The federal government is pushing for a “digital detox” in schools.

In a new report, it outlines growing concerns about the use of digital technologies in classrooms. This includes concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) harming children’s critical thinking, concentration and problem-solving skills.

The government now plans to reduce the time students spend on screens and limit AI use at school to improve learning. Education Minister Jason Clare told ABC Radio National on Thursday,

I’m not making the argument here to burn the iPads […] but I am saying that there’s a pretty good argument here for more pen and paper and less tech.

This position reverses a decades-long trend of expanding the use of digital technologies in Australian classrooms.

What does this report mean for schools? And what’s missing in our discussion about screens in schools so far?

What’s in the report?

State and federal education ministers have agreed to consider national limits on screen use. This builds on screen-time limits already flagged in New South Wales and Victoria and soon to be piloted in Western Australia. It also follows international examples such as Norway and New York.

The report also flags:

• some of the Year 5 NAPLAN tests will return to a written assessment (it is currently all done online)

• a new taskforce to look at “digital detoxing” in schools, set to report to ministers three times next year, and

• generative AI to be restricted in primary schools and for high school assessments.

The argument for making these changes is that educational technology should be used to support effective teaching, but not replace it. The report says,

when technology is used, it should be for a purpose, including supporting student learning and wellbeing, and if it causes harm, it should be restricted.

What does this mean for schools?

In practical terms, these changes will mean less emphasis on technology, with a return to pens and paper. And teachers will increasingly have hard limits on the amount of time they can use technology in lessons, particularly in primary schools.

For some teachers, this may require a complete revamp of their teaching practices. For others, there may be no noticeable difference as they are not using technology much currently.

There is no comprehensive national data on how much time Australian children spend on devices at school.

The rules around tech use have been just as patchy. For example, phone bans are implemented at state level. Almost everything else has been decided school by school, including whether students bring a laptop and which AI tools they can use.

What does the research say?

The evidence around how much technology is optimal for learning is also mixed.

Recent international test results suggest 15-year-old students who use devices moderately for learning do better than both heavy users and non-users. But given so few students now go without technology, critics argue the comparison with non-users does not tell us anything particularly useful.

Research also suggests raising the bar for the use of educational technologies (which most of the time means screens) makes sense. For decades, we have lacked sufficient evidence of their positive impact on learning.

For example, a 2015 OECD analysis found countries that had invested heavily in computers for schools saw no appreciable improvement in students’ reading, maths or science scores.

Tech can help, but …

That isn’t to say technology never helps. Used for something specific, such as more targeted practice or more precise feedback, it can improve learning.

But there has not been enough onus on those selling technologies to schools to demonstrate their positive impact on learning. Instead, implementation decisions are often made on the basis of pilots and word of mouth.

And with the introduction of generative AI and AI agents, concerns have moved beyond a lack of evidence around the positive impact of technology on learning to a concern about negative impacts.

Discussions about students using AI to offload their learning have dominated global conversations in education. The main concern is AI use will lead to “cognitive stunting”, where repeated use of the technology can weaken learning and thinking skills.

UNESCO has published arguments that “cognitive friction” – or struggle – is where real learning happens. In September, at a global meeting, education ministers called for AI that makes learners reason and do the “hard thinking” work themselves.

What next?

But while this latest report is a step in the right direction, we need more planning and more information.

Whether we like it or not, technology (including AI) is increasingly part of the world young people live in and will work in. It’s now almost unavoidable if you use Google, for example.

One of the major questions the new taskforce will need to address is: when are the appropriate times and circumstances to integrate technologies into classrooms?

Students will increasingly be interacting with technologies such as AI as soon as they walk out of the school gates (if they aren’t already). Preparing them to survive and thrive in this new era of AI is an important job for schools.

A complete technology ban across all of primary and secondary schooling is not what is being suggested by the government. So, questions about how and when remain open.

We need to do a lot more research and thinking to truly ensure our education and training systems are appropriate for the age of AI.

As world leaders Singapore and Estonia have shown, this will require investing in teachers and using tools designed for learning, rather than just churning out answers.

Jason M. Lodge, Director of the Learning, Instruction & Technology Lab and Professor of Educational Psychology, School of Education, The University of Queensland

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

As a high school or uni student, you might sometimes find yourself putting off study to do other tasks even when an important assessment deadline or exam is looming over you.

This can look like doom-scrolling, texting friends, or checking emails for the seventh time. You might even turn to tasks you usually avoid, such as cleaning, to put off study.

After procrastinating, you may feel more negative, guilty, or stressed because you know the task you put off is important.

So why do we still do it? And how can we overcome it?

What is procrastination?

Procrastination is an unnecessary delay in starting or finishing a task. It’s voluntary, but quite unhelpful. Any short-term feelings of relief that come when avoiding the task often have longer term costs for your learning and sense of self.

Procrastination is extremely common. In a US study, published last month, researchers asked more than 65,000 college students about 18 common lifestyle and health issues. This included finances, family, career, procrastination, ADHD, insomnia, anxiety, stress and depression.

Procrastination and stress were the two most prevalent issues in students’ lives, with each experienced by more than seven in ten students. Procrastination was also the lifestyle factor most likely to harm students’ academic performance and cause them further distress.

Why do we procrastinate?

Procrastination is not simply a question of your willpower. It typically involves a failure in self-regulation. This is our ability to direct our thoughts and behaviours towards achieving specific goals.

Self-regulation is also tied to how we see ourselves as learners. When worried about underperforming, we may avoid challenging tasks to protect our sense of self. For example, you might tell yourself:

did I really fail if I didn’t try?

While some students work well under the pressure of deadlines, others may find it makes their procrastination worse. Knowing you are behind is stressful, and procrastination can be a way to feel more in control.

When are you more likely to procrastinate?

Research suggests you’re more likely to procrastinate about anything if you:

• are aged between 14 and 29 years

• have a tendency towards perfectionism

• have ADHD symptoms related to inattention

• find the task challenging or the rewards too far away in the future.

We are also more likely to procrastinate when we lack confidence in our ability to perform the task at hand.

This can create a vicious cycle, where the skills or knowledge we most need to learn become the ones we practise the least.

But this doesn’t mean it’s all over. These are some practical ways you can get back on track.

1. Start small

Sometimes starting the process of studying is half the battle.

To help yourself ease into it, set aside five to ten minutes to start your work. Keep the task simple too. For example, you might review a few notes or answer some practice questions.

Taking the first small step can make the task feel less overwhelming and build momentum to keep learning.

2. Set clear, achievable goals

Ensure you know what the goal of a study session will be. Is it to practise a specific skill, review a topic, or write a draft?

When you set clear goals for study, it can help you track your progress and adjust your approach when needed.

3. Break tasks into manageable chunks

People are more likely to procrastinate when tasks feel overwhelming, especially when they think everything needs to be done in one go.

Breaking larger tasks into smaller chunks can prevent procrastination. Research shows spacing study over time can also be better for memory and learning than cramming.

4. Avoid ‘all or nothing’ thinking

We all become distracted sometimes. This doesn’t mean the entire day is lost when you procrastinate.

If you find yourself off task, avoid “all or nothing” thinking, such as telling yourself the rest of the morning is a write-off. Instead, praise yourself for jumping back on track.

5. Create a study environment free from distractions

Attention is core to learning, and distractions, such as those that come from devices, encourage procrastination.

So it is important to enter the “do not disturb” zone while studying.

Consider a digital disconnect to reduce the amount of distractions around you. This might look like leaving your phone in another room or putting your email, social media, and smart watch notifications on mute.

6. Learn how to study effectively

You may procrastinate if you feel your study isn’t leading to better results. However, you might be using study techniques that aren’t as effective for learning, such as repeatedly reading your textbook.

It’s important to engage study practices we know strengthen memory pathways and build strong bodies of knowledge. These include:

• quizzing yourself on topics

• explaining concepts to friends

• doing practice problems

• thinking of examples

• looking for connections across the content you have learned.

7. Be self-compassionate

Learning can be hard and preparing for important final assessments is often stressful.

Procrastination can make us feel like “bad” students, even if this is not true.

When you find yourself procrastinating, pause, take a break for a set period of time if you need it, then regroup and get back to it.

Penny Van Bergen, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Wollongong; Emma Burns, Associate Professor of Teacher Education, University of Sydney, and Serena Sun, Research Assistant, University of Wollongong

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

Books may be solitary, but reading rarely is. Literary culture has always depended on conversation in the form of book clubs, university, festival and bookshop events, and spirited conversations with friends. Literary podcasts – both accessible and surprisingly intimate – have become one of the most vibrant places for these conversations.

These five Australian podcasts approach literature from very different angles.

In one, two novelists have an unfiltered chat about the same book, with special guests. Another is a deep dive into Tasmania’s literary culture. Others focus on short fiction, biography and the reading life.

Hosts range from novelist Tony Birch to books influencer Luke Bateman and former ABC arts journalist Caroline Baum. And surprising guests include Louise Milligan on The First Stone and Bri Lee on short fiction. Together, they demonstrate the depth and diversity of Australia’s contemporary literary scene.

1. He Read She Read

In classic literary podcast style, Melbourne crime writer J.P. Pomare and novelist Sarah Bailey read the same book and discuss it together, in He Read She Read. Fortunately, the execution is much more interesting than the concept might suggest!

Pomare and Bailey have an easy rapport, giving episodes the feel of a particularly intelligent book club. (It reminded me of Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett’s The Book Club, and Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole’s Secret Life of Books). Their talks are conversational: they aren’t afraid to admit when a book doesn’t appeal. A recent discussion of Frank Herbert’s Dune opens with the confession that one host failed to finish it, prompting a fantastic conversation about literary reputation and reader expectations.

Often, discussions springboard into broader cultural debate. An episode on Helen Garner’s The First Stone, featuring investigative journalist Louise Milligan, explores Garner’s place in the Australian literary landscape, questions of gender and power, and the lingering controversies surrounding one of Australia’s most debated works of nonfiction.

Some other podcasts offer more formal literary criticism. But He Read She Read succeeds because it captures the pleasure of serious readers thinking aloud, unfiltered, together.

2. Unfolded

Unfolded may be the most unusual podcast on this list. As the hosts, creative writing academic Seth Robinson and award-winning novelist Tony Birch, put it, listeners “hear the stories, then go to the source”. Produced through the University of Melbourne’s Public Humanities Initiative, each episode pairs a contemporary short story with a conversation with its author. It explores where the story came from and the questions it seeks to address.

Because listeners encounter the story before the conversation, the discussion remains grounded in a shared reading experience, rather than drifting into promotion. The result feels somewhere between a literary journal, an author interview and a public humanities seminar.

Episodes featuring writers like Dominic Amerena, (author of I Want Everything), and Bri Lee demonstrate the range of the podcast’s intellectual interests. Conversations move easily between creative process and larger cultural questions. They rove over social media and artistic community, class and climate politics, the pressures of publishing, the relationship between fiction and activism, and the enduring power of storytelling. Authors are encouraged to reflect on the anxieties and preoccupations that shaped their work.

Birch is a particularly effective host, often drawing connections between a story and broader questions of memory, place, politics and literary culture. His exchanges with writers frequently become some of the most illuminating parts of the episode, revealing how fiction emerges from both personal experience and wider social concerns.

At a time when short fiction receives relatively little attention outside literary journals, Unfolded offers a thoughtful, accessible space where contemporary stories can be both heard and discussed.

3. In the Good Books

Reading advocate and influencer Luke Bateman’s In The Good Books is built on a belief that stories matter. Bateman’s project is less interested in judging books than in exploring why people read, write and connect through them.

Episodes alternate between book club style discussions and interviews with authors. Recent guests have included Australian Children’s Laureate Andy Griffiths, historical novelist Ariel Lawhon and fantasy writer Shen Tao. Bateman’s interviews are warm and generous: he encourages authors to reflect on reading and the books that shaped them. Conversations often drift naturally from questions of craft into broader reflections on memory, identity and the power of storytelling.

Bateman is also refreshingly willing to laugh at himself. Before tackling Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, he admitted: “I’m a big scaredy-cat”. Approaching Jane Austen, he confessed feeling “on the outside looking in” whenever people discussed the classics. He approaches books with both sincerity and humour. And his enthusiasm is often infectious, whether he’s talking romance, fantasy, horror – or the simple pleasure of discovering a book that changes the way we see the world.

Readers seeking rigorous literary criticism may want something more sceptical. Yet, there is genuine value in a podcast that takes books seriously while remaining unashamedly enthusiastic.

4. Life Sentences

For readers fascinated by other people’s lives, Life Sentences is essential listening. Hosted by journalist, critic and broadcaster Caroline Baum, it features conversations with biographers about the lives they write – and the challenges of turning a life into a story.

The podcast is distinguished by Baum’s interest in biography as both literary form and investigative practice. Her interviews regularly probe questions of ethics and historical reconstruction. How much can we ever know about another person? Where is the line between scholarship and speculation? What happens when public reputations or inconvenient truths get in the way of a good story?

Recent episodes illustrate these concerns particularly well. A discussion with Patricia O'Brien about her biography of Errol Flynn examines the gap between Hollywood mythology and historical reality. Another, with Kerrie Davies, explores Miles Franklin’s decision to reinvent herself as a domestic servant after the success of My Brilliant Career.

Baum is an attentive and intellectually curious interviewer. She is more interested in uncovering complexity than in delivering verdicts.

5. Remotely Lit

Hosted by Tasmanian writer and researcher Liz Evans, Remotely Lit is a literary podcast produced in Lutruwita/Tasmania. It often begins with a book, then expands into discussions of language, history, culture and community.

A sense of place is what makes it so distinct: Evans is deeply engaged with Tasmania’s literary and intellectual life. Many episodes explore the relationship between storytelling and the communities stories emerge from.

A fascinating conversation with Pakana researcher, poet and language consultant Theresa Sainty ranges from palawa kani language retrieval to cultural memory, oral history and the role of language in sustaining identity. Another episode, featuring Aimen Jafri of Hobart’s Migrant Resource Centre, examines storytelling as a tool for cultural inclusion and belonging in migrant communities.

Evans is a generous, well prepared interviewer who allows complex ideas the time they need to develop. Remotely Lit feels less like a literary podcast than a project illustrating the conditions that make literature possible.

Caitlin Macdonald, Researcher, School of Art, Communication and English, University of Sydney

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

When you think of archives, you probably think of dusty old boxes of paper documents, photos, diaries, letters and flyers, filed away in storage. But increasingly, our archival materials are digital, and material from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s are often stored on formats like floppy disks and CD-ROMs.

Aging and outdated technology has rendered decades of data, memories and cultural heritage inaccessible and at risk of being lost. The constant churn of computer hardware and software upgrades means digital content from as little as 20 years ago cannot be accessed via today’s computers.

We know so little about what everyday people used computers for when they first became available. This means we don’t exactly know what we might be losing – family narratives, unpublished memoirs and other important records.

So much of our history is now stored on outmoded digital platforms. To help combat this, we recently worked with members of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria to archive their own materials. Here’s some of what we found.

Saving the ‘born digital’

New computers don’t include CD-ROM drives, let alone floppy drives, and a lot of older software will not run on contemporary operating systems.

And physical storage media are deteriorating. CD-ROMs and floppy disks fail at alarming rates: in one study, only 8% of old CD-ROMs could be read today.

“Born digital” content is artefacts that have been created using a computer. If we don’t save this content, it will not be available for future use.

Our research is concerned with preserving the born digital, from Australian videogames of the 1980s and 1990s to interactive artworks.

There are three main steps in our digital preservation workflow.

1. Create a “disk image”. Using vintage and restored drives, we can read floppy disks, CD-ROMs and Zip disks. We then make a “bit-perfect” copy – a single file which holds the entire contents, including all hidden or unused sections, of the disk.

2. Analyse the content. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a computer’s native file explorer. At other times, additional software may be needed to view the file names and types stored on the disk.

3. Store the new content. Freed from the need for old hardware drives to open them, the disk image files can be stored on hard drives, cloud storage or added to content management systems.

Digital preservation is ongoing, and digital objects will still require careful stewardship into the future. But once content has been liberated from deteriorating disks, the recovered files and disk images can continue to be migrated as our technology changes.

Major galleries, libraries, archives and museums have been working for years to build and preserve digital archives. But much historically significant content remains with individuals and smaller organisations, outside of formal digital preservation ecosystems.

Into the Victorian archives

To help support smaller organisations and their archives, we asked members of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria to bring in their digital holdings.

Some files on CD-ROMs were able to be copied without imaging; all that was required was an inexpensive USB CD drive. Floppy disks can be much trickier as drives are increasingly rare. They require controllers to connect to current computers: some of these have playful names like Greaseweazle and Applesauce.

We were excited to see what materials were brought in.

There were genealogical files, Word documents, oral history materials, sporting club records and photographs of large engineering projects.

One local library staff member could now see a way to manage the archival content the library holds, such as recordings of the 1991 Australian chamber opera Seduction of a General by composer Martin Friedel.

The Wodonga Family History Society were excited to access indexes of local cemetery records, and scanned photographs of the construction of the Hume Weir.

One member brought six 3.5" floppy disks with files for a discontinued genealogical program from 1996. Imaging her disks, we were able to help her re-access the data which was doubly stranded: on floppy disks and file-types particular to the old software.

She said she was “thrilled to access the information on family members. It’s almost magic!”

And by exporting to an open file format, she will now be able to import the data into a current genealogical program.

Local archives often hold information that is not stored elsewhere. Getting data off obsolete media is a start. But how they will look after their data in the future remains an open question.

By sharing access to our equipment and know-how, we not only made a start on preserving at-risk content but reassured custodians it is possible to still access this material, despite the challenges of digital obsolescence.

Hazel Ellis, PhD Candidate, Centre for Transformative Media Technology, Swinburne University of Technology and Melanie Swalwell, Professor of Digital Media Heritage

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

Godzilla Minus Zero’s incursion into Australian cinemas is proving to be a proper theatrical event.

Audiences aren’t just seeing the beast; they are feeling him. One IMAX attendee reported getting 90 decibel (dB) noise alerts on their smartwatch, and described it as the loudest film they’d ever watched.

As blockbuster soundtracks become increasingly sophisticated, the same question keeps cropping up: why are some cinema screenings so much louder than others?

The answer is a mix of artistic intent, acoustic science, industry standards and a cinema’s individual choice.

What makes a film ‘loud’?

One of the key elements of film sound is dynamic range: the difference between the quietest and loudest parts of the soundtrack. Imagine two characters whispering, perhaps with some subtle ambient noise – then all of a sudden there’s an explosion.

Cinema soundtracks have a much wider dynamic range than we’re used to getting from our TV or laptop speakers.

But apparent loudness isn’t just a function of peak levels. A soundtrack with music, dialogue and effects all going at once will seem much “louder” than one with just a few very loud moments – even if the peak levels on both are the same.

Our ears also respond differently to different frequencies. Highs can be piercing, while lows can be felt in the chest.

A creature the size of Godzilla is interesting to work with. How can a sound designer convey the sheer scale of such a beast? Volume alone isn’t enough.

Large things onscreen – such as machines, thunder and beasts like Godzilla – tend to be accompanied by low-frequency sounds such as deep rumbles. Cinema subwoofers reproduce these low frequencies so you can feel them as vibrations.

Higher frequencies add detail and definition to a scene – such as the sudden crack of a building coming down, or the hit of an explosion.

The original 1954 Godzilla roar was achieved by dragging a glove coated in resin across double bass strings. Composer Akira Ifukube developed an effective orchestral language for the creature, with low frequencies suggesting mass, sharp impacts suggesting force, and reverb used to emphasise scale.

Sound made for IMAX

Godzilla Minus Zero joins a small number of films made for IMAX in recent years.

In 2025, at least 14 films were specifically “filmed for IMAX”, compared with the 122 films released in IMAX theatres worldwide.

This distinction matters. Films that are made for the IMAX format have enhanced presentation, including enhanced sound. Some IMAX with Laser theatres have 12-channel sound systems (including overheads and extra side channels). That can make a real difference to experiencing a character like Godzilla.

Deep bass gives the monster’s footsteps a tangible presence, while surround sound can place falling debris, explosions, and other environmental effects around you – rather than just in front.

Who controls the cinema volume?

Films are mixed in dedicated dubbing theatres, where the sound engineers will deliberately balance the dialogue, music and effects. These mixes are designed to be reproduceable across all cinemas.

The traditional method of theatrical calibration uses a reference level of about 85dB for a test signal played through a single front speaker. That doesn’t mean the film is going to be at 85dB all the time. It’s just a reference that’s used to ensure playback is consistent.

However, this process doesn’t necessarily mean every cinema will reproduce a film at exactly the same volume?

While filmmakers and studios meticulously mix audio to a highly strict industry standard, cinemas are not legally bound to preserve that exact volume and routinely adjust it based on audience comfort, theatre acoustics, and business logistics.

Some cinemas may accommodate requests for having the volume turned up or down, but this can depend on factors such as the cinema’s technical settings, management policies, and the specific sound mix of the film being played.

What about those 90dB warnings?

A smartwatch can detect high sound levels, but it can’t tell you what the overall sound level of a film was – which is more important when it comes to hearing safety.

Hearing damage depends on both sound intensity and exposure time. A brief burst of loud sound isn’t equivalent to sustained exposure at the same level.

Sound starts getting dangerous for human ears at a sustained level of 85 dBA and above, with dBA (A-weighted decibels) being a unit of measuring “loudness” that accounts for how humans hear.

Prolonged exposure to noise at or above this 85 dBA level can lead to permanent, irreversible noise-induced hearing loss. But no cinema soundtrack would consistently be this loud. Immediate permanent damage from a single sound (like an onscreen explosion) is also highly unlikely, as this occurs at levels above 140dB.

With staff constantly walking in and out of auditoriums, cinemas manage their volume levels to ensure they aren’t exceeding legal thresholds. Of course, that doesn’t mean the loudness is always comfortable.

Louder isn’t always better

Modern technologies such as Dolby Atmos and the IMAX multi-channel have given directors greater control over how the sound of their film fills a cinema. But does greater technical capability lead to a more powerful viewing experience?

If everything is just loud, you’ve lost contrast. In my own compositional and sound design work, I’m always thinking about how sound serves the story, rather than just adding to the spectacle.

A quiet musical gesture or subtle environmental sound can be far more disturbing than an explosion. Godzilla’s roar isn’t just impactful because of its sheer volume, but because of everything that built up to it.

A good filmmaker will have you primed to listen.

Alison Cole, Composer and Lecturer in Screen Composition, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney

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

Imagine opening a history book and finding several chapters torn out. This was what geologists looking into the rock records of Earth’s past discovered on several continents in the 1870s.

They dubbed it the Great Unconformity. Where layers of rock often stack up in a steady sequence from oldest to youngest, in many places around the world there is a gap of hundreds of millions of years.

For 150 years, nobody has known what erased those missing chapters. In new research published today in Nature, we finally provide an explanation: deep processes inside Earth lifted some continents high above the sea, where their surfaces were scoured down by the grinding movement of enormous sheets of ice.

The Great Unconformity

Layers of rock often stack up in chronological order, with the oldest at the bottom and the youngest at the top.

Yet in some places, such as the Grand Canyon in North America, you can touch rock layers from two different ages, hundreds of millions of years apart. A flat layer of sedimentary rock, about 540 million years old or younger, rests directly atop a crystalline “basement” up to two billion years old.

Somewhere in between, a considerable chunk (up to a quarter) of Earth’s history has simply vanished.

Important things happened in that time. The sedimentary layers on the younger side of the Great Unconformity appear at the same time as a huge diversification in the forms of life on Earth. This is the so-called Cambrian explosion, which began around 540 million years ago.

Scientists have speculated entire continents were eroded during the Great Unconformity, which may have altered the chemical balance of seawater and allowed animal life to flourish.

The puzzle of missing rock

Geologists have found evidence of the Great Unconformity throughout North America and parts of northern China, as well as beneath younger rocks in northern Europe. Yet its origin has remained a puzzle.

Some scientists have argued it was caused by erosion by massive ice sheets during the Snowball Earth period between 720 million years and 635 million years ago. Others have pointed to the reshuffling of continental blocks, mountain-building processes, heat-induced movement inside the Earth, volcanic activity, or global sea level change.

Testing these hypotheses has been a challenge because the primary evidence consists of missing rock. As a result, we need to work from what we already know to fill in the gaps.

How hot rock can move continents

We had a theory that the creation of the Great Unconformity might have been influenced by heat-driven motion in Earth’s mantle. The mantle is a 2,900-kilometre thick layer of hot solid rock that slowly moves over tens to hundreds of millions of years. Hot mantle rises from deep beneath and cold mantle sinks, pushing and pulling the surface above.

This huge, slow movement can raise or lower the surface by hundreds of metres. Continents sit on top of the mantle and get pushed up and down by its motion.

We used the Australian supercomputer Gadi to model how the movement of the mantle had affected continents over the past billion years.

Our results consistently showed that mantle convection caused ancient continental blocks Laurentia (which now makes up much of North America), Baltica (parts of northern Europe), and North China to be lifted up from around a billion years ago to 540 million years ago. Over the past 540 million years, they have been pulled downward.

This up-and-down movement is the ideal scenario for the formation and preservation of the Great Unconformity. When these continental blocks were lifted up, we see the crystalline underlayer was at the surface – and the layers of sediment above were eroded away. Then when the blocks sank, new layers of sediment began to form, which are preserved in rock to this day.

Lifted continents scoured clean by ice

Importantly, the uplift predicted by our models coincided with the Snowball Earth period. During this period, enormous ice sheets scraped over the surface of continents for tens of millions of years.

Glaciers and ice sheets are more efficient than rivers at eroding continents, even on gentle slopes. The ice sheets would have slowly slid downhill across the uplifted continents, eroding away everything in their path.

In contrast to Laurentia, Baltica and North China, we found that Australia and South America experienced only two cycles of uplift and subsidence from 900 million years ago. This scenario is not conducive to the formation and preservation of the Great Unconformity – and indeed we see little evidence of it on these continents.

Our research suggests the missing pages in Earth’s geological archive may be due to slow mantle convection that gently lifted entire continents then made them subside over hundreds of millions of years.

In that sense, the Great Unconformity is the fingerprint of deep Earth processes. Forces deep beneath our feet have left planet-scale marks in the geological record, and shaped the environment in which complex life first evolved.

Santosh Dhungana, PhD Candidate, Environmental Futures, School of Science, University of Wollongong and Nicolas Flament, Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow, Environmental Futures, School of Science, University of Wollongong

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

Look closely at a face in a painting and you might think you know what emotion the person is experiencing. A smile suggests happiness. A furrowed brow might signal anger. Widened eyes could mean fear or surprise. But what happens when you ask lots of people the same question? Do they see the same emotion, or something more complicated?

In our recent research, we tested how consistently people interpret faces and their emotions depicted in paintings.

Emotions are central to how we experience and navigate the world around us. Because facial expressions are an important way emotions are communicated, psychologists have spent decades studying what faces can tell us about emotional states.

One of the main tools for studying emotions has been photographic databases like the classic Pictures of Facial Affect. In these images, actors pose using standardised combinations of facial movements to represent six basic, widely recognised emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. These passport photo type images are incredibly valuable for studying how people recognise clear, prototypical emotion expressions. However, expressions do not always fit neatly into one of these six categories.

To understand the more nuanced ways people interpret facial expressions, researchers also need examples that go beyond clear-cut expressions. However, asking someone to pose with a convincing layered emotional expression for a photograph is not straightforward.

So researchers have found examples from films or everyday life, while also introducing additional emotion labels and other ways of measuring how a facial expression is understood, such as how positive or negative and how strongly that emotion is felt.

I work as part of an international team of psychologists that decided to look at how art could offer a fascinating option. Take, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. There has been over 500 years of debate over whether she is smiling or not. Research has found that perceptions of her gaze can change depending on how the painting is viewed, and that her eyes can appear to smile even when viewed on their own. It is a striking example of how much information can be packed into a single painted face.

The face in a painting is the result of deliberate artistic decisions, observation and traditions, while tapping into the ways our faces naturally move when we express emotion.

In our research, we selected 116 faces from European paintings dating from around 1400 to 1900. Before testing, we standardised the images by making sure that all faces were clearly visible and similar in how they were positioned. We then cropped the faces from the paintings, removing the wider scene and body language so that participants were judging the expressions themselves. We presented these isolated faces to 152 participants, who viewed them individually and selected which of the six basic emotions best described the expression.

Our findings revealed that agreement exists on a sliding scale. On one end of this spectrum, some faces produced a clear consensus: viewers consistently selected the exact same emotion. We classified 61 of the 116 faces in this way as showing a classic “basic emotion”.

But the other 55 faces produced consistent patterns of responses across two or three emotional categories.

One painting that garnered such a response was Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1879). The painting shows Joan in her family home in Domrémy, France at the moment she is told by the saints she must fight against the English in the Hundred Years War.

The full scene, along with our cultural knowledge of who she is and the heavy fate awaiting her, provides a vivid narrative context that helps us decode her psychological state. The chair beside her spinning wheel is upturned, telling us that she has been suddenly interrupted. When we look to the trees, we see the faint traces of the apparitions of the saints who have assigned her the terrifying burden of the role she must play in the defence of France.

But when the context was stripped away and participants viewed Joan’s isolated face, they didn’t agree on one single emotion. People most often saw fear, but many also saw sadness or surprise. For the participants, Joan’s expression did not convey a single, flat emotion but several plausible interpretations at once.

These complex, yet non-random patterns of response, to Joan’s face and the other 54 paintings, suggest that paintings offer interesting new avenues for the exploration of how people perceive emotion. Artworks then could offer researchers a wider range of facial expressions to investigate.

Zoe Thurtle, PhD Student in Cognitive Psychology, Sheffield Hallam University

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

The gunpowder plot of 1605 was an attempt to assassinate King James I, blow up London’s Houses of Parliament and trigger a full-scale Catholic rebellion in England. To commemorate its spectacular failure, parliament passed the Act for a Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God Every Year on the Fifth Day of November. But few needed an excuse for celebrations as winter closed in.

In Jacobean England, November 5 added just another red-letter day to a calendar already enlivened by the bonfires lit in commemoration of Elizabeth I’s accession on November 17. But the English tradition of bonfires and feasting didn’t begin with Elizabeth either. The ritualised burning of the debris of the year can be dated back to pre-Christian times. The act of 1605 both sanctioned and positively encouraged such activities.

Food was always an important part of the merrymaking. Here are four of the most popular delicacies that have marked bonfire season in England over the centuries.

1. Potatoes

As a child in the 1960s, I remember my mother wrapping potatoes in tinfoil to stick on the edge of a roaring fire to bake. Afterwards, in keeping with traditions in her native Lancashire, there would be parkin (a dense gingerbread cake) and tray-baked homemade treacle toffee that you had to hammer to break up. In village firework parties in the north of England, such food traditions are still going strong.

Interestingly, tossing them in the embers is mentioned in the first British reference to potatoes in a herbal (a guide to plants and herbs) by John Gerard, published in 1633. This was apparently seen as a way of making them “lose much of their windinesse, especially being eaten sopped in wine”.

Potatoes, albeit generally smaller and in fewer varieties than available today, were first introduced in England in the 1570s. Acceptance was remarkably slow. Long dismissed as an exotic novelty or livestock feed, they only became a mainstream English staple during the food shortages of the late 18th century. Yet as Gerard’s 1633 account proves, early adopters had already figured out that the embers of a fire were the easiest way to bake them.

Maybe the tradition of sopping them in wine continues today in the peculiar British tradition of putting vinegar on chips.

2. Parkin

Parkin, however, is of more recent origin. The first recorded reference to it is seemingly when a woman named Sarah Priestley was arraigned at Pontefract Quarter Sessions in 1729 for stealing oatmeal to make a parkin. This clearly indicates that parkin was already a desirable Yorkshire delicacy, but leaves its origins obscure.

Parkin seems to have evolved from “tharf cakes”, large round oaten cakes, sometimes made with plums inside. They are recorded as far back as the Lindisfarne gospels, a Christian manuscript created around AD700-715. Tharf cakes were a 12th night delicacy in Cumbria and a November 5 tradition in Sheffield up to the late 19th century.

Eighteenth-century parkin, like tharf cakes, was a thin oatmeal cake baked directly on a griddle stone. What made it parkin was the addition of ginger and a sweetener. Depending on region this is generally black treacle (Yorkshire), syrup (Lancashire) or even honey (West Yorkshire).

From the mid-19th century, parkin began to be commercially produced in ovens with bicarbonate of soda added to leaven it and give it what has become its characteristic texture.

The production of parkin drew on the surplus of oats at the end of the harvest. As oats were not generally grown in the south of England, its consumption never caught on there.

3. Soul cakes

In most parts of England, it is likely that the first sweetmeats associated with November 5 were soul cakes. These are small, round cakes flavoured with spices such as nutmeg and ginger.

According to T. F. Thistleton-Dyer’s book British Popular Customs (1876), the custom of going “a-souling” – begging or singing for soul cakes – was already well established by Shakespeare’s time, as a pastime during the celebrations of All Hallowstide between October 31 and November 2.

Indeed, this tradition goes back further, as an appropriation of the Celtic tradition of Samhain and is the distant origin of modern trick or treating at Halloween.

The tradition of seeking cakes “or any good thing to make them merry” was easily adapted to Bonfire Night from 1605. This included seasonal fruits. For instance, in Cheshire, one of the songs associated with the season emphasised “we are come for apples and strong beer”.

4. Toffee apples

Apples and sweetmeats therefore became adopted as part of the fun on the new festive date of November 5 after 1605. Eventually, the two were put together. From the 1890s, toffee apples began to appear in London during these festivities.

These foods are all part of the historic experience of Bonfire Night and the smells and tastes it evokes. The festivities would not be the same without the food associated with it. Indeed, the idea that the distinctive nature and flavour of regional foods need to be protected is even enshrined in European law.

When Britain was in the EU, foodstuffs such as Melton Mowbray pies, stilton cheese and Cornish pasties were given this protected status. This continues under post-Brexit arrangements. Yet this list of protected foodstuffs does not, as yet, include parkin. Maybe it should. After all, in the north of England parkin is an important – and delicious – part of the intangible cultural heritage of Guy Fawkes Day.

Pippa Catterall, Professor of History and Policy, University of Westminster

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

Any concept that has a history, philosopher Michel Foucault tells us, cannot have a fixed definition.

Plagiarism is a concept with a history, as the subtitle of Roger Kreuz’s Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots reminds us. But it might be close to perennial.

Review: Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots – Roger Kreuz (Cambridge University Press)

As a term describing literary, artistic or intellectual theft, “plagiarism” is derived from one of the epigrams of the ancient Roman poet Martial:

Quintianus, I commend you my little books – that is, however, if I can call them mine when your poet friend recites them. If they complain of harsh enslavement, come forward to claim their freedom and give bail as required. And when he calls himself their owner, say they are mine, discharged from my hand. If you shout this three or four times, you will make the kidnapper ashamed of himself.

The Latin word for “kidnapper” Martial uses is plagiario, which gives us the English term “plagiarism”. Other Roman writers, like Cicero, already familiar with the phenomenon of literary theft, used different terms like furtum (a trick) and surripio (taking something secretly), which cover a range of connotations.

The Statute of Anne

Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether the ways we understand plagiarism are continuous with the classical notions that gave us the term, or whether there has been a rupture (or several).

The most often cited candidate is the Statute of Anne (1710), the first effort by a government anywhere to codify copyright and make it enforceable under the law.

Copyright, the argument goes, emanates from the rumbustious commercial culture of Restoration England. It encourages us to think about literary texts as a form of capital, valuable for their ability to generate income for their creators and their creators’ descendants.

Medieval and early modern attitudes towards appropriation differed from later ones. Witness the massive profusion of Aristotle’s ideas throughout medieval philosophy, for instance, or Shakespeare’s avid lifting of plots from historians Holinshed and Plutarch.

But, equally, who would deny the enormous ingenuity that transformed Aristotelianism into the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, or the chronicles of Holinshed into King Lear?

There is an important slippage here, the one telegraphed in Kreuz’s subtitle: from plagiarism to appropriation. Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon railed against the “idols of the theatre”, his name for dogmas derived from ancient philosophy, assented to only for their antiquity. But Bacon was not accusing anyone of passing off Aristotle’s texts as their own.

Inspiration, allusion, influence, all the textual chains that make up a tradition or a culture: these are complex. They take time and patience to disentangle. Yet plagiarism, as literary critic Christopher Ricks is at pains to remind us, is simple: it is an act of dishonesty. And it has been deprecated as such at every stage of literate culture.

The Statute of Anne did not invent a new understanding of plagiarism grounded in copyright, though it was responding to the new salience of literary theft, as the world of print made the practice easier and, seemingly, more widespread. The great threat to authors’ livelihoods at this time was the pirated edition, rather than theft in the sense of fraudulent attribution (although this took place as well).

Far from representing a rupture with the classical tradition, copyright accentuates a dimension of plagiarism present from the start. It adds a literal theft to the moral injury that Martial’s “kidnapping” characterises as a metaphorical theft.

Ricks underscores another facet of Martial’s tenacious metaphor. The plagiarist does not deprive the originator of the work itself, in the way a thief deprives its owner of the stolen object. In Ricks’ words, the plagiarist “hopes to gain honour from a dishonourable practice”.

For Ricks, this dual aspect of plagiarism is apt to lead us astray. To the extent that we rely on judicial determinations and judicial remedies, we tend to neglect the original sense of moral injury.

The problem of intention

Such is the outline of a historical account of plagiarism. What do we learn from it?

We learn that plagiarism is a simple concept with an unusual degree of historical consistency, but that its connections with neighbouring concepts, such as influence and copyright, can be complex.

We learn that a legalistic or procedural approach to the problem of plagiarism leaves an important dimension of it unaddressed.

A more fine-grained account would also reveal that authors tend to be perpetually in crisis over plagiarism’s perceived prevalence.

For Kreuz, however, plagiarism is an example of what he and his fellow social scientists would call a “fuzzy concept”. He cites a lack of consensus around whether insufficient attribution amounts to the same thing as plagiarism (yes, if the intent was to deceive) and how much copying counts as plagiarism (conceivably any amount, again depending on the intention).

Intention, famously, is hard to establish. As Ricks reminds us, however, this doesn’t make the concept of plagiarism itself unclear.

Questions of allusion and influence, and the point at which knowledge leaves the preserve of its discoverer and joins what Karl Marx called the “general intellect”, are nigh on impossible to legislate in advance. The point was made by philosopher G.W.F Hegel two centuries ago, when he argued that, because such questions “cannot be precisely determined” in strictly legal terms, plagiarism ought to be a “matter of honour, and honour should deter people from committing it”.

How, then, does Kreuz propose to advance our understanding beyond this durable-seeming consensus? He has amassed a database of some 4,600 incidents of plagiarism drawn principally from “journalistic accounts”.

That database has been well used: the substance of the book is a seemingly interminable series of vignettes, drawn from a variety of national contexts (but mostly American), professions and periods. These include, for instance, the infamous 1976 ruling in a music publisher’s case against George Harrison over his song My Sweet Lord, which was found to be an “unconscious plagiarism” of the Chiffons’ 1963 hit He’s So Fine.

Another example is Joe Biden reproducing certain phrases and arguments from a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the Democratic presidential primaries in 1987. The revelation derailed Biden’s campaign.

But it is unclear what these vignettes are supposed to teach us about the nature of plagiarism, the traits of plagiarists, the nature of originality, and the place of influence. None of the important issues are adjudicated on, or even expanded upon. Instead, they are merely gestured at, before we move swiftly on to another anecdote.

Dishonourable times

The slippage between “plagiarism” and “appropriation” in Kreuz’s preface is constant and neither term is defined. Is the former a subset of the latter? It takes until page 192 for us to learn that plagiarism is a “fuzzy concept”, leaving us to wonder what rules governed inclusion in the database underlying the project.

The book’s marketing and subtitle suggest it tells us something urgent about plagiarism and appropriation in the age of AI. This is false. Its final sentence is another equivocation – namely, that those water-muddying cultural norms might be shifting again in the present.

How? Should they? Kreuz doesn’t say.

Those of us working in the universities have seen, since 2022, the venerable essay virtually obliterated as a form of assessment by the promiscuous use students make of AI. AI cheating is a form of plagiarism: these students have tried (usually successfully) to deceive their teachers that they are the authors of computer-generated prose.

The legalistic, procedural response seems futile. AI detection software is widely judged unreliable. Academic dishonesty procedures are producing insuperable amounts of bureaucratic work, beyond even what even the distended administration of the modern university can absorb.

All that remains is the moral dimension. It would probably do little good to insist to anyone who passes off AI-generated work as their own that they are dishonouring themselves. But that is because we live in a society determined to exterminate every measure of value apart from self-interest. Hegel’s “honour” is at best a quaint vestige of a vanished world.

If we really value intellectual originality, artistic creativity and human excellence, we have to do more than develop better detection tools and oppose AI companies’ pilfering of art, literature, and thought. We have to try to build a society that fosters these values for everyone, not one that tries to commercialise them at best and extirpate them at worst.

Yes, there is often a legal dimension to plagiarism, but there is an irreducible moral dimension as well, and the whole tendency of our society is toward the procedural and legalistic, to the detriment of every other consideration.

Hegel was right: plagiarism has to be a matter of honour. But we live in dishonourable times.

Benjamin Madden, Senior lecturer, School of Humanities, Adelaide University

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