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Keywords: Go Back To Where You Came From

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Chatbots for love

    • Michael McGirr
    • 09 February 2023
    6 Comments

    At the root of questions around ChatGPT are issues of authenticity and creativity. It has the capacity to call the bluff on a society which is increasingly inclined to trade pre-digested ‘messaging’ and call it a conversation. Outsourcing self-expression to a computer forces you to ask yourself what makes a human being. Where does the machine end and where do I begin? 

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  • MEDIA

    On Twitter

    • David Halliday
    • 20 May 2022

    The news of Musk’s $44 billion dollar purchase of the platform was met with paroxysms of excitement or hysteria depending on where one sits on the political spectrum. Everyone had something to say about it (including Eureka Street). Considering the corrosive state of public discourse over the last few years, which has at least in part been influenced by the algorithms driving social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, I’ll be upfront in saying I’m not especially convinced of Twitter’s status as a social good. So, this development is at least deserving of some curiosity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The inhumane logic of Australia’s refugee deterrence policy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 June 2021
    32 Comments

    Deterrence has an inner logic that we can see in Australian treatment of people who seek protection. In the first place it tends to become increasingly brutal. Each breach of policy must be met with a more effective deterrent.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A very varied Christmas

    • Barry Gittins
    • 17 December 2020
    5 Comments

    What does Christmas mean for you? What does it have in store? Preceding and in the midst of the annual celebration of life and hope that is Christmas, we will always have those, as H L Mencken noted, are obsessed with the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    COVID-19 doesn't discriminate, nor should we

    • Carolina Gottardo
    • 06 April 2020
    6 Comments

    The ability to work from home or social distance is a class issue. How do you practice social distancing in the slums of Lagos, the favelas of Rio or the shanty towns of Bogota, the city where I was born? Here in Australia, it’s not much different for refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants in vulnerable situations.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    This delicious failure of common names

    • Paul Hetherington
    • 09 December 2019
    2 Comments

    You don't know the word for butter, so you spend seconds miming the way it froths in the pan. The owner of the shop says nothing. You want to buy their famous pesto, but it's nowhere on display. You speak to other customers, who nod and frown. Eventually you point at fragrant cheese and a melon that smells of ripest green.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Not even with time travel

    • Earl Livings
    • 03 December 2018
    3 Comments

    You never will know all ... You'd have to be everywhere at once, be behind and in every word and act, flow with the charged breath of mote and light. To sum up: You'd have to be God. Poor Thing. For the one fact denied God is the unforeseen.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our mothers called us little fish

    • Chelsea Candy
    • 02 November 2017
    2 Comments

    You'd swear a dinghy was alive. Sometimes she was sluggish and moody, refusing to set, dragging me along a grey sea. Or she hurtled like a stallion, not caring if we won or if we went over, me hanging off the side by my ankle straps, not knowing where we would end.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Libraries adapt to the age of free information

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 06 July 2017
    6 Comments

    I often visit my local library. I tend to go in the after-school hours, so there are children everywhere. I can see mothers guiding young, chubby hands across picture book pages. I think of Mem Fox's advice about how children should hear a thousand stories before learning to read. With the internet and ebooks, the free information that made a library unique is no longer exclusive. Classic literature can be found with a Google search. So what do brick and mortar libraries offer that Amazon can't?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    You beaut country

    • Tony London
    • 03 July 2017

    His baseline is country, ridges, lakes, breakaways, songlines, and we are taken along the skylines of his imagination which shoulders its way through the streamers of the players race, colours askew, bursting out into the field of play where we are invited into his game, his rules, goal posts he moves forever, we engage with the master gamer.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The language of exploitation in the online labour market

    • Daniel Nicholson
    • 24 April 2017
    3 Comments

    When you are in the business of exploiting people, language matters. A recently leaked document from Deliveroo is geared to emphasising that the people who deliver food for Deliveroo are and should remain independent contractors, not employees. In 2016, a Unions NSW report into the employment practices of gig-economy company AirTasker categorised the online labour market as 'unregulated Taylorism within a Dickensian marketplace where workers compete for bite-sized fragments of labour'.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Palestinian water divide highlights discrimination

    • Na'ama Carlin
    • 28 March 2017
    12 Comments

    Some things are invisible until pointed out. Take the water tanks that pepper the rooves of buildings and homes in the West Bank. 'That's how you tell between Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements,' a friend points out. 'The Palestinian homes need water tanks because of restricted water supply from Israel, whereas the settlements don't.' Access to clean water is a fundamental human right, and the water situation in Palestine reveals a cruel privileging of one group over another.

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