Adventure Ausrama Blog

Sudden death in young people has a genetic cause - Long QT syndrome. There is a predilection for some young adults to suddenly die. In a way it is similar to cot death: until now the cause was unknown. The "disease" has been identified and is called Long QT syndrome. A third of sudden "unexplained" deaths in people up to their mid thirties die of heart rhythm complications due to the inherited illness. The heart problem is not always evident in autopsies. Parents can also die of the condition in later life. The faulty gene runs in families and is generally passed on to some offspring. A gene testing study of children having symptoms of heart disease is showing that many carry the gene.  Ongoing monitoring of youngsters is saving lives.  However, there is no official program that tests all children.  Some, of course are not diagnosed early and it is these who are at risk of sudden death.  It is heart breaking for a family to lose a child in this way, ◆ Genetic...

Genetics: genetic predisposition makes girls or nboys good at maths. The money poured into education to encourage girls and more boys to study maths and science could be a waste.  Research on twins shows that numerical aptitude is 75 per cent genetic.  Either both twin children are good at dealing with numbers or both are not.  There is also a 50 per cent genetic predilection for writing skills. Despite parents helping their children with homework and the like, it had little influence on academic achievement.  Furthermore, teachers and the schools attended whether private or public had no impact.  Children took to maths or English according to their genetic makeup. It is not clear if teachers are evenly well trained so students are benefiting evenly across the nation.  However, this is clutching at straws.  We all remember the lazy, bad teachers who threw a chapter of a book at use to scribble the lesson away while he/she played around at th...

The day of Frankenstein has arrived. New human beings have been born. The path of human evolution has been changed, and should I say damaged, forever. Even though a person can have three parents it should never have been done. Heaven knows what the long term consequences for the human species will be. Man could die out because natural selection has been bypassed for the first time in human evolution. Now that Britain has passed legislation to allow such births, do-gooders in other countries are calling for its adoption too. Do they have the right to play God? They certainly do not! This affects every person living now and in the future. Consider the legal problems ahead for inheritance. Offspring will ultimately try to claim the wealth of a "host" egg provider when she dies. Your ancestors will be impossible to trace because some members of the population have three or more generations of three parents. The problem with politicians is - They take knee jerk...

There is nothing wrong with the quality of Australian teachers. Saying that we can learn a lot from Asian teachers is absolutely wrong. It is the culture of the student that determines whether he/she will be successful in becoming educationally proficient. Children of Chinese immigrants to Australia do much better than offspring of many other subcultures. Native third generation Australians do worst of all. This is because their parents get on with living their own lives and leave their kids to learn by themselves. There is nothing wrong with this policy. Chinese parents do similarly, but they do help much more financially with education. Mao Tse-tung was once asked by a Western reporter what was the most difficult thing about governing China. He replied it was teaching children to believe in Communism when Chinese are born Capitalists. Trading has been an important part of Chinese culture for thousands of years so calculating and finance are important. To be successful in l...

Childhood memories are figments of your imagination. If you believe that, you'll believe anything. Children in the UK were asked to recall memories of things their parents said didn't happen. But how do we know if children were trying to please their parents? Most children live in a dream land anyway. So asking them to recall seeing Santa Claus is just "baiting". And asking them about flying through the air is "hypnotising" for dream recall. If you broke your leg as child you would certainly remember that, and whether the sun was out when it happened. The pain makes it stay in your mind. One thing that really remains is the care one receives from others. You remember things done with grandma because she was always kind and forgiving. Furthermore, really horrible events like being involved in a road accident and then being taken to hospital remain as clear as the day they occurred. We wouldn't have an identity without memories. We are the sum of our e...

There is little sympathy for sole mothers from others in society or government. Social security payments have been tightened up by the federal Government. If sole mothers do not work they must go back to school, probably learning something that is useless for their future. Not many full-time workers have brought up children as well without paying someone else to care for their babies and toddlers. Older children are consistently being left alone as mothers do some sort of part-time work. This is reality. Part-time jobs do not pay well enough to provide money for carers. When Single mothers come home they not only look after their children, they must do all the household chores as well as do repair work to the home. The government's new harsher policy comes into force next January. Welfare payments will fall. Even those working part-time will lose some of the part-payment they get from social security. Children will be the real losers as food and heating/cooling are reduce...

The concept of building one and two bedroom houses instead of the traditional three and four bedroom homes seems doomed to failure.  More adult children than ever are going back home to live with their parents.  A single person simply cannot earn enough  to get a loan for a house.  If you are a labourer or a TAFE trained worker this is  increasingly the case.  As many as 70 per cent of people aged under 35 cannot buy a  home of their own. While specialists say tax incentives are needed to enable young people to buy this is not the problem.  Australia will have a housing shortage for decades because there are not enough qualified builders in outback Australia.  This is particularly the case in  booming Western Australia with mineral companies being forced to have accommodation  built at great cost. Giving the young tax breaks and just giving them handouts is not a solution.  It is a bottom up issue not a top down proble...

Western Australia is about to fill up its jails and children's care homes in the war on drugs. New legislation will jail parents and take away children for the cultivation of one cannabis plant. The jail terms are mandatory for the manufacture of small amounts of other drugs.  The conservative government has certainly lived up to its ideals of trying to turn back the clock a century or so. Transportation to a far off land could be next for "criminals". An earlier Labor government had decriminalized minor marijuana use. Just why the WA government would want to change a situation that seemed to be working is the real question. The premier must know that tough regulation like in the US has failed, totally. If legislation worked, such action would be justified Even in the UK, people found with a small amount of drugs on their person are given a warning the first time it happens. Only serial offenders are jailed. This is the best idea. Target the dealers not individu...

Australian wild cockatoos have been "infiltrated" by domesticated cockatoos who have escaped. Wild birds are copying words learned by escaped household pets. Cockatoos are not the only wild birds being affected in this way. Galahs and corellas shout out words that startle people. Escaped birds breed with their wild counterparts and chicks learn to talk from parents. The parrot family is extremely good at mimicking sounds they hear. Songbirds and hummingbirds can also do this to a degree. The problem is cockatoos and parakeets are social animals. To wild birds a word is just a new sound to be learned and used socially. Human babbling to learn language is called subsong in birds, where chicks learn by trial and error. Like humans, cockatoos continue to learn "words" all through their lives. "Natural" cockatoo sounds go together to form a language which has its own grammar. Human words are being integrated into this language. A pet bird may only hea...

Australians are not doing their parental duties very well. A record number of children are in government care due to abuse and neglect. Authorities say that out-of-care has grown largely because of improvement in information gathering. However, an increase of 44 per cent in 4 years is worrying. Putting children in care is seen as making life better for badly treated children. There is debate about this issue. A child living on a quasi temporary basis in an institution or foster family situation certainly grows up with a "skewed" outlook on life. Their upbringing is not "normal". And they know it. Saying there are multiple issues at home is really a cop out by the government. It doesn't explain why the problem exists nor offer a satisfactory solution. Holding that reuniting them with their families is too much work sounds very much like the department has given up. The desire to be with their families is strong even when they are young adults. Foster care has alw...