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PM foreshadows ‘ambitious’ cuts to fund Gonski reforms

Date February 22, 2013 – 4:30PM 44 reading now

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Dan Harrison

Health and Indigenous Affairs Correspondent

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Garrett: Gonski change ‘silly’

Education Minister Peter Garrett savages Green plans to change the government’s Gonski school reforms.
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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has warned her government will make ”ambitious” cuts to find money for a new school funding model.

Addressing the Australian Education Union conference in Melbourne, Ms Gillard promised her audience she would deliver her national plan for school improvement.

”We will get this thing done,” she said.

But she warned she would have to make significant savings to fund her education reforms – based on the recommendations of a panel led by businessman David Gonski – as well as the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

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”Since NDIS and Gonski are huge reforms, our savings will be correspondingly ambitious,” Ms Gillard said.

”They won’t be a nip and tuck. They will be a statement of where our priorities lie. That in times of financial stringency, when dollars are scarce, we save from where it is needed least and invest where it is needed most. Without fear, without favour.”

Ms Gillard insisted the education reforms – which have been costed at about $6.5 billion a year – were affordable.

”Our nation spends twice that amount each year on tobacco. We spend twice that amount again on alcohol,” she said.

”We can’t afford not to reform our schools.”

She said state and territory leaders would have to pay their share of the cost of the changes.

”The big test will come at COAG in April,” she said. ”I hope the Premiers will rise to the challenge. Australia’s children are counting on them.”

Earlier School Education Minister Peter Garrett dismissed a threat by the Greens to amend the federal government’s school funding reforms as ”silly”, saying it risked hurting students.

Just days after announcing that the formal alliance with Labor, forged in 2010, is over, Greens leader Christine Milne announced on Friday plans to amend the $6 billion Gonski enabling bill in the House of Representatives to ensure any additional Commonwealth funding goes to the poorest schools first.

Senator Milne used her speech to the same conference in Melbourne to build pressure on the government to fix the mining tax, which raised only $126 million in its first six months. It was forecast to raise $2 billion in its first 12 months.

”With the government failing to fix the mining tax we are worried that there will not be enough money to fund the full implementation of Gonski,” she said.

”If this is the case then the additional funds available must be prioritised to where they are needed and that means they must flow to our most disadvantaged public schools.”

Senator Milne said the Greens had no intention of putting the Gonski reforms at risk, and would vote for them even if their amendment was not supported.

Speaking to Fairfax Media on Friday, Mr Garrett said the Greens bid to have changes made to the mining tax by threatening other measures such as the Gonski education funding model is ”futile”.

Mr Garrett said the Greens were seeking to delay legislation that would provide additional resources to schools.

”This is a particularly pointless gesture on the part of the Greens and seems to miss the point completely that the Gonski reforms and a new national plan for school improvement will see additional resources go to those schools that have got great student need,” he said.

”We don’t want any unnecessary delays and I’m surprised by this rather silly gesture from the Greens.”

Ms Gillard used her speech at the union conference to call on teachers to work for the re-election of her government, predicting ”Mr Abbott’s Liberals will always stand in the way of this reform”.

”The only way this major change can be delivered for this nation is by this Labor government this year and by this Labor government in the years beyond. So you as teachers and unionists need to be part of the fight.”

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NBN boss calls for study into broadband future

By Justine Parker and Naomi Woodley, ABCUpdated February 22, 2013, 9:51 pm

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The head of the National Broadband Network (NBN) wants an industry study to determine the best way to build the high-speed internet project.

Construction has been underway on the NBN for more than two years but there is still debate over which technology should be used.

The NBN Co is using a technology called ‘fibre to the premises’, which goes all the way to a home, to build most of the network.

But the Coalition wants to use ‘fibre to the node’. It says this method is faster and cheaper, but it will come with slower speeds.

NBN boss Mike Quigley is trying to bring an end to the debate in the lead up to the federal election.

He says he supports a proposed study by the Communications Alliance into the pros and cons of a range of technologies to see which is best.

“It gives them an opportunity to have a voice and give their opinion on what is the right way forward for the NBN,” he told PM.

“There is a lot of debate at the moment about what the right way forward is. Who’s better placed than the industry itself to have a view?”

But he says his support for the study does not mean he does not fully support the NBN.

“Having an open debate can only be a good thing for the country,” he said.

‘Colossal failure’

Opposition communication spokesman Malcolm Turnbull says the study should have been completed before the Government embarked on the NBN project.

“Mike Quigley’s statement today is a colossal admission of failure,” he told PM.

“It is admitting that the Government has made a hash of this … that there needs to be an examination of the different options and … that should have been done four years ago.”

“The question should have been asked: ‘we want everyone in Australia to have very fast broadband, what are the options to do so, let’s rank them in terms of time of deployment, cost of deployment, service delivery outcomes’.

“That’s what we’ve been begging the Government to do for four years, but they’ve embarked on this, they’ve arrogantly dismissed every request for this and now Mike Quigley himself is saying he’d like to see it done.”

Mr Turnbull says if the Coalition wins government, it will examine all aspects of the NBN and decide whether the rollout should continue.

“We will ensure there is produced a comprehensive analysis, totally transparent analysis, of what it will take in terms of dollars and time to complete the network on the plan of the current Government,” he said.

“We will then produce a similar analysis which shows the savings in dollars and time by burying it, by making changes, along the lines of the kind that we’ve proposed, using much more fibre to the node, which is consistent with the experience and practice in most other developed markets.

“We’ll also ensure there is done a cost benefit analysis by the Productivity Commission, and we will also conduct a very rigorous inquiry into the whole process relating to the NBN.

“I think Australians need to be told the truth about this project, they need to be told how it could possible have been embarked upon with so little analysis.”

‘Rational debate’

The board of the Communications Alliance, which represents the telecommunications industry, has not yet decided whether it will go ahead with the study.

But its chief executive, John Stanton, says it is the right time to look at the technologies on offer.

“I guess the point is we’re not at a late stage of the rollout of the NBN, we’re in the very early stages of a nine year or more rollout,” he said.

“The nexus of the idea here is that technologies develop, things are learnt as you start to roll out a network like this, and it is logical and inevitable that over a multi-year rollout, there will be evolution and improvement of the way that the network is deployed.

“So it could make sense to have industry, which after all designed the original reference architecture for the NBN, continue to look at what could make sense.”

Mr Stanton says the debate over high-speed internet needs to be taken out of political hands.

“We need a rational, inclusive debate that sits above politics and simply looks at what might be sensible options in the national interest,” he said.

Major telco Optus does not agree that the study by the alliance would be effective.

It has issued a statement saying it would be better for individual companies to contribute to the debate on various broadband technologies rather than a Communications Alliance review.
The ABC asked Telstra for a response to Mr Quigley’s plan for a study, but it did not reply.

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Earthquakes in Small Laboratory Samples

Feb. 21, 2013 — Mechanical failure of materials is a complex phenomenon underlying many accidents and natural disasters ranging from the fracture of small devices to earthquakes. Despite the vast separation of spatial, temporal, energy, and strain-rate scales, and the differences in geometry, it has been proposed that laboratory experiments on brittle fracture in heterogeneous materials can be a model for earthquake occurrence.

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A study led by researchers from the University of Barcelona, and published on the journal Physical Review Letters, has carried out experiments with a material loaded under compression that reproduces the four main statistical laws of seismicity: the Gutenberg-Ritcher law, the Omori’s law, the distribution of waiting times between consecutive events and the productivity law.

The researcher Eduard Vives, from the Faculty of Physics of the UB, led the research in which collaborated several researchers from the Faculty, Xavier Illa, Antoni Planes and Jordi Baró (the main author), as well as Álvaro Corral, from the Centre for Mathematical Research (CERCA — Government of Catalonia), and researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Viena and the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research of San Luis Potosi (Mexico).

The material, analyzed by means of a device developed by the Materials Technological Unit of the Scientific and Technological Centers of the UB, is a porous glass (40 % porosity), designed for industrial applications, and named Vycor®. The sample, about 5mm, was introduced between two plates and subjected to uniaxial compression that increases linearly until the sample fragments into pieces. Acoustic sensors were place on the compression plates. They will function as seismographs which measure ultrasonic acoustic waves and detect sample’s fractures.

“The experiment carried out simulates the emergence of a new fault,” explains the UB researcher Eduard Vives. “By this means — he continues — , we observed time distribution, which at the laboratory corresponds to some hours and in earthquakes to thousands of years.” On the contrary, seismology study the space statistical changes considering the data obtained from high seismic activity areas, as California, and low activity ones. According to the researcher, “this symmetry in space and time reveals that it is probable that earthquakes behavior corresponds to any kind of self-organized criticality — as some theories state — , and if it could be proved, it would be a great advance to apply existent theories.

Several works have previously tried to establish comparisons between earthquakes and laboratory fracture of materials, mainly using rocks, but results were not completely reliable, as they do not reproduce all the properties of earthquakes. “This material allows to carried out experiments that control several parameters, such as or magnitude or speed,” concludes Vives.

Four laws of statistical seismology

The results of the experiments performed with this material fulfill the four fundamental laws of statistical seismology. On the one hand, the energy detected by acoustic emissions varies as the Gutenberg-Ritcher law affirms; this law states that the number of earthquakes as a function of their radiated energy decreases as a power law.

To get a general idea of the different scales, it is important to remember that a big earthquake (magnitude 8) equals 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, whereas the maximum energy measured in the laboratory equals the fission energy of one uranium atom. This different magnitude corresponds, approximately, to a factor of 1027.

Another experiment made with this material studied the number of aftershocks produced after a big fracture and it has been observed that it decays with time, so the tendency to follow Omori’s law is clear. “Laboratory maximum rate of aftershocks with time corresponds to some hours, whereas in earthquakes it last more than one hundred years,” remarks the UB researcher.

The third law of statistical seismology is the one related to waiting times, which relates the time between two consecutive earthquakes. In this case, laboratory results obtained were compared to the ones got from the earthquakes happened in Southern California, and “although different scales, similarity is higher,” affirms Vives. Finally, the productivity law was also proved, which relates the rate of aftershocks triggered by a mainshock to its magnitude: larger-magnitude earthquakes produce on average more aftershocks.

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Particle Physics Research Sheds New Light On Possible ‘Fifth Force of Nature’

Feb. 21, 2013 — In a breakthrough for the field of particle physics, Professor of Physics Larry Hunter and colleagues at Amherst College and The University of Texas at Austin have established new limits on what scientists call “long-range spin-spin interactions” between atomic particles. These interactions have been proposed by theoretical physicists but have not yet been seen. Their observation would constitute the discovery of a “fifth force of nature” (in addition to the four known fundamental forces: gravity, weak, strong and electromagnetic) and would suggest the existence of new particles, beyond those presently described by the Standard Model of particle physics.

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The new limits were established by considering the interaction between the spins of laboratory fermions (electrons, neutrons and protons) and the spins of the electrons within Earth. To make this study possible, the authors created the first comprehensive map of electron polarization within Earth induced by the planet’s geomagnetic field.

Hunter — along with emeritus Amherst physics professor Joel Gordon; postdoctoral fellow Stephen Peck; student researcher Daniel Ang ’15; and Jung-Fu “Afu” Lin, associate professor of geosciences at UT Austin — co-authored a paper about their work that appears in this week’s issue of the journal Science. The highly interdisciplinary research relies on geophysics, atomic physics, particle physics, mineral physics, solid-state physics and nuclear physics to reach its conclusions.

The paper describes how the team combined a model of Earth’s interior with a precise map of the planet’s geomagnetic field to produce a map of the magnitude and direction of electron spins throughout Earth. Their model was based in part on insights gained from Lin’s studies of spin transitions at the high temperatures and pressures of Earth’s interior.

Every fundamental particle (every electron, neutron and proton, to be specific), explained Hunter, has the intrinsic atomic property of “spin.” Spin can be thought of as a vector — an arrow that points in a particular direction. Like all matter, Earth and its mantle — a thick geological layer sandwiched between the thin outer crust and the central core — are made of atoms. The atoms are themselves made up of electrons, neutrons and protons that have spin. Earth’s magnetic field causes some of the electrons in the mantle’s minerals to become slightly spin-polarized, meaning the directions in which their spins point are no longer completely random, but have some net orientation.

Earlier experiments, including one in Hunter’s laboratory, explored whether their laboratory spins prefer to point in a particular direction. “We know, for example, that a magnetic dipole has a lower energy when it is oriented parallel to the geomagnetic field and it lines up with this particular direction — that is how a compass works,” he explained. “Our experiments removed this magnetic interaction and looked to see if there might be some other interaction that would orient our experimental spins. One interpretation of this ‘other’ interaction is that it could be a long-range interaction between the spins in our apparatus, and the electron spins within the Earth, that have been aligned by the geomagnetic field. This is the long-range spin-spin interaction we are looking for.”

So far, no experiment has been able to detect any such interaction. But in Hunter’s paper, the researchers describe how they were able to infer that such so-called spin-spin forces, if they exist, must be incredibly weak — as much as a million times weaker than the gravitational attraction between the particles. At this level, the experiments can constrain “torsion gravity” — a proposed theoretical extension of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Given the high sensitivity of the technique Hunter and his team used, it may provide a useful path for future experiments that will refine the search for such a fifth force. If a long-range spin-spin force is found, it not only would revolutionize particle physics but might eventually provide geophysicists with a new tool that would allow them to directly study the spin-polarized electrons within Earth.

“If the long-range spin-spin interactions are discovered in future experiments, geoscientists can eventually use such information to reliably understand the geochemistry and geophysics of the planet’s interior,” said Lin.

Possible future discoveries aside, Hunter said that he was pleased that this particular project enabled him to work with Lin. “When I began investigating spin transitions in the mantle, all of the literature led to him,” he explained. “I was thrilled that he was interested in the project and willing to sign on as a collaborator. He has been a good teacher and has had enormous patience with my ignorance about geophysics. It has been a very fruitful collaboration.”

Lin had his own take: “The most rewarding and surprising thing about this project was realizing that particle physics could actually be used to study the deep Earth.”

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Major methane release is almost inevitable
19:00 21 February 2013 by Michael Marshall
For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

We are on the cusp of a tipping point in the climate. If the global climate warms another few tenths of a degree, a large expanse of the Siberian permafrost will start to melt uncontrollably. The result: a significant amount of extra greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, and a threat – ironically – to the infrastructure that carries natural gas from Russia to Europe.

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and climatologists have long warned that this will cause positive feedbacks that will speed up climate change further. The region is home to enormous stores of organic carbon, mostly in the form of permafrost soils and icy clathrates that trap methane – a powerful greenhouse gas that could escape into the atmosphere.

The Siberian permafrost is a particular danger. A large region called the Yedoma could undergo runaway decomposition once it starts to melt, because microbes in the soil would eat the carbon and produce heat, melting more soil and releasing ever more greenhouse gases. In short, the melting of Yedoma is a tipping point: once it starts, there may be no stopping it.

For the first time, we have an indication of when this could start happening. Anton Vaks of the University of Oxford in the UK and colleagues have reconstructed the history of the Siberian permafrost going back 500,000 years. We already know how global temperatures have risen and fallen as ice sheets have advanced and retreated, so Vaks’s team’s record of changing permafrost gives an indication of how sensitive it is to changing temperatures.

Stalagmite record

But there is no direct record of how the permafrost has changed, so Vaks had to find an indirect method. His team visited six caves that run along a south-north line, with the two southernmost ones being under the Gobi desert. Further north, three caves sit beneath a landscape of sporadic patches of permafrost, and the northernmost cave is right at the edge of Siberia’s continuous permafrost zone.

The team focused on the 500,000-year history of stalagmites and similar rock formations in the caves. “Stalagmites only grow when water flows into caves,” Vaks says. “It cannot happen when the soil is frozen.” The team used radiometric dating to determine how old the stalagmites were. By building up a record of when they grew, Vaks could figure out when the ground above the caves was frozen and when it wasn’t.

As expected, in most of the caves, stalagmites formed during every warm interglacial period as the patchy permafrost melted overhead.

But it took a particularly warm interglacial, from 424,000 and 374,000 years ago, for the stalagmites in the northernmost cave to grow – suggesting the continuous permafrost overhead melted just once in the last 500,000 years.

At the time, global temperatures were 1.5 °C warmer than they have been in the last 10,000 years. In other words, today’s permafrost is likely to become vulnerable when we hit 1.5 °C of global warming, says Vaks.

“Up until this point, we didn’t have direct evidence of how this happened in past warming periods,” says Ted Schuur of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

It will be very hard to stop the permafrost degrading as a warming of 1.5 °C is not far off. Between 1850 and 2005, global temperatures rose 0.8 °C, according to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Even if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, temperatures would rise another 0.2 °C over the next 20 years. That would leave a window of 0.5 °C – but in fact our emissions are increasing. What’s more, new fossil fuel power stations commit us to several decades of emissions.

Soggy permafrost

What are the consequences? The greatest concern, says Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter in the UK, is the regional landscape. Buildings and infrastructure are often built on hard permafrost, and will start subsiding. “Ice roads won’t exist any more.”

The increasingly soggy permafrost will also threaten the pipelines that transport Russian gas to Europe. “The maintenance and upkeep of that infrastructure is going to cost a lot more,” says Schuur.

As for the methane that could be released into the atmosphere, Schuur estimates that emissions will be equivalent to between 160 and 290 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That sounds like a lot, but is little compared to the vast amount humans are likely to emit, says Lenton. “The signal’s going to be swamped by fossil fuel [emissions].”

He says the dangers of the permafrost greenhouse gases have been overhyped, particularly as much of the methane will be converted to carbon dioxide by microbes in the soil, leading to a slower warming effect.

Schurr agrees with Lenton that the methane emissions are “not a runaway effect but an additional source that is not accounted in current climate models”.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1228729

Eddie Obeid’s Mt Penny mining licence pulled

Andrew Clennell and Vanda Carson
The Daily Telegraph
February 22, 201312:00AM

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Eddie Obeid at the ICAC inquiry / Pic: Craig Greenhill Source: The Daily Telegraph

PREMIER Barry O’Farrell will block the controversial Mt Penny coal mine, approved on top of Eddie Obeid’s farm, saying the ICAC scandal had “cast a shadow over public administration in NSW”.

He will now judge any development application with a new “public interest test” and take into account allegations of corrupt conduct.

Mr O’Farrell said ICAC had “stained the reputation of all those who have toiled honestly and hard in this parliament over the past 157 years of its history”.

He told parliament he was taking the action after receiving advice from ICAC which did not advise him to cancel the mine licence.

The move looks set to end the hopes of Cascade Coal to build the mine – and came as the barrister for Cascade and its millionaire directors, Bob Stitt QC, told the Federal Court the ICAC Commissioner David Ipp would “no doubt” recommend criminal charges be laid over the awarding of the mine licence.

The ICAC has heard allegations the Mount Penny mine was approved on top of Mr Obeid’s farm and associated land bought by the Obeid family by former close colleague Ian Macdonald.

It was also revealed the Obeid family took a secret stake in Cascade Coal and that along with a stake in another mine, had the potential to allegedly earn the Obeids more than $75 million.

Mr O’Farrell had gone to Commissioner Ipp last week to see whether he should suspend or cancel the controversial mining licences.

Commissioner Ipp told the Premier that: “The commission considers that if the minister for planning … considers the grant of an exploration licence was tainted by misconduct (in consequence of which a great deal of money was made by people which, but for the tainted conduct, they would not have made) then it must follow that the minister can take that into account in deciding whether or not it is in the public interest to grant or refuse a development application.”

Cabinet met before Question Time during which Mr O’Farrell announced Cabinet had decided: “For the purpose of the Mt Penny Coal major project application, to interpret public interest as including, but not limited to, consideration of matters raised in evidence before the ICAC.”

The government would legislate if it had to and consider whether new laws were also needed to protect the public interest in the future granting of mine licences.

Mr Stitt told the Federal Court “there will no doubt be recommendations” for criminal charges made by Commissioner Ipp, who’s due to report in July. He did not identify those he believed would be recommended for prosecution.

Mr Stitt’s clients, who include millionaires Travers Duncan and John McGuigan, have been sued for $13 million in damages by investors Neville Crichton and Denis O’Neil, who bought into Cascade Coal in 2010. They claim they were misled into investing, believing their money would go into Cascade’s coffers but instead it ended up in the hands of the Obeid family.