The Australian citizenship test has just turned four. Its birthday passed without fanfare but this is not surprising. Soon after its introduction, a Labor government review addressed early concerns that…
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One of the world’s largest online video gaming networks, Steam, has been hacked and its 35 million users may have had their accounts “compromised”. And yes, “compromised” means their (encrypted) credit…
The European Union is in crisis – yet again. If you enter “Europe in crisis” into Google, more than 655 million entries pop up. Europe’s current problems are being described as a Euro crisis – it is a…
Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away over the weekend. The 22-year-old was one of four former NYU student developers of Diaspora, an open source social network platform that has been the basis…
Is the Eurozone about to crash and burn, leaving Club Med in its wake? Not so fast. Reports have suggested that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have discussed a strategic…
In his recent speech accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, Chomsky returned to a recurrent theme from his work in political science: that the violence perpetrated by the West is not represented in our media…
Quitting smoking is clearly beneficial but a growing push by the pharmaceutical industry to encourage drugs for the purpose should be strongly resisted. Not only do most smokers successfully quit by other…
The bill creating the carbon price has passed through Parliament. However, the campaigning efforts of the environmental lobby will not pause. More than ever, the coal industry is in its sights, with court…
Picture this common scenario: A mother is worried about the size of her 13-year-old daughter, who appears quite a bit heavier than the other students in her class. But the mother is reassured by her friend…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Fraud is the exception not the rule in science, but it happens, as one recent high-profile case showed. How does this occur, and what can mathematics bring to the equation? Jon Borwein…
Storm clouds are gathering in the world of weather and climate modelling – a discipline that saves lives and property every day and has revolutionised our lives in recent decades. What we might call the…
The latest round of chest beating over Iran developing nuclear weapons has seen renewed speculation over the possibility of military strikes on the Islamic Republic’s enrichment facilities. Certainly if…
Pretty soon, not being involved in social media will be just as implausible as not having a telephone. If my 80-year-old dad is on Facebook and women over 55 are the fastest growing demographic on the…
Spokespeople for the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia and some other pastoralist organisations, are warning that in the current land of “flooding rain”, landholders will be overwhelmed by burgeoning…
It is possible to rebuild relations after major disputes. British Airways is currently trying to do just that after a long industrial-relations dispute with many of its flight attendants. Qantas’s CEO…
You may notice more than a few of your friends and colleagues are a little more hirsute than normal this month. The annual charity event Movember encourages men to grow moustaches to raise money and awareness…
The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (East Timor) is one of the world’s newest post-conflict nations. Next year it celebrates ten years as an independent democratic state, after almost 30 years of Indonesian…
Social media provokes some of the most voluminous and heated responses in two key areas of contemporary society – democracy and privacy. Promoting the first and threatening the second, social media is…
Influenza is never off the news agenda for long. If it’s not the flu season (and it always is in one hemisphere) and the attendant calls for vaccinations, it’s news about vaccines causing problems or new…
When Treasurer Wayne Swan finger-wagged at the recent set of G20 events, scolding his European colleagues and telling them to get their act together, he had more of a point than perhaps the Australian…
So Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been called a liar in a conversation that was released on the web. I’m not talking about the chat between Nicholas Sarkozy and Barack Obama. Rather, I’m…
Three recent shark attacks in Western Australian waters have led some politicians in WA to request the culling of the sharks involved, and the increase of fisheries quotas for sharks. What no politician…
It is just possible that the Federal Government’s public statements about the need to get back, at all costs, to a budget surplus for the 2012-13 year are based on a grim view of the intelligence of the…
This is a shorter version of an article that appears in the latest issue of Perspectives, an opinion-led journal published by Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute. It’s predicted that two-thirds of the…
The recent plan to see women take on frontline combat roles in the Australian military from 2016 removes one of the last formal barriers to women’s participation in all realms of work. Unsurprisingly…