Adventure Ausrama Blog

The Queensland state government is making drastic changes to the way young people who commit crimes are treated. Young offenders are to be named and shamed. Those punished by being sent to institutions will be transferred to adult prisons when they reach the age of eighteen. Many of the "young criminals" are victims of crime themselves. Difficult home life has pushed them into crime. Naming them would make their lives intolerable. The government decision has been made on just one survey. It seems the decision was made before the survey began. Young people are not mature adults. They are growing and learning. Judging them at such a stage in their lives is marking them as bad citizens for life. Other changes include making fixed penalties for some crimes committed by adults. Judges will not have the discretion to modify the sentences according to prevailing circumstances. A change that just about everyone agrees on is courts knowing the case histories of adult defen

Microsoft is going to offer a way for consumers to get around national firewalls. It is aimed at domestic US consumers to access corporate resources but it will make for a revolution in bypassing national restrictions, particularly for music and television programming. Of course you will need a Windows mobile phone to access the feature. This is a trump card that Microsoft has played. However, like with cloud services when one enterprise gives something extra all competitors provide it as well. While it is essentially for business use, VPN access will ultimately be used to access local content in countries that restrict it to their citizens. Just how program providers will react to this is not known. This announcement has been a surprise. However, many users pay a few dollars a month for VPNs already. It makes for easy use of programming supposedly blocked for overseas people. If business gets "free" use of VPNs, the ordinary consumer will want it too. Soon rivals

For many years it has been said that Australia lacks maths and science graduates. Maths teachers are in short supply we are told. Professor Ian Chubb, a chief scientist, certainly pushes this case. Unfortunately, data does not support this premise. Like qualified information technology people, maths and science graduates find the job market difficult. It seems there is real demand only in geological science. A little more than half of graduates say their qualifications are relevant to their work. They hold down jobs only in distantly related fields. One would think that with science and technology moving forward at a rapid pace such qualified people would be sorely needed. Employment in agricultural science is falling because young people are leaving rural towns and refuse to learn about farming. It is seen as glorified laboring. Getting a post-graduate qualification does not help to find work. Employers see higher degrees as narrowing educational scope. Government is cont

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In the modern world many types of behavior are tolerated. Angry people are allowed to run the streets chanting their violent slogans. Individuals are entitled to live the life of a hermit, barely communicating with anyone else. Saying that things have changed is too simplistic. The more things change the more they stay the same. Some have said that Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is too familiar with all those around him, calling fellow members of cabinet by their nicknames. It has been said that this is new for Australia. This is nonsense. Australians quickly find the names of strangers and from the "get go" call them by their first names. I remember watching a talk on television some years ago and the American was really upset by the Australian, who was also being interviewed, for not addressing him as Mr "Smith". Australia is an unusual country. It has a culture of bringing everyone to the same level. Honorifics have little place in such

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Why do Whales beach themselves? The theory is that some coastal regions are shallow so sonar does not bounce back to the animals to tell them to keep away. This is only a theory. There seems to be no way of stopping the mammals from laying themselves on the sand to die a painful death. Dragging them out to sea is an attempt to save them, but they continue toward the beach again within hours. A few days ago killer whales beached themselves on sandbars near Fraser Island. Three of them died. Fishermen have been told to keep their boats well away from the animals. They are trying to find deeper water. The hope is that open sea will attract them and they will move away from the shallow sand. Apparently when a whale beaches, the whole pod panics. The presence of boats, particularly motorized ones, stresses them more. One would have thought that evolution would have "bred" out the beaching trait. The numbers who die each year on beaches is obviously not high enough to