With the recent acquisition by Facebook of voice-recognition company Wit.ai, all four major players in the post-PC market (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) now have a significant infrastructure for…
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Sir Paul McCartney has been making some waves. On New Year’s Eve, Kanye West released a new single, Only One, a collaboration with The Beatles great on keys. On Twitter, Kanye’s fans reacted, wanting to…
The Australian government is reviewing vocational education and training qualifications. The aim is to streamline a system that has educators, employers and government baffled by its complexity. The government…
In any terrorist attack by Muslim extremists perpetrated in the name of Islam – such as the recent Charlie Hebdo atrocity – discussions about the Prophet Muhammad, his life and his teachings come to the…
We’ve heard a lot lately about superbugs – bacteria that are resistant to current antibiotics. But as the threat of superbugs continues to rise, the number of new treatments available has flatlined. This…
Last July, the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, announced the appointment of Gregory Andrews as Australia’s first Threatened Species Commissioner. His mission: to help avert the extinction of a…
In late 2007, a couple of months after our last HSC exam, one of my best friends punched me. In hindsight, I probably deserved it. We were 18, liberated from school and newcomers to alcohol. To make a…
Early this month, the Federal Court rejected Channel Seven’s appeal against an Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) ruling that its program about the Suruwaha Indians was inaccurate and…
Hair loss is no longer an inevitable march to baldness. Medical advances over recent decades mean male hair loss can be treated. And it need not break the bank. The cause of male pattern baldness is well…
Now the flight data recorders from Air Asia flight QZ8501 have been found investigators have a chance to find out what really brought down the aircraft with 162 passengers and crew on board. Divers have…
In a first for an Australian general election, when Queenslanders head to the polls on January 31 they’ll need more than loose change for the sausage sizzle and cake stalls – they now also need to bring…
While research generally agrees that boys are more likely to be disengaged with school than girls, there is far less agreement as to why. Social expectations of being a boy Many of the studies on boys…
Could what we flush down the toilet be used to power our homes? Thanks to biogas technology, Australia’s relationship with organic waste – human and animal excreta, plant scraps and food-processing waste…
When Brian the farmer finished his poem the crowd went wild. Small wonder he earned the People’s Choice Award on the night. We were at a so-called poetry “slam” at a country hall in a place so tiny it…
British scholar Bill Lucas recently asserted the need for a consistent, appropriate and measurable definition of creativity. In his words: if creativity is to be taken more seriously by educators and educational…
Aviation has an emissions problem. As an industry, both in the scope of its operations and the nature of its emissions, aviation has a significant effect on the environment. Despite this, aviation emissions…
Beyond the tourist fantasy of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, France today is a fabulously colourful mixture of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists. This is the situation all over Europe…
On Sunday, millions of people turned out to reaffirm the unity of France in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack. About 1.5 million people came to the march in Paris. For two hours before the march started…
Around 30 Australians are diagnosed with melanoma every day and more than 1,200 die from the disease each year. While small amounts of ultraviolet (UV) radiation are required for the production of vitamin…
Bridging our growing divide: Inequality in Australia is an important report tabled without fanfare in the Senate by its Community Affairs References Committee. The report is clearly argued and well-buttressed…
One evening ten years ago I was walking in pouring rain down the streets of Cidade Baixa in downtown Porto Alegre, Brazil. I went into a music store to look around and, to my surprise, the two-storey building…
Judging from the first week of campaigning, the 2015 Queensland election is going to be very much about economics – and jobs in particular. On the one hand, Premier Campbell Newman and his Liberal National…
I recently watched Salinger (2013), the documentary about the late American writer J.D. Salinger, famous recluse and author of The Catcher in the Rye. In it, the word “genius” was bandied about often and…
The opening night of Masquerade at the Sydney Opera House last Friday attracted a rather higher number of under-12s than might usually be expected for Australia’s theatre demographic – and it was a delightful…
The Charlie Hebdo massacre and the subsequent attack on the Hyper Cache kosher market in France are merely the latest and most bloody jihadist atrocities to have traumatised the West. From Ottawa to Sydney…