Real change and attainment of gender equity will only be fulfilled when government, academia – including its societies and colleges – and industry work together as a collective to drive systemic change directed by grassroots advocacy and initiatives. Solutions cannot be about fixing women, but instead need to focus on shifting the barriers and changing the fundamental ways things are done, including our ideas of what traits valuable leaders possess.
These five women alone demonstrate how varied a “STEM career” can be: a researcher, an engineer, a medical director, a radio science journalist, and a STEM career strategist. If we can attract more girls into STEM fields, then we will need systemic change to create an environment they would then want to stay in. Women face many and varied cultural and systemic barriers to success; there are extra hurdles faced by all.
Unnecessary overtreatment costs Australia $30 billion per annum. Only 60% of diagnostics and treatments are effective, while 30% is of no or little value and 10% can be harmful. So while medical care undoubtedly provides many benefits to many people, sometimes treatments can be ineffective and sometimes even downright harmful. We could save more than 8,000 kilotons of carbon emissions by scrapping low value care that does not demonstrate any benefit.
‘Trees are the architects of the modern world,’ says Dr Ashleigh Hood. At the end of the Devonian period, forests emerged and spread, providing a great source of oxygen via photosynthesis. So while many consider the emergence of animals to be the principal driver of contemporary life, Ashleigh’s work suggests the atmospheric oxygen provided by terrestrial plants has been foundational to the emergence of Earth’s modern biosphere.
Whether “intelligence” can be created within hardware is a fascinating question, and one that remains unanswered despite significant efforts. In contrast, biological intelligence from a neural source offers a “ground truth” of opportunity. As such, the question becomes not ‘if’ general intelligence can arise from something artificial, but ‘how’.
