Gentle parenting means no punishments and no rewards: just a partnership with your kids where they want to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing.
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In a piece in The Conversation, Bernadette Saunders described positive discipline. Parents who practise positive discipline or gentle parenting use neither rewards nor punishments to encourage their children…
A handwritten Qur'an in Lahore Museum, Pakistan.
Usman Ahmed/Flickr
Islam, like Judaism, is a religion of law. The usual Arabic word for Islamic law is sharia (pronounced shar-ee-ah), originally the track leading to a waterhole in the desert. For Muslims, the morally good…
An example of unidirectional cause and effect: bad weather means umbrella sales rise, but buying umbrellas won’t make it rain.
Mariusz Olszewski/Flickr
UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? Today we look at the dangers of making a link between unrelated results. Here’s an…
Bundilla elder Aunty Barbara Raymond with schoolchildren in Darwin last year, supporting the cause of Indigenous constitutional recognition.
AAP Image/Supplied by Richard Oppusunggu
Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australia has been on the national agenda for a long time, but is back in the headlines with the news that the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader hope to release…
Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie is willing to take a DNA test to prove her Indigenous heritage – but would that do any good?
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie recently created controversy by claiming in her first speech to Parliament that going back six generations, she is related to the renowned Tasmanian Aboriginal…
Most adults need seven to nine hours sleep to function at their best.
Jiuck/Flickr
The amount of sleep adults need has once again come under the spotlight, with a recent Wall Street Journal article suggesting seven hours sleep is better than eight hours and the American Academy of Sleep…
Polio is still not adequately controlled in Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan.
Wen-Yan King/Flickr
Polio (poliomyelitis) is a viral disease that can lead to incurable paralysis. The World Health Organisation is coordinating a programme to eradicate this disease from the face of the earth, and we are…
Andrew Wilkie argues that parliamentary debate and authorisation should be necessary for Australia to go to war.
AAP/Gary Schafer
With the announcement of Australia’s involvement in dropping aid to Kurdish fighters engaged against Islamic State extremists in northern Iraq, questions have again arisen about who should control Australia’s…
A lack of intent may be at the heart of everyday racism.
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There is nothing casual about racism. But the term “casual racism” has emerged over the last couple of years in media coverage reporting on more extreme forms of interpersonal racism, such as racist slang…
Yes…but is it war? Inspecting weapons seized in east Ukraine.
EPA/Tatyana Zenkovich
Is the conflict in Ukraine a war? This question has been raised in recent reports about a Russian invasion in Ukraine on the Caspian Sea. The USA and other NATO powers call it an “incursion”; the Baltic…
Extreme duration can transform otherwise simple activity into something strange and powerful.
Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010, MOMA, New York. Andrew Russeth
Last September, I sat down in the Capital Theatre in Bendigo to listen to American composer Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No.2 played by the Flux Quartet from New York. Sounds a nice way to spend an…
Our moon orbits the Earth in the same way satellites do.
Flickr/Alexey Kljatov
Take a look at the moon and it isn’t hard to imagine it as a planet. A 3,476 kilometres-in-diameter ball of rock, with basalt plains and mountain ranges, whose gravitational pull produces tides here on…
Chilli might make it seem as though your face is on fire – so why is milk so soothing?
Andrés Nieto Porras
Whether it’s a few flakes on a pizza or the spiciest vindaloo known to humankind, most people can tolerate or even enjoy the tingling, burning sensation chilli can bring. So how does chilli deliver its…
Space may seem calm, but it is a more hostile environment than that on Earth. Invisible radiation is a big problem for space enthusiasts and scientific instruments. Substituting electronic devices to do…
Many people think a snake’s forked tongue is creepy. Every so often, the snake waves it around rapidly, then retracts it. Theories explaining the forked tongues of snakes have been around for thousands…
When cells are deprived of energy and nutrients from their external environment, they package up and consume their own components to survive.
Kevin McShane/Flickr
Deb White, South Australian Health & Medical Research Institute and Lisa Schafranek, South Australian Health & Medical Research Institute
Can you imagine being so desperate for food that you would eat yourself to survive? Most people can’t but our cells do exactly this. When cells are deprived of energy and nutrients from their external…
An Israeli Iron Dome missile is fired to intercept a rocket from Gaza.
EPA/Abir Sultan
The breakdown of an initial ceasefire between Israeli forces and Hamas last weekend played out to a familiar soundtrack: the wail of air-raid sirens and the menacing hiss of incoming rocket fire, followed…
A model of the bubonic plague bacterium, which is known as Yersina pestis.
Tim Evanson/Flcikr
Cases of plague have been reported in the Chinese city of Yumen, where a man has died of the disease. Control measures taken by the authorities include travel restrictions in and out of the city, and 151…
Win Butler of Arcade Fire performs some indie, 2014 style.
Will Oliver/EPA
Today, indie-rock, indie-folk, indie-dance, indie-hip-hop and even indie-classical are common terms used to describe the sonically discernible offshoots of an evolving genre once referred to as “indie…
How is gender inequality explained in the ‘postfeminist’ age?
AAP/ Bernard Menigault
Women have struggled for greater participation in spheres reserved for men in every nation, dating back at least to 620BCE. Yet there is no society on the planet in which women are equally represented…