up community development, out of real fear of murder or traumatic misadventure at the hands of organised crime gangs (“bikies,” Aboriginal & other ethnic criminal thugs + our own Trump-Bannon-Musk Blood & Soil “very fine gentlemen” – loosely, neonazis and #cookers) in the virtual employ of, at the beck and call of, state or federal police or military personnel engaged on colonial-era “blackfella- or “Injun-“ shooting frontiers/ border-zones or in so-called interventions in any given region or country.
False & Arbitrary Imprisonment in breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on 16 Dec 1966 is the coercive and criminalising legal weapon of choice of authorities and in Australia all three major political parties and of the racist sexist neofascist political Right worldwide – whose political game has always been Iusuf Dzhugashvili’s fabled ‘person/ problem no-person/ no-problem’ saw
..as I myself experienced on nine occasions between 1996 & 2008 in Australia BECAUSE I was a renowned regenerative and genuine organic pioneer AND prominent energy reformer and NOT in consequence of the commission of any criminal offence
Reflecting on yet a another think-puddle of econometrics & 45-years behind the clock stocks & flows social indicators garbage about reconstructing Gross Domestic Product without saying a blind thing about markets or money let alone what governments SHOULD spend money on – only endlessly as ever in @GretaThunberg blah-blah-blah about social outcomes from political class and academic HEADBANGERS today on #ABC Radio in #auspol I am moved to add a couple more thoughts (to the outing c.10 paragraphs below..
At moments like this in human history genuine economists certainly are moved to commentary – bean counters and gross accumulators may go. Just go you dementing losers.
Understanding & reforming economy is no more about replacing GDP with sociocultural & environmental outcomes econometrics than any Stop the World undergraduate cry for “degrowth,” let alone grass skirts or AK47s. It’s about the UN #ESG goals: what we produce and how when where & why we do it, for life health longevity and the human love and cooperation act & ethic/ fact & value this work requires for its success.. its real or human social value.. asking why of supply, demand and market price, recognising all three are human artificial constructs – concepts– driven by enterprisers not holy writ generated by invisible hand, mysterious spirit or wizard in the sky for goodness’ sake..
This week we learn Microsoft & Amazon are laying off thousands [of postmodern post-fact Dunning-Kruger Effect vanity-narcissist-influencer Gordon Geckoe cult of individualism morally, culturally, spiritually & ecologically moribund consumer-society know-nothing flaneurs] of life-wasters basically stealing money from people’s bank accounts.
..I must renew* my Amazon Prime whoops I don’t use the thing. As if.
..I must act on irregularities with my internet line whoops I don’t have one. As if.
..I must light candles, burn incense and slaughter fatted calves for all of those artificial consumer spender & voter programming algorithms we all so depend upon and cherish.. doing our own thinking for us. Intelligence. Seriously?
Enjoy this short note about the Davos haute bourgeois Thought Bomb. Never forget to laugh at delusional nonsense spruiking. It’s NOT unkind if its charlatans making themselves the enemies of humanity. It essential. Or they’ll prevail as they have since Milton Friedman’s orgiastic profiteering via regulatory shutdown.
And as we all now realise it won’t just be about those rotten apples but all of us – all the young leastwise.
John Friday evening 20/1/23
So yeah, here it was >>
Klaus Schwab’s 2-dimensional Analogue “Newtonian Mechanics”^^ Global Economy is Broken
On LinkedIn, Ian Kaplan, ‘bringing people together..’ with our thanks“$250,000 to attend Davos as a formal delegate at the annual World Economic Forum event??!! (link below)
“COP28 to be led by an oil company CEO??!!
“Is it any surprise when there are calls for an alternative framework to WEF, COP, etc. as the place to come together to discuss and take action on the climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and social inequality caused by the flawed system we live in?
“It’s time to boycott these frameworks and make them irrelevant.
“NOW.
“There’s no time to wait and see what happens.
“Wheels are already in motion for an alternative framework for bringing people together based on bioregions, negating the ability of industry lobbies to torpedo efforts for change, negating the setting of a core global agenda by established institutions opposed to changing the existing political economy, and negating their ability to determine who can and who can’t participate and be heard. The alternative framework includes a mechanism for encouraging and facilitating continuous action and progress, including measuring progress towards clear goals. ALL with a positive message!
“Looking for partners who have had enough of the BS. Feel free to reach out.”
I know: let’s get a hardware store garden 🪴🥸
^^ the Push Me Pull You Marx-Engels-Thatcher-& yes, evidently -Merkel – stemmie sighin’-tests’ (to use the Australian baby-talk) NO society/ don’t worry about that left-wing stuff, those groups, those activists/ how dare they disrupt our nineteenth century neoclassical theory and methodology? – oowhh/ yuck/ atheists too – the monetarist-wonderland dialectical ‘Rand-span’ Objectivist Zero Sum Game = the global ecological meltdown-threatening SUPPLY SIDE gang-bang
^^ Zero Sum=Maximum Sun – how we all relish the prospect within 2 -3 years of 58°C summer days in temperate zones🤓🙄😕
* “I’m calling to tell you your Amazon Prime is being renewed for $99.00. If you don’t want this prescription Dial 1” – THIS is not fiction. It first came to my notice in February last year when despite my skills, knowledge and emotional maturity this huge and sophisticated organised crime outfit from “Mountain View” stole $2,500 from my bank account and the bank, Bendigo Bank declined to reimburse me despite the money being initially deposited into an Australian bank account. And NOW, a year later, I’ve had four calls this week. The Australian minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neill claims to be angry about cyber-crime. I call bullshit.
This from Mario Russo: “Albasleasy complains about the previous ten years. Now in charge he and Blowhard Bowan (sic) destroy our power system, forcing prices to blow out and still cannot offer certainly of supply..”
And from Robin Tully: “They took the money for 10 years and did nothing. Now they hand out money to anything and everything as a cover for their incompetence.”
plus David NSW: “Bowen and Albanese will wreck the joint. It is odds on!”
WHY ARE THE LIKES of Google, Apple and in the most egregious alienating contrarian mode Microsoft “News” encouraged by government and or law enforcement authorities to run divisive polarising fake #science report and commentary, this ghastly internationally embarrassing and even humiliating tree-biting frothy-mouthed stuff like Chris Kenny’s?
He’s from Adelaide – if that helps readers to get a grip on the rich people’s #energy & Awful-@Greens Kiddie-hate headbanger frenzy, with pointy-hats, manly chest-beating and lots of whoop-whoop-whoop calls, right?
The world around now faces huge and existentially threatening #weather #systems failure, collapse, concertina-ing, erratic movement AND retardation of systems’ eastward movement AND retardation of ocean currents on their South – North/ North – South polar-towards-equator progress because of the loss of solar radiation reflecting snow and ice (albedo)
These radical disruptions to seasonal and food security include SIX major “climate” or weather-systems drivers in angry flux presently NOT simply the El Ninol/ La Nina southern anticlockwise or clockwise “oscillation” of cooler or warmer air between South America and the Western Pacific: largely obscured from public discussion behind the acronym ENSO.
As with IOD, SAM/ AO. Then last year #weather #system DRIVERS converstaion was again boosted initially among enthusiastic young USA students like Orlando Figueroa II at @RutgersU), this time by the Madden-Julien Oscillation..
In one of @figueroa_II’s tweets, 5/8/2022, he writes “There are variables in the Atlantic alone involved incuding but not limited to: Saharan Air Layer, Nino Anomalies, CONVECTIVELY -COUPLED KELVIN WAVES,* Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, Madden Julien Oscillation, Shear Tendencies, Tropical Upper Tropospheric Troughs, and more.”
These compounding and scrambling weather systems, so deeply threatening, are believed to be, on #science’s best rigorous modelling, irreversible for some 350 years
..strictly on account of excessive solar radiation heating the terrestrial and oceanic Earth calamitously exacerbated by the trapping of infrared radiation ‘bouncing’ off Earth via lost albedo-effect and wait for it, children and aged gentlefolk.. carbon gases and an array of lesser human-generated industrial gases in the atmosphere, that “thin blue band” about the Earth less tha 10 kilometres above us.
There, we’ve spelled it out yet again for the billionaires and mafia. And all of those newsmedia organisations and accountancy firms running the hazard of their prosecution in the ICJ for Crimes against Humanity within three or four years.
There are of course an unimaginably chaotic 2030 and NO 2050 in our irrefutable valid #scientific calculus.
The resulting flood rains, wildfire, dangerous storms, polar vortex and unseasonal Southern Hemisphere freeezes/ prolonged cold weather, crop & fisheries failure, hunger, starvation & food insecurity generally, new diseases in humans/ animals, birds, fish, fungi, plants, wetlands & eutrophying (no-longer-generating oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide or growing-green-foliage by photosynthesis) are ALL due to excessive solar radiation, or heat, including that trapped in the lower atmosphere, or “life-zone” troposphere, by carbon gases and unable to escape to the mid atmosphere by the ‘greenhouse effect.’
They are FLATLY not matters for polemical dispute in what may now prove to be the apocalyptic, “pluralist” or insane neoliberal trope & meme “governments mustn’t interfere with free-trade or in markets.”
Nor should we excuse the abuse of monetary and fiscal policies, from whiteboards to colour-coded charts of favoured electorates undertaken in the wildly erroneous mid 20th century belief among the political class and ruling elites of ALL liberal democratic countries that #Politics is merely the art of the possible (or the art of whatever power-holders may get away with: rife in Australian politics since 1901.
Nor can we add “whatever it takes to nail a parliamentary opposition” of course (Morrisonism 2018-22 and perhaps Keating 1993-96 at their most extreme) so “ignoring the environmental & greening movement and Electrify Everything in toto and even making international fools of ourselves by boycotting global conferences, let us greenwash “renewable”(!) natural gas in a big-budget television promotion to go to air two days after the election of 22/5/2022, let’s not say a word about electric cars, and let’s throw the Left a bit of💰for say solar panels & community batteries so they’ll shut up and we can carry on #business as usual 🔥-ing…”
The City of London’s “great game,” identified after military atrocities in Afghanistan in the mid nineteenth century, is essentially a double game: largesse or treasure offered with an ulterior nefarious motive.
In the present case of apocalyptic weather systems collapse the neoliberal hegemony’s motive is simply to render the earth unfit for human habitation by its business-as-usual conduct and exclusively for its own pecuniary profit by 2032-’35.
This Great Game as I read history has its patrician or noblesse-oblige (ancient Roman ruling class/ just look how kindly & beneficent your government is) origins in the imperial tactic to placate opposition and suppress dissent by “bearing gifts,” or advancing public funds to indigenous populations (or “Groups!”)
It is all about the present-day minimising, trivialising, deflecting and actually NONSENSISING neoliberal slogans of #adaptation & #resilience – called Capacity Building in the disastrous Harvard MPA days of 20 -25 years ago and shamelessly, even unself-consciously(!), named Retail Politics by Australian federal MP and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce.^
It is of course “greenwashing,” but NOTHING like as innocuous-sounding as virtually playing with “lighted dynamite 🧨 🧨 sticks.”
Readers who perhaps had not given a great deal of detailed thought to the hazard humanity faces at this moment in human #history will quickly figure out why we must discard “the art of the possible” for the highest-possible-priority environmental, public health & good-governance (corporate, civil/ public service & local government) responsibility.
John Blundell. Economy Ecosystems Health, Jan 19 2023
#auspol #energy #disease #health #ESG
#Independents #Greens #AustralianLaborParty
Snip
Good-governance = academic, corporate, civil/ public service and local government responsibility under the rule of just law in a well-functioning GLOBALIST Macro-economy
~ “Connectively..” – my capitals.. humour, for the love of clarity & sanity
*after the redcoats’ humiliation by revolutionary and French forces in North America 1781-3
^always for anodyne tokenistic SOCIAL ‘busy-bee’ inconsequential Activity Trap projects: THESE ARE NOT ECONOMIC, der – as if bloody not, part & parcel of an overall process of prevarication, deceit, espionage, subterfuge and propagandising – as dementing ageing denialists in positions of political power presently “fool with dynamite sticks” by placating, education & trying to schmooze the world’s real leaders and innovators on behalf of their fossil-fuels corporations donor-puppeteers, actually defeating what are inescapable societal priorities to “decarbonise” all human industry (simply to stop🔥-ing) wherever, whatever, however possible – in LESS THAN 7 YEARS
“UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult has taken the first step in the development of a new sustainable energy technology from space, securing almost £500k in funding from the UK Space Agency (UKSA) to kick-start research and development into a future Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) system, which will ultimately create a new, fully renewable baseload energy technology.”
Obscenity: The UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult has taken the first step in the development of a new sustainable energy technology from space, securing almost £500k in funding from the UK Space Agency (UKSA) to kick-start research and development into a future Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) system, which will ultimately create a new, fully renewable baseload energy technology.
Just-Make-Stuff-Up #science: Dr Mamatha Maheshwarappa, Payload Systems Lead at the UK Space Agency, said: “Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) has the exciting potential to provide sustainable energy, helping meet the government’s net-zero target and provide energy security.
Public-money burning: The total project value is £620k, funded by a £465k grant from the UK Space Agency and a further contribution from the Satellite Applications Catapult of £155k.
How the Socially & Ecologically Unreferenced Growth & Development Model Emerged in Response to the Horror & Insecurity of WWII – a Monetarist New World Order..
The German economist and banker Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1877-1970)
The historical photo is of Hjalmar Schact, who did not of course attend Bretton Woods, 1944. Forty-four allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. At that time, the world economy was very shaky, and the allied nations sought to meet to discuss and find a solution for the prevailing issues that plagued currency exchange
The following notes from the Wickipedia entry on “the Bretton Woods System..”
Other links left highlighted as they may be useful to students..
~The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold (or 0.88867 gram fine gold per dollar). It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.[1]
~Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still being fought, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference. The delegates deliberated from 1 to 22 July 1944, and signed the Bretton Woods agreement on its final day. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, these accords established the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of the world’s gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the US dollar. Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that the institutions they had created were “branches of Wall Street”.[2] These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. According to Barry Eichengreen, the Bretton Woods system operated successfully due to three factors: “low international capital mobility, tight financial regulation, and the dominant economic and financial position of the United States and the dollar.”
~On 15 August 1971, the United States terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.[4] Shortly thereafter, many fixed currencies (such as the pound sterling) also became free-floating,[5] and the subsequent era has been characterized by floating exchange rates.[6] The end of Bretton Woods was formally ratified by the Jamaica Accords in 1976.
Here the piece referred to in this morning’s update of my swingeing critique of the capture, betrayal and lethally-dangerous-to-liberal-democracy – and liveable survivable enduring habitat worldwide – betrayal and failure of #journalism..
The clown-car that is so not funny it stands to wipe our entire put-on-a-jolly-good show-Old-Chap performative neoclassical culture ..on historical lines with fake-#science references of course
“Judgment is Me sayeth the Lord; Vengeance is Mine.”
Vengeance is Mine
I’d be glad if readers first looked at Les Robinson’s compelling article – then you might begin by counting the myriad ways we have as a race of people honed the arts of engineered disocciative trauma, depersonalisation, brutalisation even the full termination of #HumanRights as realised in effective murder or official state killing, reflecting ruefully that at the hands of hateful superstitious sexist racist ideological fascists, ALL of them fundamentalist evangelical religious, who have no understanding of constitution, law, government or society itself except as out-of-this-world, even deranged & gibbering rule of Marshall Plan USA Harvard, MIT & Chicago schools meritocracy and Cold War warriors, how it includes coheres welcomes healthy innovation and essential reform in industry and of the economic tools by which it may be successfully managed or inevitably collapses on the racist sexist hatred & otherising that were their stock-in-trade.
changeology.com Les Robinson 29/08/2017 follows with thanks..
Refugees, Aborigines, and the unemployed will change their behaviour if they are treated cruelly enough. At least that’s according to the wisdom of those who design multi-billion dollar Australian Government programs. I’d like to meet some of those people.
The latest torment-based innovation is drug-testing for welfare recipients. Absolutely no informed person thinks it will work, or is fair, or will produce anything other than greater human suffering. The head of the Australian Medical Association gave it a “Nasty star” as “mean and non-evidence-based”. Matt Noffs from the Ted Noffs Foundation wrote “This model doesn’t have heart, and certainly not brains. It is designed to punish the poor, the marginalised, for their circumstances when they need support and options.” Nadine Hazzard, clinical director at the St Vincent’s Hospital wrote “Can the government point to a single piece of evidence – here or overseas – that shows the likelihood of this succeeding? They can’t because it doesn’t exist…By definition, people with clinical disorders are unable to modify their behaviour, even in the face of negative consequences.”
Meanwhile, NSW high school students are being threatened with no HSC if they don’t achieve ‘band 8/10’ in reading, writing and maths in their standardised NAPLAN tests – which is quite a high score. A horrifying 68% of 15-16 year olds, at the most vulnerable time of their adolescence, have just been humiliated and belittled by being told to sit additional NAPLAN tests until they get the desired score. How many mental health experts were involved in that decision?
And refugees who’ve come to Australia for medical attention are about to have their miserable $100 a week survival support removed if they don’t go back to the living hell of Manus Island. Meanwhile, indigenous people aren’t even threatened, they just have their financial autonomy obliterated, via BasicsCard, irrespective of their behaviour, just because they happen to live in certain communities. They’re being punished for being, just, indigenous. How would you feel about being punished for simply being who you are?
For some reason, “Tough love” and “Cruel to be kind” are the folk remedies of preference for white, church-going, patriarchal, establishment males who are trying to control an uncompliant population. Why on earth? Is it caused by too much Old Testament, or does conservative politics somehow auto-select believers with lack of human empathy plus stupidity?
Really, even if BasicsCard or NAPLAN were good ideas, there’s no science to justify the use of threats and punishments to influence human behaviour. Behavioural science is unusually clear on this: threats and punishments cause denial, active resistance, and superficial compliance of the most reluctant and temporary kind. (For example: Elliot, B. (2003) The Psychology of Fear Appeals Revisited, http://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS030056.pdf)
If you seriously wanted to change the world (and not simply be bastards) threats, cruelty and humiliation would never be your tools of choice.
Instead you’d offer people desirable goals and then construct paths that were within their capacities, to reach those goals. All your efforts would go into creating and smoothing those paths for people. To help long-term unemployed into work, for example, you’d provide intensive counselling, support and training to help them build their capacities, as well as actually having jobs available for them (according to an authoritative 2014 study by Anglicare).
To illustrate the point clearly, let’s use hungry people and a bear to explain the difference between these two approaches.
First, a positive approach: Let’s offer people goals they value and then design pathways, that are within their capacities, to get to those goals. What’s the result?
Notice how a clear, desirable goal motivates just ONE action: towards the goal. Provided the path is follow-able, the results relatively certain, and the demands not onerous, we can be pretty sure than large numbers of people will head off, with a will, towards that goal. There are only two behavioural choices, approach the goal or do nothing, and the determining factors are the attraction of the goal and the easiness of the path.
Now, let’s see what a threat does.
Notice that a threat produces a LARGE NUMBER of possible behaviours and directions of motion, including, in this example: freeze and be eaten, act dead, hide under a rock, grab the nearest weapon and fight back, or panic and run, blindly, in any direction that doesn’t have a bear in it.
Presumably, some people will randomly head off in the ‘right’ direction, but this is almost accidental: most people will do something the program designer didn’t think would happen, or want. Most especially, they’ll use all their human wiles to avoid and resist the threat. And, in the meantime, they won’t be thinking about achieving a positive goal that betters their lives, they’ll be thinking about immediately escaping the threat.
It’s also well known that threats reduce people’s attention and brain power so they tend to make more dumb, short-term choices and less sensible choices that require long-term staying power. There’s a pile of science on this too. That’s another undesirable result of threats.
The proliferation of torment-based programs is a big lesson about the void of compassion, rationality and curiosity in conservative politics. Experience, science and empathy seem to have become inherently alien to conservative political culture. Add a predilection for cruelty and governments are continually wounding large numbers of people for little or no social gain. But those politicians and their advisors are in for a surprise: cruelty is a boomerang. The punished always find ways to punish back their punishers. There’s a pile of science on that too.
Imagine that: sunbeams, lollipops, rainbows AND unicorns.
Oh those greenie-hater Team Australia loonies of the Noughties, Anthony Albanese’s 2013 “infrastructure mates,” those frankly weird/ electrode-wired/ parallel mental-galaxy turgid skin-crawling #abc television’s “Utopia” people, those dead-creepy “On Your Side” #global#weather#systems smashers and “Resist and Denounce the ingrates, whingers & China” cookers, those failed #showbiz-, #entertainmentindustry-, #royalty-, and #popular wooden anodyne #psychology-driven vaguely-but-alas-not-convincingly-literate AI’d*** spell-checked predictively-texted Supply Siders with their Michael Somare era – or James Marape the present evangelical Christian witchcraft & street-rape guy – Papua Niugini electoral cargo cult B-a-a-a-a-r-n-by Joyce Retail Politics replete with stuff off the world’s supermarket shelves & McDonnell Douglas, Westinghouse, General Electric, Boeing and Wartsila Finland huge variously muffled loud bang-bang fuel-burning machies to fulfill all the lazy-arsed passive-consumer desires (& ??lusts) of cognitively impaired &/or congenitally deranged aspirational upper middle-income people, whose marionettes & string-puppets call all the public shots in this frankly bewildering very-very-late neoliberalism mentally-disordered Jimmy Carter era fake-Voltairean explicitly Friedmanite “defend to the death your right to incite slaughter, mass starvation, nuclear warfare.. era
..in the name of libert-aryanism, egalit-aryanism and really cool sweat-lodge tough-mudder paint-ball cross-burning adventure-island Golding’s-1954-Lord-of-the-Flies broederbond fraternity, Friedmanite/ No Judgment/ No Government-Interference-in-Markets Mediaeval Priapocracy or Phallocracy: mentally, spiritually and figuratively in vile 16th century Cromwellian stocks or dangling from jibbets*, with late #primaryschool prepubescent 1970s #psychiatry‘s object-relations, UTTERLY bereft of Piagetian full adult-capacity #concrete#operations, critical thinking, contextualising, de-literalising meanings or unpacking – or at least laughing at incongruous, discordanty or dissonant – metaphors, swept away to social irelevance and ignominy and PERMANENTLY LOCKED OUT OF THE OTHER SIDE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS~ by their belligerent machismo refusal to even accept that PTSD is a medical condition, most likely never having even heard of Bessel van der Kolk** or Pierre Janet’s 75 year-old scientific explanation of disocciation, how it actually unravels personhood and its mentally crippling effects: so indeed there these meme-, cliche-, catchcry-, 50 y-o Johnny Farnham song- & slogan-laden both-sidesist story telling confabulators and rhetoricians sit, or rather blob about, from aeroplane ride to aeroplane ride, from newsmedia conference to newsmedia conference, fiercely honouring Ken Burns’s (The Civil War, The West, 1990s) Narrative Drive and legendary balance in a supposed debating chamber – the Australian Parliament – Jesus wept – or on skynewsme, SKYTV et set era, who still to this day have THE LATE GREAT AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY IN A DEATH-GRIP.
Indeed the more I poke fun at them the more they dig their Enrich-the-rich-but-screw-the-middle-class-Josh-Frydenberg heels in, the money they are on is evidently that flash. ..Stanley Melborne Bruce 1923 – 1929 the Nationalist Party, or mad pastor Shouty 2018 – 2022, take your pick, Mick/ Michaelia.
Get rid of these fools please. Today would be the best day and it is crystal-clear from current knowledge of global geophysical terrestrial atmospheric oceanic & weather-systems functioning symbolically the ONLY day available to us. – At least if the broad political class (every household on more than $85 – 90,000 a year after-tax income) could ease up rabbiting on about syphilis & 12 year-old Pacifica girls man Cap’n James Cook Royal Navy this January that would be a start on talking things that actually matter and will determine whether the infant born today lives past 35.
I know I am like a dog with a bone but too bad, my job is to fight for human futures or I have no job, but how utterly bewildering it is that 9 of 10 adult Australians have NO IDEA of the hazard to life on earth, all life on earth (tropical thru savannah sub tropical thru temperate thru cool thru cold belts of latitude) of excessive solar radiation. Excessive UVR has been on an upcurve sice I first wrote about it in August 1994, when as the cloud aerosols started to give way to blue summer skies over Antarctica and everywhere south of say latitude 25 degrees south we some of us thought uh-oh this is ozone depletion. And since then? Almost every year ludicrous lies from government, corrupt universities and billion-dollar authorities like the AAD, BoM, CSIRO and Chief fake Scientists whose brief from #Fossilfuels corporations and organised crime cartels has been to say nothing important or even factual and has been so ever since I first heard of a ‘chief scientist’ 40-odd years ago – and he was a loquacious Australian in Pom-land being lionised by Robyn Williams the #ABC Seance Shoah dude.~~
So yes, let’s please get on with the work cut out for us and reject the utterly dysfunctional literally bloody pantomime of strategic electoral jockeying public relations performative display, ceremony, announcement, advertising promotion & ludicrous in fact lethally dangerous focus-group & consumer opinion poll government.
John Blundell, Political Leadership Australia – no Grattan, no Lowy, no ASPI, no National War Museum theme-park, no IPA, no sex-romps a la Ayn Rand Alan Greenspan Nathaniel Branden – NO SLOPPY SECONDS or indeed any men’s rapine enthusiasms – NO oil economy corrupted- and criminally irresponsible-“#science” and an immediate worldwide end to neokeynesian chat & ‘Thunberg’ blather concerning the econometric monetary billionaire cabal’s delights, interest rates, wages, rates of employment, the money supply, untenable fictive derivative credits/ offsets that have no connect whatever with reducing global meltdown hazard per excessive terrestrial solar radiation, taking ZERO acccount of public and ecological health, let alone the United Nations’ now utterly fanciful development goals’ promotions & its advertising slogan #ESG
South Australia, the rest of the country and all points beyond – we’re with you. And have never in our lives fought so hard
* A gibbet /ˈdʒɪbɪt/ is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, executioner’s block, impalement stake, hanging gallows, or related scaffold). Gibbeting is the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of criminals were hanged on public display to deter other existing..
~in traditional and indigenous society as is now clear in functional operational neuroscience (that is POST-NEUROPLASTICITY neurolinguistics not the wooden bio-mechanical Alan Turing mental calculus & busy little neuronal micro-geographical centres for seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, effing, effing effing, effing, emoting & obviously the joy of defecation) the other side of consciousness, or kuta ngulu in the central Australian Arrrente landguage (whoops, not) is hesitation, pondering, reflection and creative – or yes self-hazarding – ideation. Other side ideation is generated in the right cerebral hemisphere of right-handed mammals. “Right-side,” in central Australian people who’ve grown up with, or into, our old people’s language refers to the law and the material – real time, if you like.
** The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Body and Mind in the Healing of Trauma – from 30 years of work, 2014, USA
~~ lower (troposheric)-, mid-, upper atmosphere CHFC gases and at least 4 other indusrty-generated gases research AND the NASA observations of the hot air updraft of November 2019 over Antarctica exactly when Australia began to burn 24 million hectares, 3,000 homes & 3 billion animals and related complex weather system changes that probably cannot be reversed for say 350 years is incredibly sophisticated, multi-faceted and dramatically variable in different seasons at different latitudes, and – as i have noted at the commencement of this note – altitudes above Earth. Any civilisation that tries to reduce this superb research to some lunatic kiddie cartoon push-me-pull-you dialectical good-bad zero-sum game flatly condemns itself to the rubbish bin of human history
Thank you ZC for the plain words and plain talk about a projected 200 million persons to be displaced – not by some amorphous public relations slogan – “#climate #change” (actually proscribed, even in a million schools for the love of sanity, or its public usage so circumscribed in official circles so as to surprise when heard AND EVEN NONSENSISED IN POPULAR CULTURE and #social #media to convey positive value as we hear bewildered young people say they are Working for Climate Change) that’s in early 2023 so past its social, economic and cultural use-by date that we can all “smell it” – the term has become “universal (what??)” branding for nutters, the clinically depressed and jibbering ministers of religion – BUT coastal inundation by sea water and the glacial-meltwater devastation and literal collapse of lands by avalanching, undermining, earthquake, tsunami and volcanic ash-cloud/ heat & carbon dioxide transferred to the stratosphere 10-30km up.. are real things.
..we can all hear taste smell feel touch hunger asphyxiate dehydrate drown or get heat-struck by (or on sorry account of) them.
Readers greatly appreciate your summaries ZC [see 6 paras immediately below], your 👀-wide-open reflections on the worldwide geophysical & essential macroeconomic conceptual econometrics we MUST NOW begin to model assiduously and honestly, no longer for the fun & profit & fancy bright-coloured graphics of meteorology bureaus, law and accountancy conglomerates or the politicians of crude liberal majoritarianism’s electoral autocracy run by ad agencies, public-menace culturally vitiating individually targeted consumer product- marketing artificial intelligence and Elon Musk’s imploding public square.
•On current forecasts, more than 200 million people are likely to be #displaced around the world by 2030, by a variety of factors including the climate crisis. Most of them are likely to stay within their country borders, but the impact will be vast.
•The impact of the climate crisis on human mobility is significant, and that must be recognised,” said Daniels.
•The plight of women also needed more attention, she added. “There are particular impacts on women and children. Women are often in a vulnerable situation, and have less access to resources, whether that’s money, land, education or health, and they are often in care-giving roles or bear the burden for their families.”
•Andrew Harper, the special adviser on climate action at the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees, said rich countries must start taking seriously the need to help poor countries adapt to the effects of extreme weather, of which the consequences were now obvious. “Ignorance is no excuse any more; we are seeing disasters now on a daily basis,” he said. “One person was displaced every second last year. At what point do we start taking this seriously? When it’s two people a second?”
•Climate-related disasters last year included devastating floods in Pakistan that left more than 20 million people dependent on humanitarian aid, and severe droughts in the Horn of Africa, where close to 150 million people are facing extreme hunger.
•Climate change has turbocharged extreme weather events,” said Harper. “And those extreme weather events are in turn displacing people.” “
Now my input – it’s about the busted contemporary journalism genre, a professional backwater with ever more funding, encouraging and neo-absurdist lionising from the global billionaire cabal.
It grows ever more ECONOMICALLY irrelevant and ECOLOGICALLY dangerous with every passing week – such that 7 billion ordinary working, intelligent & world-aware people in full command of their own senses and sensibilities – these are actually grown-up humans (adults) – demand its repair…
As I reflect, I’ve been writing in the same mode for five years, always contextualising, confronting “It’s their economy stupored,” writing as anchored in one’s own regional, hemispheric and global milieu, NOT IN AN ARTIFICIAL-REALITY NEWSMEDIA ELITES STUDIO OR UPLINK BUBBLE, fiercely rejecting the utterly offensive both-sidesism, that takes the 1970s hippie Carter era Values-Free social, economic, cultural AND environmental posture & gesture as politically & socially de rigeuer,* vapid cliches, vacuous mixed metaphors, the ‘baby-talk’ of other nations being called “family,” the deliberate** neoclassical Ox-bridge English ruling elites mispronunciation of names-people-places-institutions (eg màfia, eg cop, eg the sound ‘j’ showily spelled ‘g’ as gibberish or vice versa Menin-jee ..SA town w flood threat presently) and EVER in corporate-state #journalism’s endless bilge-flow of childish narrative reports the deracinated b, the gluggy, turgid, officially vetted (even by national spy & security services for Christ’s Sake) m rounded off with the obligatory resounding but vapid bathetic e – always advancing the sum of human knowledge by a negative quantum & psycho-culturally (psychiatrically) pushing the patient consumers of this stuff inexorably towards an actually “dumbed down” state of mind, that is into cognitive impairment & in the macro, or Big Picture, an actual meltdown of health & personal support services and ultimately what is now correctly identified as the rule of lawlessness by the UN.
Here’s my resonant ending-bit, Ms Cohen: you and me both will work our t..s off for the needs & hopes of ordinary people
John, 🇦🇺
In French, de rigueur means “out of strictness” or “according to strict etiquette”; one definition of our word rigor, to which rigueur is related, is “the quality of being strict, unyielding, or inflexible.” In English, we tend to use de rigueur to describe a fashion or custom that is so commonplace within a context
** in the entirely vexed malicious pursuit of ethnocentric cultural hegemony for the billionaire class’s precious City of London no less
“When we started, there was no regulatory path,” she said. “No one has ever developed an insect vaccine — they’re wild animals who fly around,” compared to domesticated livestock and pets with vaccine protocols. She added, “We’re really hoping we’re going to change the industry now.”
Dr. Delaplane, the entomologist at the University of Georgia, agreed.
“Someday,” he said, “we could have a cocktail that solves a lot of bee problems — that would be the holy grail.”
U.S.D.A. Approves First Vaccine for Honeybees
With our thanks to the New York Times..
“Dalan Animal Health’s vaccine for American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterial disease, is the first for any insect in the United States”
A conditional license for a vaccine to protect honeybees against American foulbrood disease has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Credit…Steve Pfost/Newsday, via Getty Images
A biotech company in Georgia has received conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the first vaccine for honeybees, a move scientists say could help pave the way for controlling a range of viruses and pests that have decimated the global population. It is the first vaccine approved for any insect in the United States.
The company, Dalan Animal Health, which is based in Athens, Ga., developed a prophylactic vaccine that protects honeybees from American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterium that can spread quickly from hive to hive. Previous treatments included burning infected colonies and all of the associated equipment, or using antibiotics. Diamond Animal Health, a manufacturer that is collaborating with Dalan, holds the conditional license.
Dalail Freitak, an associate professor in honeybee research at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz in Austria and chief science officer for Dalan, said the vaccine could help change the way scientists approach animal health.
“There are millions of beehives all over the world, and they don’t have a good health care system compared to other animals,” she said. “Now we have the tools to improve their resistance against diseases.”
Before you start imagining a tiny syringe being inserted into a bee, the vaccine — which contains dead versions of Paenibacillus larvae, the bacterium that causes American foulbrood — comes in the form of food. The vaccine is incorporated into royal jelly, a sugar feed given to queen bees. Once they ingest it, the vaccine is then deposited in their ovaries, giving developing larvae immunity as they hatch.
Scientists long assumed that insects could not acquire immunity because they lacked antibodies, the proteins that help many animals’ immune systems recognize and fight bacteria and viruses. Once scientists understood that insects could indeed acquire immunity and pass it to their offspring, Dr. Freitak set about answering the question of how they did so. In 2015, she and two other researchers identified the specific protein that prompts an immune response in the offspring and realized they could cultivate immunity in a bee population with a single queen.
Their first goal was tackling American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that turns larvae dark brown and makes the hive give off a rotting smell. The disease ran rampant during the 1800s and the early 1900s in bee colonies in parts of the United States. While American foulbrood is not as destructive as varroa mites, the bacterium can easily wipe out colonies of 60,000 bees.
The introduction of a vaccine comes at a critical moment for honeybees, which are vital to the world’s food system but are also declining globally because of climate change, pesticides, habitat loss and disease.
“There is no silver bullet, but there is a toxic stew of causation, and some of that includes diseases that are new and some that are old and familiar,” said Keith Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia and the director of its honeybee program, which provided research grounds for Dalan. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
By pollinating food as they feed on pollen and nectar, honeybees pollinate about one-third of the food crops in the United States and help produce an estimated $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year. Many beekeepers lease their hives across the country to assist in pollination of almonds, pears, cherries, apples and other types of produce.
Chris Hiatt, who keeps bees in North Dakota and California and is the president of the American Honey Producers Association, participated in the vaccine trial over the summer with about 800 queen bees in North Dakota.
“For beekeepers, you just don’t want to be reliant on antibiotics,” which most beekeepers give once a year or when there are flare-ups, he said. “Antibiotics can wipe out some of the beneficial microbes. This has the potential to add other things, too.”
Annette Kleiser, the chief executive of Dalan, called the vaccine “a huge breakthrough.”
“Bees are livestock and should have the same modern tools to care for them and protect them that we have for our chickens, cats, dogs and so on,” Ms. Kleiser said.
The conditional approval provides a mechanism that allows companies to accelerate approval for vaccines if they demonstrate there is a high, unmet need in the market, Ms. Kleiser said.
“The agency realizes that these new tools are needed in the market to help change practices,” Ms. Kleiser said, adding that the U.S.D.A. had recommended that the company pursue a conditional path “to get this out onto the marketplace as quickly as possible.”
Ms. Kleiser said that the company had to show proof of “safety, purity and certain degrees of efficacy” to gain approval and that it planned to continue collecting data while it applied for full approval. Dalan also hopes to use the American foulbrood vaccine as a map to produce vaccines for other diseases that affect honeybees.
“When we started, there was no regulatory path,” she said. “No one has ever developed an insect vaccine — they’re wild animals who fly around,” compared to domesticated livestock and pets with vaccine protocols. She added, “We’re really hoping we’re going to change the industry now.”
Dr. Delaplane, the entomologist at the University of Georgia, agreed.
“Someday,” he said, “we could have a cocktail that solves a lot of bee problems — that would be the holy grail.”
*concerns the global virus Varroa destructor.. https://www.outbreak.gov.au/current-responses-to-outbreaks/varroa-mite/ summary: Pest situation On 8 July an industry agreed Response Plan was initiated, with the intent to eradicate varroa mite and minimise the impact on businesses, communities, ancillary industries and the environment.
greeneconomyaction.com acknowledges with thanks the ongoing contributions of Nature. This writer, a bona fide 30-year #climate scholar, knows and cares less than nothing about documents gathered under the rubric or preposterous post-fact legal aegis of @Nature_eco: self-respect, personal dignity & integrity and the limited number of working hours available to any of us who give a damn about the state of the world in my view DEMAND that economists and philosophers almost completely bypass the facile, turgid, cloying-beyond-absurd if not deranged anodyne Attenborough & Disney & National Geographic era junk environment information-product and rich-tourist greenwash spurting-from-the-proverbial-existential-ground of affluent~ Global North countries’ contemporary billion-dollar per year ooh-and-ahh publishing bonanza. Look, over there, a dead child-destroyer Pope, unicorns, kids-in-Yemen and General Mark Milley.. Look over here: Australia.
~ meaning in possession of surplus disposable income and therefore, in turn, ruthlessly targeted and/ or fleeced by corporations, banks and organised crime operatives analogous with the fictive medieval self-devouring priapic serpent-beast (Sigmund Freud eats his own heart out, yet again)
@nature-magazine CAREER FEATURE: “Classroom assistance: the scientists turning the tools of their trade to education” : ‘A small but growing number of scientific faculty positions are focusing on the science of teaching’
Education-focused researchers explore the most effective ways of teaching science.Credit: Getty
As a doctoral student at the University of Washington in Seattle, biologist Michelle Smith spent a lot of time sorting fruit flies under the microscope. But she often found her mind wandering to her teaching activities: assisting with undergraduate laboratory and writing courses, and instructing schoolchildren in physics and biology.
“I felt this real draw towards teaching, but I also liked research,” she recalls. She felt lost, until 2007, when she took up a postdoctoral position in education research with Carl Wieman, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist with a deep interest in science education, then at the University of Colorado Boulder. She’d found her dream position: using her research skills to investigate how peer discussions help undergraduates to learn basic genetics concepts. She published her results in Science1.
When she started her postdoc, Smith recalls, there weren’t many faculty positions available for education-focused researchers in biology departments. That’s changing, and she is now a tenured professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, researching learning in ecology field courses, and senior associate dean for undergraduate education.Stop describing academic teaching as a ‘load’
Tenure-track faculty members with expertise in education research are starting to pop up in science departments at leading research universities — although this remains the path less taken. Their presence, position and prestige also varies widely by nation, institution and field of study2.
“There has been a growth in these types of position, both for tenure-track and long-term contract faculty members,” says Emily Miller, deputy vice-president for institutional policy at the Association of American Universities in Washington DC.
Precise data on the trend are scarce, but researchers from around the world point to the United States as a leader. The US National Science Foundation funds extensive research into science pedagogy, much of it through its Directorate for STEM Education, which doles out US$5 million to postdoctoral fellowships in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. There has also been a modest rise in a handful of other nations, including Canada and Australia, but they tend to have less money to support such studies, says Kimberly Tanner, a biologist at San Francisco State University in California, who focuses on biology-education research and co-edits the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education. The field has gained stature from the participation and support of big-name scientists such as Wieman and Tanner’s mentor Bruce Alberts. Alberts is a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, past president of the US National Academy of Sciences and author of the prominent textbook The Molecular Biology of the Cell.
Researcher Michelle Smith, who studies learning in ecology field courses at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, guides students in an activity that models evolutionary principles.Credit: Cornell University
Faculty members in this speciality might largely teach, or they could maintain a strong research programme that focuses on education. “Within this field, you can think about the balance that you want, and you can have options,” says Smith.
Some researchers, such as Wieman, transitioned into education research after becoming established in their initial discipline. As the number of positions grows, early-career researchers will be able to enter education-focused positions directly. Faculty members who focus on education not only support their own students, but also help their colleagues to adopt the latest, science-based teaching methods, which in turn improves universities’ reputations with applicants.
Sideways steps
The discipline of physics has a long history of engaging with education research, says Wieman. His interest in education was sparked after starting his atomic-physics lab several decades ago, when he noticed that some graduate students who excelled at physics courses in the classroom were not as successful when they embarked on research in the lab. They were book smart, but lacked the problem-solving skills to debug scientific equipment or interpret experimental results. “There was just this fundamental puzzle,” he says. “Why were these things so disconnected?” So, for the next 15 years or so, he led parallel research programmes in atomic physics and physics education.Better teachers are needed to improve science education
The atomic-physics programme earned him a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, and that also gave him a “bigger soapbox to stand on” to advocate for improvements in education. In 2007, he moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he set up a Can$11-million (US$8-million) initiative to transform undergraduate science education with evidence-based methods, while managing a similar initiative in Colorado.
Wieman says that, rather than relying solely on lectures, teachers should facilitate “learning to think in a different way, and there’s real expertise in how to guide people to do that”. Many education experts promote active-learning techniques, such as getting students to work together to solve problems. More than 100 courses at the University of British Columbia were altered as a result of Wieman’s initiative3.
Wieman now has a joint appointment in the physics department and at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in California. Today, his research focuses exclusively on education, and specifically on undergraduate education of ‘technical expertise’ in physics, engineering and medicine.
Biology is another field with a history of education research, but it has taken time for many departments to prioritize educational innovation. In 1999, when evolutionary ecologist Raoul Mulder was interviewed for his first faculty job, a standard teaching and research position at the University of Melbourne in Australia, he recalls being asked only one question about lecturing.
As Mulder’s studies of bird ecology progressed, he, too, became intrigued by educational methods. “I think teaching is an absolutely natural outlet for this curiosity we all have as researchers,” says Mulder.
He began to turn the tools of science on education. He describes his initial education research, which began in the early 2000s, as “kind of a side hustle, I suppose. I wasn’t sure whether it was an accepted part of my identity”.
One of these side interests was student assessment. He noticed that students often didn’t pick up their final papers after grading. His careful feedback came too late to help them to improve their grades. So he experimented with a system wherein students received feedback from each other ahead of final submissions. Not only were the final papers improved, but students often couldn’t tell the difference between comments from their peers and their teachers4.
As these side projects continued, Mulder accumulated education-focused grants adding up to nearly Aus$1 million (US$675,000). Although his education studies account for only about 10% of his papers, they fuel more than 20% of his citations and make up nearly half of his top-ten most-impactful citations. “What was a side hustle has actually become more important than I thought,” Mulder says.Improve undergraduate science education
It also marked him as someone interested in education studies, and in 2021 resulted in him taking on a leadership role at the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, which focuses on evidence-based practices for higher education and professional development. Part of Mulder’s job includes handing out grants for others to do education research.
Those interested in the science of science education can start with questions inspired by their own classrooms, Mulder says, then dig into the “rich and growing” literature. He also suggests striking up conversations with other faculty members, who might be open to collaborating on studies of their own teaching practices.
But young researchers on a standard faculty track would be wise to speak with their department chair before focusing too much attention on education, says Neil Haave, a biologist at the University of Alberta in Camrose, Canada. “If they don’t see scholarship of teaching and learning as being research, that might not get you to full professor,” he warns.
Education-focused from the start
Another option is to enter an education-focused position directly as a new faculty member, as did Natasha Holmes, a physics-education researcher at Cornell who studies the efficacy of laboratory courses. “There are more and more graduate students coming up the pipeline now,” says Holmes, another Wieman protégé.
During her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia, Holmes assisted a postdoctoral fellow with an education research project, and was inspired to switch her PhD thesis to physics-education research. “It just tapped into my passions and curiosities,” Holmes recalls.
Researcher Natasha Holmes studies the efficacy of physics laboratory courses.Credit: Serge Petchenyi/Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation
She focused on what she calls “a really extreme form of active learning”, when students invent solutions to problems before being taught the standard methods. It results in “much richer and deeper understanding”, Holmes says.
Tanner’s path, by contrast, started in the biology lab. She earned a PhD in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1997. She then did a postdoc in education research, studying partnerships between scientists and school classrooms. Tanner, who started her professor post at San Francisco State University in 2004, is particularly interested in how teachers and scientists can work together to make classroom biology more like actual biology research.
As her career has advanced, so has the community of researchers who share her passion. At a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research last July, she saw her former postdocs and graduate students who now have teams of their own.
There are many journals, professional organizations and conferences at which people can start learning about education research (see ‘Resources for science-education researchers’). Social media is beneficial, too, says Manuel João Costa, deputy rector for student affairs and innovations in teaching and learning at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. He advises following the social-media accounts of teaching and learning centres, which often post content of interest.
Resources for science-education researchers
Scientists interested in pivoting to the science-education field can get started by reading the literature, attending conferences and joining relevant organizations.
Gordon Research Conferences are small, international meetings at which scientists can discuss research that has not yet been published. Upcoming US events include:
• Undergraduate Biology Education Research in Lewiston, Maine, 25–30 June 2023
• Chemistry Education Research and Practice in Lewiston, Maine, 9–14 July 2023
• Visualization in Science and Education in Lewiston, Maine, 16–21 July 2023
“It’s important to get some professional qualification in this space,” advises Susan Rowland, deputy executive dean for the faculty of science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She gained a graduate certificate in teaching in 2007 as she pivoted towards an education-focused career, and says it helped her to become the first teaching-focused faculty member in the biochemistry department, in 2009. Teaching-specific training also schools researchers in the vocabulary that educators and education scholars use when they communicate and publish their work.
Being the first teaching-focused researcher in her department also meant that Rowland had to work out how to angle for tenure. To prove her worth, she says, it was crucial to operate in the ‘currency’ that other faculty members valued: papers, grants and visible public impact.
Eager educators should also be aware, Rowland adds, that by taking a teaching-focused position, they could be closing the door on a more conventional research-based career.
Seeking status
Perceptions of education and teaching vary, and Tanner has found that many academic deans in California exhibit some bias against education-focused researchers — although they appreciate the grant money these faculty members bring in5. Tanner recalls that numerous people told her that her career path was a waste of her neuroscience training. She says she was “pretty great” at neuroscience research, and that there is no reason to think that other education-minded scientists failed at the bench, either. She has obtained grants, awards and success by following her passions.
In fact, both students and faculty members benefit when education-focused academics are embedded in science departments. These specialists understand their science discipline better than do scholars who trained in education only, and they can serve as formal or informal resources for colleagues who want to improve in the classroom.
“We drive curriculum renewal and best practice in the classroom and online,” says Terry Mulhern, a biomedical-science educator at the University of Melbourne. “We innovate and improve, and in doing so we bring our [department] colleagues with us.” For example, in 2019, he and a colleague revamped their university’s introductory biochemistry course using individualized feedback to students, lessons based on common misconceptions and several online elements. The latter proved useful when the institution had to pivot to full online learning in 2020 as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Manuel João Costa teaches biochemistry to medicine students at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal.Credit: Rui Oliveira
Changing colleagues’ attitudes towards education can take time, as Rowland knows well. When she was first hired to change the culture of teaching in the University of Queensland’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, her first move was to choose the undesirable office next to the men’s toilets. Most of the department’s faculty were men, and she knew they’d all have to walk past her door eventually. That’s when she’d call out a cheery “Hi!”
After a while, colleagues started coming in, sitting in her comfortable chairs and talking about their students. Then they’d ask her questions — “You’ve published in PNAS? And in Nature journals? And you’re teaching-focused?” Yes, yes and yes, she’d respond.
Eventually, Rowland says, she earned her peers’ respect. Faculty members would come to her with teaching ideas, and she would help them to choose new approaches to try in their classrooms. “My presence legitimized the idea that they could talk about their courses as works in progress,” she says. The biochemistry department now has 6 teaching-focused academics amid a faculty of 70.Ban the lecture
At Cornell, Holmes says that she isn’t formally expected to help her peers in the physics department to improve their teaching, but she serves as a resource just like any other faculty member with specific expertise. She knows cutting-edge teaching techniques she can implement and share with colleagues. For example, peer instruction is a technique in which lecture students answer a multiple-choice question, confer with their classmates, then answer it again, usually with improved understanding. The method often spreads between faculty members by word of mouth6.
Holmes also brings a fresh perspective to education research, using techniques such as machine learning. For example, a graduate student in her group applied theoretical statistical physics to model the messy data on student behaviours in physics lab courses. Using this technique, the researchers uncovered a gender divide in enquiry-based lab projects, with men more likely to use equipment and women more likely to analyse data7.
All this effort in improving education eventually feeds the research enterprise, says Rui Oliveira, a biochemist and education researcher at the University of Minho. Well-taught undergraduates become capable graduate students and postdocs with critical-thinking skills — just what Wieman was after when he started investigating teaching 35 years ago.
“In the long run,” says Oliveira, “you will get better scientists to work with, and do better science.”
2nd Section GEA 11/1/23: After the likes of Anne Frank, Baruch Spinoza & John Locke let’s get to work now.
“Active learning interventions improve achievement for all students; those with disadvantaged and ethnic-minority backgrounds gain the most6. Administrators and faculty members have a responsibility to ensure that introductory classes do not push students away from STEM courses but promote critical thinking, problem solving, engaged learning and knowledge retention for all students, whether they intend to major in STEM fields or not. Effective STEM teaching is crucial to developing a science-literate population that can address the complex and interdisciplinary health, energy, security and environmental challenges of our time.”
https://rdcu.be/c287J, also Nature, with thanks, this source, Australian readers note it has extensive Australian input
Philosophy of Science students please “unpack” the above statement (as they go in Socratic/ Leninism-Marxism industrial era teaching-methodology or siloised, say, 18th Century neoclassical pedagogy – artificially compartmentalised to maximise pecuniary gain and societal prestige for practitioners – not primarily capital owners but aspirational fiscal accumulators – 18th Century neoclassical pedagogy – or Second Millennium rapine coloniser aristoi “global north” economy generally): deracinated, marketed for cash, kudos and expert-celebrity status, eviscerated, etherised/ evaporated and “stored” at enormous fiscal & global environmental cost as data in the dying days of global dereguatory governance-blind neoliberalism: still early in this third decade of the 21st century
..this the literary-cultural “Big Bang Theory” (USA clever young men demeaning, seconding, sexually capturing & lampooning all females) and “time-travel” era accumulation & compilation of disembodied facts of imagination or conjecture comprehensively, utterly and totally divorced from ecological, even non-household communal reality – a social universe oxymoronic extravaganza that is supposed to pass as entertainment for my grandchildren and yours, reader.
..I’m reminded of the living human culture Jeanette Winterson essays, “Love Objects” 1995, providing me at least with a rather chilling insight into the lives of children in mental-illness manufacturing, disjunctive~~ and frankly psychotic households now proliferating almost exponentially (r-number at least 1.1 likely?) all over the middle- and upper income consumer society world~~
..numbed and nonsensised by historical narrative, celebrity, mythos, hubris, solopsism and exponentially “metastasing” (that is to write in non-emotive non-rhetorical terms proliferating) solecisms, not logos re names, numbers, geolocations & things, let alone considered reflection upon their quantum relations in say fourto five set series (my original reads-any-way sequentia quantum-maths I first called trialectics in the context of the historically, technically, morally and intellectually busted post WWII Dialectics of the Damned – Workers vs Capital and Monetary vs Fiscal and Atheists vs Opus Dei to nominate three of the world’s worst-ever psycholinguistic trainwrecks) 1996 – 99 JB SA
Meanwhile here’s your European and American Deep South 1930’s zeitgeist Australian Broad & Bloke Casting Corporation radio seance shoah – we’re here to blow any new technology out of the water – it’s disruptive for goodness sake old chap – and clamp down on the arts, humanities, sociology and your actual marine coastal and terrestrial environmental #science – they’re disruptive of our fabulous earnings from toxic #FossilFuels-burning enterprises that employ thousands, who in turn revel in trickled-down Adam Smith 1776 opulence and go off to live in Denpasar old chap – focussing resolutely on making compendious notes and videos about fairy penguins/ cute anthropomorhised fishies & piggies & stuff ‘cos kids love it, collecting krill and spending 100s of millions on iBeacons & RFIDs instead of doing any critical global heating research (or indeed saying a damned word about it) because this TV & #tourism detritus helps the economy and the kickbacks, junkets, preferments, sinecures, wink-winks, knight-/ damehoods and state awards are fantastic.
Never let it be said we just make stuff up. We’re the fabulists, grinches and electoral autocracy champs Saatchi & Saatchi, Burston Marsela, Crosby Textor, Deloitte, KPMG, @pwc, McKinsey & Co, Jim Reed’s Resolve Strategic, the egregious Steve Bannon – Sarah Ferguson, Englishwoman’s, Cambridge Analytica friend, King & Wood Mallesons, Clayton Utz, the internationally embarrassing 43% carbon emissions reduction in EIGHT years Bellyflop RepuTech, Goldman Sachs, the Institute for Economic Affairs (Britain), the Prince’s Trust (ANU-chancellor Chair Julie Bishop), the wild and raunchy Australian Taxation Office, the 1948 Oxford Union Debating Club with Norman Mailer tackling that wicked woman Julian A.., whoops Germaine Greer, we the hard men & dizzy ladies of #Econometrics and the #Global #Derivatives #Markets and we’re making a complete killing.
So call Lifeline, suckers.
John Blundell. South Australia 11012023
~~ ~~ RD Laing “The Divided Self” originally published 1960 globally popularised among enquiring readers 1971, especially students intent on finding alternatives to basically medieval pills, potions, syringes, surgery Germ & Dettol theory and unquestioned prestigious allopathic medicine in general – our health is ours to nurture, nourish, heal and grow, we were all learning – only the half of it could be supplied by expert services, we knew
Billionaire-🙈🙊🙉🐒s with Olivettis 