crytical

Money Slipping Through Nation’s Fingers
MORE than 40 per cent of Australians cannot name their electricity company, don’t know what their mortgage interest rate is and don’t know if their mobile phone plan is good value, a new study shows.
The report by The Australia Institute shows Australians borrowed $274 billion through home loans last year and spent $226 billion on their credit cards – but questions how smart their decisions were.
It reveals about 70 per cent of Australians make irrational decisions about money and are either overconfident or overwhelmed by money matters or oblivious to sensible financial management.

Illustration: John Shakespeare
Yet most people, even those who admit to having been in financial difficulties in the past year, rate themselves as “better than average” money managers.
“Australians have an exaggerated self perception of their financial knowledge and decision-making skills,” the report says.
Based on an online survey of 1180 adults in October, the study shows education is not the main determinant of good or bad financial behaviour with the tertiary qualified almost as likely as early school leavers to make poor decisions.
Almost 30 per cent of those who describe themselves as “better than average” carry a credit card debt or have made other basic mistakes.
More than half those took out home loans recently had not considered that they might lose a job or become sick.
The survey found a minority – 22 per cent – paid credit card debts in full, compared phone plans and bought things they needed in sales. The report’s authors describe this group as “human calculators”.
The report says orthodox economics is based on the assumption that all adults act rationally, like human calculators. But the survey paints a different picture.
“Some people are hyper-vigilant about petrol prices but oblivious about paying $2 when withdrawing money from the ATM,” it says.
Alina Foulkes, 23, a business analyst from Paddington, estimates she is losing several hundred dollars a year by not shopping around for mobile phone and credit card plans.
“I just haven’t been proactive enough in scoping out the best deals,” she said. “It’s a time thing and it also seems too complex. If I knew it would take 10 minutes, then I’d do it.”
People aged over 55 were much more likely than younger people to be “human calculators”.
More than one-third of Australians lacked confidence in saving for retirement, while more than one-quarter had suffered financial difficulties in the past year – including 15 per cent of high income earners.
“The majority of low-income earners report being able to meet their financial obligations, while a significant minority of high-income earners do not,” the report says.
Over-confidence was a big cause of financial stress and led people to believe they could solve complex financial problems by themselves.
Irrational behaviour included people holding money in savings accounts earmarked for special purposes such as a wedding or holiday when they had not paid off their credit cards in full and faced more than 20 per cent in interest a year.
Irrationality extended to investment behaviour with people four times more likely to see a fall in share prices as an opportunity to invest than they were to see a fall in superannuation value as a similar opportunity, although most super funds were invested in shares.
“Only when we have admitted that it is difficult to be a human calculator … will it be possible to persuade more people to use the digital calculators lurking in their desk drawers,” it says, “or failing that, to call someone who enjoys the challenge.”
Adele Horan SMH 1.12.2010

US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment

                

                
                Simon Jenkins
                guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 November 2010 18.30 GMT
Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation’s secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing’s snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.
Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be “world policeman” – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces.
In this light, two backup checks were applied. The US government was told in advance the areas or themes covered, and “representations” were invited in return. These were considered. Details of “redactions” were then shared with the other four media recipients of the material and sent to WikiLeaks itself, to establish, albeit voluntarily, some common standard.
The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published. Nor is the material classified top secret, being at a level that more than 3 million US government employees are cleared to see, and available on the defence department’s internal Siprnet. Such dissemination of “secrets” might be thought reckless, suggesting a diplomatic outreach that makes the British empire seem minuscule.
The revelations do not have the startling, coldblooded immediacy of the WikiLeaks war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, with their astonishing insight into the minds of fighting men seemingly detached from the ethics of war. The’s disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do.
Few will be surprised to know that Vladimir Putin runs the world’s most sensational kleptocracy, that the Saudis wanted the Americans to bomb Iran, or that Pakistan’s ISI is hopelessly involved with Taliban groups of fiendish complexity. We now know that Washington knows too. The full extent of American dealings with Yemen might upset that country’s government, but is hardly surprising. If it is true that the Pentagon targeted refugee camps for bombing, it should be of general concern. American congressmen might also be interested in the sums of money given to certain foreign generals supposedly to pay for military equipment.
The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.
No harm is done by high-class chatter about President Nicolas Sarkozy’s vulgarity and lack of house-training, or about the British royal family. What the American embassy in London thinks about the coalition suggests not an alliance at risk but an embassy with a talent problem.
Some stars shine through the banality such as the heroic envoy in Islamabad, Anne Patterson. She pleads that Washington’s whole policy is counterproductive: it “risks destabilising the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal”. Nor is any amount of money going to bribe the Taliban to our side. Patterson’s cables are like missives from the Titanic as it already heads for the bottom.
The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world’s superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.
America’s foreign policy is revealed as a slave to rightwing drift, terrified of a bomb exploding abroad or of a pro-Israeli congressman at home. If the cables tell of the progress to war over Iran or Pakistan or Gaza or Yemen, their revelation might help debate the inanity of policies which, as Patterson says, seem to be leading in just that direction. Perhaps we can now see how catastrophe unfolds when there is time to avert it, rather than having to await a Chilcot report after the event. If that is not in the public’s interest, I fail to see what is.
Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets. Were there some overriding national jeopardy in revealing them, greater restraint might be in order. There is no such overriding jeopardy, except from the policies themselves as revealed. Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.
What this saga must do is alter the basis of diplomatic reporting. If WikiLeaks can gain access to secret material, by whatever means, so presumably can a foreign power. Words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not. The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets. The Guardian material must be a breach of the official secrets acts. But coupled with the penetration already allowed under freedom of information, the walls round policy formation and documentation are all but gone. All barriers are permeable. In future the only secrets will be spoken ones. Whether that is a good thing should be a topic for public debate.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Korean Impasse Needs A Game-Changer
Kevin Rudd has had all his ambassadors from east Asia down in Canberra this week for a confab, and hosted the Japanese foreign minister as well, but it’s a fair bet that no bold ideas will emerge for breaking the region’s chronic strategic stalemate.
Kim Jong-il has upped the ante twice in a month, showing off his new uranium enrichment centrifuges, then shelling an outlying bit of South Korea. The Americans will respond by sailing a carrier group around the Yellow Sea; the South Koreans will cut the remnants of its aid to the North; everyone will urge China to do something; another ineffective resolution may scrape through the UN Security Council.
Beijing is pained by the antics of neighbour, but its Politburo members and army generals will still visit Pyongyang and pledge constant support. Saving the North Korean comrades might have cost it hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers in the 1950-53 Korean War, and getting back Taiwan (Eisenhower was about to cut Chiang Kai-shek loose), but it can’t see beyond the immediate risks of a sudden collapse of the communist state: floods of refugees, conflict and American forces moving up to its own land border.
The Americans are inhibited from trying their own circuit-breaker: giving the North Koreans the diplomatic recognition Kim craves and opening direct contacts in Pyongyang. They’re still trapped by their own hopes North Korea will collapse soon, concern about upsetting South Korea, and the political mantra against ”rewarding bad behaviour”. An American embrace might actually hasten the end of the Kim dynasty.
Meanwhile, Seiji Maehara’s decision to make Australia his first overseas call as Japan’s foreign minister reflects a country suddenly realising it needs to revitalise its friendly relationships. Japan is still a country of immense saved wealth, world-beating technology and much more powerful defences than most of us realise. But it remains trapped in a downward spiral.
Its population began declining a year ago from a peak of 127 million and on present trends will be about 89 million by mid-century, by which time 40 per cent of its people will be aged over 65. Combined with slow economic growth and resistance to new sources of labour (immigrants, women), this will erode Japan’s ability to sustain its relative power and influence. Nearby nations are already contesting islands put under the Japanese flag in the 19th century.
The causes of this are twofold, illustrated by the writings of the great American contrarian scholar, Chalmers Johnson, who died in San Diego last Saturday, aged 79. In domestic policies, government agencies and big business remain largely locked in to what Johnson called the “capitalist developmental state” in his 1982 book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle – MITI being the old Ministry of International Trade and Industry, since renamed, which channelled the low-interest savings in Japanese postal accounts towards export-oriented industries.
Chalmers, a Korean War navy officer and later CIA consultant, came to see Japan’s postwar alliance with the US as symbiotic with this economic policy: its mercantilistic gouging of the US industrial heartland was tolerated as the price of keeping Japan as occupied territory, providing the forward bases off the Asian mainland for the US Navy to apply the ocean-control doctrines of its guiding strategic thinker, Alfred Thayer Mahan.
As Steve Clemons, of the website The Washington Note, wrote this week, these ideas brought him into conflict with what Johnson called the ”Chrysanthemum Club” – the network of America’s established Japan scholars and foreign policy officials who blotted out the state role in Japan’s ”free enterprise” economy and played down Washington’s security grip and its oppressive effects in areas like Okinawa that host US bases.
Later, between 2000 and 2006 came a trilogy, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, in which Johnson argued the US had turned into an imperial power, bringing an avoidable backlash of attacks, undercutting its democracy at home and incurring a ruinous expense.
In his last writing (for the TomDispatch.com website in August) Johnson saw America’s century as ”top dog” coming to an end – with the US looking like ”a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run” with only Hollywood making waves just as the Beatles and Twiggy did in the 1960s – unless it dismantled its ”empire of military bases” and invested the savings to reinvent the republic as ”a productive, normal nation”.
Johnson didn’t expect this to happen, and his view would not have changed if he had been at the recent US-Australia strategic meeting in Melbourne (or the ganging up at the ”trilateral” security dialogues with Japan). Rudd and the Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, welcomed an intensification of the US security presence across Asia, including our own bases. The centrepiece of that system is Japan. But what if it is the American embrace that is slowly strangling that ally? We have our own branch of the Chrysanthemum Club.
Japan won’t become strong until it is let off the leash, just as Germany was, showing that the early 20th century need not be repeated. In the best outcome, it would reconcile with the Koreans and Chinese, as the French, British and Germans have done with each other. Instead of a mighty war, we might see a mighty process of economic integration, with huge external spinoffs to suppliers like us.
There’s an historic diplomatic task here, which Rudd could assist by assigning competent people, consistent effort and a modicum of self-effacement to the task of persuading China it’s safe to work towards Korean reunification. He might also urge the Americans to open up relations with Pyongyang. It’s not necessarily a reward.
As it is, the situation is going backwards. Kim Jong-il’s regime may be there for years or decades more. He’s preparing his third nuclear test, and Seoul is starting to suggest US tactical nuclear weapons (removed in 1991 by George Bush snr) might need to be redeployed in the South.
Hamish McDonald Asia-Pacific editor, Sydney Morning Herald
27.11.2010

Chalmers Johnson, 79, Critic Of U.S. Role In World
Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.
The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, his wife, Sheila, said.
Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.
In “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (Metropolitan Books, 2000), Dr. Johnson wondered why America’s military spending continued to rise after the cold war had ended. He concluded that through a network of more than 700 strategic bases around the world, the United States was committed to creating global hegemony. And he worried about the consequences for American democracy.
It was a theme he expanded upon in three subsequent books, “The Sorrows of Empire” (2004), “Nemesis” (2006) and “Dismantling the Empire” (2010).
Summarising the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote.
“This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”
To maintain its empire, he said, the United States “will inevitably undercut domestic democracy.”
In a review of “The Sorrows of Empire” in The New York Times, Ronald Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, wrote that the book was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger.” He added that it “conveys a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the United States has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms.”
E. B. Keehn, past president of the Japan Society of Southern California and a former lecturer at Cambridge University, said in an interview on Monday that Dr. Johnson “did not go into his work with an agenda.”
“If the data pointed to a conclusion that made people uncomfortable, including himself,” Dr. Keehn said, “he would never shy away from it.”
That was true not only of the “blowback” series, Dr. Keehn said, but of Dr. Johnson’s studies of Chinese Communism and of the role Japan’s government played in its economy.
His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market.
The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”
Born in Phoenix on Aug. 6, 1931, Chalmers Ashby Johnson was one of two children of Katherine and David Johnson Jr. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, with a degree in economics, he served in the Navy in the Korean War; it was the start of his fascination with Asia. “His assault boat landing craft was constantly being repaired in Yokohama,” his wife said, “so he started to study Japanese.”
After receiving his master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1961, both from Berkeley, he joined the university’s political science faculty. He headed the China Centre at Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and was chairman of the political science department from 1976 to 1980. In 1988 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach at its new School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He retired in 1992.
Besides his wife, the former Sheila Knipscheer, he is survived by his sister, Barbara Johnson.
By DENNIS HEVESI

New York Times 24.11.2012
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New York Times 24.11.2010

Flamingos gather in the shape of a flamingo in Yucatan, Mexico. Photograph: Robert Haas/National Geographic/Caters News Agency

Flamingos have many extraordinary qualities, but until now they have never been considered to be performance artists. Now, thanks to this amazing aerial photograph of a flock of Caribbean flamingos in the Mexican province of Yucatán, we may have to think again. Some believe that the birds’ ability to arrange themselves into the shape of a flamingo (albeit a rather inelegant one) is evidence of divine intervention. But like all flocking behaviour, it is simply the best way to avoid predators and to find the best place to feed. Still, a once-in-a-lifetime moment for photographer Bobby Haas, who managed to grab just one image before the birds dispersed.
Guardian UK 23.11.2010

Army Ants Are Creators Not Destroyers Of Worlds
By Matt Walker 
Editor, Earth News

Army ants swarm in search of prey, while other species follow them for their own survival
Army ants have a reputation for annihilating everything in their path as they march through the jungle.
But the most complete study of its kind has found that army ants are creators of whole worlds, not destroyers.
More than 300 species, ranging from birds to tiny mites, depend in part on a single species of army ant for their survival, scientists have discovered.
That means army ants support a greater number of other life forms than any other known species.


It is a bit of a paradox that E. burchellii, bringing death to so many species, has this other role

Biologist Stefanie Bergoff
This revelation about army ants is the culmination of more than 50 years of scientific research into their behaviour conducted by naturalist Carl Rettenmeyer and his wife Marian, based at the University of Connecticut, US.
Together with fellow biologists, they generated a comprehensive list of animals known to be found in the company of a single army ant species Eciton burchellii.
This New World species is one of two army ant species that sends out large swarming raiding parties above ground, and it is the only one that creates temporary bivouacs above ground in piles of brush, or inside logs or tree trunks.

Antbird at the swarm front, waiting for the ants to flush out arthropods
Around half a million worker ants belong to a colony.
Each colony sets up home for a period of 20 days, which gives time for ant pupae and newly laid eggs to develop.
During this time, the workers send out daily raids, each time proceeding in a new direction to avoid raiding the same area twice.
Then once the eggs have hatched and the larvae have become adults, the colony becomes nomadic.
During this wandering phase, the army ant colony again raids every day, setting up bivouacs at night.
But while it is well known that army ants kill and eat numerous insects and other arthropods on their raids, less well known is how many animals actually depend on the ants for their survival.

Workers holding a male ant, which carries a beetle on its thorax

“Only a few studies have focused on collecting army ant ‘guests’,” says Dr Stefanie Bergoff, who worked with the Rettenmeyers to complete the study.
Some of these “guest” or associate species, as biologists call them, are already known.
So-called antbirds, for example, follow ant raiding parties, picking up arthropods flushed out by the marauding ants.
One species of African army ant even has a snake that follows it.

A bristletail running in an E. burchellii column
But until now, no-one has recognised the huge diversity of other species that army ants support.
Carl Rettenmeyer, who died in April last year, and his wife Marian started collecting these associate species in 1952.
The research team, who continued the work after Carl’s death in 2009, have now collated data from 1200 coloniesof E. burchellii ants, adding samples from 345 colonies studied by other scientists.
What they found is remarkable: 557 separate species have been recorded associating with this single type of army ant.
Of those, more than 300 are known to depend on the ants in some way for their survival.
“And I think this is only the tip of the iceberg,” Dr Bergoff told the BBC.

Close-up of a E. burchellii bivouac
At least 29 species of bird, including “typical” antbirds, ground antbirds and woodcreepers feed on arthropods flushed out by the ants, such as millipedes, cockroaches and stick insects, rather than the ants themselves.
At least 239 butterfly species have been seen or collected at ant swarms, feeding on bird droppings laid by birds that have been attracted by the ants, while springtails run with the army ant columns at night.
Tiny wasps buzz around the ant swarms, seeking out small spiders that flee the raiding parties. These wasps are parasitoids of the spiders, laying their eggs within them.
Thousands of blowflies, flesh flies, tachinid flies and scuttle flies accompany each swarm raid too, belonging to numerous different species.
Many appear to target dead insects or those newly killed by the ants, laying their eggs within the insect carcasses.
Such species flock to each army ant raiding party, but many others frequent refuse deposits left by the ants, or the bivouacs they live in.
Army ants create refuse deposits, or garbage dumps, which contain all the hard bits of prey items, such as insects’ legs, that are inedible to them and their larvae.
However, these deposits are teeming with life.
Beetle, mite, wasp and springtail species all depend on them as a habitat and food.
Tens or hundreds of similar small creatures also survive with the bivouacs of E. burchellii.
Many of these associate species are difficult to capture and study.
Because of that, say the researchers, it is likely that many, many more species that depend on E. burchellii will remain to be identified.
“If really well studied, I would think the number of E. burchellii associates could double,” says Dr Bergoff.
“It is a bit of a paradox that E. burchellii, bringing death to so many species, has this other role for such a higher number of associates,” she adds.
BBC Earth News 22nd November, 2010

Although the key focus of my research is landslides, I also spend some of my time working with mining companies.  Thus, the Pike River accident in New Zealand is of interest.  The blast today appears to have left at least 27 miners trapped underground; at the time of writing there has been no contact with the missing workers, although rescue operations are clearly underway.  All modern mines have fully trained mine rescue teams that lead the way in such events.  They regularly liaise with the emergency services, and a contingency plan will be in place.  Note however that entering a coal mine after an explosion can be very dangerous, with risks including toxic fumes, dust, collapses, and further explosions.  For this reason the team may not enter the mine for some time to come.
The mine itself is comparatively new, extracting premium hard coking coal, used primarily for metal smelting.  The planned annual production level is one million tonnes, mostly for export, although current production is less than half of this.  The first shipment was made early this year.  The good news about such a new mine is that, unlike the San Jose mine in Chile, it will have been constructed  with two exit routes for the miners (see below).
The cross section of the mine plan is provided in an overview document, which is available here (caution – pdf).  The entrance adit is off to the right of the image.

The Pike River mine air shaft
As the cross section above shows, one aspect of this mine that is important is that the primary access roadway is via an inclined drift (roadway) rather than the conventional vertcal shaft that most people associate with coal mines. This inclined roadway is large – 5.5 metres wide and 4 metres high – see image above (source – caution pdf).
A key part of the rescue may be the presence of a large vertical ventilation shaft from the mine workings to the hilltop, shown to the left – source).  This shaft, which appears to have a cross section of 4 square metres, may provide an additional access route for the rescue teams.  However, above ground access to the shaft is by helicopter only, so the logistics will be challenging.  This shaft has been subject to rockfalls in the past, and indeed a substantial section had to be rebuilt in 2009, but hopefully it will provide a key potential rescue route.
There is a very interesting pdf article about the development of the mine online here (caution – it is a pdf).  This article was written by Gordon Ward, the Chief Executive Officer of the mine.  This article includes the image below, which shows the nature of the mining operations.  At the time that this article was written the tunnel had yet to intercept the dipping coal seam (the remaining tunnel length then to be produced is marked “remaining section to tunnel”).  The tunnel was intended to intercept the tunnel at the location of the Hawera Fault.
The rescue operation will probably be very challenging, so do not expect rapid information to emerge from the onsite teams, despite the undoubtedly frenzied media interest.  I will try to keep this updated over the weekend as news emerges.

AGU Blogosphere 21.11.2012

• All numbers are estimates because exact numbers are top secret.
• Strategic nuclear warheads are designed to target cities, missile locations and military headquarters as part of a strategic plan.
ISRAEL
Israeli authorities have never confirmed or denied the country has nuclear weapons.
NORTH KOREA
The highly secretive state claims it has nuclear weapons, but there is no information in the public domain that proves this.
IRAN
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in 2003 there had been covert nuclear activity to make fissile material and continues to monitor Tehran’s nuclear program.
SYRIA
US officials have claimed it is covertly seeking nuclear weapons.
BBC News 20.11.2019

The Carina Nebula is a large bright nebula that surrounds several clusters of stars. It contains two of the most massive and luminous stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae and HD 93129A. Located 7500 light years away, the nebula itself spans some 260 light years across, about 7 times the size of the Orion Nebula, and is shown in all its glory in this mosaic. It is based on images collected with the 1.5-m Danish telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. Being brighter than one million Suns, Eta Carinae (the brightest star in this image) is the most luminous star known in the Galaxy, and has most likely a mass over 100 times that of the Sun. It is the closest example of a luminous blue variable, the last phase in the life of a very massive star before it explodes in a fiery supernova. Eta Carinae is surrounded by an expanding bipolar cloud of dust and gas known as the Homunculus (little man in Latin), which astronomers believe was expelled from the star during a great outburst seen in 1843.
Commons Wikimedia 19.11.2010

Opinions based on fact and expertise outweigh those based on quackery.
WE KNOW the discoveries of science can transform the world. Yet some, it seems, would disagree. Some would challenge the very legitimacy of science.
To be generous, this might be the product of our misunderstanding of the scientific method. To scientists, the contest of ideas is what drives science forward. It allows us to test, refine and improve our knowledge. Yet in the popular mind, scientists can be seen as the keepers of truth and the arbiters of fact. Too often, we assert that science provides ”the proof”.
The historian in me asserts that science at best provides the consensus of experts, based on robust assessment of the known evidence. That’s what we mean by peer review. To be less generous, we make no such claims in politics. And we certainly make no such claims in political journalism.
So when politics is dressed up as science, how can the public measure credibility?
In theory, political journalism claims that both sides of an argument need to be heard. In practice, that means claims vetted and dismissed in the halls of science by peer review may well clog up the halls of public opinion. Put simply, not all opinions are of equal intellectual value in scientific debate. And quackery certainly doesn’t deserve equal time with credible research.
The point is well made by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their recent book Merchants of Doubt.
They demonstrate how the enemies of science have been able to undermine public confidence and buttress vested interests over the past 50 years. The authors build their case using numerous examples, from the infamous tactics of the tobacco industry, to the debate around asbestos, to the ongoing campaign against climate scientists.
Our ability to counter this trend in Australia must surely be compromised by the absence of serious science specialists in our mainstream press. Think for a moment how few special science rounds there are in our major dailies.
The Australian Science Media Centre has identified just 11 dedicated science writers writing in the major national and metropolitan papers. Eight of them double as environment, technology or general news reporters.
So, who’s giving us the science news? More and more it comes from what ABC science journalist Robyn Williams calls ”the dark side” – the world of public relations. In a recent edition of The Walkley magazine, he points out that PR officers outnumber journalists 20 to one in the Australian Science Communicators.
Then there is social media, some of which is well informed. But a lot of it is not. There is a mass of anecdote, opinion and special pleading – all demanding to be treated as the intellectual equivalent of science. There are too many people who are willing to acquiesce to that demand.
Since the days of Galileo, individual scientists have been reluctant to engage in public controversy. A sense of isolation can be intimidating, and intimidation is a powerful silencer. That’s why the friends of science within the political system have to speak up.
But we need more. Modern science is dependent on collaboration, on the work of teams. We need today a team of champions prepared to challenge the merchants of doubt. We need our scientific community to inspire Australia so that our scientists have the courage to carry our nation’s hopes and dreams.
Kim Carr is federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. He delivered this speech on Wednesday when presenting the 2010 Prime Minister’s prizes for science.
The Age 19.11.2010