More than 260,000 students across Australia are going to university for the first time.

Some come to university to pursue a passion, others to discover one, and some aren’t quite sure why they’re here. Whatever their reason, it can take time to adjust and feel comfortable at uni, and some students decide studying is not for them. In their first year, around 14% of Australian students will choose to leave.

What do you do if you get to uni and it isn’t quite what you expect?

Expectations versus reality

The transition from high school to university can be a big adjustment, especially for Year 12 students who are used to structured learning and clear guidance. Suddenly, you’re managing a new timetable, deadlines, and navigating new places and possibly new subjects on your own.

While university social clubs and campus activities can help you settle in, your first year at university can be a lonely time. You are away from familiar school friends and in classes full of people you don’t know.

Mature-aged students (anyone over 21) face their own challenges when life experience does not always translate to confidence in academic skills.

Juggling study, work and personal commitments isn’t easy. Fitting university in around other life pressures can feel overwhelming.

Seek out support

Each university will have slightly different offerings around student support.

If you are finding the academic work difficult, ask if there are academic writing supports or library research supports available.

If you are worried about your funds, ask about financial counselling.

Also seek out on-campus mental health or counselling supports if you you are feeling particularly stressed about your situation.

Can you change your degree or subjects?

If you’re not enjoying yourself, try to work out exactly what it is you don’t like: is it university itself? Is it your course? Or just a particular subject?

If your current degree isn’t working, you could consider switching degrees or the mix of subjects you are studying. Switching to another degree or discipline may come with credit for prior study. Remember, no learning is ever wasted, and many skills are transferable. You can talk to your university admissions team to see what’s possible.

Or perhaps part-time study would be a better option for you. This is very common among uni students. Only 40% complete their degree within four years.

Universities often allow up to ten years for a bachelors’ degree, so you have time to rethink and adjust. Chat with an academic advisor or student services to understand your options.

If university isn’t working at all, remember there are many other options post-school. This includes vocational education and training courses (some of which are free) that provide practical skills, geared towards a job. It is OK to change your mind.

Key dates to know

Timing is important. You need to be aware of the “census date” for your particular uni. This is the deadline when your fees are locked in.

Before then, you can drop courses without financial or academic penalties.

Think of the time before the census date as a “try-before-you-buy” period. While dates vary between universities, the first few weeks give you a chance to experience course content and decide if it’s the right fit for you.

Remember you are going through a big change – so go easy on yourself. And speak to academic, career, and wellbeing supports at your university if you think you need to make a change.

Catherine Stephen, Lecturer, School of Nursing, University of Wollongong; Brandon W. Smith, Associate Lecturer, School of Nursing, University of Wollongong, and Christopher Patterson, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Whether it’s for a work meeting or a class assignment, presenting data to others is a common task on our to-do list.

We use data to make decisions on our health, finances and the world we live in, yet finding the best ways to communicate data without boring your audience can be daunting.

However, there are some tried and true techniques to getting your message across effectively.

First, you need to boost your data literacy – which includes learning about the different kind of charts and how to use them.

What is data literacy?

Data literacy is the ability to “plot” and present complex data in a way that’s easy to digest. There is even a branch of statistics focusing on the best way to present data.

It’s one of the most desired skills in the workplace, yet a 2020 survey found only one in five employees across nine different countries (including Australia) believe they are data literate.

With seemingly countless options available, choosing the right chart is challenging, and the wrong choice can influence how data is interpreted.

Passing on the humble pie

Pie charts are often the first pick when it comes to presenting data with different categories, such as age group or blood type. These categories are represented as slices, with the size of each slice proportional to the amount of data.

Doughnut charts, a close relative of the pie chart, work the same way but are shown with a hole in the middle.

As delicious as they sound, these charts should be consumed in moderation.

Pie charts present data in a circular pattern, making it difficult to make comparisons when there are many groups, or when groups are similar in size. They can also misrepresent data entirely, especially when data add up to over 100%.

Here are some alternatives to pie charts that sound just as tasty, but are easier to digest.

Bar charts

Bar charts summarise data across different categories, but present them next to each other. This makes it easier to compare several categories at once.

Here is an example from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing the different generations from the last census.

Waffle charts

Waffle charts are a good option for data organised by categories.

They present data in a grid, with each unit representing a fixed number. This is useful for presenting both large and small percentages that are difficult to compare side-by-side.

We can clearly see most people eat meat from the figure.

However, a bar chart would make comparing less common diets difficult. With a waffle chart, we can see 4% of people surveyed are vegan, while 2% are pescetarian.

Histograms

Data often represent different measurements, such as height and weight, or time taken to write an article.

Histograms also present data with bars but, unlike bar charts, are used for data collected as numbers, or numerical data.

This chart type is used to show how a set of numbers are spread out, and can be useful in seeing which numbers occur more often than others.

It’s tempting to simplify data by fitting them into categories, but this can sometimes hide interesting facts.

The example below shows the body mass index (BMI) of a group of people as a bar chart.

It’s easy to lose information when trying to simplify BMI into categories, especially among people who may be obese.

Each category in the bar chart could easily be misunderstood as representing BMI as similar ranges. However, if we look at the histogram, BMI for obese people can be as high as 70.

A doctor using this data would need to take into account that someone with a BMI of 60 may need a different treatment method compared to someone with a BMI of 30.

Line charts and scatterplots

Other chart types for numerical data, such as line charts and scatterplots, allow us to explore how different measurements are related to one another.

Line charts are used to visualise trends over time, such as stock prices and weekly flu cases.

In contrast, scatterplots show how two different measurements collected on the same subject are related.

While scatterplots summarise trends, they sometimes show unusual results that would go unnoticed if measurements were charted separately.

For example, the figure below compares life expectancy and health expenditure in different countries.

If we’re only looking at health expenditure, people from the United States would appear healthier as the US spends the most money on health care per person.

Presenting this information along with life expectancy tells a different story.

Keep it simple and avoid ‘chart junk’

It is always tempting to add more information.

“Chart junk” refers to extra information such as excess labels, 3D effects or even different types of data in the same chart.

This makes them more difficult to read and can distort the data, and is usually a sign your data is too complicated. You’re better off using multiple charts to tell the full story.

As Coco Chanel once said, “simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance”.

Keep these words in mind and choose a chart that keeps it simple without compromising style, content and detail.

Nicole White, Associate Professor of Statistics, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the summer of 1905, a young Canadian widow, Mina Hubbard, set out on an expedition to map the northeastern corner of Labrador, from Lake Melville up to Ungava Bay, an inlet of the Arctic Ocean. It was an unusual challenge for a former nurse who had left school at 16.

Her husband, Leonidas Hubbard, had died in this same harsh environment two years earlier. Mina, 35, intended to complete his work.

Although she faced physical dangers on the 600-mile journey – starvation, bears, freezing rivers and rapids – her greatest antagonists were the reporters and editors of the male-dominated outdoors press of early 20th-century north America.

The popular Outing magazine, for whom Leonidas Hubbard had written, was the most excoriating. Its editor, Caspar Whitney, thundered in an editorial that “the widow” should not be in the wilderness, let alone speak about it.

The wild was no place for a white woman, especially one accompanied by First Nation (Native American) guides. This was not long after she had given an interview to another paper.

Other newspapers described her as a grief-stricken hysteric. This was the only explanation they could find for her decision to go on such a long and arduous journey. When she was 300 miles into her expedition, having found the source of the Naskaupi River, the New York Times reported on its front page that she had given up, beaten back by hardship and privations.

Instead the paper claimed that a man, an explorer called Dillon Wallace who was also in northern Labrador, was “pushing forward beyond any white man’s previous track”. In fact, Hubbard had neither given up, nor had Wallace caught up with her. She would reach Ungava Bay several weeks before his party. But it fitted the dominant narrative of the time: that the wilderness was no place for a woman.

I explore the idea of what the wild is, and of its being a gendered space, in my new book, Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World. From ancient myths such as Ulysses or Gilgamesh, to the present where research shows that women face harassment and othering even on remote Antarctic bases, the wild has for centuries been a site of heroic male adventuring and rugged exploration.

Studies show that even in modern hunting societies, while women tend forest plots and hunt small game near the village or camp, it is the men who go away, often for many days, to hunt for big game and status.

Myths from across the world have told listeners and readers that women who stray beyond the city wall, village paling or encampment are either supernatural, monsters, or have been banished for perceived sins against society.

In the Greek myth of Polyphonte, the young girl who refuses to follow the correct gender role to become a wife and mother, and wants instead to hunt in the forest, is treated to a terrible punishment from the gods. She is tricked into falling in love with a bear-turned-man and gives birth to two bestial children. She and her sons are then transformed into flesh-eating birds.

In a more recent echo of the media coverage of Mina Hubbard’s journey, in Kenya in the 1980s and 1990s, the environmental activist Wangari Maathai was attacked and belittled. She even had a curse put on her for planting trees in forests earmarked for development by the country’s then president, Daniel arap Moi, and for challenging Moi’s plans to build a skyscraper in one of Nairobi’s last green spaces.

At the height of Maathai’s confrontation with President Moi, the Daily Nation newspaper repeated criticism of both Maathai and her Green Belt Movement organisation. Headlines included: “MPs condemn Prof Maathai” and “MPs want Maathai movement banned”. Her crime? Wanting to slow disastrous desertification and soil erosion, and to empower rural women by planting 30 million trees.

When British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves was killed in the Himalayas in 1995, reporting focused on her being a mother and wife. Historical newspaper records I found during my research roundly accused her of abandoning her primary role of caring for her children.

The Sunday Times called her “A mother obsessed”, while the Independent led with the headline, “Dangerous ambition of a woman on the peaks”. The Daily Telegraph headline read, “A wife driven to high challenges”. Readers’ letters were even more critical, branding her as selfish and irresponsible.

A novelty nail file

Women who have received neutral or positive coverage for their work have tended to have novelty value, or had accomplished a feat so extraordinary that their being a woman was part of the narrative.

The entomologist Evelyn Cheesman spent decades collecting insects on Pacific islands, from the Galapagos to New Guinea. Her work led to support for a biological dividing line between different ecosystems in the New Hebrides to be named Cheesman’s Line, and her contribution to science was a great novelty for the newspaper press.

Her months-long, arduous expedition to Papua New Guinea in the early 1930s earned her the headline in the now defunct UK News Chronicle, “Woman collects 42,000 insects”.

After Cheesman published her memoir in 1957, detailing four decades of exploration, the headline in the newspaper Reynolds News announced: “Woman trapped in giant spider’s web”. The sub-head simply statesd, “saved by her nail file”.

More broadly, my research disappointingly concludes that over 100 years on, women explorers and scientific fieldworkers are still represented as unusual or out of place in the wild. These media narratives are dangerous as they feed into social attitudes that put women at risk and cause them to change their behaviour outdoors by avoiding isolated places, especially beyond daylight hours, for example.

Studies show that women (and black and hispanic) hikers in the US are more afraid of being attacked by men than by bears or other wild animals. Women’s outdoor groups, and campaigners such as Woman with Altitude and the Tough Girl podcast are working hard to counter this narrative, encouraging women to enjoy the beauties and discoveries still to be made in the world’s most rugged and remote places.

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Sarah Lonsdale, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, City St George's, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Throughout my school years I had an exuberant, elderly piano teacher, Miss Hazel. She was one of five daughters (like me) and, like many young women of her generation, had never married her sweetheart because he did not return from the war.

Her unabashed gusto for life and infectious, positive outlook left an indelible impression upon me. So too did the memorable fact that Miss Hazel read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from beginning to end once every year.

As a younger girl I wondered about the ways Pride and Prejudice could be so important to a woman in her eighties that she would want to read it annually. Was it to do with Austen’s depiction of a family with five daughters, or to relive an endearing love story?

Since those years I have seen, more through lived experience than through academic study, just how deeply meaningful the reading of classic books, like Pride and Prejudice, can be.

I no longer simply read this book for Elizabeth Bennett’s love story, but for the finely crafted replication Austen gives us of human character, with all its flaws. Hers are imaginary yet imaginably real situations, all depicted with humour and a sensitively calibrated dose of sympathy for even the most unlikeable literary figures.

The clergyman Mr Collins, Elizabeth’s distant cousin and her rejected suitor, was always repellent for his obsequiousness but I see more readily now his self-serving nature cloaked in altruism. The haughty snobbery of Darcy’s aristocratic aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, hints at a deeper layer of sadness and fragility only rereading can illuminate.

Box-ticking and speed

When we’re at school or university we may read for speed. I remember managing my reading of Ann Radcliffe’s 432-page gothic romance The Romance of the Forest to work out how many pages per hour I would need to read across a weekend in order to finish the novel before my university tutorial. (It was an ungodly ratio and I don’t recall much of the novel.)

Or we may read for the tick-box exercise of writing for assessment requirements: accumulating knowledge of a novel’s original metaphors, descriptions that best capture a prescribed theme (“belonging” or “identity”), or of poetry by which we can demonstrate a grasp of innovative metre.

But how and why do we reread classic books, when we are not constrained by class plans or prescribed exam themes. And why should we?

‘Like a graft to a tree’

Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch offers a compelling exploration of one writer’s five-yearly revisitation of George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch.

Mead first read the novel at school, and Eliot’s subtitle to the novel, “A Study of Provincial Life”, captured precisely what Mead was trying to escape at that time: provinciality.

Eliot’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, captivated Mead as an unconventional intellectual heroine yearning for a life of meaning and significance. Mead marked out important moments with a fluorescent pen, such as when the intellectual and spiritual inadequacies of Dorothea’s husband, Casaubon, dawn upon her. Mead writes, quoting Eliot:

‘Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness […]’ These seemed like things worth holding on to. The book was reading me, as I was reading it.

This idea of books “reading us” can sound like an odd animism. But books can prompt us to reflect on our own lives, too. Eliot makes Middlemarch almost compulsory to reread later in life: the idealism of youth captures the young reader, while the novel’s humour becomes more sympathetic as we age. To reread a novel like Middlemarch is to trace the ways we too have experienced idealism turn to illusion, or have seen the restless pursuit of change turn to a retrospective gratitude and a recognition of grace.

Our ability to acknowledge new depths of meaning in our own lives and to recognise within ourselves a subtler sympathy for the lives of others can be articulated almost as precisely as lived experience itself. As Mead says, “There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.”

Feeling for Lear

The same can be said of Shakespeare. As young readers, we won’t necessarily capture the full vision King Lear offers us of the tragicomic paradoxes sometimes presented by old age. The play depicts the loss of power and control over one’s life and decision-making, the tender fragility of family relationships when the care of aged parents is suddenly an urgent question and the madness that can prevail when an inheritance is at stake.

Some of these things might abstractly be understood when taught to us in the classroom, but they are far more powerfully seen when revisited after we have lived a little more of that imaginably real life ourselves.

As students we might have squirmed with discomfort at the literal blinding of Lear’s loyal subject the Earl of Gloucester (the horror of witnessing a visceral, grotesque injury).

But as we age it is the tragedy of moral blindness that lingers, making the final scene so extraordinarily moving: “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there,” Lear pleads, as if to say that Cordelia, lifeless in his arms, still breathes.

Does he really see her lips quiver? Does he really believe she lives? Is this some consolation with which he dies or is it delusion? Lear’s heart is broken. So is mine.

Each time I revisit this final scene, the grief of Lear as a father is profoundly felt, but my heart is broken even more so by his continuing blindness; his vision (what he thinks he sees) is desperate, untrue, and ultimately meaningless.

Sites of discovery

When we read we inhabit imaginary worlds and each time the reading can be different. Philip Davis, a professor of literature and psychology has written,

Rereading is important in checking and refreshing that sense of meaning, as the reader goes back and re-enters the precise language once again.

Davis points to an idea advanced by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, of the reader’s collection of special, memorable fragments, which serve as metaphors for the reader’s self-utterances, developed over time. These are “nascent sites for thinking and re-centring”.

This is a similar idea to the novelist and journalist Italo Calvino’s description in Why Read the Classics? of the way classic books “imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable” and “hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.”

Works of imaginative literature are not manuals for life, though they might along the way gift us with some wisdom; they are sites of discovery and rediscovery.

The classic works we are introduced to at school may establish such sites for thinking about ourselves and others, but it is in rereading them as we grow older that we can better see the ways we have grown as imaginative, moral beings.

Johanna Harris, Associate Professor, Literature, Western Civilisation Program, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The question of how best to eliminate corruption has exercised the minds of philosophers as much as the practical drafters of legislation from Ancient Greek and Roman times.

Within the political sphere, the notion of “corruption” has fluctuated between broad and narrow conceptions.

The broad conception relates to the decay of institutions or of the stature of the individuals who comprise them. On the other hand, the narrow conception focuses on the abuse of public office for private gain.

There is also “grey corruption” – which involves questionable behaviour involving a breach of integrity standards that does not necessarily amount to criminal conduct.

This could include where a person has undue influence over a politician, such as by essentially buying that power through making large donations or hiring expensive lobbyists, particularly where it causes public officials to behave in corrupt ways.

However the notion is defined, it is clear the fight against corruption is one of the basic tasks of a liberal democracy, perhaps even of an effectively functioning civil society.

Corruption control is a pressing issue worldwide: the United Nations estimated the economic cost of corruption at 5% of global domestic product or $3.6 trillion annually.

Australia has had a number of major corruption scandals throughout its history. Corruption was rife in the colonial era, where wealthy landholders sought to influence parliamentarians with monetary bribes.

This has been followed by several major corruption scandals, such as the Fitzgerald inquiry, which revealed widespread police corruption involving illegal gambling and prostitution.

What are anti-corruption commissions?

Anti-corruption commissions are arguably the most significant tool developed in liberal democracies to fight corruption in recent times.

The first anti-corruption commission in Australia, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), was established in New South Wales in 1988 by then premier Nick Greiner.

Infamously, a few years later, Greiner became the first premier to resign due to an ICAC investigation.

Over the next few decades, all states and territories have set up their own anti-corruption or integrity commissions.

In 2023, the Commonwealth followed suit with the introduction of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), a promise made by Anthony Albanese in the lead-up to the 2022 election after considerable pressure from the public and from within parliament.

As a result, Australia now has a comprehensive network of broad-based public sector anti-corruption agencies covering all levels of government – a significant development nationally and internationally.

Anti-corruption commissions are tasked with investigating serious and systemic corrupt conduct in government. This includes not just members of the House and Senate, but their staff and public servants.

In performing their functions, these commissions have strong coercive powers, equivalent to the powers of a royal commission. This includes the power to compel documents and witnesses.

Some anti-corruption commissions such as the NACC and NSW’s ICAC have the power to conduct public hearings if they believe it’s in the public interest. This increases transparency in government. But concerns have been expressed about reputational damage for those subject to investigations.

Anti-corruption commissions also have corruption prevention functions. They are tasked with educating the public about the detrimental effects of corruption on public administration.

Reports of anti-corruption commissions are often attended by significant media publicity, leading to public awareness of corruption in government.

Why are anti-corruption commissions needed?

It has become well accepted that effective anti-corruption institutions play an important role as institutions supporting constitutional democracy.

The state anti-corruption bodies have brought to light many indiscretions by politicians that would have otherwise remained hidden.

Without these commissions, corruption in the public sector can take root without us knowing about it. An anti-corruption agency is a powerful deterrent against improper behaviour.

Yet anti-corruption commissions tend to be unpopular within governments because they scrutinise government action. This means the a commission may expose improper conduct or corruption within their ranks.

It is common for governments hostile to anti-corruption commissions to attack them, including by reducing their powers or funding.

This is despite their integral role in our democracy. Alongside other oversight bodies such as the ombudsman (who investigates maladministration within government) and auditor-general (who performs audits of government expenditure), anti-corruption commissions form part of an intricate, interlocking integrity framework that monitors executive action.

Who watches the watchdogs?

A big question is about how we ensure anti-corruption commissions do not overstep their bounds. Given their broad coercive powers, how do we hold them to account?

From their inception, concerns have been expressed about the potential for anti-corruption bodies to infringe on civil liberties, and the possibility they may exceed or abuse their powers.

In Australia, anti-corruption commissions are subject to a strong system of accountability through parliaments and the courts. They report to dedicated parliamentary committees who scrutinise their actions and decisions. Complaints against anti-corruption commissions can be made to a dedicated inspectorate – an independent statutory officer who oversees their actions.

Anti-corruption commissions are also subject to judicial review by the courts to ensure they don’t exceed their legal boundaries. Court scrutiny occurs when a person investigated by an anti-corruption commission takes their grievance to court.

To be effective, anti-corruption commissions require strong powers and institutional independence. But this needs to be balanced with accountability and the protection of individual rights.

What is pork barrelling and what are some recent examples?

Pork barrelling involves governments channelling public funds to seats they hold or seats they would like to win from an opponent, as a way of winning voters’ favour. This means the money is used for political purposes, rather than proper allocation according to merit.

We have been inundated with pork barrelling scandals in recent years. This includes the car park rorts scandal, where 77% of the commuter car park sites selected were in electorates held by the then Coalition government, rather than in areas of real need with congestion issues.

This followed close on the heels of the “sports rorts” scandal. Minister Bridget McKenzie resigned from cabinet following allegations she had intervened in the sport grants program to benefit the Coalition government while in a position of conflict of interest.

My research has shown that pork barrelling is an intractable problem across multiple governments over many decades. It takes different forms based on electoral systems.

Australia has a single member electorate parliamentary system, which makes it more susceptible to pork barrelling than multi-member electorates such as Norway or Spain. The belief is that politicians who “bring home the bacon” for their constituents are electorally rewarded for doing so.

This means there are incentives for the central cabinet to strategically apportion benefits to marginal electorates to increase prospects of electoral success. There is also an incentive to bias the apportionment of funds towards the party in power.

In short, rorts scandals keep happening because governments believe that channelling money to marginal and government electorates will win them elections.

Potentially the NACC could investigate rorts scandals, but only where it amounts to serious or systemic corrupt conduct.

How do we fix the grants system?

At the federal level, we have sophisticated financial management legislation that provides a framework for grant rules. The Commonwealth grant rules provide a detailed set of guidelines that ministers and government officials must follow on grant application and selection processes.

However, there are significant loopholes in the rules. For example, the “car park rorts” scandal is not covered by these rules because it involves money being channelled through the states.

Also, there are no sanctions for breaching the rules. So ministers and government officials can break the rules without any repercussions.

To fix the system, we need to reform the rules about grants allocation and close the loopholes. We also need to impose punishment for breaching the rules.

It is imperative our grants administration system be reformed to ensure that taxpayer funds are protected from governmental abuse. If the ministerial discretion available in grants processes is improperly used, this can give rise to political favouritism and corruption.

How corrupt is Australia compared to other countries?

There is a public perception that a small elite is reaping large benefits in Australian society in terms of political influence and its flow-on dividends.

In Australia, the “game of mates” is flourishing. There’s now a revolving door in politics with many politicians, advisers and senior government officials leaving the public sector to become well-paid lobbyists.

Add to that the appointments of political “mates” to commissions, tribunals and cushy ambassadorships and the blatant misuse of parliamentary entitlements such as helicopter trips on taxpayer funds.

Political parties are also accepting millions of dollars in donations from lobbyists and others interested in influencing policy outcomes.

All of this adds to the perception that the system is rigged - and not in favour of the person on the street.

Australia has fallen steadily in Transparency International’s global corruption index, from 8th place in 2012 to 14th in 2024. But even so, Australia is the 14th-least corrupt country in the world, which is still a respectable ranking.

More alarming is the fact that one in 30 Australian public servants said in a survey last year they had seen a colleague acting in a corrupt manner.

The types of corruption witnessed included cronyism or nepotism (favourable treatment of friends or family members without proper regard to merit). Fraud, forgery, embezzlement and conflicts of interest were also reported.

In the 1980s, there were incidences of large-scale corruption that rocked the country, culminating in the Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland and the WA Inc Royal Commission in Western Australia. These scandals led to the resignations and imprisonments of various former ministers and officials.

Although we have not sunk to such depths since then, state anti-corruption commissions, such as the NSW ICAC, have uncovered various instances of corruption in recent years. The NSW ICAC’s inquiries have led to the resignations of several politicians, as well as the conviction of former Labor MP Eric Obeid.

Another classic case of corruption exposed by the ICAC led to the downfall of former Newcastle lord mayor, Jeff McCloy. McCloy famously bragged that politicians treated him like a “walking ATM” and admitted to giving two MPs envelopes of cash amounting to $10,000.

In Victoria, the Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission’s (IBAC) revealed that a lobbyist funnelled suitcases of cash totalling more than $100,000 from a property developer to a councillor, under the guise of sham transactions.

These explosive scandals involving corrupt conduct by public officials have eroded public trust in politicians. But the exposure of these scandals by anti-corruption commissions have an important deterrent and educative effect on public officials and the broader public.

Our faith in government has been eroded by a lack of transparency and the perception that those in power are enjoying unfair benefits. The active investigations by robust institutions such as anti-corruption commissions will act as checks and balances on governmental power - and are key to a vibrant democracy.

This is an edited extract from How Australian Democracy Works, a new book from leading authors at The Conversation on all aspects of our political system and its history, out March 4.

Yee-Fui Ng, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps against the advice of his men, who claimed it was impossible. “Aut inveniam viam, aut faciam,” Hannibal is said to have replied: “I shall either find a way, or make one.”

Though apocryphal, Hannibal’s bold statement captures a trait much sought in the tech industry today: “high agency”. This means being able to positively influence yourself or the world around you.

Psychologists use a range of other terms to refer to this kind of trait — including perceived control, mastery, and efficacy. All of them boil down to being able to achieve the things you want, when you want.

Recognising agency

In the business world, the term high agency is used in much the same way as “disruptor”, “game-changer” and “self-starter” were before it. As you might expect from those comparisons, high agency is a catch-all phrase for people who see and take opportunities where others see roadblocks.

More than this, high agency describes a person who creates their own opportunities where there appear to be none.

High agency is beneficial in more than the professional sphere, however.

Research shows that feeling able to achieve important goals is a building block for motivation in most domains of life, including education, health and political action. This is because people who feel “in control” set higher goals, are more committed those goals, and exert greater effort to achieve those goals than people who feel “out of control”.

Agency differs by demographic, including factors such as age. Some research suggests people feel more in control of their life circumstances and outcomes in middle age than in old age.

Socioeconomic factors such as education, income and work history also play a role. Put simply, people who are “better off” feel more agentic.

Mental health seems to be both an outcome and a predictor of high agency. People who are less depressed feel more in control of their lives, and those who feel more in control are less depressed.

Rethinking agency

The concept of “high agency” is an amalgamation of, or an umbrella term for, a range of traits that psychologists have studied for decades. Related concepts include the prized “growth mindset” (the belief that one’s talents are developable rather than innate), “proactivity” (acting in advance of, rather than reacting to, situations), and the somewhat controversial “grit” (perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals). Note, however, that some argue grit is just a rebranded version of the personality trait “conscientiousness”.

High agency, as the tech world sees it, appears to borrow from all these concepts, wrapped up in one convenient package. Agentic people are those who see possibility where others see barriers, take action rather than wait to be told what to do, and aren’t afraid to go after what they want.

These traits are also stereotypically associated with particular people in society: members of advantaged majority groups, such as men, those with high socioeconomic status, and white people.

In many ways, high-agency behaviour is an act of privilege. It involves trusting that others will react well to your efforts to try a new approach or disrupt the status quo.

The reality is that the way other people respond will depend at least in part on factors outside our control. This may be particularly true for less privileged people, who tend to see less opportunity to exert choice and influence the world due to the very real structural barriers they face. This means acting “high agency” may be a risk for some people: actions that see one person praised as a “game changer” could easily see another labelled a “troublemaker”.

Taken to an extreme, high agency could read as “alpha” – the kind of person who takes charge and is a natural leader. Alpha is a gendered term, most commonly applied with a suffix such as male, bro or dude.

The already male-dominated tech industry should be wary of baking gendered traits into personnel selection procedures. If high agency is understood to mean a certain type of person rather than just a type of personality, it could be a problem for equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Realising agency

Given the rising value of high agency in professional settings – not to mention its personal emotional and motivational benefits – you might wonder how people can become more agentic.

Many proponents of high agency emphasise its value for looking at the world in a different way. So too it might be valuable to look at high agency in a different way: not what makes an individual agentic, but what are the conditions that allow agency to thrive.

Research shows that certain types of environments set people up for success. Environments that allow people to thrive are those that meet three basic psychological needs.

The first is the need for autonomy: the ability to freely choose what we do and when we do it. The second is the need for competence: the feeling of being capable of performing desired actions. Finally, there is the need for relatedness: the feeling of being connected to others.

These needs can be fostered by the work environment. (Google famously adopts similar motivational workplace practices.) People can also adapt themselves by “job crafting” to help create the conditions conducive to success.

While high agency may seem like an innate personality trait, emerging research suggests the people around us may be a powerful source of personal agency. People who are better able to influence their own outcomes are often those who can turn to, or recruit, others to help them achieve those outcomes.

Paradoxically, this means that “high agency” might not (just) be a quality of you personally, but a quality of the people around you.

Katharine H. Greenaway, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, is one of the world’s richest men. He is also a highly controversial figure.

On one hand, he contributes to social, medical and environmental causes through his foundation, making grants worth more than US$77 billion ($A123 billion) from its inception to the end of 2023. On the other, he has confirmed associations with Jeffrey Epstein and was the subject of spurious COVID conspiracy theories.

Even Gates’ Microsoft days were controversial. Under his leadership, Microsoft became the first tech giant, but Gates has been repeatedly described as ruthless, both personally and professionally.

Review: Source Code, My Beginnings – Bill Gates (Penguin)

He was accused by his late long-term friend and business partner Paul Allen, of canvassing ways to dilute Allen’s shares in Microsoft when the latter was undergoing treatment for lymphoma. Gates reportedly apologised to Allen, and they repaired their relationship, and were on good terms by the time Allen died.

Still, as a leader, his style has been characterised by some who worked with him in the 1980s and 1990s as bullying. (Gates’ spokesperson has denied he mistreated employees.)

Childhood

In Source Code, Gates sets out to tell his own story, and the story of the birth of the tech industry.

His parents were the children of hardworking strugglers. His father, Bill Senior, was educated as a lawyer on the GI bill; his mother, Mary, was, according to Gates, an innovative and engaged homemaker, who later shattered glass ceilings.

Born in 1955 Gates describes himself as the kind of kid his mother had to warn his preschool teachers about. He responded to not knowing how to fit in with other kids by becoming a class clown, and was pushed by his mother to relate to other adults.

He was introduced to mathematics by his maternal grandmother, a Christian Scientist and a card sharp. She played assiduously with her grandchildren. She did not believe in losing to them deliberately. Through cards, Gates learned two key lessons: that you can learn the mathematics of a problem, and that practising a skill will hone it.

His relationship with his father was loving and respectful, but his relationship with his mother was more fraught. She encouraged him, but he resented her expectation that he live up to social mores so much that peace had to be brokered by a family therapist.

The privilege of private school

Gates was sent to a private school for boys, and his stories about Lakeside School in Seattle are probably the most engaging segment of the book. It was at Lakeside that he learned to apply himself academically, after his class-clown act failed to impress. There, he also met Allen, who would become co-founder of Microsoft, and got his hands on his first computer.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, computer time was charged by the minute. Gates used lucky connections and his entreprenurial spirit to get a job coding, so he could do more of what he loved. This was how he clocked up 500 hours coding before he left high school, a mean feat even by today’s standards.

Gates describes a degree of freedom almost unimaginable in today’s regimented education system. He had access to the computer lab at all hours and was able to take an entire semester off to code.

He continued his elite education at Harvard. Eventually, he chose to major in applied mathematics, partly because it gave him some of the same freedom he had been accustomed to. He soon realised he was not the best at pure mathematics, as he had anticipated.

Gates again got early access to computers at Harvard. He used this access to build his first microprocessor software (“Micro-Soft”), with Allen, which he and Allen sold to a company called MITS in 1975.

He was sanctioned by Harvard for this project. Their computers were not supposed to be for commercial use. He was also bringing non-students into the lab.

At this point, aged 19, he decided to take a semester off to focus on his business.

But they stole my software!

In 1975 Gates went to work with MITS, the company that built the first desktop computer, where he expanded his software.

The first version of this software was literally stolen at a trade fair, reducing Microsoft’s profits and creating a rift between Gates and many of the hobbyists who were using this software

Gates believed that software should be paid for; many of the hobbyists believed software should be free and open source.

Gates describes the head of MITS, Ed Roberts, as loud and somewhat mercurial, an irony that is not lost as we read Gates’ letters to his friends and business partners, in whom he is frequently disappointed.

Eventually, the relationship with MITS broke down. MITS failed to meet the terms of its contract to promote and license Gates’s software.

The end of this contract left Gates free to sell his software to a range of companies, including Apple and Texas Instruments. A legal judgement confirmed MITS had not fulfilled its contract to Microsoft, and that Microsoft had full ownership of its software and the right to sell it. This judgement is probably the foundation of the for-profit software industry.

In early adulthood, Gates already showed little respect for other people and social norms. He describes subscribing to the ideology of the lone genius, being arrested for speeding (where the famous mugshot of him comes from), and even joyriding on parked bulldozers.

This section of the book is probably the least readable. It presents a limited account of an exciting time in computing. Steven Levy’s Hackers is a great alternative account.

The DNA of computer programs

The “source code” is the DNA of the computer programs we use. Gates’ book sets out the source code of Microsoft, as a company, and in many ways, of the tech industry as a business.

Gates created not just Microsoft, but arguably an entire industry: selling software. His book describes the unique set of personal characteristics that made him the right person for this (single minded focus, which Gates attributes to likely autism, and a willingness to ignore all other considerations to get the job done).

It also describes a lucky set of circumstances. Gates benefited from a legal education at his father’s knee, a family history of entrepreneurship, and early access to computers.

The book ends in the late 1970s just as this combination of circumstances is about to bear fruit and a full four years before the launch of Microsoft’s first operating system. It does not cover Microsoft’s heyday, nor Gates’ substantial philanthropic activities later in life.

It isn’t clear why Gates has written this book now. If it is to rehabilitate his image, he makes a poor job of it. He describes a life of consistent privilege and only acknowledges this privilege at the end of the book, which rings hollow.

He displays a profound belief that he has been right in his interactions with others, going so far as to describe his relationship with Steve Jobs at Apple as “sometimes rivalrous, sometimes friendly”, even though Apple famously sued Microsoft over the rights to the windows style of user interface we are all used to today.

There is little acknowledgement in the book even of the regrets he has expressed elsewhere, for example over his treatment of Paul Allen. There is little to dilute the impression that Gates was ruthless, though perhaps a later memoir may document changes later in life.

A male-dominated industry

While Gates’ focus and drive were clearly fundamental to the growth of the tech industry, this book also exposes the DNA of some of the tech industry’s problems.

He describes his father as a feminist, but his mother’s social expectations were a source of irritation to him, and he barely mentions his two sisters. He got his first access to computers at an elite boys’ school – a school where, notably, his best friend protested the integration of the sister school for fear it would reduce academic standards.

This school, and later Harvard (then another male bastion), were the source of all early Microsoft employees, sowing the seeds of today’s male-dominated industry, with all its attendant problems.

Gates’ attitude to property underpins Microsoft’s aggressive business practices. He was clearly prepared to borrow what isn’t his (bulldozers, computer lab time), but he is incensed by the theft of his intellectual property. This attitude is evident in the long history of Microsoft litigation.

The company has been repeatedly prosecuted for antitrust behaviour and sued for copyright infringement. Conversely, it aggressively pursued those it believes to be infringing, including, famously, a 17-year-old entrepreneur, who was probably not unlike Gates himself.

Gates doesn’t draw these connections. He is largely uncritical of his own path, only occasionally admitting he treated someone poorly.

Ultimately, his book is a useful insight into the source code of the tech industry, but not always in the ways Gates likely anticipates.

Dana McKay, Associate Dean, Interaction, Technology and Information, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What do the Australian lungfish, ghost bat, sandhill dunnart and southern and central greater gliders have in common? They’re all threatened species that need a formal “recovery plan” – but do not have one.

Today, environmental group the Wilderness Society launched a case in the Federal Court against Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, arguing she and successive environment ministers have failed to meet their legal obligations to create threatened species recovery plans.

Other species forming the basis of the case are Baudin’s cockatoo, the Australian grayling, Carnaby’s black cockatoo, red goshawk, forest red-tailed black cockatoo and the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle.

Many other species and ecological communities also don’t have recovery plans. If successful, the case would set a precedent compelling future environment ministers to meet their legal obligations and improve Australia’s dire conservation record. This is a significant moment for conservation in Australia – testing how accountable environment ministers are in preventing species extinctions.

Why do recovery plans matter?

Threatened species recovery plans lay out very clearly why species or ecological communities are in trouble and the actions necessary to save them. Once a plan is in place, it can directly benefit the species by tackling threats and safeguarding habitat.

Proposals such as a new farm, suburb or mining project can be assessed by the environment minister and rejected if they are inconsistent with recovery plans and place threatened species at increased risk of extinction. Recovery plans have helped dozens of species come back from the brink.

Under Australia’s national environmental laws, the environment minister must decide whether a recovery plan is required for a species or ecological community listed as threatened.

If a plan is ordered, it must typically be created within three years. But a 2022 Auditor-General’s report found just 2% of plans met this timeframe.

Recovery is possible, but plans are vital

Successive governments have failed to keep up with creating and implementing recovery plans in a timely manner. The perennial and chronic lack of funding for conservation means there’s little capacity to do the vital but time-consuming work of planning and recovery.

As a result, the federal government has increasingly shifted to offering conservation advices in place of recovery plans. Conservation advices can be produced and updated faster than recovery plans. This is useful if, say, a new threat emerges and needs a rapid response.

But there’s a key legal difference. When the environment minister is considering a project such as land clearing for new farmland or a mine, they need only consider any conservation advice in place. When a recovery plan is in place, the minister is legally obliged not to approve actions which are contrary to its objectives and would make the plight of a species or ecological community worse.

A conservation advice can be thought of more like a fact sheet without the same legal weight or accountability that recovery plans have.

In March 2022, the Morrison government scrapped recovery plans for 176 threatened species and habitats, despite thousands of submissions arguing against this.

After the Albanese government took power in May 2022, it pledged to end “wilful neglect” of the environment and to introduce stronger environmental laws. Sadly, this commitment has not been honoured.

Why do we need recovery plans?

Australia’s species protection record is unenviable. Since European colonisation, more than 100 species have been driven to extinction and more than 2,000 species and ecological communities are listed at risk of suffering the same fate.

For a species to be considered threatened, its population has to have shrunk or meet other criteria putting it at risk of extinction. The severity of the decline and hence its extinction risk will determine how it’s categorised, from vulnerable through to critically endangered. Recovery plans lay out the research required to actually recover these species, meaning helping their populations to grow out of the danger zone.

A key role for these plans is to coordinate planning and action between relevant interest groups and agencies. This is especially important for species found across state and territory borders, such as the southern greater glider and the migratory swift parrot. The greater glider should have had a recovery plan in place since 2016, but does not.

Are individual plans still worthwhile?

Faced with so many species in need of protection and limited funding, prominent figures including former Environment Minister Peter Garrett have argued we should focus our efforts on protecting ecosystems rather than single species to make the best use of scarce funds.

But there is a deeper issue. Australia is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It has the capacity to greatly increase conservation spending without impoverishing humans, and should do so for the benefit of the economy, culture and our health and wellbeing.

That’s not to say ecosystem protection isn’t worthwhile. After all, ecosystems are made up of species and their interactions with each other and their environment. You cannot have healthy species without healthy ecosystems and vice versa.

But if we focus only on protecting large expanses of wetland, forest and grasslands, we risk overlooking a key issue. Two species in the same ecosystem can be very differently affected by a specific threat (predation by foxes, for instance). Some species can even have conflicting management needs. For some species, invasive species are the biggest threat, while climate change and intensified fire regimes threaten others the most.

Extinction is a choice

As Australia’s natural world continues to deteriorate, climate change deepens and worsening wildlife woes abound, these issues will no doubt be front of mind for many in the upcoming federal election.

It can be easy to see these trends as inevitable. But they are not – the collapse of nature is a choice. We have what we need for success, including traditional, ecological and conservation knowledge. What’s sorely needed is political will.

There were once fewer than 50 northern hairy-nosed wombats alive. Today, that number exceeds 400. When supported, conservation can succeed.

Almost all Australians want their government to do more to save our species. Let us hope whoever forms the next government takes up that challenge – even if it takes court cases to prompt action.

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union for voice actors and creatives, recently circulated a video of voice actor Thomas G. Burt describing the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on his livelihood.

Voice actors have been hit hard by GenAI, particularly those working in the video game sector. Many are contract workers without ongoing employment, and for some game companies already feeling the squeeze, supplementing voice-acting work with GenAI is just too tempting.

Audio work – whether music, sound design or voice acting – already lacks strong protections. Recent research from my colleagues and I on the use of GenAI and automation in producing music for Australian video games reveals a messy picture.

Facing the crunch

A need for greater productivity, increased turnarounds, and budget restraints in the Australian games sector is incentivising the accelerated uptake of automation.

The games sector is already susceptible to “crunch”, or unpaid overtime, to reach a deadline. This crunch demands faster workflows, increasing automation and the adoption of GenAI throughout the sector.

The Australian games industry is also experiencing a period of significant contraction, with many workers facing layoffs. This has constrained resources and increased the prevalence of crunch, which may increase reliance on automation at the expense of re-skilling the workforce.

One participant told us:

the fear that I have going forward for a lot of creative forms is I feel like this is going to be the fast fashion of art and of text.

Mixed emotions and fair compensation

Workers in the Australian games industry have mixed feelings about the impact of GenAI, ranging from hopeful to scared.

Audio workers are generally more pessimistic than non-audio games professionals. Many see GenAI as extractive and potentially exploitative. When asked how they see the future of the sector, one participant responded:

I would say negative, and the general feeling being probably fear and anxiety, specifically around job security.

Others noted it will increase productivity and efficiency:

[when] synthesisers started being made, people were like, ‘oh, it’s going to replace musicians. It’s going to take jobs away’. And maybe it did, but like, it also opened up this whole other world of possibilities for people to be creative.

Regardless, most participants expressed concerns about whether a GenAI model was ethically trained and whether licensing can be properly remunerated, concerns echoed by the union.

Those we spoke with believed the authors of any material used to train AI data-sets should be fairly compensated and/or credited.

An “opt-in” licensing model has been proposed by unions as a compromise. This states a creators’ data should only be used for training GenAI under an opt-in basis, and the use of content to train generative AI models should be subject to consent and compensation.

Taboos, confusion and loss of community

Some audio professionals interested in working with GenAI do not feel like they can speak openly about the subject, as it is seen as taboo:

There’s like this feeling of dread and despair, just completely swirling around our entire creative field of people. And it doesn’t need to be like that. We just need to have the right discussions, and we can’t have the right discussions if everyone’s hair is on fire.

The technology is clearly divisive, despite perceived benefits.

Several participants expressed concerns the prevalence of GenAI may reduce collaboration across the sector. They feared this could result in an erosion of professional community, as well as potential loss of institutional knowledge and specific creative skills:

I really like working with people […] And handing that over to a machine, like, I can’t be friends with the machine […] I want to work with someone who’s going to come in and completely shake up the way, you know, our project works.

The Australian games sector is reliant on a highly networked but often precarious set of workers, who move between projects based on need and demand for certain skills.

The ability to replace such skills with automation may lead to siloing and a deterioration of greater professional collaboration.

But there are benefits to be had

Many workers in the games audio sector see automation as helpful in terms of administration, ideation, workshopping, programming and as an educational tool:

In terms of automation, I see it as, like, utilities. For example, being a developer, I write scripts. So, if I’m doing something and it’s gonna take me a long time, I’ll automate it by writing a script.

These systems also have helpful applications for neurodivergent professionals and workers who may struggle with time management or other attention-related issues.

Over half of participants said AI and automation allows more time for creativity, as workers can automate the more tedious elements of their workflow:

I suffer like anyone else from writer’s block […] If you can give me a piece of software that is trained off me, that I could say, ‘I need something that’s in my house style, make me something’, and a piece of software could spit back at me a piece of music that sounds like me that I could go, ‘oh, that’s exactly it’, I would do it. That would save me an incalculable amount of time.

Many professionals who would prefer not to use AI said they would consider using it in the face of time or budget constraints. Others stated GenAI allows teams and individuals to deliver more work than they would without it:

Especially with deadlines always being as short as they are, I think a lot of automation can help to focus on the more creative and decision-based aspects.

Many workers within the digital audio space are already working hard to create ethical alternatives to AI theft.

Although GenAI may be here to stay, a balance between the efficiencies provided should not come at the cost of creative professions.

Sam Whiting, Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Director Sean Baker has made history by becoming the first person to win four Academy Awards in the same night for the same film – Anora – taking home prizes for original screenplay, film editing, directing and best picture.

Anora centres on Ani (Mikey Madison), a Brooklyn sex worker entangled with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the immature son of a Russian oligarch. After Ivan disappears, Ani searches through New York with his handler Toros (Karren Karagulian) to find him.

Baker’s Oscars sweep capped off a string of wins over the past year, but surprised many pundits who expected three-and-a-half hour epic The Brutalist to take home the top prize.

He’s made the 97th Academy Awards one for the history books. So who is Sean Baker?

An indie film lifer

Baker has been a fixture of the international film festival circuit for more than a decade. His films are carefully researched character studies, often focused on sex workers, immigrants and low-income communities.

Baker maintains creative control by working with ultra-low budgets, often serving as writer, director and editor simultaneously. He often casts new or non-professional actors and prefers to shoot on location with natural light.

His breakout film Tangerine (2015) followed two transgender African American sex workers in Los Angeles. Tangerine grapples with the complicated lives of its characters but also celebrates their humour and friendships. The film was a technical milestone: shot entirely on the iPhone 5S by cinematographer Radium Cheung. The total estimated budget was just US$100,000.

Baker’s next film, The Florida Project (2017), was a portrait of low-income children living in cheap motels near Walt Disney World. The film playfully frames its characters’ difficult childhoods as colourful and ecstatic, drawing an outstanding performance from six-year-old star Brooklynn Prince in her first film appearance.

Red Rocket (2021) centred on a retired porn star returning to his Texas home town, but struggled at the box office amid the COVID pandemic.

Baker’s film budgets have increased gradually over time, but have still remained very small by Hollywood standards. The Florida Project was produced on a measly budget of US$2 million, while Anora cost just US$6 million. For context, the production of last year’s best picture winner Oppenheimer (2023) cost Universal Pictures about US$100 million (before marketing costs).

The high price of creative freedom

Anora premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, where it won the coveted Palme d'Or.

The Palme d'Or is widely considered the most prestigious award in international art cinema – and has launched previous Oscar winners such as Parasite (2019), The Zone of Interest (2023) and Anatomy of a Fall (2023). These awards play an important role in marketing and financing films outside the studio system.

The realities of independent filmmaking are harsher than the glittering appearance of awards season. Independent filmmakers are often precariously employed and earn modest incomes from their work.

In a speech delivered at the Director’s Guild of America Awards earlier this month, Baker laid out the financial difficulties associated with working as an indie director:

It’s just simply not enough to get by on in today’s world, especially if one is is trying to support a family. I personally do not have children, but I know for a fact that if I did, I would not be able to make the movies that I make.

Fellow nominee Brady Corbet, who made The Brutalist with about US$10 million, faced similar challenges, saying in an interview with Vanity Fair that he had made nothing from his two previous films.

Little films on the big screen

Anora has arrived during a time of great upheaval in Hollywood. Studios and streaming giants are adjusting their business models to maximise profits.

Meanwhile, the industry is still recovering from strikes in 2023 by the Writers Guild of America and The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which shut down productions for months.

Hollywood has often turned to independent filmmakers in such moments of crisis. In the 1970s, independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes, Roger Corman, George Lucas and David Lynch disrupted an industry that was stagnating after its Golden Age.

Today, distributors such as Neon (which distributed Anora) and A24 specialise in marketing independent films through careful awards campaigns and viral marketing strategies.

Baker’s win underscores the role of independent films — less constrained by commercial expectations — in shaping the industry’s future. By taking greater creative risks, his style of intimate filmmaking is a breath of fresh air in Hollywood’s stuffy, franchise-driven business model.

Duncan Caillard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Radio astronomers see what the naked eye can’t. As we study the sky with telescopes that record radio signals rather than light, we end up seeing a lot of circles.

The newest generation of radio telescopes – including the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and MeerKAT, a telescope in South Africa – is revealing incredibly faint cosmic objects, never before seen.

In astronomy, surface brightness is a measure that tells us how easily visible an object is. The extraordinary sensitivity of MeerKAT and ASKAP is now revealing a new “low surface brightness universe” to radio astronomers. It’s comprised of radio sources so faint they have never been seen before, each with their own unique physical properties.

Many of the ASKAP results presented here were obtained with one of its major observing programs called EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe). EMU is mapping the entire southern sky with an unprecedented sensitivity and will deliver the most detailed map of the southern hemisphere sky to date – a spectacular new radio atlas that will be used for decades to come.

EMU’s all-hemisphere coverage paired with ASKAP’s exceptional sensitivity, especially within the Milky Way, is what’s yielded so many recent discoveries.

Here’s what they’re teaching us.

Unstable stars

The ghostly ring Kýklos (from the Greek κύκλος, circle or ring) and the object WR16 both show the environment of rare and unusual celestial objects known as Wolf-Rayet stars.

When big stars are close to running out of fuel, they become unstable as they enter one of the last stages of the stellar life cycle, becoming a Wolf-Rayet star. They begin surging and pulsing, shedding their outer layers which can form bright nebulous structures around the star.

In these objects, a previous outflow of material has cleared the space around the star, allowing the current outburst to expand symmetrically in all directions. This sphere of stellar detritus shows itself as a circle.

Exploded stars

Stingray 1, Perun, Ancora and Unicycle are supernova remnants. When a big star finally runs out of fuel, it can no longer hold back the crush of gravity. The matter falling inwards causes one final explosion, and the remains of these violent star deaths are known as supernovas.

Their expanding shockwaves sweep up material into an expanding sphere, forming beautiful circular features.

The supernova remnant will be deformed by its environment over time. If one side of the explosion slams into an interstellar cloud, we’ll see a squashed shape. So, a near-perfect circle in a messy universe is a special find.

Teleios – named from the Greek Τελεɩοσ (“perfect”) for its near-perfectly circular shape – is shown below. This unique object has never been seen in any wavelength, including visible light, demonstrating ASKAP’s incredible ability to discover new objects.

The shape indicates Teleios has remained relatively untouched by its environment. This presents us with an opportunity to make inferences about the initial supernova explosion, providing rare insight into one of the most energetic events in the universe.

At the other extreme, we can take an object and discover something entirely new about it. The Diprotodon supernova remnant is shown below.

This remnant is one of the largest objects in the sky, appearing approximately six times larger than the Moon. Hence the name: the animal Diprotodon, one of Australia’s most famous megafauna, a giant wombat that lived about 25,000 years ago.

ASKAP’s sensitivity has uncovered the object’s full extent. This discovery led to further analysis, uncovering more of the history and the physics behind this object. The messy internal structure can be seen as different parts of the expanding shell slam into a busy interstellar environment.

A cosmic mirror

Lagotis is another object that can show how new telescope data can reclassify previously discovered objects. The reflection nebula VdB-80 has been seen before, within the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. The light we see was emitted by nearby stars, and then reflected off a nearby cloud of gas and dust.

However, with newly available ASKAP EMU data, we were able to discover an associated cloud of ionised hydrogen (known as an HII region, pronounced “aitch two”), where stellar energy has caused the gaseous matter to lose its electrons.

This HII region is seen to coexist with the reflection nebula, sharing the same stellar centre, and is created from the star pushing into a molecular cloud. This movement is akin to burrowing, so the object earned the name Lagotis after Macrotis lagotis, the Australian greater bilby.

Outside the galaxy

ASKAP and MeerKAT are also illuminating objects from outside our Milky Way galaxy – for example, “radio ring” galaxies. When we use visible light to look at the stars in this galaxy, we see a rather plain disk.

But in radio light, we see a ring. Why is there a hole in the middle? Perhaps the combined force of many exploding supernovas has pushed all the radio-emitting clouds out of the centre. We’re not sure – we’re looking for more examples to test our ideas.

Finally, LMC-ORC is an Odd Radio Circle (ORC), a prominent new class of objects with unfamiliar origins. Only being visible in radio light, they are perhaps the most mysterious of all.

The next generation

MeerKAT and ASKAP are revealing incredible insights into the low surface brightness universe. However, they are precursors for the Square Kilometre Array, an international collaborative endeavour that will increase the abilities of radio astronomers and reveal even more unique features of the universe.

The low-surface brightness universe presents many mysteries. These discoveries push our understanding further. Currently, the EMU survey using ASKAP is only 25% complete.

As more of this survey becomes available, we will discover many more unique and exciting objects, both new to astrophysics and extensions on previously known objects.

Acknowledgements: Aaron Bradley and Zachary Smeaton, Masters Research Students at Western Sydney University, made valuable contributions to this article.

Miroslav Filipovic, Professor, Western Sydney University; Andrew Hopkins, Professor of Astronomy, Macquarie University; Luke Barnes, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Western Sydney University, and Nicholas Tothill, Associate professor, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Have you ever been called a Luddite? We have – usually as an insult, rooted in a popular misconception that Luddites are anti-progress fanatics.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The original 19th century Luddites weren’t against technology. Rather, they resisted its oppressive use.

Their rebellion was violently suppressed. But their core critique lives on: technology should benefit all of humanity, not a privileged few.

Today, as Silicon Valley billionaires and United States president Donald Trump turbocharge corporate control of public digital infrastructure, this critique rings truer than ever.

In response, we are a seeing a growing surge of attempts to wrest back control of technology for democratic ends. This is a kind of “digital Luddism” which echoes past struggles against high-tech injustice.

The original Luddites

The Luddites were 19th century English textile workers who destroyed machinery threatening their craft and livelihoods. Historians call their tactics “collective bargaining by riot”. They were fighting against technologies that centralised power and stripped workers of dignity.

Luddite resistance was part of broader struggles for labour rights and socioeconomic justice.

For example, in 18th century France, silk weavers similarly revolted against mechanisation that devalued their craft.

Earlier, England’s Diggers and Levellers resisted the privatisation of communal lands. This foreshadowed today’s battles over corporate control of digital infrastructure.

The Luddites faced severe punishment, including imprisonment and even execution. Despite this, their legacy endures. Today, dismissing critics of Big Tech as “Luddites” repeats the mistake of conflating resistance to exploitation with fear of progress.

In the most extreme scenario, unchecked corporate power allied with monstrous government polices can lead to atrocities. In Nazi Germany, for example, Dehomag, a former subsidiary of computer giant IBM, provided data systems to the Nazis to track victims. Chemical company IG Farben also supplied Zyklon B gas for extermination camps. Many other companies profited from forced labour and funded the regime. This shows how complicity can make oppression more efficient.

Today, digital technologies are deepening inequality, eroding democracy, undermining privacy, and concentrating power.

Digital technologies are also fuelling surveillance capitalism, the displacement of human workers by AI algorithms and the growth of monopolistic platforms.

Platforms and AI systems governed by “broligarchs” such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are also shaping politics, culture, and beliefs globally.

Digital Luddism, also known as neo-Luddism, tackles these issues through three strategies: resistance, removal and replacement.

Resistance: blocking harmful systems

Technology is not inevitable — it’s a choice. Sustained collective action can counter corporate dominance and align tech with democratic values.

In 2018, more than 3,000 Google workers protested the company’s military AI contract, forcing it to adopt ethical guidelines. However, in February this year, Google expanded defence deals, showing how resistance must be sustained.

Three years later, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed the harmful algorithms at the heart of the social media platform.

Then, in 2024, Amazon and Google staff also staged walkouts over a US$1.2 billion AI contract linked to Israeli military operations.

Creative industries are also fighting back. For example, in 2023 screenwriters and actors in Hollywood protested against AI replacing their roles. Similarly, Australia’s “right to disconnect” law reflects Luddite principles of reclaiming autonomy.

Non-profit organisations such as the Algorithmic Justice League and the Electronic Frontier Foundation empower digital rights advocates to take back control over digital spaces by exposing AI bias and through legal litigation.

Digital Luddism doesn’t reject innovation. It demands technology serve stakeholders, not shareholders.

Removal: dismantling entrenched power

Some systems are beyond reform, requiring direct intervention. Removal involves political action and legal regulation. It also involves public pressure to break monopolies or impose penalties on unethical corporations.

For example, the TraffickingHub petition has garnered more than two million signatories to hold adult website PornHub accountable for unethical or unlawful content. This has led financial institutions, such as Visa and Mastercard, to cut ties to the website. For more than 20 years, hacker collective Anonymous has carried out cyber-attacks on authoritarian regimes, extremists and corporations.

Digital Luddites can also lend a hand to the long arm of the law.

The European Union’s 2023 Digital Markets Act broke Apple’s app store monopoly. This sparked a surge in small EU developers.

Big Tech has also repeatedly faced huge fines and antitrust lawsuits. However, breaking up or nationalising these corporations remains rhetoric for now.

Replacement: building ethical alternatives

Proprietary corporate systems have long been challenged by free, open-source alternatives.

But digital Luddism isn’t just about using different tools. It’s about systemic change towards sustainable, transparent and user-controlled infrastructure.

After Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, decentralised alternatives that let users control content flourished. For example, Bluesky grew from 1 million to more than 27 million users in one year.

The Australian government is also responding to a broader public demand for platform independence. For example, it has introduced policies aimed at enhancing people’s data rights. Its Digital Transformation Agency is also advocating for improved open data standards.

Open-source AI projects such as China’s DeepSeek and HuggingFace’s Deep Research now rival corporate models, proving open tech is a force to reckon with.

The original Luddites smashed machines. But the global nature of today’s digital infrastructure makes physical sabotage impractical. That’s why digital Luddism isn’t about smashing screens. Instead, it’s about smashing oppressive systems.

Raffaele F Ciriello, Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems, University of Sydney; Rick Sullivan, PhD candidate, University of Sydney, and Vitali Mindel, Assistant professor in Business Information Technology, Virginia Tech

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.