The Convergence Review and the future of Australian content regulation

This article examines the place of Australian and local content regulation in the new media policy framework proposed by the Convergence Review. It outlines the history of Australian content regulation and the existing policy framework, before going on to detail some of the debates around Australian content during the Review. The final section analyses the relevant recommendations in the Convergence Review Final Report, and highlights some issues and problems that may arise in the new framework

Proton decay into charged leptons

We discuss proton and neutron decays involving three leptons in the final state. Some of these modes could constitute the dominant decay channel because they conserve lepton-flavor symmetries that are broken in all usually considered channels. This includes the particularly interesting and rarely discussed $p\to e^+ e^+ \mu^-$ and $p\to \mu^+ \mu^+ e^-$ modes. As the relevant effective operators arise at dimension 9 or 10, observation of a three-lepton mode would probe energy scales of order 100 TeV. This allows to connect proton decay to other probes such as rare meson decays or collider physics. UV completions of this scenario involving leptoquarks unavoidably violate lepton flavor universality and could provide an explanation to the recent $b\to s\mu\mu$ anomalies observed in $B$ meson decays.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in PR

Convergence and Australian content: The importance of access

In the light of new and complex challenges to media policy and regulation, the Austrlaian government commissioned the Convergence Review in late 2010 to assess the continuing applicability and utility of the principles and objectives that have shaped the policy framework to this point. It proposed a range of options for policy change and identified three enduring priorities for continued media regulation: media ownership and control; content standards; and Australian content production and distribution. The purpose of this article is to highlight an area where we feel there are opportunities for further discussion and research: the question of how the accessibility and visibility of Australian and local content may be assured in the future media policy framework via a combination of regulation and incentives to encourage innovation in content distribution

Autonomy and the Ethics of Biological Behaviour Modification

Much disease and disability is the result of lifestyle behaviours. For example, the contribution of imprudence in the form of smoking, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, and drug and alcohol abuse to ill-health is now well established. More importantly, some of the greatest challenges facing humanity as a whole – climate change, terrorism, global poverty, depletion of resources, abuse of children, overpopulation – are the result of human behaviour. In this chapter, we will explore the possibility of using advances in the cognitive sciences to develop strategies to intentionally manipulate human motivation and behaviour. While our arguments apply also to improving prudential motivation and behaviour in relation to health, we will focus on the more controversial instance: the deliberate targeted use of biomedicine to improve moral motivation and behaviour. We do this because the challenge of improving human morality is arguably the most important issue facing humankind (Persson and Savulescu, forthcoming). We will ask whether using the knowledge from the biological and cognitive sciences to influence motivation and behaviour erodes autonomy and, if so, whether this makes it wrong

Microscopic theory for the phase separation of self-propelled repulsive disks

Motivated by recent experiments on colloidal suspensions, we study analytically and numerically a microscopic model for self-propelled particles lacking alignment interactions. In this model, even for purely repulsive interactions, a dynamical instability leading to phase separation has been reported. Starting from the many-body Smoluchowski equation, we develop a mean-field description based on a novel closure scheme and derive the effective hydrodynamic equations. We demonstrate that the microscopic origin of the instability is a force imbalance due to an anisotropic pair distribution leading to self-trapping. The phase diagram can be understood in terms of two quantities: a minimal drive and the force imbalance. At sufficiently high propulsion speeds there is a reentrance into the disordered fluid

Emergence of novel magnetic order at finite temperature in overdoped pnictides

We examine the temperature dependence of the magnetic ordering in the frustrated Heisenberg $J_1-J_2$ model in presence of two different kind of dopants: vacancies or magnetic impurities. We demonstrate that, irrespective to their magnetic ratio, the introduction of impurities quenches the order by disorder selection mechanism associated with an Ising-like phase transition at low temperatures and gives way to a $90^\circ$ (anticollinear) order . The presence of dopants triggers a non trivial competition between entropically selected states (collinear) and energetically favoured ones (anticollinear) in dependence of both dilution and temperature. While in case of magnetic impurity, the interesting magnetic phases are observed for full range of temperature and doping, in case of nonmagnetic impurities every magnetic order is destroyed at all temperatures above $12\%$ dilution. At fixed low temperature and tuning the doping we show a first order phase transition leading to the re-entrance of the Ising-like order with percolation of islands of $90^\circ$ order. At fixed doping and varying the temperature we observe a transition from the anticollinear to the collinear phase assisted by a new emerging magnetic phase in the presence of magnetic impurities, whilst in case of vacancies this transition is characterised by a coexistent region of both. Furthermore, tuning the magnetic moment of the impurities, a complete collapse of the Ising-like order is attained. This is in agreement with observations of Ir dopant atoms in superconducting Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Ir$_x$)$_2$As$_2$ with $x<0.047$

Moral Neuroenhancement

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of “moral neuroenhancement,” offering a novel definition as well as spelling out three conditions under which we expect that such neuroenhancement would be most likely to be permissible (or even desirable). Furthermore, we draw a distinction between first-order moral capacities, which we suggest are less promising targets for neurointervention, and second-order moral capacities, which we suggest are more promising. We conclude by discussing concerns that moral neuroenhancement might restrict freedom or otherwise “misfire,” and argue that these concerns are not as damning as they may seem at first