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    <title><![CDATA[Ockham's Razor]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[William of Ockham was an English monk, philosopher, theologian, who provided the scientific method with its key principle 700 years ago. 'What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more,' he said. That is, in explaining any phenomenon, we should use no more explanatory concepts than are absolutely necessary. Simplicity should never be despised. Thoughtful people have their say, without interruption, on important science-related topics.]]></description>
    <link>http://abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/</link>
    <copyright>Australian Broadcasting Corporation</copyright>
    <language>en</language>
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      <title><![CDATA[Ockham's Razor]]></title>
      <link>http://abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/</link>
    </image>
    <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
    <itunes:summary><![CDATA[William of Ockham was an English monk, philosopher, theologian, who provided the scientific method with its key principle 700 years ago. 'What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more,' he said. That is, in explaining any phenomenon, we should use no more explanatory concepts than are absolutely necessary. Simplicity should never be despised. Thoughtful people have their say, without interruption, on important science-related topics.]]></itunes:summary>
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      <title><![CDATA[2010-07-25 Worlds in transition ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[Professor Jim Falk from the University of Melbourne discusses governance in a rapidly changing world. He has co-authored a book called Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet with Professor Joseph Camilleri from La Trobe University.]]></description>
      <link>http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/07/orr_20100725.mp3</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[Professor Jim Falk from the University of Melbourne discusses governance in a rapidly changing world. He has co-authored a book called Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet with Professor Joseph Camilleri from La Trobe University.
 TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Do you find yourself constantly being jostled by hundreds of boat people every time you go shopping, take Bunty or Gideon to school, or go to play golf?

Have you contributed to the Red Cross Appeal for distressed mining executives, now very much on their uppers, crippled by taxes?

Do you agree that carbon dioxide reduction measures are just so `last year´?

If, perhaps, right now at the start of an election campaign you perceive something of a gap between big world issues and the flotsam we´re being offered, then Professor Jim Falk is here to explain what´s going on -- a gap between real democracy and governance. Jim Falk.

Jim Falk: This thing called governance has begun to appear as a key global issue. A stark illustration of its importance has been provided by the climate change negotiations at COP15 in Copenhagen last December. There was virtual consensus on the need to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions globally. So we knew what needed to happen. But we knew much less about how to achieve it. That demonstrated the sharp limits to our current human capacity to shape our future.

So there is a recent spike of interest in how to improve our capacity of governance. This may be new, but the search for such improvement is not. Rather, the current interest represents just one episode in the effort to develop this human capacity - a process stretching across the long sweep of human history. Viewed this way, governance can be seen as an evolving capacity of humans - which in the end will be related to our long term survival, and in the course of that, to our successful adaptation, as a species, to rapidly changing circumstances.

We can view the development of our cultural capacities as co-evolving with our biological endowments. We have developed certain biologically based abilities which provide our basis for `doing´ culture. Key amongst these is our capacity for language. Built on that is our ability to do mathematics, and more recently, to manipulate information. Our developing facility for reflexivity utilises all of these. By reflexivity I mean our ability, individually and collectively through our institutions, to perceive and reflect on the past, current and potentially future consequences of our individual and collective actions. These consequences include not only our impacts on our environment, but also our impacts on each other.

Human culture can be seen as having evolved through a series of major epochs, each of which has been separated by a period of upheaval. It´s during these critical periods of transition that our prevailing worldviews, practices and institutions have particularly been called into question. We seem to be living through such a transition now - a watershed as critical perhaps as any of the six or seven most significant transitions of the last 100,000 years.

The transition we are in is both physical and social. It includes the impacts of our growing population, which in the half-century from 1950 to 2000 has more than doubled. In fact global population has increased from 2.5 billion to 6 billion and is projected to rise to more than 9 billion by 2050. A transition in our reflexive collective social capacity is being shaped by the computer network, which in less than 25 years has been invented, deployed and already joined together some 1.3 billion users, and whose use continues to grow exponentially.

In the same 50 years, in constant dollars, the world economy has grown sevenfold with a corresponding rise in consumption and production. And to power this economic growth, we have increased our consumption of fossil fuels by 350 percent, for example, burning up to some 30% to 50% of the planet´s accumulated oil, overall releasing sufficient carbon dioxide to create concentrations in the atmosphere unprecedented for 650,000 years, sufficient to begin to reshape our planet´s temperature and climate.

Perhaps most tellingly, in our intensifying consumption of the physical and biological world, we humans have accelerated the extinction of other species by some 500 to 1,000 times the background rate. According to some, this threatens, within the next 25 years, to eliminate close to one third of all other species. These trends suggest that within this century a `sixth extinction´ may well be unleashed, rivalled only five times in the past 4 billion years of the planet´s living history - the last occasion came 65 million years ago with the end of the `age of the dinosaurs´.

So the common pattern is of roughly exponential growth in many of the indices of our human activity, rising in ever more precipitous and apparently unsustainable trajectories.

The question remains: have we the capacity to govern this change sufficiently to deflect it towards a more sustainable direction? The broad sweep of human history which proceeds this moment, suggests two highly relevant trends are at play.

The first is a positive one - a trend towards greater capacity in reflexivity. We need only look at the extraordinarily enhanced capacities through science and computer modelling, and the unparalleled volume of information available now through the internet, to see how our capacities have in principle, dramatically increased to see and understand the moment we are in.

But there is also a confounding trend - a consistent tendency towards us creating greater social, economic and political complexity. That is, there is ever more varied and more intense interaction between disparate parts of the human species, its activities and the rest of its environment.

One illustration of this arrow of increasing complexity is provided historically by the ever more potent flows human activity has generated: for example, extending flows of finance, information, pathogens, and security threats, to name just a few.

As these flows increase in scale, they have had increasing impact across the boundaries around which prior governance institutions and processes had been erected. We need only think of our generated flows of atmospheric pollutants - developing from local smog, to acid rain to ozone-destroying chemicals, to greenhouse gases - to see how this increase in scale and intensity increasingly transgresses the boundaries of city, state, nation, and region, and how existing structures of governance, based on these, are increasingly confounded by the need to mitigate them and their impacts.

Human attempts to govern such atmospheric flows of pollutants, at least at local scale, can be traced back to Roman England. But with their increasing intensity and scale, not only has the problem of governing such flows become greater, but so has the need.

In the face of these tests of governance, prior boundaries drawn for example between nation states, or between government, market, and civil society, have become less useful as interconnections have proliferated across them.

Flows of pathogens have a particular significance because - as evidenced by the emergence of recent epidemics of HIV/AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu, and most recently Swine Flu, pathogenic flows have the capacity to evolve as fast, or perhaps faster, than our capacity to govern our responses to them. Indeed they evolve to take advantage of our cultural developments, for example, riding the flows of people and goods which we are creating across the planet, and developing resistance to our medical responses.

The increasing need to shape such trans-boundary flows, has provided one centrally important impetus for innovation in governance. Such flows are just a sub-set of the challenges of increasing complexity created by human activity to which governments must now respond. This challenge-response dynamic leads to innovation, often creating new governance mechanisms, although usually not replacing existing ones. Rather they develop, layered over older mechanisms like the skins of an onion.

This dynamic has helped shape the historical direction of development in human governance - from extended family and clan, to tribe, chiefdom, kingdom, city state, ancient imperial state, and eventually the Modern state. However, what we call the Modern period is rapidly coming to an end.

The key evidence for this is that the capacity of modern institutions (by which I mean those developed in 17th and 18th century Europe) to shape coherent and adaptive responses relative to the contemporary challenges has for some time been in steady decline.

The complexity of the tasks facing these institutions, most notably the Nation State, and their decreasing ability to carry them through, is creating a moment of tension. Whilst the material standard of living of many has never been greater, paradoxically our age has tellingly been described as the `age of uncertainty´, the `age of anxiety´, and even the `age of extremes´. Global recessions, the threat of global warming and nuclear war, international terrorism, pandemics, famines and other catastrophic humanitarian emergencies graphically illustrate the pervasive reality and perception of insecurity.

Of course these extraordinary challenges have not gone without responses. There is a long history of incremental initiatives being mounted in response to the dangers posed, whether from atmospheric pollution or the spread of infectious diseases. Since World War II the pace of change in the way we organise ourselves has been nothing less than remarkable. Norms, laws and institutions that manage the way societies function and interact have all changed dramatically.

Not only new institutions, but a range of new principles have been adopted by an emerging international community to deal with war, human rights, poverty reduction, humanitarian disasters, the environment, trade and now, even finance.

Extraordinarily complex decisions can now be taken with unprecedented speed and global reach. Witness for example, the international response to the earthquake in Haiti this year.

However, we also have to achieve more than ever before. We live in a world where governance operates at numerous levels - local, national, region and global - simultaneously and interactively. These levels of governance now have no option but to incorporate both big and smaller players operating in the market and civil society.

One increasingly important player for example in governance, over the last 50 years has been the rising influence of scientists, intellectuals, professional networks, social and religious movements, side by side with the unparalleled growth of international law and international organisations.

These innovations are still unfolding. But important though they are, the fact remains that they are not necessarily equal to the task. It is not at all clear they will succeed in handling the complexity, speed and sheer volume in the flow of pollutants, goods and services, money, technology, arms, drugs, people, information, ideas and images which now form just part of the governance task.

In short, there is a sort of arms race in time between the rapid evolution of human governance and the challenges confronting it. Indeed, the improved capacities required for better governance also support the growth of the problems it confronts.

What would be the characteristics of a governance system that would enable humans to successfully adapt to the world they are creating? We say much more about this in our recent book. But it seems to Joe Camilleri and I that so far, despite all the innovation that has taken place, it is still in doubt that humans will create a coherent governance system from local to global scale, with sufficient strength to meet the challenges they are creating. What has emerged so far seems neither sufficiently coherent nor effective.

One thing that does seem clear, however coherent, messy or organic the structure of governance is as it evolves, to be effective it needs to move in a direction in which more insights are shared, and there is greater understanding of the challenges. For this reason we argue that any trajectory forward to a form of governance which will prove adaptative will have a much higher level of shared reflexitive capacity. We call this a movement towards `holoreflexivity´ - the development of greatly enhanced capacity by human communities and institutions, at all levels (from the local to the global) to see and comprehend impacts, changes and initiatives elsewhere, wherever they are.

Further progress would be centrally important for achieving the goal, enunciated by increasingly powerful voices for democratic global decision-making to meet global challenges. This is easy to say but very hard to do. For, as Copenhagen has shown it´s not simply a case of allowing more states to have a say, important as that is, but of creating an environment in which different voices can be heard and listened to: the voices of the powerful and the weak, the North and the South, East and West.

Overall our analysis has led us to an uncomfortable conclusion: across the planet, those seeking to shape laws and institutions are struggling to find a formula which recognises the social reality which is global and planetary, yet comprised of diverse cultures, societies, religions and civilisations. Reconciling the one and the many is the supreme challenge confronting contemporary governance. The future prospects for effective human adaptation depend on it.

Robyn Williams: Professor Jim Falk, from the University of Melbourne. His book, written with Professor Joseph Camilleri, is Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet. 

Yes we can is getting harder and harder.

Next week, young Aborigines in modern Australia.

I´m Robyn Williams.]]></itunes:summary>
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      <title><![CDATA[2010-07-18 Diamonds ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[Associate Professor James Rabeau from Macquarie University in Sydney takes a look at diamonds, particularly the synthetic diamond.]]></description>
      <link>http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/07/orr_20100718.mp3</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[Associate Professor James Rabeau from Macquarie University in Sydney takes a look at diamonds, particularly the synthetic diamond.
 TRANSCRIPT: 

Robyn Williams: Carbon - what an element! You´re made of it, and so am I, last time I checked. So´s your cat. And your potted plant.

Carbon has three branches of chemistry to deal with itself (one mega branch isn´t enough). There´s inorganic chemistry, which handles outside relations with elements of a sundry nature; organic chemistry is all about a kind of incestuous relationship that carbon has with itself, with almost unlimited permutations. And then, thirdly, in 1985, Sir Harry Kroto and his mates announced yet another huge kingdom of carbon, posited for outer space, and then made here on earth in the lab. It´s called Buckminsterfullerene or C60.

And then carbon comes as lead in your pencil, charcoal in your fire or diamonds around your neck, or in your watch.

I like it as C2H5OH, especially from Margaret River, in the form of wine, or even as a bludgeon in my hands on the cricket pitch. Trees take carbon from thin air to make their vasty, weighty bulk.

Carbon is also a drama queen and will feature as such in the policies of all the major parties in the election, now off and running.

But today we deal with carbon in its hardest form, its most glamorous and spectacular.

Here´s Professor James Rabeau from Macquarie University.

James Rabeau: Diamonds ... irrefutably the most coveted of gem stones. The hardest known material, brilliant and varied in colour, from perfectly clear to pink, red, blue, brown and even black. Technologically it has enormous usage including an ideal material for polishing, cutting and drilling. Beyond these everyday uses, infinite new technological potential is yet to be realised. Generally, jewellery is regarded as the biggest market for diamond. It is probably true that when the word `diamond´ is mentioned, most people think of bejewelled fingers, necks or unfathomably large and beautiful museum pieces. However, diamond is only just beginning to glimpse its true potential.

On geological time scales, a relatively recent technological feat has been realised. Diamonds can be made synthetically. In this context, do not confuse the word `synthetic´ with `fake´. On the contrary, synthetic diamond is absolutely 100% real diamond, sometimes even better than natural diamond, but it is only made by artificial means, and hence termed `synthetic´ diamond. So get rid of that picture of cubic zirconia that has crept into your brain and remember that synthetic diamond is real diamond made by synthetic means.

The technology to make diamond has been around since before the laser was developed and before the first semiconductor was made. In the 1950s, basically simultaneously, a group in Russia and the company General Electric in the United States, found how to make diamonds. The thought alone conjures images of ancient alchemists labouring in vain to transmute lead into gold. Unlike this form of alchemy however, the `synthesis´ of diamond is very real. In fact GE scientists raised the bar on the quest to turn lead into gold, by actually turning store-bought peanut butter into pure diamond!

Let´s start at the beginning. The most logical way to make something which is forged deep in the earth´s crust under extreme forces of pressure and heat, is to try as best as you can to emulate the conditions. High pressure and high temperature. This is exactly what the pioneers of diamond synthesis did. High pressure and high temperature, or HPHT, was not a new technology, and many had previously used these systems to carry out sophisticated studies on a variety of materials. It wasn´t until the right conditions were found, a recipe, if you will, which provided the conditions necessary to make diamond the stable form of carbon, instead of its boring cousin, graphite. Under normal, everyday conditions, graphite is the stable form of carbon, meaning that carbon is much `happier´ arranging itself into 2-dimensional and weakly-bound sheets, instead of 3-dimensional and tightly bound crystals. This feature of carbon is precisely why graphite is an efficient scribing tool and mechanical lubricant - the graphite sheets readily slip and sheer over one another much like two pieces of paper. Diamond, composed of exactly the same atoms, would do no such thing and rather cuts efficiently through most materials instead of breaking apart.

However, given enough energy, for example in the form of heat, diamond will rapidly convert to graphite. Yuck! Only by finding the right thermodynamic conditions is it possible to make diamond more stable than graphite. That´s exactly what happens deep in the earth´s crust, and exactly the conditions which were imitated in laboratories in the 1950s. GE scientists found the right pressure and the right temperature to make this happen. The key ingredient obviously was carbon. During the peak of this research study, it has been written that GE scientists, in order to prove their methodology, literally placed a teaspoon of peanut butter, high in carbon content, into the High Pressure and High Temperature reactor to produce a piece of diamond.

The first thing people tend to think of when the word `diamond´ is mentioned, is almost certainly jewellery. Of course, why not? However, more and more, in the scientific community, diamond is being recognised as a super-material capable of meeting the needs across a whole range of new technological applications. Very simply, take for example cutting and drilling implements. These applications have for a long time been the driving market force behind the production of synthetic diamond. Diamond polishing, drilling and even shaving implements can be bought cheaply at the local hardware store or supermarket. To be frank, the majority of synthetically made diamond is not big or pretty or anything approaching gem quality. Generally, it is rife with impurities and defects formed during the growth process, sometimes black or grey in colour and often in the form of powder. Despite this, for the most part, synthetic diamond retains all the extreme properties of a bona fide natural diamond: hardness, in particular. For long-lasting sharp and hard edges, or ultra durable polishing materials, diamond is without equal. As a result, hardware stores, oil rigs and any number of heavy industry manufacturers make use of so-called `industrial diamond´ to meet the needs of cutting, polishing and drilling of less hard materials. For a long time this was the mainstay of industrial diamond.

Through the 1980s, diamond synthesis saw a boost due to heavy investment from the US government. The interest was mainly driven by the potential use of diamond in semiconductor technology and over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a genuine race to realise a diamond-based semiconductor chip by attempting to fabricate a diamond chip capable of performing better than silicon computer chip. Many still strive for this dream. However, during that period, although then fabrication of practical semiconducting diamond still lay out of reach, many other possible applications were recognised, including the use of diamond at a heat sink - a material capable of rapidly transferring heat away from a body.

Despite the range of real and practical potential for diamond, the overall interest waned somewhat from the exuberance of the 1980s. However, over the last 8 to 10 years, interest has grown dramatically and new and even more exciting possibilities lay on the horizon for `synthetic´ diamond. It turns out that a great deal is in store in fact for a most unlikely member of the diamond family - NANO diamond - crystals that are more than 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

What is it about these tiny diamonds? Well, it comes down to the fact that they can `host´ defects, or impurity atoms. That means a diamond, which is a carbon lattice or `cage´, can trap other atoms and molecules inside it. And some of these so-called `colour centres´ have the ability to emit light very efficiently. It is correct in this sense to think of one tiny particle of diamond as a beacon of light. One single impurity is a single quantum object that can be used in quantum technologies, and many impurities can make a diamond useful as a light probe in biological imaging.

The new class of technological applications for diamond revolve around the impurities they are able to host. Quantum technologies refer to technologies which are underpinned by the laws of quantum physics, and may give rise to ultra-powerful computers, or un-hackable communications. In order to realise these in a practical sense, one must be able to make, measure and control single quantum `bits´ or so-called qubits. Well beyond the scope of this talk, suffice it to say that impurities in diamond are a very promising avenue for quantum technologies and groups in Australia and around the world are pursuing this topic. The quest to realise practical quantum technologies is providing ample fuel for fundamental studies and is certainly pushing the limits of our capabilities of understanding diamond.

A second big area in which diamond is making waves is in biological science. For a long time it has been a critical part of scientific discovery that we can `see´ small objects. This has pushed development of a range of microscopy techniques, each having a different means for visualising things on a micro or nano scale. Conventional optical microscopy simply channels light through a series of lenses in order to magnify an object. This is effective, widely used and perfectly adequate for many applications, however sometimes the objects are not accessible using simple microscopy, or more accurately, too small, and remain effectively invisible.

Sometimes, particularly in biological sciences, we need to see how things are moving into and out of cells or tissues. One way to see an otherwise invisible object is to use fluorescent probes. These are small particles that fluoresce brightly, attached to an object of interest. The bright fluorescence is the `beacon´ which provides the signal to locate the position of the invisible object. For example, a protein molecule by itself is essentially invisible, but by attaching bright probes like nano-diamonds, it is possible to see where they are and where they are travelling to. Existing techniques employ other types of `fluorescent probes´ in biomedical imaging, but they can often extinguish or turn dark and may be toxic in a live body. And nano-diamonds may genuinely represent the next generation in biomedical imaging.

This is just a cursory look at some of the fascinating new possibilities in store for diamond. And studying the processing, properties and applications for nano-diamonds is one of the things we do at Macquarie University and these are very exciting times indeed. Coupled with good funding and good people, the sky is the limit.

Robyn Williams: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Sorry, I couldn´t resist. A good way to sequester carbon, perhaps. 

James Rabau is an Associate Professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, as you heard, where he´s a Future Fellow. He came here via Canada and Scotland.

Next week, as we contemplate what seems the near impossibility of being governed effectively, Professor Jim Falk from Melbourne University surveys ways in which our polity could be run in the 21st century, instead of resembling a weak episode of The Biggest Loser. 

I´m Robyn Williams.]]></itunes:summary>
      <itunes:duration>12:07</itunes:duration>
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      <itunes:keywords><![CDATA[environment,mining,science and technology,geology,engineering,computers and technology]]></itunes:keywords>
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      <title><![CDATA[2010-07-11 Seabirds on the Southern Ocean ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[Author and keen birdwatcher Sue Taylor from Melbourne tells us of her quest to sight albatrosses in Australian waters. Travelling south from Hobart into the Southern Ocean aboard a small yacht she endured rough seas and sea sickness.]]></description>
      <link>http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/07/orr_20100711.mp3</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[Author and keen birdwatcher Sue Taylor from Melbourne tells us of her quest to sight albatrosses in Australian waters. Travelling south from Hobart into the Southern Ocean aboard a small yacht she endured rough seas and sea sickness.
 TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Last weekend my Sunday was made by two visitors: elegant, somehow very serene and easygoing, and exquisitely beautiful. They strayed for brunch, then after 20 minutes, disappeared.

I´m talking about a pair of King Parrots. Deep green and pillar-box red, quite plump actually, and delightful to watch, on the deck.

Yes, I do my birdwatching in comfort, and take pleasure in fairly common species.

Sue Taylor, on the other hand, is a specialist, and puts herself right on the line in her quest for sightings, or on the boat, in this case. Very brave. 

Sue.

Sue Taylor: The official Australian bird list includes nine species of albatross. This is a very conservative assessment. Most ornithologists agree that there are more than nine different albatrosses found in Australian waters, perhaps as many as fifteen. Of course twitchers (like me) want species to be split, so they can accumulate more ticks. However, while the official list includes just nine species, that is all honest twitchers can count. And, being honest, let me assure you that seeing all nine species is quite hard enough. Most people find that the first seven are relatively easy. Then they are left for years wondering how they´ll ever tick the last two -- for most twitchers these are the light-mantled sooty albatross and the grey-headed albatross. Both these albatrosses breed on various sub-Antarctic islands and do not normally venture close to the Australian mainland. To make things even harder, usually only immature grey-headed albatross are seen in Australian waters, and these are easily mistaken for immature black-browed albatross. To see either light-mantled sooty or grey-headed albatrosses, twitchers usually have to embark on somewhat daunting sea journeys.

Last winter I did just that. I joined nine other brave souls aboard a 20-metre yacht called Blizzard to travel south from Hobart into the Southern Ocean. We were away three rough days and three sleepless nights, and it was probably the most uncomfortable three days of my life.

In my attempt to see all of the 93 seabirds on the Australian list, I´ve been in turbulent seas before. We had a difficult crossing from Geraldton to the Abrolhos, where I ticked the lesser noddy.

I´ve been out on the Southern Ocean before in winter, several times from Eaglehawk Neck. They were just day trips. On one notable occasion (the day I saw my first grey petrel) everyone on board was seasick except me. Even the crew were seasick. Once, many years ago, when pelagics used to go out from Portland, in Victoria, one woman was so sick she lay on the deck all day and we stepped over her. She was shaken back to life when we returned to shore and the organiser wanted her money. On my very first pelagic out from Eden, one woman was so ill she vowed she´d never get onto a small boat again, and as far as I know, she hasn´t.

Some unfortunate people are seasick in very moderate conditions. The summer before last I did a pelagic out of Southport on the Gold Coast in search of Tahiti petrels. It was a very successful day. We saw lots of Tahiti petrels. The sea was very calm, yet two people were seasick and two others managed to fall over. Not overboard, just onto the deck of the moving boat. But no-one damaged their binoculars or their cameras, so that´s all right.

I have only ever been on an overnight pelagic bird-watching trip once before. I went out from Ulladulla, in New South Wales in April 2008, hoping to see Gould´s petrel. We saw dozens. I saw my first one before breakfast on the first day, and identified it. We also saw a black petrel, a kermadec petrel and some white-bellied storm-petrels -- all lifers for me. I also met some wonderful people. It was a very successful trip.

It was a big steel ship, the MV Banks, 31 metres long. A former Navy survey vessel, it accommodated 15 birders as well as the captain, his crew, our tour leader and his wife. There was plenty of room to move about comfortably and adequate handrails to cling to as you did. Not so on the little yacht, Blizzard.

Until my recent trip on Blizzard, I´ve always been the one person on the boat who´s never succumbed to seasickness. However, this trip in search of light-mantled sooties and grey-headed albatross -- three days and three nights on the Southern Ocean in winter, got the better of me. For the first time in my life, I was miserably, embarrassingly, publicly seasick. In my defence I should say that the seas were very rough. And let me assure you, it was worth it. Sadly, I dipped on grey-headed albatross. But I had excellent views of light-mantled sooties and they are truly beautiful birds, well worth all the angst and the discomfort.

I saw other birds too, that were new for me: three species of prion and a lovely blue petrel.

Blizzard had been out the week before with another group of seabirders. The weather was kind, the sea was calm; the yacht travelled 190 nautical miles south of Hobart. They had gone to a sea mount (literally a mountain under the sea) where different depths, currents and water temperatures mean different marine life and different seabirds.

That lucky group of birders reported seeing thousands of prions: Antarctic and broad-billed and probably others. They also saw immature grey-headed albatross, lucky people. Word of their success spread and we set off with great expectations.

Apart from the captain and crew, we had ten birders on board. I was the only female birder and also the least competent, although I was not the youngest by a long way. Amongst our number we had Australia´s two top birders: Mike Carter and Rohan Clarke -- always reassuring to have experts on hand.

In contrast with the week before, when we were about to set out, the weather was not kind. We had been scheduled to leave at 5pm on Saturday. We sat around in Hobart for 48 hours, waiting for the wind to abate, getting more and more frustrated, more anxious that we´d run out of time, that we wouldn´t get far enough out to sea, that we wouldn´t see all the birds that the previous week´s lucky group had been treated to. The yacht had been chartered until 5pm on Thursday. If we were to get anywhere near where the others had had their spectacular sightings of prions, we had to leave.

The Captain listened to the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts and refused to go out to sea. He was not a birder: he did not understand the allure of those prions. He was adamant. He was not taking a small yacht out to the ocean in 30 knot winds. He would sail down the coast to Southport where we would shelter overnight and be ready for an early start tomorrow morning. Nothing anyone could say would persuade him otherwise.

And so it was. Tuesday morning saw us setting out to sea, at last. We all wore safety harnesses, which the captain said were not on properly unless they were uncomfortable. We could attach the harness to various points on the boat, or on to lifelines which ran down each side of the yacht, enabling us to walk around on deck. The harnesses were heavy and uncomfortable. The captain need have no fear of that. The clips were stiff and difficult to operate, even when your fingers were not cold and wet. And when the harnesses became wet, they were even heavier and more uncomfortable. 

Normally on pelagics, seabirds are attracted by burleigh, which is any sort of meat or fish enhanced with the smelliest possible fish oil. This does wonders for anyone on board who´s feeling a little queasy. Seabirds can smell it from vast distances and obediently come and land on the water right beside the boat, and pose for all the photographers present. This is what happened on the Blizzard the week before I was on it. I know. I´ve seen the photos.

No bird landed beside the Blizzard on the three days I was on the yacht. It was too rough.

So Tuesday was wet and uncomfortable and bird-less. I was seasick because my safety harness meant I couldn´t get at my Travalcalm in my jacket pocket. But far worse than any distress or embarrassment that this might have caused, was the knowledge that the weather was still a bit rough, meaning we were making very slow progress and we may not make it to the sea mount. As time progressed and the little yacht was buffeted by wind and waves, we each silently dreaded having to face the fact that time had run out; we´d have to turn back and we´d barely seen a bird.

A new dawn often brings renewed hope. On Wednesday morning as I staggered from my heaving bunk, someone on deck yelled `Light-mantled sooty´.

It is not possible to run on a pitching yacht, but I travelled as fast as my tottering legs allowed and, breaking all the captain´s rules, reached the cockpit without donning my safety harness. I didn´t need binoculars (which is just as well, because while others managed, I found it tantamount to impossible to get binoculars to my eyes, and to focus with one hand, while hanging on with the other, and the object I´m trying to focus on is flying in and out of sight as waves surge and the boat lurches). In any case, I didn´t need binoculars. That magnificent light sooty albatross flew right over my head. For me the trip had been worthwhile. Others, I knew, wanted the spectacle of thousands of prions. But I was sated with my light-mantled sooty.

No-one told me to go below and put on my safety harness, so I didn´t. A little later, I was standing beside our tour leader when he saw a fiordland penguin in the water. I glimpsed a white blob swimming just below the surface and I fancy it had a yellow crest. No twitcher could possibly count such a blur. Our tour leader celebrated loudly. He´d been the only one to see the penguin. We all congratulated him, those of us who´d previously seen fiordland penguins even meant it.

Then someone yelled `Prion´. Prions are difficult birds to identify. You know that they´re prions because they´re small, blue-grey birds with a dark `M´ on their backs, but precisely which sort of prion is hard to say. Even if they weren´t flying fast and we weren´t on a moving boat, they´d still be difficult to identify. We had two great advantages: we had a first-rank photographer and we had Australia´s two top birders with us. We watched a bird. It was photographed and identified. This is how I ticked Antarctic and Salvin´s prions.

We saw a few prions. Nothing like the thousands that had been reported further out to sea. We travelled 120 nautical miles south, south-east of Hobart. I have no doubt that if we could have gone further, we would have seen greater numbers of birds.

Then someone called out, `Broad-billed prion!´ and everyone concentrated hard. These birds are aptly named. They are the biggest prion and they do have visibly very broad bills. That is, if you can see the bill on the bird whizzing past in the distance. Our bird was considerate and we all managed to see its bill.

That broad-billed prion was Mike Carter´s 811th Australian bird. We all congratulated him heartily, knowing that such a feat was well beyond most of us.

I was sorry I didn´t see grey-headed albatrosses. But, for me, the light-mantled sooty albatross made the trip (and all its indignities) worthwhile. The broad-billed prion might be rarer. This just might have been the only opportunity I´ll ever have of confidently saying that I´ve seen Antarctic and Salvin´s prions, but for me, the light-mantled sooty albatross won the day. Such a beautiful bird.

Robyn Williams: Just like my King Parrots.

But would you go to such lengths to spot a new species? And what about scoring 811? Sue Taylor setting the standards (she´s now well over 600 -- the species I mean) and she lives in Melbourne.

Next week, how to make a diamond: Professor James Rabeau from Macquarie University with some tips. I´m Robyn Williams.]]></itunes:summary>
      <itunes:duration>13:19</itunes:duration>
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      <title><![CDATA[2010-07-04 Electric junk ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[Dr Trevor McAllister, a retired chemist from Melbourne, discusses our dependence on electricity.]]></description>
      <link>http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/07/orr_20100704.mp3</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[Dr Trevor McAllister, a retired chemist from Melbourne, discusses our dependence on electricity.
 TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: So, July 4th, American Independence Day and a day marking the death of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two presidents who´d signed the Declaration.

And so we´ll have to give a nod to America in today´s talk from Trevor McAllister about light, and, of course, Thomas Edison is part of the story. But it´s also one about gadgets, innovation and, inevitably, a sustainable future in America and Australia.

Trevor McAllister.

Trevor McAllister: During Earth Hour on March 28th in Melbourne we had environmentalists dining and reading by candlelight while not far away the Grand Prix circuit was bathed in floodlight, a dramatic example of the huge cultural gap between those who would like to reduce their greenhouse emissions from electricity and those who don´t care, and intend to continue their profligate ways.

Our dependence on electricity began with the incandescent light bulb. These will soon be unavailable in Australia, but it may be some time before we see a decrease in household power consumption. Lighting contributes only about 10% of total household electricity demand. Much more comes from appliances which clutter the average Australian home -- refrigerators, microwaves, dishwashers, washing machines, plasma televisions, computers, air conditioners.

The first electric lights were lamps, dazzling bright electric discharges of several hundred candle power, struck, between carbon electrodes fed by batteries. The arc lamp was invented by Humphry Davy in 1807, but was too bright for households and was only used to light public places once a reliable electric generator had been developed by Gramme in Paris in 1871. In Melbourne, the most notable floodlit event was a footy game at the MCG on 6th August, 1879 between Collingwood Artillery and East Melbourne. In that year, the incandescent lamp was invented separately by Swan and Edison, and gave a much less bright light of about 16 candle power, suitable for domestic use.

In 1882, the first incandescent lamps in Australia were brought to Sydney from New York by HH Kingsbury, who had been following the progress of Edison´s new power station at Pearl Street in Manhattan. The first public building in Australia to be lit by the new lamps was the Martin Place GPO in May.

Marvellous Melbourne was loathe to be outdone by Sydney, so in June the Australian Electric Light Company and a group of interested businessmen staged a demonstration of electrical technologies in the Athenaeum Hall, on Collins Street, where since 1842 many exhibitions and civic events had been held. The governor of Victoria, Lord Normanby, was invited to open the proceedings on Monday 12th June. Presiding was the future Professor of Engineering at the university, William Charles Kernot, chairman of the Australian Electric Light Company which had been founded by Robert E. Joseph, a Swanston Street jeweller in 1879.

The governor made a brief speech and declared the exhibition open. The switches were closed to the electric supply carried on overhead wires across Little Collins Street from the Australian Electric Light company´s building in Russell Place. In the Russell Place building, a coal-fired steam engine drove the generator, which produced direct current, DC electricity at 100 volts. Swan incandescent lamps mounted on the gaseliers lit up the gloom of the midwinter afternoon. The show stealers were the completely furnished drawing room from Cullis, Hill and Company, and the billiard room, from Alcock and Company, both lit by the new Swan lamps.

It´s not recorded whether another board member of the Australian Electric Light Company, the Victorian Government Astronomer, Robert Lewis John Ellery, F.R.S., was present to view the new technology which would eventually plague his profession with light pollution. He might have been too engrossed with plans for observing the coming transit of Venus, in December, from his new observatory in the Botanic Gardens.

DC electricity at 100 volts potential is limited by the consequences of Ohm´s law, volts equals current times resistance. The longer the cable, the greater the resistance, so the current available from the generator dropped off rapidly with distance, and beyond a city block the light available was too feeble. Joseph´s company proceeded in September to light the nearby Opera House, the future Tivoli Theatre in Bourke Street with 120 Swan lamps, again powered from the company generator in Russell Place. But the extension of electric lighting to other city buildings, such as Parliament House and the Public Library, required the installation of generators on site.

Across the world in New York at 3pm on September 4th, 1882, Edison started up the supply from his Pearl Street power station in a ceremony held in the offices of Drexel and Morgan at the corner of Wall Street with Broad. Edison´s operation was on a much larger scale than Joseph´s. Six 100 kW dynamos were used, connected to buildings in lower Manhattan by underground cables and supplying the electricity at 110 volts DC to 400 lamps of 16 Candle Power, about 25 Watts, for 85 customers, including The New York Times.

Edison was a champion of DC power, but his partisan efforts in its defence were of no avail.

DC was steadily replaced by alternating current, AC, first demonstrated with success in Italy in 1884, when AC power was transmitted over a 40 kilometre cable to an exhibition in Turin. With the invention of the transformer, AC power could be generated at high voltage and transmitted over long distances with little current loss, to be transformed to lower voltage and higher current nearer to the user. Current was what was required to light the incandescent lamps, and to drive the increasingly useful electric motors. Smaller electric power companies in Melbourne merged and eventually the city council opened its own power station in Spencer Street, in August 1894.

Electric motors for industry and the new electric trams were the boom market for electric power before the 1914/18 war, a demand actively sought by the power companies, in order to fully utilise the plant installed to provide lighting, which was little used during the daytime. The new State Electricity Commission of Victoria, formed in 1919 to generate electricity from the brown coal of Gippsland and make Victoria independent of New South Wales black coal, installed plant to supply this motive power during the 1920s, but with the slump in industrial use due to the Great Depression in 1929, spare capacity became available and the marketing challenge was to create the demand to employ the idle plant.

A revealing SECV pamphlet, published in 1931, set out the case for stimulating electricity demand by promoting the sale of domestic electrical appliances. It estimated that the average per capita domestic electricity use in Victoria was 400 kilowatt hours yearly, whereas in Niagara Falls in Canada, amply supplied by hydro electricity, the average was 3000 kwH.

In 1931, the estimated upper limit for an all-electrical house, equipped with water heater, electric cooker, washing machine, refrigerator and vacuum cleaner was 7000 kwH. This would represent a steady demand of 1 kW all year. Last year my household used about 4k,500 kwH, to supply about 25 compact fluorescent lamps, one electric oven, one microwave, one blender, one coffee maker, one washing machines, one dishwasher, one television set and recorder, one radio and CD player, two computers, one vacuum cleaner, one iron, one air conditioner, and two ceiling fans, not all of which were operating at once.

Domestic appliances using electric motors were invented in the early 20th century: electric fans in 1902, washing machines in 1907, vacuum cleaners in 1908, refrigerators in 1912. All of these had been preceded by the invention of electric irons and ovens in the 1880s, in the earliest days of public electricity supply. The partial replacement of human labour with machine-driven cleaning and washing, and the convenience of the electric iron, plus the benefits of refrigerated food, contained the seeds of a social revolution, the full effects of which were not felt until the post-1945 economic boom. Then, white goods showrooms multiplied and fortunes were made. Household electricity demand increased apace, interrupted only occasionally by a power cut or a blown fuse.

Vaclav Smil records in his 2003 book Energy at the Crossroads that American households in 2000 had 30 kW of electricity capacity, in comparison with 4KW in 1950 and about half a kW in 1900. The 1900 house would have had only a few electric lamps of low wattage, the 1950, 12 lamps, a refrigerator, electric oven, washing machines, TV and radio. Most modern households probably could not give an accurate account of all their electrical appliances. Smil estimates that there would be at least 80 electric outlets in the modern mansion of average 400 sq metres area!

Quite apart from the enormous task of overcoming vested interests in the energy market, the enormous adjustment in domestic behaviour that will be required in developing countries, is outlined in a paper by Daniel Spreng, published in the journal Energy Policy in 2005. Spreng coins the concept of `Energy Equity´, which is presumably the desired goal of contraction and convergence.

At present, he reckons that the average energy use per capita in the world is about 2 kW, that is of all energy sources, electric, oil, gas, coal, wood, even dung fuel. If we are to restrain climate change we need to stabilise energy use as close to this value as possible, mostly by changes in behaviour in the developed world, where the average energy use per capita is well above 2kW, being about 30 kW in the USA and 18 kW in Australia. Spreng cites the estimate from India of a half kW average per capita energy use which gives two cooked meals a day, light from a kerosene lamp, an d the indirect energy to produce the food and clothing and shelter consumed 2kW per capita will certainly take us back to the 1930s when the SEC pamphlet was written, alleviated perhaps by the gains in efficiency of energy use since then.

There are some who believe that we can get out of jail free by offsetting our emissions from power consumption.

Offsetting greenhouse emissions seems to me to be similar in principle to the sale of indulgences by the church in Medieval Europe -- you pay your money, and you go on sinning. The process encourages a feelgood factor, but there is no guarantee that the carbon credits claimed by the offsetting agencies will be realised, whether the free CFLs will be installed, or the promised trees planted and nurtured to maturity.

It´s hard to imagine the necessary change to a low carbon economy occurring without considerable pain and restraint. Attempts to compensate for that pain will only delay the inevitable moment when most of those appliances will have to be disconnected.

So, go turn them off ... now!

Robyn Williams: But not your radio, which needs very little juice of course. That was Dr Trevor McAllister, who´s a chemist and was once with CSIRO.

Next week, Sue Taylor gets on a small boat, heads south through very rough seas, and tries to spot an albatross or three.

I´m Robyn Williams.]]></itunes:summary>
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