Tag: SB001

The age of the driverless taxi has arrived – at least in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. Self-driving car company Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced its autonomous vehicles are now available to the general public.

During a typical day, we touch the surfaces of many different objects, often without noticing: money, phones, door handles, elevator buttons, cups, desks, keyboards, petrol pumps and shopping trolleys.

Kevin Rudd’s petition to parliament for a royal commission into the dominance of the Murdoch media in Australia is entitled to be seen as more than an embittered ex-politician’s desire for revenge.

Scott Morrison has thrown his weight behind the embattled Gladys Berejiklian, ahead of Wednesday’s evidence to the Independent Commission Against Corruption from disgraced former MP Daryl Maguire.

While recessions are never a good thing, the “V-shaped” recovery is deemed the best-case scenario. In a recession with a V shape, the decline is rapid, but so is the recovery.

Companies in sectors such as personal protective equipment manufacturing, home delivery, online entertainment, IT, consultancy services, banks and social media have certainly made excess profits compared to the world prior to COVID-19.

In nine of these countries, including the US, UK, Australia, South Korea and Germany, negative views of China have reached their highest level since Pew began polling in these countries more than a decade ago.

As long as there is a sufficient supply of people still susceptible to the disease for each infected person to pass it on to, it will continue to spread.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to two Americans, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, for their work in analysing auctions and how to make them more efficient.

The 26th Conference of the Parties — better known as COP26 — is the United Nations climate change conference that was scheduled to be held in Glasgow, UK, during the first two weeks of November 2020.

Introduced in 2009, the responsible lending obligations made it illegal to offer credit that was unsuitable for a consumer based on their needs and capacity to make payments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in rapid changes to the way Australians access health care. We’re now using telehealth more than ever.

The arts industry is among the most devastated by the pandemic. Artists and arts workers often rely on casual, project-based or fixed-term contracts, and COVID-19 restrictions have left many with little or no income. This has affected the mental health of many working in the arts.

Scientific analysis of COVID-19 is dominated by medical and pharmaceutical questions of vaccines and risk minimisation. But meanwhile, social scientists must track the emerging social orders where new conventions and senses of self and kinship are forming.

Arts minister Paul Fletcher argues “the old approach of treating film and television differently no longer makes sense” and “simplifying regulations” will encourage creators to develop higher production value content for international streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Platforms are driven by algorithms, which rank and recommend content for us based on our data.

While New Zealand is supporting global efforts to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine, pressing for improved global preparedness for the next pandemic must be a priority.

Melburnians are addicted to the Victorian health department’s daily tweet of the state’s new COVID-19 cases. This figure contributes to the all-important rolling 14-day average, which alongside the number of mystery cases, tells us whether we’re on target for the next phase of reopening.

There are more and more programmes explicitly aimed at helping people with experiences of distress by providing structured contact with nature.

Typically, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assesses chemicals for potential harm, it examines one substance at a time. That approach isn’t working for PFAS, given the sheer number of them and the fact that manufacturers commonly replace toxic substances with “regrettable substitutes” – similar, lesser-known chemicals that also threaten ...

Childcare was the centrepiece of last night’s budget reply speech from Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese.

It is a critical time for public interest journalism. Trust in the mainstream media is a major problem as fake news spreads unabated on social networks.

The sale and promotion of derivatives of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to amateur investors is being banned in the UK by the financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

By awarding the 2020 Nobel peace prize to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), the Nobel committee said that it wanted to “turn the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger”.

Details are still emerging about the men arrested on federal and state charges related to an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Despite widespread predictions the Labor Party would win the May 2019 federal election, the Coalition had a “miracle” victory, thanks – in part – to Queensland.

Housing inequalities have been laid bare by COVID-19, further exposing a housing crisis in England that is already severe. Unless some genuine steps are taken, it will only get worse for millions living in inadequate housing. The numbers are staggering – more than 8 million people are living in unsuitable ...

After Hurricane Harvey, the Houston sports market was displaced, and teams had to play extended road games because it was not feasible to host games or have fans safely travel to the stadiums.

One of the deeper issues with the government restrictions, which has less often been discussed, is a moral one. It concerns the level of control we grant to the government over our individual healthcare decisions.

The proportion of Earth’s surface designated as “protected” has expanded over the past decade. But new findings show these areas have failed to improve the state of the environment, casting doubt on government commitments to biodiversity conservation.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has promised an ambitious $20 billion plan to modernise Australia’s electricity grid and extra spending of $6.2 billion over four years for more affordable child care in a budget reply that emphasises the role of government.

Offshore wind energy is cheaper than gas power stations or nuclear power, so economically this is a policy no-brainer.

Two decades ago, in 2001, Estonia created an anti-silo data management system called X-Road through which public and private organisations can share data securely while maintaining data privacy through cryptography.

Researchers have been able to manipulate large chunks of genetic code for almost 50 years. But it is only within the past decade that they have been able to do it with exquisite precision – adding, deleting and substituting single units of the genetic code just as an editor can ...

The debate was something of a back-to-the-future event with both candidates drawing on a playbook made famous in the 1988 campaign.

China’s President Xi Jinping surprised the global community recently by committing his country to net-zero emissions by 2060.

In many ways, a vice president’s most important constitutional duty is simply to stay alive. Beyond breaking ties in the US Senate, the vice president essentially has no real constitutional duties beyond replacing a deceased or incapacitated president.

When it comes to action on climate change, Tuesday’s federal budget delivered by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was a real – though not unexpected – disappointment which favoured polluting technologies over a clean energy future.

There are issues, such as global warming, where there is scientific consensus. But consensuses take decades, and COVID-19 is a new disease. Uncontrolled experiments in lockdown are still ongoing, and the long-term costs and benefits are not yet known.

The temporary loss of data relating to 16,000 positive cases of COVID-19 has raised serious concerns about the operation of the UK’s test and trace system. The NHS body responsible, Public Health England, blamed a technical glitch and said cases were added to the system immediately after the problem was ...

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in nature. They warp space and time in extreme ways and contain a mathematical impossibility, a singularity – an infinitely hot and dense object within.

A larger population does make it harder to treat the environment in the right way. But there’s no quick fix, as even the most conservative projections suggest a global population of over 8 billion by 2050.

The Australian federal budget, unveiled on Tuesday, bases several assumptions on Australians having access to a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021.

Most of the plastic dumped into the ocean likely ends up on the coasts, not floating around the ocean’s surface or on the seafloor. In fact, three-quarters of the rubbish found along Australia’s coastlines is plastics.

The COVID-19 recession is the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression. GDP fell 6.3% in the year to June, the worst annual result since 1929.

History tells us the month of October in a US presidential election year has a tendency to produce an unforeseen moment that may, or may not, have an impact on the election itself.

La Niña is a phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a pattern of ocean and atmospheric circulations over the Pacific Ocean.

In his brilliant new book Who Enters Politics and Why?, academic James Weinberg provides possibly the most sophisticated analysis of why some people decide to stand for office and others don’t. His research discovers that when it comes to their basic human values, politicians really are “different”.

Basic models for COVID-19 suggest herd immunity is achieved when 60% of people are immune. This is because in a population where everyone is susceptible to the coronavirus, an infected person is estimated to infect on average an additional 2.5 people.

The Brussels conference was in a sense the equivalent of the better known Bretton Woods conference of 1944, which agreed on the framework for the global economic order following World War II.