Remembering Bill Hayden

Opposition Leader, Foreign Minister, Governor-General, and perhaps the best Prime Minister Australia never had, the late Bill Hayden enjoyed a significant public career in service of his country.

Picturing loneliness in aged care

Gerontology tends to offer a biomedical understanding of growing old but the arts and social sciences can look at cultural dimensions to understand ageing beyond “biological decline”.

Modelling floods to save lives

While the world needs to act to limit climate change, we also need practical steps to plan ahead and engineering hydrologists, who assess flood risks, can help predict and so resist the impact of flood events on vulnerable areas.

Leaping forward on climate action

Given the urgent need to address climate change, the imperative is not only setting goals or targets, but delivering on them.

Digging into Substack

Substack has become the most prominent and accessible email newsletter platform and its rapid adoption by both local and international authors has resulted in the creation of fascinating and innovative new content.

The conflict over consciousness

The science of consciousness is still poorly understood and remains beset with philosophical difficulties and a scarcity of experimental data so competing ideas – such as integrated information theory – still battle it out in the marketplace of ideas.

Osiris Rex

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will allow scientists to put asteroid Bennu under the microscope and perhaps answer questions about the origins of life on Earth.

Breaking the glass ceiling

The National Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s data suggests that organisations with more women in leadership roles are more profitable and efficient, but Australia still has some way to go to match the global leaders in gender equality.

Listening to other voices

With the polls trending heavily against the ‘Yes’ campaign, more thought must be given to what happens if the Voice Referendum fails to pass in October and alternative ways to improve the lot of Australia’s first nations peoples.

AI backs the All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup

Despite New Zealand’s record loss to South Africa in August, All Blacks fans can take heart from statistical modelling that sees them as favourites to win this year’s Rugby World Cup.

Measuring what matters – human capital

When Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital 156 years ago, economists had a pretty good idea of what “capital” was – factories, ships, railroads, and other expensive equipment. If he were writing today, he would surely be paying far more attention to the distribution of human capital.

Google it, mate

Google has become the most successful advertising company in history over the last 25 years, harvesting user data from free search and mapping services to target ads at users, but AI chatbots could overturn its business model, leaving Google as obsolete as the search engines it replaced during its heyday.